A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  Miller returned the gaze for a moment, unperturbed, then broke it off and took a step toward her plane. “I’m afraid I need to rest,” she said. “And then Katherine and I need to begin finding some very expensive equipment. So if you’ll excuse us, I need to get my bags. Perhaps we can join you later.”

  “Ms. Miller,” I said. She stopped. “I have a question. You told Ms. Chan you were coming to work on EI, and whatever your reasons, you seem to have left us little choice in the matter. But I don’t believe you can work without code and data from China Lake. So we need to know if you plan to open a connection from here to the mainland. It’s not a good idea.”

  In response she sank down to rest on her heels and opened her case, which she then turned toward me. Fitted neatly inside were fully thirty of the now-familiar, dull silver petabyte memory blocks.

  “You see!” said Patel, beaming and nodding. “She is so efficient. That is why I let her take such good care of me!”

  Miller closed her case and walked away with Chan. Patel watched them go, then leaned closer and said, “You will want to watch that one, my young colleagues. That is a woman whose only real friends, I’m afraid, are the ones she builds with her own hands.”

  P

  atel said nothing more about himself or his odd companion, but did ask to be shown around the caverns. The elevators to the lower caverns weren’t ready, so Bolton brought up the electric cart for a tour of the airfield. Patel had a hard time getting himself into the front seat next to Bolton, and his big face worked hard with the effort. But when he was in he smiled and banged a crutch against the floor.

  “Good, good!”

  Bolton glanced at him as he drove. “What’s your impression of the island, Mr. Patel? Miller said it wasn’t what you expected.”

  “True. Yes, it is very impressive. Brutal, but impressive.” He turned around and surprised me by patting my knee. “I am sorry if I was harsh with you, young man. But I do not think you should hope for more than you have.”

  He turned back and pointed out the front. “I should like to see the view from that very big window there, if it’s not too dark. I understand we are very high in the air?”

  “You didn’t see it as you came in?”

  “Ah.” He peered at a passing laser battery. “Actually, no. We heard over the radio what the gentleman in the other aircraft expected us to do, and just at that moment I remembered a book I very much wanted to finish. Hello!” he shouted to a passing soldier. “How are you?”

  He turned to me again in the back. “Tell me where you are from.”

  “Piedras Negras. In Coahuila.”

  “Oh. El desierto vacío.”

  “Sí.”

  “My little Spanish. I am sorry.” I didn’t know if he was sorry for his Spanish or the desert.

  “No one is left,” he said. “The desert moved too quickly, and no one is left. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “You had family there?”

  “A mother and a sister.”

  “Ah-hah.”

  We came to the edge of the world. The cart’s front wheels rested close to the lip of the opening, a knife’s edge that ran to the sides and then up and across the top where it became lost in the evening’s gloom.

  No one left in Coahuila? I was stunned. What had happened to Graciela, and to my mother? All those years I’d tried not to remember them, tried not to remember that I’d walked away, leaving them to look for their husband and father by themselves . . . to find him sideways on the wires, a foolish marionette with his pants torn, his shirt pulled up around his chest . . .

  I’d wanted to pull the shirt back down. I always remembered that, wanting to see him dressed properly. But I’d walked away, leaving my mother and Graciela to see where the barbs had cut into his face, where the bullets had torn open his side, shattered his arm . . .

  I gripped the seat to fight off vertigo. Looking straight up was like seeing the universe sliced in two—half lit by the stars, the other half a shadowy grey inside the cavern. We were balanced on a line that divided the world.

  Outside the cavern there was nothing. It was as if sky surrounded us on every side, above and below.

  Then three thousand feet down, barely visible in the pale light, the great rock shelf sloped away toward the water. We were above a haze layer, looking out at the stars that floated in the deep blue over the horizon.

  Patel leaned forward, looking down at the shelf.

  “That is where we will leave from?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked for a long time, then dropped back in his seat and watched the sky. We sat for a few minutes with our own thoughts, then he said, “And that is where we are going. Yes?”

  “Out there someplace,” I said. “Yes.”

  He let out a long sigh, sputtering with his lips, then sat for another few minutes with his hands across his belly.

  “So. It is like we are on the top of Mount Nebo.”

  We didn’t answer, not understanding.

  “ ‘Moses went up from the steppes of Moab to Mount Nebo, and there the Lord showed him the Promised Land.’ ”

  Bolton nodded and after a minute restarted the cart. We made the trip back in silence, then parked by Miller’s plane on the brightly lit apron. Bolton and I got out.

  Thwack-thwack. Thwack-thwack. Thwack-thwack. A lamp flared in the roof closer to the entrance, then another and another in rapid succession until a full mile of the cavern was lit. We stared down the runways.

  Nothing. All across the two hundred acres of apron, people were getting to their feet to watch, then pointing.

  A tiny aircraft entered the light. It was flying in a slip, one wing low and the nose cocked the other way. Security troops picked up guns and started out onto the apron to meet it.

  The plane settled and the low wheel finally touched. Still the plane failed to straighten. Instead it pivoted on the wheel, then its strut snapped and the wing dug into the runway. The plane spun toward Miller’s Navy tail-fan, then skidded under its wing and snagged the gear, bringing the larger plane down on top of it. Fire crews broke into a run.

  A smack came from the little plane and a door panel flew out. A tiny figure followed, scrambling as fast as she could—no more than a girl, from a distance, with short black hair and delicate, South East Asian features.

  Her accent matched. She spun around and shouted in a shrill voice.

  “No-good-for-nothing piece-of-shit airplane! What kind of junk you do for me, hah?” She kicked it as hard as she could and another panel caved in. She spat on it.

  A woman from the fire crew reached out to get her away from the wreckage. Almost too fast to see, the girl whipped around and knocked the woman’s arm down, sending her to her knees. The girl then put her hands on her hips and rocked up and down on her toes as she looked around the apron. Guns trained and steadied.

  “So who in charge here, hah?” she shouted. She saw the three of us and started across.

  She walked like a cat, scarcely touching the ground. Her eyes seemed unnaturally bright and moved rapidly from side to side, flicking from face to face, and every now and then up to the guns.

  Polaski stood across the apron, watching from the shadows.

  Patel spoke quietly from the cart next to us. “My goodness. There is a fire burning in that one, isn’t there?” He shook his head slowly as if giving this careful thought. “A dangerous thing, such a fire, don’t you think?”

  She was very young. She had a finely-drawn, pretty face and a tiny body tight with energy. Her eyes were narrow and she took short, deep breaths, nostrils flaring.

  She stopped in front of Bolton, opting, apparently, for the best semblance of a uniform.

  “So. I am here to join with you.” She rocked up and down again on the balls of her feet.

  “I see,” said Bolton.

  “Yes. I will show your soldiers to fight.” Her eyes flashed and she bounced on her toes and looked at each of us in turn.
/>
  “Perhaps we don’t need to fight,” said Bolton, folding his arms across his chest.

  “Hah! Everyplace you need to fight! Always you need. I help you.”

  “I think not.” He nodded briefly to the troops moving around to the sides.

  “Hah! I think you are afraid to fight, Mister. I think maybe you are too pretty to fight. I think maybe your pecker’s too small, hah?” She turned to look at Patel. “Hi, fat man.” She turned further and looked at me. It was all I could do not to look away.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “My name is Tuyet, Mister Torres. Tuyet Pham.”

  FIVE

  The Sins of the Father

  I

  t would be thirty years before I learned how she came to know my name.

  Polaski insisted she stay, and put her to work right away with the troops. The security people objected, but when they looked to me for a decision I said nothing.

  I was fascinated by her. I was fascinated the way we are fascinated by an almost-familiar scent in the air, a tune heard somewhere before, the peculiar cast of winter morning’s light slipping in across the warming fires in the stockyards. She was familiar, somehow. Expected. And, as strange as it seemed, I couldn’t imagine going on without her.

  She was in my dreams that first night. Kip stood to one side of her in the dream, while to the other stood a big, sturdy man with the face of Madhu Patel but no crutches. Anne Miller watched from the shadows. Pham stood with her hands on her hips and her feet apart, wearing a frustratingly sheer gown and laughing. It was like a dream I’d had many times before, of standing naked in a circle of people, but this was the first time any of them had had faces.

  During waking hours in the caverns over the coming months she watched me constantly, with eyes that seemed to hint at some secret we shared. I felt it, too: that there was some connection between us that ran deeper than acquaintance or even blood, deeper than any bond I’d ever experienced. Yet I avoided her whenever I could.

  Several times I also had the feeling that she knew Kip and Rosler, though I couldn’t imagine how that could be.

  Kip himself made friends everywhere on the island. He took his meals around the cooking fires in the upper cavern, then after dinner played against the soldiers with a deck of cards I’d given him. He never said a word. Polaski ignored him, although I hadn’t forgotten his reaction to Kip that first day. I couldn’t tell whether Kip had forgotten or not.

  At night Kip played his flute, and sometimes I rode up in the elevators just to listen. His music had a power beyond his years, melancholy and sad in the chilly air. The tunes would start with a slow lament that drifted out across the cavern, then deftly answer their own echoes with lullabies I always thought I knew.

  W

  ake up.”

  A whisper next to my ear.

  “Eddie.”

  I woke to find Chan sitting by my cot, running a hand across my forehead.

  “You slept a long time,” she said.

  “Not really,” I said, “I hardly slept. I should have been up sooner, though.”

  “No, nothing’s so important.” She pushed her hair back and her high cheekbones caught the dim light from the corridor. She ran a hand down under the sheets.

  I pulled the blankets higher and she put her hands back in her lap.

  “You do look tired,” she said.

  “Mm.”

  “Polaski wants to see us.”

  “Oh? More table-pounding.” Over a year in the caverns and still with every day Polaski became more and more fixated on our eventual departure, more demanding of the troops working for us, and more difficult to control.

  “You’d rather be exploding your little batteries, hm?”

  “It might cheer up the dungeons a little. God knows they need it.” I was looking around at the stone chamber, trying to remember what was bothering me.

  “I dreamed about going home,” I said at last.

  “Oh. You can’t, can you?”

  “No, I just dream about it.” I kissed the palm of her hand. “You neither.”

  “There’s been nowhere to go, really, after my parents tried going back to Kowloon. All those years after the British, and they thought they could go home . . . Anyway, no.”

  There were times I wanted Chan so badly I could hardly breathe. I pulled her out of the chair.

  “Take off your clothes.”

  She was soft and supple, smooth like satin, and her thighs were slick and her lips moist, and I wanted to fill her up and swallow her and crush her against me, drown in her and never come back . . .

  W

  e met Polaski in a corner of the south manufacturing chamber, a quarter-square-mile of barrel-vaulted rock with a string of magnesium lights on the roof. We were walled in on two sides by rock, on the others by wooden pallets that cast shadows across the table.

  Polaski leaned against a wall with his hands in his pockets. Tyrone Elliot, who’d taken charge of work on the island, sat where he could be in the light without having to look at it.

  Madhu Patel sat wrapped in an Army blanket, frowning and blinking into the light. Chan and I sat at the far end from Polaski. I was bouncing an old rivet on the table, wanting to get it over with.

  Bolton didn’t come to the meetings, staying with his new teams instead. It wasn’t clear what the teams were for, except that he’d staffed them with Special Operations troops from among the Shorts. They kept to themselves.

  Pham came and went and was difficult when she was there. Polaski had assigned her to improving the troops’ hand-to-hand combat skills, though no one really believed they’d be needed. She was very good at it, in any case.

  Anne Miller came if the mood suited her. She spent most of her time with the computers she and Chan had appropriated. But that morning she came and began speaking even as she walked in.

  “I’d like to start, so I can finish.”

  She sat down in the shadows and continued without looking up.

  “I have test drones out—you’ll see them in the corridors. Keep them from flying into the elevators, please, because they’ll become confused by the motion and hit the floor and ceiling.”

  This was all delivered with abrupt condescension. She stared at the far wall and drummed her fingers. She made us uneasy, and she had yet to explain her reasons for being there. But she was building the drones.

  Elliot slid his chair forward to see her better.

  “That doesn’t sound real smart,” he said.

  “They are extremely intelligent. They simply haven’t been trained yet.”

  “So? How smart are they? As smart as our other MI?”

  “Don’t ever compare them to computers, Mr. Elliot! They are survey drones, and they have human intelligence.”

  “I thought MI was smarter than humans.”

  “It is not. MI is useless. The drones will be far more powerful—because they’ll have the one trait that makes us human and gives us our own power. I believe Mr. Torres can tell you what that is, from his time at China Lake?”

  “Awareness,” I said. “Come on, Anne, let’s keep it moving.”

  “No. Any thinking machine is aware—humans are self-aware, and that is technically a very much more difficult procedure to construct.”

  Elliot snorted. “You talk like humans are a matter of getting the wires plugged in right. You don’t just construct people, lady.”

  “Mr. Elliot, if I go into a lab and assemble DNA according to the human map, grow it in a womb, and bring it out as a child and nurture it to adulthood, is that natural or manufactured intelligence?”

  “It’s never been done.”

  “It will be within the year. Well?”

  “Okay, it’s human. It was human DNA.”

  “And if I construct it slightly differently, so that the brain is the same but it comes out on wheels?”

  “That’s cold, lady.”

  “Well?”

  “All right! I get your point.”


  “And if furthermore I take a pile of neurons and build a human brain? Is that an artifact, Mr. Elliot?”

  “Fine!”

  Madhu Patel pounded a crutch against the table.

  “You’ve made your point, my dear. I, for one, am in awe that Allah has allowed us to see the secret behind His great mystery. He has shown us much trust, and we must be careful how we use it.”

  Silence.

  “So how do you construct it?” said Elliot, interested despite himself. “This self-awareness?”

  “We construct it by giving the drones a memory so sensitive that it records their own internal events—unlike MI, which only records external events. Then, like us, they can record their own streams-of-consciousness for later review.

  “Note that none of us is aware of having thoughts as we have them—we are too busy having the thoughts to be aware of the fact that they are occurring. But afterwards—perhaps only hundredths of a second afterwards—we can scrutinize our having had those thoughts by looking in memory, and later still we can scrutinize that scrutiny, and so on, until we put together a picture of the creature that must be doing the scrutinizing.

  “So it is a trick—we can actually only see what we were an instant ago. But we are so fast at it that we are then able to project what we must be like this instant, and so we seem to see ourselves. Because of that one small twist we are able to gain new knowledge, then by knowing that that knowledge exists, construct a still higher-order layer of knowledge, and so on until we are so many orders of magnitude more powerful than other devices that we seem qualitatively different. Hence your objection, Mr. Elliot. Do not make the same mistake with the drones.”

  “So,” said Chan after a minute, “there wouldn’t be any difference between these self-aware drones and a human being?”