Robert L. Nansel

XIAOYING’S
JOURNEY

Robert Nansel has a degree in robotics engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle, and is a l995 graduate of Clarion West. He lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, a reconstructionist rabbi. Although he writes a nonfiction column on amateur robotics, his first story for Asimov’s is only his second fiction sale.

s
uppose you are a clever girl and you are in your secret place tracing the data flows of New Prosperity City when you see the sick woman reflected in the screen of your laptop. She is hugging empty air to her breasts and she is singing a wordless song.

You are sitting cross‑legged with her on a cotton pallet atop spools of unused fiber optic cable, but she doesn’t see you. She curls up on the pallet, cocooned by equipment racks, cable trays suspended from the ceiling, shelves of data manuals, outdated schematics, discarded circuit modules, and assorted broken keyboards and cable splicers.
The room is windowless, a closet, lit by a single fluorescent tube which gives the sick woman a bruised cast to her face. And that face—
The sick woman’s name is Liu Xiaoying, though she has been called other names. She is fighting her way back from nightmares and deadness, but she’s afraid to open her eyes because the nightmares might be true. Something heavy and cloying tugs at her mind, and she feels as if she swims in a fog, a narcotic honey that would pull her back to sleep and passivity.
She moves her hands across her belly, and when she feels the absence there she cries out. Gone!
Dr. Gao might try to comfort her, even though she had told Xiaoying this might happen, she had told her, but Xiaoying didn’t want to believe the other colonists could be so cruel.
They thought they could make her forget her baby, but Gao knows how it is to lose a child. And Xiaoying, laying there on the rumpled pallet, looks so much like that child Gao nearly cries herself. But Gao is the strong one. She doesn’t cry.
Dr. Gao tells Xiaoying: You mustn’t cry.
But a cry is building up inside Xiaoying, and it is the roar of a river in flood.
Xiaoying covers her mouth to stop the roar, but it isn’t enough. She bites hard on the heel of her hand. She feels the pressure but not the pain’ and the river is still rising; the swell and crest of the flood threaten to sweep her away. She bites harder until pain pierces the roar.
The river recedes and she blinks, tears in her eyes. Her clothes—short sleeve, cotton blouses and black slacks—hang from the cable tray above the pallet, leaving no room for her to sit up. She is dizzy, so she doesn’t try to sit up.
Dr. Gao touches her fingers to Xiaoying’s lips.
Xiaoying pushes herself up on her elbows, but that makes the dizziness worse. She tastes blood, salty and metallic. The bite she made throbs, but she is glad of it. The pain makes a dike that holds back the flood.
Pain gives you clarity and substance, Gao is saying; it makes you real, gives you purpose. See?
Xiaoying swings her legs over the side of the bed and stands. In Earth gravity she would surely fall, and even in the weak Lunar gravity she wobbles for a moment. Dr. Gao steadies her.
Black fiber optic bundles as big as her leg curve up from the cable trays and disappear into conduits in the ceiling, and Xiaoying thinks of all the data flowing through those data pipes, phone conversations, megabaud murmurings of computers, security camera video feeds. Surveillance data. You know all about that river of data coursing through the arteries of New Prosperity city…
But the other river is still there raging behind the pain. That way lies destruction, Dr. Gao says. Think of something else, anything else. Try Tai Chi.
Leaning against a fiber optic patch panel, Xiaoying closes her eyes and lets Tai Chi take over. She breathes deeply (smell of plastic and ozone, the clean odor of computers untainted by people stink); she moves through the first fifteen warm‑up movements. Good.
Though her eyes are closed, she can feel the older woman mirroring her movements. She feels chi welling up within her, sharpening her senses, giving her strength. And anger.
In China she tried to do things their way, but in the end the old men took everything she ever loved. Here in New Prosperity on the Moon, she thought that things might be different, but now they’ve taken her daughter.
The river floods out of its dikes now, and she is swept out of your secret place into the corridors of New Prosperity City. The flood rages in her head and she doesn’t know anything, the thunder is loud, she can’t think, except, except—
Gao urges her on, yes, fight them, yes, Xiaoying, fight them! And Xiaoying knows what she must do: take back her daughter.

“It was riot,” Raisa is saying. She cradles a kitten in one hand. “Mamma cat would not come out of zero g toilet.” She sips her coffee and makes a face. “Who brewed this poison?”
Carol puts her compad down. The personnel evaluations could wait. “May I?” She strokes the calico furball. Its eyes are still closed. “It’s adorable.”
Kimberley mutters into his tea. “We had to use germicidal baggies instead of the toilet the rest of the trip from LEO. Thank the techs at Korou for that. The wankers.”
“You don’t like cats?” Carol asks sweetly.
“Can’t abide wild beasts. I expect the techs will let mosquitoes on the shuttle next.”
“He’s just mad because mamma cat bit his ass. Her claws were sharp.”
They are in the cramped “C” observation cupola of Hadley Lunar Research Station, with its grand view east to Mt. Hadley and southeast to Silverspur; only the crests of Hadley and Silverspur burn above the velvet horizon. Beads of light—the headlights of robot rovers—bob along the Rim Road, defining the shape of Hadley Rille: a black sidewinder basking on the plain, lost in the shadows of the long lunar sunset.
“We taped helmet camera to privacy screen to watch horrible birthing process. One, two, three, pop, pop, pop. Like sausages.”
Carol fills her coffee cup. “I saw some of the video. Did the other kittens survive?”
“They all died.”
“We didn’t save that video,” Raisa says soberly. She runs her hand over her shiny black hair, so short on the sides that her scalp shows through pink.
“Mamma cat couldn’t keep all kittens in one place. Kitten floats off, mamma puts back, even though she is sick, dehydrated—good mamma!”
From her T‑shirt sleeve, she fishes out a case rolled up like a cigarette pack. Inside is a plastic syringe. “But mamma died and then kittens died. All except Chaika. She flew away. That’s why I call her ‘Chaika,’ Seagull.” She draws cream from the creamer into the syringe. “Wake up, little seagull. Time to eat.” Raisa squirts some cream in Chaika’s mouth.
A tall black man in UN fatigues enters the cupola from the direction of the Command Center. Carol smiles. “Leftenant Savimbi. You’re just in time. Have a seat.”
“Carol, hello. Kimberley. Raisa. Good to have you back in the fold.” Savimbi pulls up a chair. He is a taut, athletic man in his early fifties, hair going to gray. His hands are broad and flat, his fingers long. Carol imagines those fingers plucking the strings of a violin. Firm and precise as his British accent.
Chaika is done with the cream. She licks her whiskers drowsily while Raisa refills the syringe.
“And this must be the celebrated Kitten in the Loo”‘ Savimbi says.
“Chaika.”
“’Chaika.’ Poor creature. What a dreadful place to be born.” He tries to pet her, but Chaika sinks a needle claw into his thumb. He jerks his hand away. “The little dickens!” He looks in wonder at the scarlet drop forming on his brown skin.
“‘Nature, red in tooth and claw,’ eh Lieutenant?” Kimberley says and laughs. He tugs at his scraggly beard. “The Moon’s going to the devil.”
“Kimberley doesn’t approve of ‘wild beasts’” Carol says.
Savimbi puts his thumb to his mouth. “At the moment, I’m not sure I do either. Stay with seismology, Kimberley. Less personal danger.”
Kimberley grunts. “Except I have to compete with all the new construction the Chinese are doing. My last tour, half my seismic stations picked up naught else but their thumpings and poundings in Sinus Iridium. A thousand kilometers away.” He snorted. “Now they say that China means to quadruple the size of New Prosperity over the next five years. Quadruple! That’ll be over eight hundred more people clomping about. That will be it, then, won’t it? The end of serious scientific studies of the Moon.”
Carol shook her head. “What do you mean?”
“They mean to make it a colony, not a research station. Babies and settlers, what?”
Raisa arches her eyebrows. “What do you have against babies?”
“In two decades, the Moon will be nothing but shopping malls and slag heaps. Nobody will be doing science. Curiosity will be dead.”
“Curiosity is stubborn. Chaika is here because she is stubborn. Not just curiosity. Biology.”
“Just because biology can doesn’t mean biology should.” Kimberley says. “With fifteen billions on Earth, why do we feel compelled to duplicate the whole sodding mess up here?” He dumps spent tea leaves out of his teaball. “We have a chance to do things differently here. The Moon is the greatest natural laboratory in the solar system. And the mindless thundering masses are bent on ruining it.”
“You’re doing good work here. We all are,” Savimbi says mildly. “And the long‑term plan was always to expand Hadley. I’ve been here since the beginning, when it was just eight men and it was purely military. Now we’re at forty, most civilian. I count that an improvement.”
“For how long, though?
Carol says, “The main hurdle to doing good science is having enough people on site. We’ve proven that. Remotes will never be enough. Nothing can substitute for two eyes, two hands, and a brain right here.”
“Besides,” Raisa says, “if China colonizes the Moon, we should, too.”
“Rubbish. By that reasoning, we should scrap the Greenhouse Gas Treaty and go back to burning coal. Or building nuclear power plants. After all, the Chinese are doing it. It seems so pointless to blindly follow them. Can you all imagine raising a child in this sterile environment?”
“Sterile?” Carol looks around at the bulletin boards festooned with children’s drawings faxed up from Earth, hanging ferns in pots, the Hadley Football Pool calendar, and haiku poems on paper banners. Animal figurines carved from lunar obsidian line the window seals. An intricate sand painting depicting Hadley, executed entirely with different‑hued regolith fines, adorns the bulkhead between the windows. “I think it’s starting to look homey. I like it.”
Kimberley shakes his head. “Let’s talk about something else.”

Xiaoying is caught in the river torrents; segments of her past float by like trees torn from the banks. She clings to one:
Governor Qi never intended to allow her to keep her baby. Gao had warned her about him. He didn’t appreciate her talent as a simulationist. He never thought of her as more than a rough country girl from Fujian province. How cold he was the day she told him she was pregnant.
Dr. Gao laughed a bitter laugh: men are like that—they like to tell us we’re all equal since the Liberation. It makes them feel morally superior to grant us the illusion of equality.
But Xiaoying ignored her, because Gao always talked that way.
It wouldn’t have mattered in any case. Xiaoying knows she isn’t pretty. She is good enough to be Qi’s whore, but he would never marry her, she knows that. She isn’t even a member of the Party. She is proud of that.
Qi’s rejection hurt. But the important thing, the thing she carries as proudly as non‑membership in the Communist Party, is the life inside her.
Think of it, Xiaoying! The first child to be born on the Moon will be your child. If Qi will not claim his child, then that is to his shame, not yours.
Yet, she feels uneasy clinging to this memory tree; the branches are sharp, slick. Treacherous. Like this branch:
The day her brigade leader in the Simulation department called Xiaoying into her office.
It begins now, the incessant demand that she do the right thing, the responsible thing, the thing that she had done once, long ago, had done—
She wants to let go and just drown, but the river carries her on—
Brigade Leader Chen Suzhen is sitting at her desk with Xiaoying there in the river in the corridor. Chen is a severe, square‑faced woman in her fifties, one of the few women in a leadership position in New Prosperity.
Xiaoying likes Chen because she is direct and fair. Chen has genuine concern for the people of her brigade. She sits with folded hands on her desk. Her back is straight and she speaks: Xiaoying. Yes. I’ve been informed you are pregnant. (Chen doesn’t ask if this is true, she knows it is; it’s her job to know.)
Xiaoying wants to shout. She wants to run away. She does neither. She looks down and says, Yes…four months.
Chen presses her thumbs together, a pensive gesture, and speaks: Party policy is now to encourage women in New Prosperity to have children. But only married women can enjoy that privilege. And such women must have the permission of their work units.
Strange currents in the water tug on her legs. She grips tighter. Eyes respectfully below Chen’s, Xiaoying says that she understands.
Chen regards her.
You are my best simulationist, she is saying. Yes. Temperamental. Too proud. I would hate to lose you—and here she puts her hands flat on her desktop in emphasis—but choices have to be made.
Choices. That’s what the currents are and that’s why she dreads them: choices. A tear reaches from her eye to the river surface and disappears.
Chen’s expression softens and she leans forward. I know this situation isn’t all your fault, she says. Some men—some men lack a proper sense of responsibility. (She leans back.)
Yes. I have decided. If you register a marriage by the end of this week, I will give you permission to have the baby.
Xiaoying is astonished. In Fujian, there would have been no question; her brigade leader would simply have accompanied her to the abortion clinic. She feels relief flowing like the cool river water in her veins.
Somewhere a current tugs and she remembers a walk in a long ago September, a walk with another brigade leader…but the memory is hazy, crazy, old. She doesn’t want to think about that now. She is crying, Thank you (tears flowing freely) thank you.
She is dismissed.

Xiaoying considers her options. Through mutual friends, she finds that Ah Gen, who works as a biotechnician in Hydroponics Brigade, would be willing to marry her. While Ah Gen is several years younger than her and perhaps lacks imagination, he is a steady, decent man; he will make a good father.
She registers the marriage and receives Brigade Leader Chen’s official blessing: she can have her baby.
The memory flood washes her through the corridors of New Prosperity for this time, a happy time for her. Has she ever been happy?
Hold tight, now, steady…it’s not a complete happiness: people whisper about who the real father is. But when they look upon her and Ah Gen, they smile.
A baby is a baby.
The other colonists do favors for her and find excuses just to talk to her. Then—
Then another woman in the colony announces her pregnancy. Her name is Jian Ling. She is beautiful, a cultured woman, and a doctor, besides. Her husband, Wei Liguo, a team leader in Construction Brigade, beams with obvious pride. No whispers about who the father of Jian Ling’s child is!
Xiaoying might have been jealous of Jian Ling and perhaps even have rebuffed her timid overtures of friendship. It would only be natural. She would be first, that should be all that mattered.
Gao, because she is older and understands people better, isn’t so sanguine. You have to get along better with people, Xiaoying. Don’t be so stubborn. Xiaoying?
But Xiaoying isn’t listening. She’s thinking about a stubborn girl in a village, she forgets where or when.
Maybe you’ve heard about this girl, how she refused—refused!—the humiliating bride price a certain Deng Zhongmao offered her father. As if any other man would have her! Her father was a poor man with only a few fish ponds and some geese. Despite the villagers’ clucking, she stayed in school and learned algebraic theory and studied the words of the new Leader, not the great one, the one who made the American Nixon come to China when everybody was poor, but the wiley, cigarette‑smoking leader who brought prosperity back to China when the old leader died. That one.
Would it have been surprising for such a girl to quickly master the new government computer in her school? No more surprising than a girl running away to Beijing and attending Qinghua University and rising to the top of her class. But that’s the way it happened.
You could have told the girl as much. If she is smart, if she is willing to work harder than anybody else, she might do it, even in China.
Like this: by sleeping with the head librarian, she might get a job in the university library when she is seventeen. She might live in the broom closet in the hall and there study books about American computers and American software…beautiful software! The patterns and logic of it weave through her brain like song. It calls to her in her dreams, a promise of a shining China when everybody would be rich like Americans.
In a broom closet, by the dirt‑filtered light of a 40‑watt bulb, in the stacks re-shelving books, or on the grimy streets of Beijing, a clever girl like her might unravel the mysteries attending spreadsheets and macros and debuggers. She might master Object Oriented Programming and earn money writing programs to help perplexed young men pass their computer science classes, enough money to buy a used laptop—her own computer!—from a drunk Hong Kong businessman. Such a girl could go far.
But Gao won’t let Xiaoying think about the stubborn girl. Maybe the girl reminds Gao of somebody she once knew, or maybe she reminds her too much of Xiaoying. No matter.
Gao wants to say to Xiaoying, listen: you shouldn’t argue so incessantly; it makes you look immature. Or, listen: you shame yourself when you snub Jian Ling.
Xiaoying shrugs and says she’ll try not to argue so much.
And Jian Ling?
Jian Ling, the beautiful, Jian Ling, the doctor.
Jian Ling, the cataract.
That roar is the river in Xiaoying’s head, maddeningly loud, if it would just be quiet, she could think. Gao looks at her in the way that always seems as if she is looking right into Xiaoying’s private thoughts. She might try, but she can never ignore that probing gaze. It scours her resistance away like a swift stream.
She makes promises. She promises Gao she’ll be polite to Jian Ling, she will be friendly. As her belly swells, it becomes easier to forget her pride and think instead of her child’s future welfare.
Most surprising to her is Gen. He becomes a true source of strength for her. Living with him is awkward at first. He is so formal and lacks Qi’s creativity when it comes to sex, but he is gentle and undemanding.
In the end, though, it is the whispers that win.
Her daughter is gone, and she must make plans to get her back.
But how?
You are a clever girl. Tell her how it is:
If you are to get your daughter back—if you are to keep her—you have to get away from New Prosperity. But where to go? There are two possibilities.
The first is Earth. Earth is no paradise, but at least a woman and her baby could disappear into the crowds there. But that would mean stowing aboard the weekly shuttle, and the shuttle is a nuclear rocket, unapproachable except through the shielded passenger‑access tubes. Impossible. Forget it.
The only other destination you have any hope of reaching is the American research station at Hadley, over a thousand kilometers southeast across Sinus Iridium and Mare Imbrium. You can get there by cargo rover or suborbital hopper. You don’t have any experience with hoppers (and they are all in use up north, anyway). But with full fuel cells, a cargo rover would have enough range to make it to Hadley. It would take perhaps twenty hours.
Gao isn’t sure: They will expect her to try for Hadley. Even if she manages to slip away undetected, it will not take long before the rover is missed. All they will have to do is follow her tracks.
But Xiaoying knows all about cargo rovers; her job when she first arrived at New Prosperity was running supplies to the geology stations in the are of the Jura Mountains west of the colony. She knows that cargo rovers can fly short distances on thrusters. Not thousands of kilometers like hoppers, no, but enough to hop over boulders and crevasses.
Lightly loaded, a rover can jump nine or ten kilometers. If she jumped the rover a few times, she could surely make it difficult for them to pick up her tracks again.

It is six days since local sunset; out the rover’s right window, the Earth, nearly full, lights up Sinus Iridium, the Sea of Rainbows, with blue ghosts. Xiaoying is driving a stolen rover southeast across the desolate plain. Ahead lies Mare Imbrium and freedom.
Dr. Gao’s head is hurting, a spiking headache. It could be that she doesn’t want to think about how Jian Ling woke up when Xiaoying picked up the baby, how Jian Ling fought with her and tried to stop Xiaoying from taking back her daughter. How Xiaoying scratched Jian Ling’s pretty, pretty face and held her in a choke hold until she fell limp on the floor.
Such things happen in slow motion when you remember them, the way Jian Ling fell to the floor in one‑sixth g, and the way Xiaoying ran all the way to the East airlocks with the baby in her arms.
No, no, no…it wasn’t supposed to happen that way, Xiaoying!
No one else saw her, though. Tell her that.
Gao holds her head and rocks. No, no, no…
Okay, tell her that this is what we’ll do: We’ll keep the rover on the main road until we pass Heraclides Promontory, the southeastern horn of the Jurl Mountain chain. There we can leave the road and make a few hops south to virgin soil. Then straight to Hadley across the Imbrium plain.
No, no, no…
But Xiaoying isn’t listening.
In a few minutes, the lights of New Prosperity disappear over the horizon, and with them the radio chatter goes silent. Switch off the rover’s radio beacon, switch off the running lights and headlights. Switch off everything that would help pursuers find them. They are on their own now.
Xiaoying’s daughter is asleep in a plastic cradle beside her. She strokes the smooth surface of the cradle and hums a lullaby.

When the computer alarm wakes her, Xiaoying is dreaming of her old village on Earth in Fujian province, of tending her father’s fish ponds and geese. For a moment, she doesn’t remember who she is, then her head starts working and she remembers her escape. Beside her, her daughter still sleeps peacefully.
Gao says, you’ve been asleep for half an hour.
Xiaoying shakes her head to clear it; she hadn’t realized how tired she was
The computer wails again. She side‑slips her mind into General Access so she can see what the problem is. Dr. Gao is already there before her.
Through the extended senses of the rover, she sees five other cargo rovers converging to intercept them from the northwest. They are caught between the rovers and the Jura Mountains to the south.
The southern arc of the Juras is barely visible above the horizon from New Prosperity, but now they rise like a wall of black sand dunes.
They are still twenty minutes from Heraclides Promontory. The rovers will reach them in ten.
Xiaoying opens up a topographic of their situation. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. She looks at the mountains to the south. On a hunch, she calls up a ballistic simulation; are the mountains low enough that the rover can jump over them on thrusters?
Gao shakes her head: They will be expecting that and track our trajectory. They will find us again, unless—
Unless what?
Gao takes on the air of a Teacher: We must be unpredictable. We must ask ourselves what they will be thinking now.
Xiaoying turns due south toward the mountains and she thinks. It would be men in those rovers. The revolution has been promising women equality since her grandmother’s girlhood. She came to New Prosperity hoping to find that equality.
Ask yourself: what would these men expect a woman in her position to do?
They are probably thinking I’ll do something desperate, Xiaoying says. They think I will panic.
Gao inclines her head. So. Let us fulfill the first expectation, but not the second.
If I jump the rover into the mountain highlands to hide, that would look desperate.
And then what?
We could aim for a spot in the highlands on the south slope of the mountains, then, before the other rovers clear the peaks, make a jump in another direction while the mountains shield us from their radar.
Gao smiles.
Here is where we’ll aim for. (Point to a spot on the Topographic.) You set up the ballistic simulation.
It will work, but we won’t have much fuel left to hop obstacles later in the journey. It will buy us time. Quick, download the simulated trajectory elements into the rover’s flight computer. Xiaoying gathers her daughter in her arms and waits for the five‑second countdown.
The thrusters kick in and the ground lurches away from her. She feels heavier than she ever remembers being, though she knows it is only a little over one g.
The burn lasts seventeen seconds, then they are in free fall. Xiaoying has forty‑seven long seconds to think before the first touchdown.
Her daughter is crying, frightened by the jolts, the noise, and now, weightlessness. She comforts her as best she can.
As they near the top of their trajectory, Gao turns to Xiaoying. If we leave some wreckage at our first landing site, that might give us even more time to escape.
The cargo module?
That would make a convincing display.
Xiaoying arms the explosive bolts that hold the empty cargo module slung beneath the backbone of the rover.
She waits tensely until they have dropped behind the radar shadow of the mountains, then blows the explosive bolts to jettison the module. There. A clean separation.
She watches while the rectangular cargo box tumbles away from the rover, and feeds in new trajectory elements for the rover minus the mass of the cargo module.
Twelve seconds to go.
Instead of landing on this hop as she first planned, she will thrust laterally toward the south and then brake to soft land at the base of the mountains.
The south slope of the mountains rushes up to meet them. She is terrified, but also exhilarated. She braces herself.
Thrust! She watches the blur of the cargo module as it impacts behind them. Jagged shards of aluminum and plastic litter the site, which is much more rugged than she would have liked to try landing on.
Gao smiles. The other rovers will have the same problem. It will take an hour, maybe more, before they can investigate the “crash scene” well enough to determine it is just a. cargo module, not an entire rover.
Xiaoying braces for the third burn.

Carol Johnson hates meetings, but as civilian Science Coordinator at Hadley Lunar Research Station, she has no choice but to endure them. You can’t do good science on the Moon without good support, and for now, like it or not, the UN military hierarchy is that support.
But sometimes, like now, getting information out of the military people is like extracting molars.
“Do we know anything about who they are?”
Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Collins straightens the cuff of his shirtsleeve. He is old‑line USAF down to the creases in his trousers. “Chinese nationals. My sources suggest one or two of their workers stole a cargo rover from their motor pool. From radio intercepts, we know they want to find them bad.”
“Are they defectors?”
“We don’t know.”
“Can we rescue them?”
“That’s a sticky proposition. We can’t join a search until the Chinese ask for our assistance. In any case, the Outer Space Treaty of l968 requires us to return any of their people should we find them.”
Lieutenant Desmond Savimbi speaks next. “They had seven rovers conducting search operations for several hours in the South Jura highlands.” Carol loves listening to his deep voice, his British accent. His is the only other black face in the room, much darker than her own. “From orbiter imagery it appeared at first to be a crash site, but apparently they didn’t find what they were looking for. No rover. Only bits of a cargo container.”
“A decoy crash?”
Desmond nods. “Possibly. The search group seems to think so; they’ve since moved east into Imbrium.”

The rover plows through the dust, blue‑gray in the Earthlight. Xiaoying unstraps herself and rocks her daughter, who is hungry again. She just can’t seem to nurse her enough these last sixteen hours. All of the bumps and jolts from rough terrain and the short hops they’ve made to avoid obstacles are taking their toll.
Gao looks on as she sits cross‑legged on the floor of the rover; Xiaoying holds the howling infant to her breast and nurses her. In a few minutes, Xiaoying becomes drowsy. She begins to dream.
She dreams she is Gao, watching and remembering.
If you were Gao, you might wish you could sleep, too, but her head hurts—she hasn’t told Xiaoying about the headaches. She hasn’t told her she too hears the raging torrent. But someone needs to stay awake. She gingerly takes the baby girl in her own arms.
Gao feels as if a part of herself has gone to sleep. She hums a lullaby to the baby and remembers her own daughter. She would have been twenty‑four, now.
Xiaoying’s age.
Suppose in Xiaoying’s dream it is a warm spring in Beijing. It is l989—a quarter of a century ago—and everyone in the city is talking about the student protests. See the students from Qinghua University, Gao included, marching in joyful, defiant parades through the city. Big changes are coming to China. She marches beside Han Fengsuo, whom she intends to marry.
She exults at the Goddess of Liberty statue the students have built in Tiananmen Square. The speeches she hears move her, and she convinces Fengsuo they should stay. Fengsuo even gets up and makes a speech himself. She cheers until she is hoarse, claps until her hands are raw.
The old men of the Government don’t seem to know what to do about such things; May becomes June wild rumors sweep through the protesters. Some say troops are coming to kill them all; others say the Army is coming to support the students. After all, are they not the People’s Liberation Army?
But the old men will have their way. It starts with trucks of soldiers thundering down the streets leading to the square. The soldiers set fire to the barricades of trucks and buses, then advance on the students.
Everyone is yelling and Gao can find no one who knows what to do. She and Fengsuo run. AK‑47’s crack behind them, and, for the first time, she realizes that the soldiers are firing on the students.
Soldiers with truncheons swing and hit, swing and hit at anyone on the sidewalks and marble bridges leading to the Forbidden City. For a moment, she and Fengsuo crouch behind the stone lions of the Imperial City to catch their breaths. They scramble through the hutungs, the narrow alleys that snake through the city. The trees are afire along Changan Avenue, the Avenue of Eternal Peace.
At dawn, the sky is enveloped in smoke. The streets are empty except for the carcasses of smoldering vehicles; soldiers have begun sweeping up the shoes and other debris left in the night of terror.
During the running and hiding, she has lost Fengsuo. She stays with a fiend and tries frantically to find what has become of him, but can learn nothing.
After a few weeks, she learns that he is dead, just one among the hundreds of deaths that officially never happened.
She manages to escape notice of the police. In a few months, when travel restrictions to the country are lifted, she makes her way back home to her old village. By that time, she knows that she is carrying Fengsuo’s child. She is given no choice about aborting the baby; she does not resist.
Gao’s eyes tear up. She rubs the tears away, but each time she looks down at the baby girl in her arms, the tears come again. Her head throbs. She stares out at the passing desolation, a match to her own. The empty pain spikes and Gao cries out.
Xiaoying pops awake. The dream is over; she still holds her child. The navcomp shows they are just east of the medium‑size crater Timocharis. The rover is stopped. Why?
Gao points out the window. They have reached the edge of a scarp, far too steep for the rover to negotiate.
It isn’t much of a drop, Xiaoying says. Only about ten meters.
It might as well be a hundred meters. They don’t have any thruster fuel left. They’ll have to go around.
But as Xiaoying looks over the chart, she realizes that the scarp will take them a hundred kilometers further south than they want, and the fuel cells are getting low.
She runs the simulation several times, but can find no way out.
Gao is rocking again: We must call for help.

“Lieutenant Savimbi?” Carol waves. She is near the rover airlocks loading supplies for an overland site survey. “I could use some help with my survey gear. Could I trouble you for a minute?”
“Yes, of course. How may I be of assistance?”
“It’s Rover three,” she says. She ducks into the umbilical tunnel without looking to see if Desmond follows her.
Once both are in the cab of the rover, Carol seals the hatch behind them.
“Now, Desmond”‘ she says as she pulls his arms around her waist. “Are you going to tell me what’s up, or do I have to get rough on you?” She nips at his ear and rubs her cheek against his chin. In a station of only forty men and women, privacy is impossible to sustain; it has been days since she and Desmond have had the opportunity to be alone together. She hugs him close and kisses his neck.
Desmond returns her kisses with equal urgency. After a few minutes, though, he pulls away.
“There’s something you should know”‘ he says. He strokes the line of her jaw with the back of his hand. “It seems a child was born in New Prosperity in the last month.” He holds up his hand. “Don’t even think of asking me how I know.”
“So the rumors are true, then. And you think the mother and her baby might be on board that rover?”
“An educated guess.”
“’Guess,’” my ass. You know, don’t you?”
Desmond says nothing. Carol looks in his eyes, but is not sure what she sees.
She disentangles herself from him.
She sits back on the arm rest of the rover’s piloting couch. “Not mounting a rescue was one thing when all we were dealing with was a defector. I don’t happen to agree with the policy, but let’s leave that as it is. But when there’s a baby involved—” She waves her hands. “I can’t justify playing these political games. A mother is out there, running for her life like Eliza on the ice—”
“Eliza?”
“It’s from a book. Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she says impatiently. “The point is, we’ve got to help them.”
“I’m under specific orders not to help them.”
Carol crosses her arms over her chest. “If you let that order overrule your conscience, Desmond Savimbi, then I don’t know why.”
Desmond doesn’t respond directly. He turns, and for a heart‑thumping moment, Carol thinks he might actually leave.
Instead, he looks down the length of the aft compartment of the rover. “So, What equipment did you need my help with?” he asks, as if nothing has just passed between them.
Carol presses her lips tightly together. “Nothing. I’m all set to go.”
Desmond walks down the length of the cargo and equipment racks. “I should say it doesn’t look like you’ve loaded nearly enough supplies for the trip.
Carol cocks her head. “Sure I have. It’s just a run north up to Autolycus. Kimberley and I have made the trip a couple times. It only takes three hours each way.”
Desmond turns back toward her. “Autolycus?” He frowns. “Sorry, I was under the impression you were going to site the next observatory near Timocharis.”
Timocharis is four hundred kilometers away, three times the distance to Autolycus, and west, not north. “It’d take us eight hours just to get there—”
“Probably longer. The west Road doesn’t run any farther west than the core sample at Beer Crater.” He faces her. If you were going to Timocharis, you would naturally need more provisions. But since you’re not…” He shrugs. “My mistake.” Desmond moves toward the hatch to the docking tube.
“Wait,” Carol says and takes his arm. “Enough games. Tell me what you know.”
“I can’t.”
“But you do know something,” she says. “Something about Timocharis Crater.” She stops. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s where they are. You must have gotten a distress call.”
Desmond makes no reply.
Carol thinks of another approach. “Maybe you’re right. Autolycus is pretty close to the north road. We would have less problems from rover traffic vibration at Timocharis. Not much rover traffic out that far west.”
“Not much.”
“I’d need some help scouting the route from Beer to Timocharis.” She smiles and draws him near. “Know anyone available?”
“I thought you were taking Rogers.”
She shrugs. “He gets motion‑sick off the main roads.”
“Pity.”

The message had been short, merely their coordinates and situation. They have waited over ten hours, but still no sign of the Americans. Xiaoying has just about given up hope when she sees the American rover crest the east horizon.
She and Gao have already determined that she can use the rover’s winch to lower themselves down the scarp. They have rigged a sling with a couple of diapers with which Xiaoying can suspend her baby between her breasts inside her suit. It is snug, but the baby breathes comfortably. Xiaoying will ride the sling down first, then Gao will follow.
They are preparing to do just that when the computer alarm goes off.
Xiaoying flicks into General Access and sees rovers from New Prosperity closing in from the west. Five minutes and they will be here.
Gao looks worried and says, You go down and I’ll send the rover south on automatic. As long as they follow the rover, maybe they won’t see us below.
Gao seals Xiaoying’s suit and urges her out into the sling. The cable thrums under her gloves and she begins her descent. She bumps against the scarp wall a few times, but no damage is done. She can see the Americans just fifty meters away; a talus field is between her and them.
Boulders ranging from grapefruit size to rover size partially block the way; she looks up to see if Dr. Gao is coming, but to her surprise the rover is moving before the winch is even hauled up all the way. “Gao!” she cries out. But Gao does not reply. The rover is gone.
Tears sting her eyes; she isn’t sure she can make it through the boulders without help. So you help her by becoming her, to show her the way.
You move cautiously, deathly afraid of falling on your chest and crushing the baby. Your suit smells of sweat and neoprene and sour milk. You see two pressure‑suited figures emerge from the American rover. They are coming toward you.

Carol drives while Desmond examines their Eliza and her baby. Finding the baby swaddled inside Xiaoying’s pressure suit was nothing short of astonishing. Desmond’s Chinese is worse than Xiaoying’s English, but he is at least able to determine her name and that both mother and child are okay. Xiaoying looks tired, and is older than he’d expected
She is tearful and excited, but everything seems fine. After his cursory examination, Desmond takes over driving until they are beyond the horizon.
Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Collins is waiting for them at the airlock. He takes Carol and Desmond aside on the way to the infirmary.
“We’ve received an official protest from the Chinese government. Nothing we didn’t expect. But there’s a problem. They say that the woman you picked up is a Dr. Gao Xiaoying. They say she’s mentally disturbed, that she assaulted another woman, then kidnapped her baby right out of the crib. I need you to convince me why I shouldn’t believe Governor Qi’s story.”
Desmond hesitates. “We can do a DNA test and we’ll know for sure.”
“Do it.”
An hour later, the DNA test results come back.
The baby isn’t hers.

Further consultation with the representatives just arrived via hopper from New Prosperity reveals that no Liu Xiaoying exists. A Dr. Gao Xiaoying, however, had recently given birth, but her child had only lived thirteen hours. Gao suffered a breakdown and was supposed to have been sent back to Earth for treatment.
“Who did we pick up? Liu Xiaoying or this Dr. Gao?” Carol asked. I don’t know what to believe.”
Desmond shakes his head. “It looks like there never was a Liu Xiaoying. She was a construct that Gao made up to protect herself when her baby died. Perhaps much longer ago than that. I’ve never seen a case quite like this one.”
“And the baby?”
“Will have to go back to New Prosperity. Her mother is waiting.”
Carol watches you, Gao Xiaoying, through the infirmary window. You are so dissociated that you don’t notice when they take the baby from you. You just keep calling out a name, your name: “Gao?…Gao?”
The truth is, the thing you feared your whole life was not a thing to fear at all. Your baby is with you, the palpable spirit of her is always with you. She never left, though you hid her away. The truth is, you are the clever girl, and she cannot be taken away again. You sit rocking on the bed and hugging empty air to your breasts. You hum a song from your youth, a song of freedom and love.