2312

There was still a big tidal bore that ran up the funnel-shaped estuary of the Qiantang River, and people still rode it on small watercraft of various sorts. It looked like they were having fun despite all. Good old Earth, so huge and dirty, the sky looking as if chewed by a brown fungus, the water the color of pale mud, the land stripped and industrialized-but all of it still out in the wind, flattened hard by its g and yet at the same time stiff with reality. Walking around the crowded alleys of the old city, Swan got Pauline to help her with Chinese dialects she didn’t catch. It slowed down her speech but it didn’t matter. The Chinese were intent on themselves and looked right through her. Surely this was part of what the Venusians had run from: everyone fixed on their inner space or their life in the work unit, to the exclusion of everything else. Surely none of these people would ever conceive a hatred against spacers: affairs outside China were in the realm of hungry ghosts. Even the life outside one’s work unit was ghostly. Or so it seemed as she sat in dives, slurping noodles and chatting with tired men who would give her a moment because a tall spacer asking them questions was unusual. And people seemed to be more tolerant in noodle shops. On the street she got some hard looks, once a shouted insult. She hurried the last part of the way to Mqaret’s colleagues. Once there she let them take a few tubes of blood and run a few tests on her eyesight and balance and such.

Back on the street, it seemed to her that there were many pairs of eyes just as interested in her as Mqaret’s colleagues had been. Possibly this was just her becoming frightened. She picked up her pace through the inevitable crowd-always at least five hundred people in view when in China. Back in her hostel she could only wonder at her fear of the crowd. But in fact, after falling asleep she woke up to find herself confined by restraints, her room lit only by medical monitors. The bed was attending to all her bodily needs, and she guessed there was a drug in her IV feed triggering her speech centers, because she was talking away without meaning to, even when she tried to stop herself. A disembodied voice from behind her head asked questions, about Alex and everything else, and she babbled away helplessly. Pauline was no help at all-seemed to have been turned off. And Swan could not resist the impulse to talk. It was not that unlike her normal self; indeed it was a bit of a relief to be able to go on and on without having to make excuses. Someone was making her do it, so she would.

Later she came to in the same bed, unrestrained, her clothing on a chair by the bed. The room was just barely bigger than the bed. Her same hostel room, yes. The AI at the desk, a green box sitting on the counter, said that it had seen no sign anything was wrong. The room monitor had shown her vital signs good, no incursions into the room, nothing unusual.

Swan turned on Pauline, who could not offer any help. It had been almost exactly twenty-four hours since she had left the clinic of Mqaret’s friends. She called Mercury House in Manhattan and told them what had happened, then called Zasha.

Everyone was shocked, concerned, and sympathetic, urging her to go immediately to the nearest Mercury House to get medical attention, and so on; but at the end of all that, Zasha said firmly, “You were on Earth alone. There are any number of malignancies down here, as I told you. It’s not like it was when you took your first sabbaticals. We tend to travel in packs here now. You saw what happened last time you went off by yourself, at my place.”

“But that was just some kids. Who was it this time?”

“I don’t know. Call Jean Genette at once. They may be able to track who did it. Or we may be able to deduce it by what happens next. They were probably on a fishing expedition in your head. That means it probably won’t happen again, but you should always travel with other people, maybe even a security team.”

“No.”

Zasha let her listen to how that sounded.

Swan said, “I guess I have to. I don’t know. It feels like I just had a bad dream. I’m a little hungry, but I think they IVed me food. They had me-I mean, I was babbling! And a lot of their questions were about Alex. I may have just told them everything I know about her!”

“Hmm.” A long silence. “Well, you see why Alex kept so much to herself.”

“So who were they?”

“I don’t know. Possibly some part of the Chinese government. They play rough sometimes. Although this seems a bit egregious. Maybe it’s a warning signal, but of what I’m not sure. So in that sense it wasn’t a very good warning. Maybe it was just a fishing expedition. Or a notice that we aren’t to fool around on Earth.”

“As if we didn’t know that.”

“But you don’t seem to know it. Maybe they don’t want you down here fooling around.”

“But who?”

“I don’t know! Consider it a message from the people of Earth. And call Genette. And come talk to me, please, before you get into any more trouble.”