Bolton’s sled was disappearing out the opening. On the range officer’s screen, with its side view of the opening, the sled turned its flank to the wall and rose upward—he was gambling on the pickets’ east wall blind spot. Finally the sled stopped, just below the ridge.
I turned to the console and got ready.
“All right,” said Bolton over his radio. “We’re going to cut a bit of a groove here. We’ll need a very sharp call-out on distance to the mast, if you would. We’re going to be able to see bugger all once we get started.”
Finally I understood.
“Bolton! I can steer your sled from here. Set it to zero-zero—mark.”
“Thank you, lad, that’s very decent of you.”
Whump.
“I’ll give you timing by voice. You’re going to leave the sled when it stops?”
“That I am, lad. All right, Roscoe, steady on.”
The sled rotated to face in along the ridge toward the antenna mast. It jerked backward in a cloud of exploding rock as the beam lit up, cutting a groove in toward the mast.
The pattern of pickets changed instantly. Two gunships streaked in toward the sled, which at the very same moment vanished in a cloud of dust exploding outward from the ridge. The gunships veered away and circled, trying to probe the cloud with radar and infrared.
“Thirty-four seconds.”
WHUMP. An equipment rack crashed to the ground. The air grew hot. Another frog nosed around the edge of the opening.
“Fifteen.”
WHUMP, WHUMP. Close. There had to be a frog all the way inside the hole, closing in on us.
“Five seconds.” I picked up the light-pen.
“Two. One.”
The sled stopped at the mast. Bolton appeared through the smoke, bent over and racing across the rock toward the mast.
But the smoke was already dissipating. One of the gunships accelerated around the edge of the cloud and shot in toward him.
“Company, Bolton.”
He dropped to his stomach and groped overhead for the connector. I clicked on the light-pen and tracked the gunship with it.
WHUMP. Dust fell from the ceiling. Bolton heaved the connector up toward its socket as a line of gunfire stitched toward him.
With a final lunge against the wires the connector slid home. Our battle map blossomed with numbers.
I pressed the button.
Bolton had caught an arm in the wire bundle and was trying to pull aside from the line of fire, but he was unable to get any leverage.
The gunship changed course, then abruptly tumbled downward. Its nose dug into the rock and an instant later an oily wall of flame slid across the rock close to Bolton.
“Stay where you are, Bolton.” I flicked the light-pen over to the other gunship and pressed. It nosed down into the ridge as well and promptly exploded.
“All right, you’re clear for a minute. Get in the sled and stay there—we’re going to need you on the north wall.”
He finished untangling his arm.
“Pray tell, Eduardo.” He was out of breath. “How exactly did you do that?”
“Stand by.”
WHUMP. Rock exploded somewhere in the wall nearby, followed by a shriek of tearing metal. I moved the light-pen to each of the aircraft along the north wall, pushing the button again and again. They plummeted down the wall and into the ocean in a cloud of steam.
“All right,” I said. “Someone write down those numbers on the screen. Fast.”
“What’s happening?” said Elliot. “Even the frogs are going in.”
“Is someone writing down those goddamned numbers?
“What those are,” I said after a moment, “is the serial numbers of the batteries in the aircraft. Every battery has a transponder in it—when the antennas query it, it responds with its serial number. Then if I transmit a serial number, that battery shuts down.”
I swept the pen across the pickets over the ocean.
“Look up those serial numbers—find out who we sold them to.”
WHUMP.
“Bolton! Get down on the north wall. There’s a laser in that hole where I can’t get at it.”
“Aye, aye.”
“Mr. Torres? Those serial numbers went to the Europeans.”
“The Europeans? What the hell are they doing here? Christ, this doesn’t make any sense.”
The complex we were in began shaking again, vibrating, and this time it didn’t stop.
“Bolton, can you see where they went in? They haven’t broken through, but they’re awfully damned close. They must be trying to hit the command center here.”
“There’s fuck all to see from here, I’m afraid. I don’t know where I am. I do think I’ve got him, though. They’ve made a bloody big hole, about your level—”
“Oh my god, no! Mr. Torres!” A woman behind me.
More shouting. Another woman’s voice, screaming now.
“The infirmary—” Awful sounds.
“It’s the children!”
Disoriented, I raced for the door—and as soon as I was through I knew something was terribly wrong. Daylight was pouring in, a hundred yards down the corridor. I ran.
The infirmary door wouldn’t move. Others were around me now, pushing, confused. I found a fire axe and tore it from the wall, then pushed my way through to the infirmary window.
And froze.
It was gone. The infirmary, utterly gone. Dust swirled over a gaping hole that sloped downward and away to daylight. The medics, the children, all gone.
Then a movement to one side caught my eye. Along one wall there remained a shattered piece of ledge, hard to see through the dust. A crib hung over the lip. Tiny hands gripped the bars and a face looked over the rail, shrieking with terror and wet with tears.
Enough of the floor remained to work my way around, if I could get through the window. The baby turned his head from side to side and cried, but from outside the window I could hear nothing but my own breathing. I stared, gripping the axe harder.
But I didn’t swing it. I knew the baby could see me in the window and was screaming for me to come, but I just stood there and stared back for what seemed like an eternity, unable to move.
The axe was torn out of my hands. The baby lifted his head to cry harder and threw his arms out toward the window, tipping the crib.
The image of his face, and his tiny hands reaching out to me, would stay with me through all the years I had left to live.
EIGHT
I Have Let You See It
With Your Own Eyes
C
han’s baby was stillborn. Chan suffered a great deal in the months that followed, and drew into herself.
I myself provided little solace. It had, in fact, become so hard for me to remember the baby that sometimes I believed she hadn’t existed. But I remembered the look in the medic’s eyes, and so I couldn’t put the event behind me completely.
It had been the worst of signs in a year filled with bad signs. I sat in the darkened manufacturing chamber now and thought about how the day past had brought only more.
By some reckonings it was the first day of the Year of the Snake—a poor sign in itself, the Chinese said. And the new year, by those reckonings, began with the full moon. The full moon meant that the sun and the moon were in line with the Earth, a circumstance that brought the highest tides of the month. This particular New Year’s marked a solstice, moreover, a time when the highest tides were to be found on the tropic of Capricorn and the tropic of Cancer, along which lay the Ganges River Delta. The conjunction of these events also came at a time when the oceans were rising because of melting ice packs, and coastal lands were subsiding because of excessive ground water pumping.
So, five and a half hours earlier, as the Year of the Snake stole westward out of Burma and the full moon rose over the Bay of Bengal, a storm had flooded the Ganges Delta. Dacca and parts of Calcutta lay under water. Forty-three million people were expected to die.
; The news had chilled our own New Year’s celebration, a procession arranged by Pham and the captive Chih-Hsien Chien during a rare truce between them. The parade had gone on for the children’s sake, but only after bottles of rice wine had passed again and again among the adults.
I stood in the darkened doorway of the manufacturing chamber and watched. The procession was led by an enormous paper snake, lowered over the heads of Chan, Elliot, Peters and others. Pham led the way, bent over with her torso inside the snake’s head. It weaved back and forth as she steered, sensuous and menacing. Lewd comments flew between her and the tail, while watchers banged noisemakers and passed bottles of the bitter wine.
Children clapped in time and jumped with excitement as the snake threw them candy. They were too young to see the edges of fear behind the merriment.
It was the snake’s job to burst through three tall paper banners blocking its path. The first was a picture of the Earth, and the second the moon. The third was painted a deep, velvety black, speckled with stars. Only by bursting through these images of the Earth, the moon and the stars could the snake find its rightful place in the heavens for the new year.
It weaved from side to side and slid forward, the bearers chanting and swaying. Coming up against the banner of the Earth, Pham paused and the snake’s head weaved in front of the paper, then reared up as high as it could and plunged through it.
Pham skidded to her knees. After an awkward moment she recovered her balance and stood, then the snake slithered through the banner of the Earth behind her.
Confronted with the moon a moment later, the snake slid up along the banner’s face but drifted to one side, so slowly that the middle and tail began to catch up with the head and coil across the road. Still the head didn’t move. The crowd grew restless. The head drifted the other way, and the body coiled tighter behind it. Finally it coiled so tightly that it forced the whole front end of the snake to smash through the banner sideways.
The crowd shouted its relief, and the snake headed drunkenly onward toward the stars.
Then suddenly the snake swept sideways across the roadway, only to whip back in the other direction a moment later. On the second swing it stopped abruptly in the center of the road with its nose against the black banner, as though transfixed by the stars. It stared and it stared, and the minutes crept by.
Then slowly the head rose upward. It rose higher and higher and the crowd held its breath, until suddenly it reared backward and, with an awful sound of crumpling paper, Pham pitched face-forward onto the ground. The snake’s head crashed to the roadway and skidded forward, coming to rest with its nose inches away from the blackness, staring with empty eyes into the glittering, unconquered stars of space.
The crowd fell silent.
The body of the snake started to come apart. Elliot shrugged off the snake’s middle and Chan sat down hard on top of it. Charlie Peters pulled the unconscious Pham out of the snake’s head and picked her up, cradling her in his arms.
Across the roadway sat Madhu Patel on his stool, watching me. Chih-Hsien was next to him, staring down at the snake.
T
he procession had come to its unpromising end at four in the afternoon, and the corridors had grown quiet in the two hours since. Somewhere above us, the night and the full moon crept across the Pacific toward us.
I’d spent the last hours in the darkened manufacturing chamber, remembering its days of feverish activity, and then the day that the machines had stopped.
The Europeans had not revealed our ability to disable the batteries. Whatever their reasons, they’d limped back home and said nothing. For months afterward the world had continued to buy the priceless power cells, becoming ever more dependent on them.
Then finally the United States declared its intention to take control of the technology behind the batteries, and attacked us by both air and sea. We crippled their batteries en masse, and the attack failed. But the word was out.
A week later Charlie Peters told us that all two and a half million line items needed for launch were in inventory. Around-the-clock meetings followed.
The week after, we severed our ties to the world. And we sent out a warning, something I’d once sworn I wouldn’t do. Sitting alone in the Operations room, I pressed a key and held it down for sixty seconds. For sixty seconds the world’s batteries stopped.
Infamy, they called it. Sixty seconds that would be remembered for generations to come.
Three hundred seventy-eight million batteries died. Lights dimmed and went out, cars stopped, work platforms and low-flying aircraft crashed, hospitals and computer towers ground to a halt.
There had been few backups. The batteries had been perfect.
The world was stunned, then angry, as it came to understand the depth of our betrayal. The market for radio shielding soared until we announced that, from here on out, a new signal broadcast continuously by us was required periodically by the cells to keep them on—that if the signal were interfered with or our island destroyed, the cells would soon stop. We were vilified and condemned, and feared.
We sealed ourselves off and waited.
Chih-Hsien Chien had been forced to stay with us. In the end he’d been eager to do so, a fact which in itself was worrisome. We used him to communicate with the Chinese government, now at war with its own people. Through Chih-Hsien we reminded them that their ships could be stopped easily if they made a move toward the tunnel before allowing the rest of us safe passage.
We remained on civil terms with the Commonwealth and North American colonization contingent, but had lost contact with the Europeans.
As Patel had asked, we assured the world that the plans for the batteries would be transmitted from our ships just before passing through the torus. There were, in any case, whispers that the Indonesians were close to discovering the cell’s principle for themselves. It wouldn’t be surprising; I was, in fact, surprised it had taken so long.
In the meantime we tested the ships and retested them, and checked and rechecked the payload. On board were a combined 86,000 tons of food, heavy equipment, MI, grasshopper and spider drones, and frozen embryos. And dirt—the upper eighteen decks of each ship weren’t really decks, but were a quarter-mile-long by eleven-foot-wide spiraling garden.
The dry stores and gardens could support more people than we’d originally planned. Polaski’s projections of 1.5 children to each of sixty-one percent of all possible couples, to equal exactly fourteen people per ship, had come to nothing. There were fewer surviving children than planned, while at the same time there were many more adults: We’d become increasingly dependent on imported talent, especially payload experts drawn away from the consortia. There would be 2,400 of us in the end.
Children with disabilities would not be placed in institutions on Earth as we’d intended, but would be brought along in specially equipped quarters. Polaski had talked vaguely about just leaving them behind on the island, but Chan and Patel had quickly silenced any discussion of it.
“Everything else,” I’d said to Bolton a while later, “we leave behind.”
“Oh?” He was fishing from the lip of an opening he’d blown in the wall of the island, against all regulations. Rain spattered on his face as the wind picked up, and made a noise against his empty bucket.
“Yes,” I said, “all of it. The fighting, the poverty. The banqueros. The stink of the place. There’s nothing we need here anymore.”
“I wonder,” he said, peering over the ledge at his line, “if that’s really what you mean to leave behind.”
I looked at the whitecaps through the rain, out across the ocean Bolton had yet to catch a fish from.
“I don’t think we will, in any case,” he said, and wound in the line. “Someday we’ll look up to find it’s still there.”
I thought of the gun coming up in Major Cole’s hand, and of the old man in his bungalow, of my father in the doorway of our shack with a piece of dung in his hand and tears in his eyes.
“Piss on it, Bolton,” I said. “I just want to go.”
P
atel was out by the opening that evening, after the procession. The airfield was deserted, swept by fitful eddies of trash, lit by the dusk sky. He sat on a stool near his flying work platform, his crutches nearby. Next to him was an empty stool.
“I thought you would come,” he said. He held a handkerchief in his lap and stared down at the mists lying on the water, his face wet with tears.
“What’s the matter, Madhu?”
“I am doing very well, my friend. Thank you for asking.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat and watched the mists darkening below us. Clouds gathered above.
“What is it, Madhu? You’re crying.”
“Ah, yes, that. Well, it is not an easy thing to explain.” He dabbed at his eyes.
“But I will try. You see, Eduardo, a short time ago I was resting in my room and thinking about this terrible day, when all at once Allah spoke to me.
“He said ‘Madhu’—He calls me Madhu, you know, because there are so very many Patels in the world.
“ ‘Madhu,’ He said, ‘many people have died today, as you know. And among them were some who found in their lives much hardship and sorrow, but who passed away before they could weep for their own unhappiness. That is a bad thing, Madhu. For while Paradise is a fine place, it is not so good to leave behind in the world grief for which no one has wept.
“ ‘Come give me your help,’ He said. ‘Come help me weep for them, before their grief finds new hearts to dwell in.’ ”
I was conscious of Patel’s warmth beside me, and conscious of the ocean swelling and falling beneath the mists. It was at its lowest tide, just turning against us now as the moon approached from beyond the horizon.
“I think perhaps He called to you, as well, Eduardo, but you could not hear him in your gloomy room filled with machines.”
“No.”
Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t hear anything at all. “We’ve been here too long, Madhu. I walk through the corridors sometimes, and I feel like I’m in a grave. I haven’t seen a sunset in five years.”
A Grey Moon Over China Page 13