Every day in Chengdu ended with a double moon night. The real moon would appear, forever cycling through its phases followed by the replica moon, an intense orange ball, always full and ringed with a fluorescent icy blue halo or golden yellow light. When both moons aligned for a few minutes each night, the commingled shine radiated luck in love on any man who sat beneath it. Everybody in Chengdu knew this to be true.
Sadly, you could no longer see mountains or seas on the replica and it had ceased to light up the city streets as in the past. The replica was dying, running out of essential thruster fuel which kept it in orbit. With expiration imminent, the moon had shifted on its own into an unengineered fuel savings mode, and cut its light by half. The handler rocketeers, bewildered by the replica’s independent behavior, were trying to keep it aloft longer before it got sucked into earth's gravitational pull and disappeared. Nobody could predict when. One night it would be there and the next, gone. This could happen any day.
I had to get to Chengdu before the replica disappeared or its magic no longer worked. I’d promised Wingo.
Unlike most people, I couldn’t make my travel arrangements online because my reaction to antibody testing was erratic. Even though my at-home monitors registered all clear, I failed at public testings, so I was using the services and pre-clearance convenience of a live travel agency. There were few of these left in the city and they specialized in cases like mine.
The office was on the forty-fifth floor of a half-empty glass tower, one of thousands in the city. They had converted the bottom half to rez use and the top was office space. I stepped through the heavy doors into an atrium and looked up to the sky, a small blue patch eighty floors up. Clothes, fluttering like bird wings, hung on lines that crisscrossed the open atrium space. Although laser cleaning had been available for a decade, many people still preferred to wash and dry using a clothesline. It made me dizzy to look up.
As I walked toward the elevator the smell of smoke, wheatmeat ribs and caramelized sugar hung in the air. Special scrubbing exhausts were added to the structures after they turned rez, but the household cooking aromas, too boisterous to be contained, leaked out from under apartment windows and doors.
In the elevator I checked my cloak and looked at myself in the reflective metal of the elevator control panel. I reminded myself to keep from adjusting my crotch—an unconscious nervous gesture. My mother had excoriated me all my life for this nasty habit from my childhood. Last week, when we were out together, she scolded me about it.
“The cloak doesn’t cover that, you know,” she said. “Cut it out! No woman wants to be seen with a man whose hand wanders to his crotch. Not even his mother.”
You’d never guess from the quiet hallway that the travel agency would be so busy. I stepped through the door into a riot of bustling people, flashing screens, people shouting and others talking into displays. There were old-fashioned screens on each desk rotating images and data at tremendous speed. Printers hissed and clattered, grinding out documents in a rainbow of colors. A young girl rode around the space on office skates, moving piles of boopaper from desk to desk. She’d pick up speed on a straightaway hallway and then brake suddenly, like a hockey player, and make a delivery. A gong sounded from somewhere and she’d be off again.
I chewed a mint to cover the smell of the lunch beer I’d shared with Lan and Zio, my best friends. They were sympathetic when I told them about my Violet experience, sympathetic and curious.
“Did you call her?” Lan asked.
“Nah. She made me uncomfortable,” I replied.
“Uncomfortable might turn into something better,” he said.
I thought of her grope in the bathroom and shuddered.
“I think you’re being a wimp,” said Zio. “So, she’s more aggressive than you bargained for. It could be a test. Shirley made me jump through a few hoops when we first met.”
Lan and Zio had been to Chengdu together last year and did the moon tour. Lan bumped into Ana in Chengdu and they married two months later. Zio was engaged to Shirley. I’d planned to go along with them, but failed to pass the antibody testing. Now they were starting new lives, and I still floundered around.
My display buzzed and a pretty travel agent greeted me with an elbow bump. Even before I saw her wedding ring, I guessed Shio Kew was married. Most of the attractive women in the city were taken. She waved me to a chair near her desk and pushed an envelope full of travel docs toward me.
“We rarely get requests for boopaper docs these days. It’s quite a pile, isn’t it?”
Besides testing for this trip, my moon trip, I was at the agency because I wanted to have paper tickets and brochures as souvenirs. If everything worked out as I hoped, I’d meet a woman and I wanted to start out on the right foot. My last relationship had crashed because of my lack of romance.
“You throw everything away!’ Lila said when she saw ticket stubs from a concert in the trash. We’d been dating for six months. Lila saved everything, even the wrappings from straws from restaurants we visited together. She glued her memorabilia into books or made collages from them.
“What?” I was bewildered by her anger. An orderly person, I kept my apartment tidy and didn’t let paper of any kind lie around.
“I don’t keep useless papers. Just clutters everything up.” I should have known better.
“Useless?” Lila said. It was soon over between us. We broke up in one of those furious fights there’s no coming back from. But I learned something about how women think.
When I told my mother about the break up, she was disappointed because she’d liked Lila and her family. But my excess status didn’t worry her as much as it did Wingo.
“Don’t be too anxious,” my mother said. “Marriage is a cage. Those in want to get out and those out want to get in.”
As I shuffled through the papers, Kew cautioned, “Look over the details. Easy to fix now, harder later.”
I concentrated on the itinerary and matched dates of trains and hotel reservations. My seat number, 088, was the luckiest number available for the moon platform. It had cost an extra triple premium for five nights and I made sure I had the boo tickets, confirmation of the fingerprint ID and the photo ID.
Modern China was in many ways unrecognizable from the Before Times, but the cultural superstitions hadn’t changed. My father paid a premium for his display number, which ended in 888. When apartments went up for sale, the eighth floor units were priced highest and sold fastest. Even the Chinese government had honored the lucky number tradition when the BT summer Olympics began in Beijing at 8:08 p.m., August 8th, 2008.
My tour included a round-trip ticket for the high-speed train to Chengdu, and five nights in the Moonlight hotel, a simple walk away from the moon observation platform. By day I’d visit the panda breeding station and the museum. I reserved one night for the face-changing Schezwan opera—the remaining four nights I’d bask in the moon glow.
“Your seat has Feng Shui too,” the travel agent said. “And it faces the Sea of Fecundity.” She didn’t have to tell me this was the most desired position for men looking for wives, and for men unable to conceive a child.
The very last piece of business was the test. My armpits were damp. I ran my hands over my bald head and shifted in my seat.
“I’ve had trouble with the test,” I told Kew, understating my problem.
She shrugged and asked me to put my index finger in the V machine, which had double screens—one facing her and one facing me. I rubbed it on my shirt and inserted it. I could feel my heart rate increase. The ancient Mac sputtered and fussed for a few seconds as it woke up, and then data splashed across both monitors. My temperature, blood pressure and oxygen levels were all normal but the fucking antibody level was blinking red.
“Oh, oh,” said Miss Kew.
Not again! My corona vaccine reaction had been abnormal since my first shots twelve years ago. It took three rounds of jabs before it caught on with me and I boosted every January. I had sufficient antibodies, but they didn’t show up on many of the various screening tests still in use.
This agency test set-up with the finger was antiquated, but the trains accepted the results, unlike the airlines.
Kew was reassuring. “Let’s take it again,” she said. “Take off your cloak.” I stood and let it fold itself and settle on the desk.
I pushed up my sleeve, shook my wrist to relax it, took a deep breath and stuck my finger in the machine again. New data sprinkled onto the screen. No red lines. I was clear to travel out of my sector, to Chengdu.
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