A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  “Too slow by half,” it said. “Don’t you think?”

  It was Little Bolton. One day years ago it had for reasons known only to itself attached itself to Michael Bolton and followed him for a full week, coming away with a perfect imitation of his Welsh accent. Less productively, and to everyone’s great regret, it had also at one time attached itself as best it could to Chan’s cat, and from that encounter it had come away proving only that grasshopper drones were better suited to the arts than to the rigors of feline flight. But with unflagging enthusiasm, it had never stopped trying.

  “Telephone call for you, Sir. Shall I ring you through?” It was still on its back, seemingly quite content.

  I wiped coffee up with my sleeve. “Yes, thank you.” After a brief clicking, young Roddy McKenna’s voice came from somewhere in the drone’s middle.

  “Mr. Torres?”

  “Yes, Roddy, I’m here.” McKenna was a blue-eyed and still freckled nineteen-year-old whom I had recently promoted to team leader for the project. He never slowed down or slept or ate much, but just kept working through all hours.

  “The entry-path people want to talk with Anne Miller before launch. They say it could cut months off the probe’s turnaround if they knew the drones’ entry protocol. I agree.” His voice was tense, waiting for me to disagree.

  “No, Rod. The project’s been insulated from her for six years—you know that. Why do you want to break the rules at the last minute?”

  “That’s exactly why, because it’s the last minute. What possible influence on the probe’s design could a discussion with the entry people have? The thing’s built already.”

  I’d promoted McKenna precisely because he was one of the few people who would argue with me; he was also sharp and aggressive. And available—he would never be able to join the more prestigious fighting crews. Unfortunately he was also prone to a muted rage that simmered in the guise of injured arrogance when questioned or doubted. He was hard to manage.

  “Look, Roddy, my guess is that you’re right, and that you can see this better than we could at first. But the reason the rule was made was that we don’t know whether any of her assumptions could bleed into our project and propagate some flaw that’s in the drones. And we still don’t. Anyway, there’s a credibility issue in the eyes of the military. We’re on shaky enough ground as it is.”

  “All right.” That was it, just “all right.” Little Bolton’s metallic belly went on pointing at the ceiling, saying nothing more.

  “Listen, Rod, about a half hour ago I saw a couple of fast troopers putting down at the LZ. Who was that, do you know?”

  “Colonel Pham with the Fourth Surface-Assault Regulars—SinoChristian boundary dispute. Establishing new borders.”

  More likely establishing the highest bidder for her services, I thought.

  “They’ll be back here at the big lock in a couple of minutes,” said McKenna. If he couldn’t join any of the line divisions, he studied them endlessly and followed their every movement.

  “Okay, Roddy, thanks for your help.”

  I turned the drone right side up.

  Beyond the mezzanine rail stood the rounded nose of the Serenitas probe. It was a capsule three stories high and nearly as wide, while below the launch building, below ground level, it stood atop two of the massive engines that normally drove our capital ships. Borrowing those engines had been less popular, but only they could do what had to be done: On one single occasion, for exactly 136 seconds, they had to hurl the Serenitas probe forward at a staggering twenty-three Gs.

  Access hatches stood open on the nose, revealing the sophisticated electronics inside. For each device visible there were two others like it, redundant and redundant again, built with such care that the years had crawled by unnoticed as we worked. We knew it had to work the first time, and we knew, more importantly, that we would have to believe it had worked even if we never heard from it again.

  The vessel was painted a light grey and bore the ragged appearance and cheerful logo of the Pikes Mountain Company asteroid mining barges; and like all Pikes Mountain vessels, it had needed christening with large black letters along its bows; my engineers, with a practiced sense of double meaning, had dubbed it S.S. Sun of Gabriel

  Six similar vessels, although dummies with ordinary engines, currently waited in orbit. Shortly all seven of them would be sent on an innocuous outward-bound orbit from the black planet toward the moons of H-v, passing close to the torus the Eurpeans still blocked, but on a course and speed that made passage through it seem out of the question. But with a sudden, compressed communication with the torus and a blindingly fast acceleration, this one ship would break course and be through the torus toward Serenitas before the European pickets could even track it. We hoped.

  Once through, it was to identify the third torus, if one existed, that the drones would have built in the Serenitas system, then while looping toward that torus for a return to us, it was to collect every scrap of information about the Serenitas system at every conceivable frequency, talking to the drones all the way. Depending on the existence and position of a return torus, within a year we expected to know whether the planet of Serenitas was ready for us, and why the drones were taking so long to return.

  Still, not everyone supported the project. “Torres’ Folly,” someone had called it. As time had passed, the immediate battles and the struggles of staying alive had become all-consuming on the base, and the hope of what Tyrone Elliot called “clean sheets and country music” had begun to die away.

  Muted sounds came from outside. A train of troop trailers was disgorging personnel onto the black dirt of the open mall beneath the window. Whether out of good humor or foul, the mall had been named “Trinity Square”—at this end, reaching all the way to the dome like a church tower, was my tightly secured vehicle launch building, while down one side ran the unmarried personnel quarters and down the other the recreation center, both of them long, low, black-brick buildings. The soldiers pouring from the trailers dumped weapons and body armor into piles on the dirt, then stuffed their acceleration suits in through the barracks’ windows amidst shouting and cheering and the arrival of plastic kegs from the rec center.

  “There’s another call waiting for you, Sir, if you’d care to take it.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t heard Little Bolton announce the call. “Who is it, do you know?”

  “Me,” said Chan, putting herself straight through. “Are you coming over to watch the show? I know you’re close to launch, but it would be nice if you could. The kids would get a big kick out of you being here.” Her voice was pleasant, out of place in the empty iron building. I looked at my watch.

  “Yes, I’ll be there. Um—Little Bolton’s done in another table.”

  “Oh, dear.” A pause. “You know you’ve got Dorczak and her delegation coming in two hours?”

  “I know.” Chan was stalling. “What is it, Chan?”

  “Charlie’s here, Eddie. If you come over, I wonder if you could talk to him a little bit. See if you could get him to go up to the station for a rest. He could go up with the children I’m sending tomorrow, but he won’t listen to me anymore when I bring it up.”

  “He doesn’t listen to me either, but I’ll talk to him if you want. He’s pretty strong, though, Chan. I think he’s okay.”

  “He drives himself too hard, Eddie. And for no good reason that I know of. Hang on just a second.” She asked a question of someone in the background, then came back on. “Did you know we have unidentified ships inbound?”

  “Carolyn’s—”

  “No, a couple of hours behind them, from the asteroid belt. No one knows who they are.”

  “The duty officer’s been told?”

  “They’re the ones who passed the word. Rosler is out there himself, because of Pham’s ships coming in. I don’t like it, Eddie. Will you be here, anyway?”

  “I’ll be there.” With a last glance at the troops out on the black dirt of Trinity Square, I
headed for the iron stairwell.

  “It’s not at all that bad, really,” said an unhappy voice behind me.

  “What’s that?”

  “The table. ‘Done in’ sounds a bit grim, don’t you think?”

  T

  he performance was of a never-before-rehearsed “Peter and the Wolf.” When I arrived it was already underway, to the accompaniment of much giggling and cheering from the children gathered in the classroom to watch. Chan stood to one side, supervising the chaos with good-humored patience.

  The children in the audience sat mostly in little wheelchairs, wearing a variety of prostheses. They were from the third generation, mostly, casualties of the high gravity or existing genetic damage. Chan planned to move some of them into weightlessness in the orbiting station the following day, a decision as painful for the parents as it was a relief from pain for the children, because once they adjusted to free fall they would never see a planet’s surface again.

  I slipped in next to Charlie Peters and tried to sort out the performers. The main character, Peter, was being played by a cheery four-year-old, sitting in a wheelchair and diligently gripping a rope in his right hand. He had a complicated set of braces on his legs and an angelic face, with brown eyes and rosy cheeks and moist lips open in an excited smile. If he had ever memorized his part, he had forgotten it, because the rope and noose, intended for the wolf, remained coiled in his hand to be waved around in his excitement, rocking back and forth in his chair and laughing at the wolf.

  The wolf, in any case, had very little to offer in the way of the needed tail. It had only its six telltale metal feet sticking out from under its wolf costume as it padded back and forth, circling and snapping ferociously at the bird. Its coat and head looked perfectly real, with a long pink flapping tongue and glistening eyes that followed the bird’s every move. The wolf also played, albeit somewhat muffled from its speakers under the coat, a perfect rendition of the wolf’s theme on the French horns.

  The bird—a spider drone optimistically disguised in three or four paper feathers—played its flute theme and bobbed and weaved and teased the wolf, now and then adding its own innovation of bird calls. If the cast’s fidelity to the plot was imprecise, the music, at least, was perfect.

  The cat . . . well, there were two cats. The real cat—the real real cat, that is, namely Chan’s cat—had apparently, and without auditioning, adopted the role of the stage cat, obeying some primordial relish involving bird sounds, a relish that had survived un-dampened through its ancestors’ freezing while still embryos. It raced back and forth and hurled itself up at the plastic and metal bird, leaping frantically up and down from the wolf’s back to get at it. The actor cat, on the other hand, another grasshopper drone decked in paper whiskers and tail, sulked at the side of the stage next to the hunters’ wheelchairs, unsure of what to do about being upstaged by its own understudy. It remained gracious enough, at least, to provide the sound of the cat’s clarinet at the proper moments.

  Charlie Peters told me confusingly and in considerable detail about each of the children, but now he changed the subject without warning.

  “You know, Eddie,” he said, “this reminds me, this business of the wolf up there—” He stopped to applaud, although I couldn’t see at what.

  “You’re going to quote something,” I said.

  “Oh, dear, am I so transparent? No, I’m going to tell you about children. So you see? You’re wrong. Something that fellow Hesse said about children and wolves. Mr. Polaski, you know. His sort.” He leaned back and folded his arms.

  “I’ve lost you, Charlie.”

  “Really. Well, one thinks of the wolf as so innocent, you know. Fixed on its prey, single-minded, no qualms, no guilt of sin because it knows nothing about sin. The perfect innocence of clear purpose, it is. Like Mr. Polaski, you see, this hollow shell of instinct, with not one shred of real feeling.”

  Up on the stage, the wolf had stepped on one of the cat’s feet, and now with a shriek and a hiss the cat spun around and sank a claw into the costumed wolf’s face. The claw stuck. Faithful to the script, however, the wolf went on with its attacks on the bird, flinging the stuck cat from side to side. The cat panicked and howled at full lung, and in a flurry of wolf’s fur tried to claw its way onto the wolf’s back for better purchase. The other cat—the drone with the cat’s part, anyway—inched its way forward toward the center of the stage, sensing its understudy’s imminent demise.

  “On the other hand,” said Peters, “look at that lovely, lovely child. How sweet and innocent can a creature be, I ask you? Not like the wolf at all, yet everyone’s model of perfect innocence. I think of young Kipper, you know, a boy—a man, really—just filled, filled by his own feelings, and not an ounce of wit about him. Everything Polaski is not.”

  “So what about Hesse? Wolves are innocent? Or children are innocent?”

  “Oh, no, neither one. Or at least, once one has learned sin, one can never regain that simple sort of innocence. Never again shed one’s own feelings, you see.”

  The cat had made it up onto the wolf, but because one claw was still stuck in the wolf’s face, it ended up perched on the wolf’s nose—facing backwards into its big rolling eyes. The cat’s ears went back and it hissed and tried to back away, while nearby Chan shook her head and hid her face behind a hand. The actors playing the hunters and grandfather took their cues and tried to assemble into the grand procession into the forest. The real cat, still clinging backwards to the wolf’s face, hissed and spat into the wolf’s ear and urinated on its nose, while the wolf pirouetted on its six legs. Taking its unexpected opportunity, the bird now shifted its attack to the cat, and the other cat, the drone-cat, snuck into line, only to stumble into the coil of rope and tangle all six of its legs.

  Peters gestured at the stage and leaned closer. “What Hesse said, you see, was that the way to innocence leads on, not back—not back to the wolf or the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.”

  He stood up to applaud. “Into the jungle, you see.”

  S

  o, Eddie, what’s this about unidentified ships approaching from the asteroids?”

  “Chan thinks you need a rest, Charlie.”

  “Aye, I know she does, poor lass. Here, this way.” He turned into a rough alleyway between black buildings, and scuffed at the gravel as we walked. I felt another change of subject coming. “She’s the one who should be resting, you know—never takes a minute for herself. It’s a fine thing, her worrying over me. But my, with those children—the wonder in their eyes, Eddie. Did you know—”

  “She thinks you won’t admit the planet’s hard on you, Charlie. She says it gives you a millstone, a cross to carry.” I plunged all the way in. “You like to think you’re carrying the weight of some holy design, Charlie, even though it’s killing you.”

  “Oh, dear, she shouldn’t have.”

  I thought I’d gone too far, but in fact Peters was paying me no attention at all. He was shaking his head and muttering and lumbering away.

  We’d come out of the alley and into Trinity Square, now a dreary expanse of black gravel relieved only by litter and a few weaving soldiers. The lowering sun shone through the dome to cast a grid of shadows across the bleak scene, breathing a dim life into misty rays of light that cut through the dust.

  Peters was flickering in and out of the beams of light and kicking up new swirls of dust behind him, crunching across the gravel toward a tiny figure wedged into a dim corner among the farthest shadows. Seeing only that a figure lay there and that Peters was intent upon reaching it, I knew it had to be Pham—passed out and left behind among the litter and the rest of the drunks.

  It was indeed Pham, easily identified by the giant gun strapped to one thigh and by the clothing. She had taken to wearing a skin-tight black body suit with nothing over it, or, as far as anyone could tell, under it. It made her look even tinier and sleeker—and deadlier: not like someone passed out and collapsed in a s
qualid stupor, but like a spider hiding in a shadowed corner, ready to slip out and sting enemies that passed.

  Peters kicked aside a blunt-looking air-syringe that lay in the dirt next to her. It was a scene of black on black in the shadows: her sleek suit with its dull sheen of dust; her close-cropped hair and high cheekbones and slack lips pressed against the dirt; her gun twisted around and pushed into the ground under her narrow waist, the barrel filled with sand and gravel. Peters leaned down.

  “Leave her be, Charlie,” I said. “Let her kill herself her own way.”

  He knelt down beside her and pulled the gun out from under her. It seemed like all he meant to do, but then he reached in under her arms.

  “Charlie, you can’t pick her up, for Christ’s sake. Come on, you’ll kill yourself.” For a man of Peters’ size, just standing upright in the high gravity was like carrying an eighty-pound weight at home. To lift another human being was nearly impossible. Stealing his strength, too, was the thin air—it was kept at a painfully low pressure to keep from blowing off the domes.

  “Oh, I’ll be all right now.” He sucked his breath in through his teeth and rolled Pham upright, then with a noise in his throat he snapped from his knees onto both feet and heaved her onto his shoulder, still crouching. “Can’t just leave her like a dog, you know. Someone’s got to look after her.” He paused to blow out his breath, then with a thrust of his thighs drove himself to his feet, boots slipping in the gravel and kicking up a new cloud of dust in the shadows. Peters’ cargo handling years were two decades behind him—for a man in his fifties it was a display of extraordinary strength.