A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  “Hah! I think maybe we have piggy for dinner, what you think?” She dragged out her huge fléchette gun and held it out in both hands. For a minute I thought the pig was finished, but instead she pointed it at the ceiling and pulled the trigger.

  As strong as she was, the gun drove her bodily back along the bench she was straddling. The force of the blast swept across the room in a hot wave, and the gout of flame from the barrel reached all the way to the ceiling—which now bore a ragged three-foot hole through the brick. Mortar dust rained to the floor and a cloud of it swirled beneath the hole in the sudden sunlight coming through it.

  The pig hadn’t seemed to notice the blast at all, but it did gradually stop its snuffling as it realized that it stood exactly in the center of a heavenly shaft of light, slanting down through the haze and spilling across its pink feet and the wet black dirt around it. Pham was sprawled back along the bench looking at it disgustedly, while the pig slowly raised its head and looked into the circle of celestial light, as though surprised that God should have shed His benevolence upon it for doing no more than urinating on the rec center floor.

  Elliot scratched his chin and leaned closer. “Twenty-to-one she don’t shoot up through that hole again.”

  “That’s a sucker’s bet, Tyrone. If she shoots up through that hole it’s going to go right through the dome, and I don’t live to collect.”

  He looked at me. “You’re pretty smart for a short, depressed person, you know that?”

  “I work at it. Now what?” The pig’s attention had finally wandered from the hole, and now its little eyes were following something else across the room; we peered into the gloom to make out a spider drone flitting along the ceiling toward us.

  “Hah!” Pham’s gun swept down from where it still pointed at the hole in the ceiling and swung across the room toward the drone as it closed on us. I watched in fascination and held my breath. Just as the gun lined unsteadily up on the drone, the drone spoke in its pleasant little voice.

  “Mr. Torres? Katherine Chan sends her compliments, and wishes you to know that the probe has—” With a crashing of benches the drunken Roddy McKenna lunged across the table and drove Pham’s hand upward just as she pulled the trigger. The room shook with another powerful blast and a gout of flame, and after a few long seconds Elliot and I opened our eyes carefully to look up at the ceiling. Not four feet from the first hole was a new one, with swirls of dust and brick raining down onto the floor and billowing out into the air. The pig didn’t even hesitate, but trotted across into the new pool of light and contentedly resumed its rooting. Pham turned and spat in McKenna’s face and jerked her arm away. “Prick,” she said, and sat back with a snort of disgust.

  From next to me came a polite “Ahem.” The spider drone hovered at my side, unfazed by its brush with death. “Ms. Chan wishes you to know that the probe has returned and has sent a communication, and that your presence is requested in the research center auditorium. Thank you.”

  Elliot held out his hand. “Congratulations, Torres, you done good. I never doubted you at all, hardly.”

  C

  ables from the research building tunneled under the edge of the dome to a row of dish antennas, rotating with infinite precision and patience as they listened to the whispering of the distant probe. Other cables slithered farther across the black dirt to a row of smaller antennas that pointed to our ships resting on the horizon, where the massive fleet MI worked to process the billions of pages of data collected by the probe during eight months in the Serenitas system.

  Indoors, metal chairs scraped against the brick floor as senior personnel filed in and took places on one side of a long row of tables. The tables stood in the center of the auditorium, a cold iron and brick hall with a high vaulted ceiling and a meager string of lamps hanging from it. Behind where we sat at the tables the auditorium was empty, but on the wall facing us hung rows of big display screens, suspended above doors that led to the labs and offices. Between our table and the wall with the screens, the floor was covered with a metal grating on which technicians were hastily setting up desks and computer consoles, and rows of printers and monitors on portable stands.

  Charlie Peters was present in his capacity as logistics chief, looking red-faced and pleasant with Kip in tow. Chan was there, too, dragging a chair across the floor with one hand and trying to read from a slippery sheaf of papers in the other. Polaski and Miller were already seated, Miller looking agitated and worrying a tiny notebook in one hand. Bolton and Roscoe Throckmorton sat back in their chairs at one end, while on the far side of the table, among the banks of presentation equipment, Elliot stood among the screens and tables arguing quietly with Lou Fiedler’s radio astronomers. The young Roddy McKenna sat ashen-faced and disconsolate at a keyboard at the back, his day in the limelight shrouded by his alcoholic haze.

  Nearly forty people worked over the machines spread across the grating, beginning the Herculean task of digesting the probe’s raw data even as the probe turned for its long sweep back from where it had re-entered our system. Those data were being sent back from the probe’s memory in the fastest way possible, a direct, unformatted dump into FleetSys’ own immense storage. But that also meant that the data needed massive processing before becoming usable. We expected to get the gross facts over a period of a few hours, but detailed interpretations could take weeks; and some facts, though discernable in theory, might never be sifted out of the hundred-trillion bits now racing toward us.

  With the hiss of a hydraulic clutch and the whining spin of its electrostatic drum, a high-speed printer began spooling out fine print on sheets of reprintable vellum. Lou Fiedler, the astrophysicist who had transmitted to us the first photographs of Serenitas years before, stood and aimed his shaggy head and glasses around the room, then pulled a stack of vellum from the printer and sat back down at a desk across from us, a conductor taking his place before his orchestra.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s move this along as fast as we can. The whole system knows the probe is back, and already everyone wants to know if they should stop squabbling over the planet the Europeans left behind and start squabbling over the one they’ve headed for.” He licked a finger and leafed through the pages. Finally he stopped and took off his glasses.

  “All right, round numbers: Probe entered Serenitas System eighteen degrees north of the ecliptic, at 5.3 AU—well outside the outermost planetoids—and corrected for a modified hyperbolic swing around the star, Serenitas Prime, with perihelion at 0.3 AU It looped back to hit the return torus just outside of Serenitas herself. Communication with the return torus was established immediately on entry into the system, with the torus found to be, um—Roddy? Torus communications?”

  “Yeah, let’s see.” McKenna was having trouble focusing. “Probe requested alignment for return to Holzstein’s at such and such a future time, and . . . what’s this? Oh, okay. Torus responded it was already aligned on Holzstein’s. More information followed, but that’s all we’ve got so far.”

  “All right, fine. After establishing contact with the torus during its first few seconds in the system, probe discontinued all communication for several hundred hours to pursue passive observation. Very wise, Mr. Torres—a quiet little look-see before becoming an actor on its own stage, hm?”

  “I still don’t get,” murmured Elliot with a glance at Miller, “how come we had to go spy on our own drones.”

  Charlie Peters, unable to pass up a reference to stages or spies, cleared his throat and leaned closer to us. “What spy be this we send in whispered night, to steal within our sovereign’s sight?”

  “Please, Father.” Fiedler had heard him and now pulled down his glasses and glared at him, then reached behind him to pull more paper off the printer.

  “Now, then, gross generalizations.” He leafed through more pages. “Paradise herself—I’ll be damned! Kate, come here and look at this.” Our planetologist, Kate Salfelder, bustled her stocky form across the grating and grabbed t
he papers out of his hand. After squinting at the fine print for almost a minute, her cherubic face lit up and she stuffed the papers back into Fiedler’s lap, then turned to look across the table at Kip, whom she treated as one of her own children and whom she preferred addressing rather than her own colleagues.

  “Well, isn’t that nice! The air on that planet used to be all pukey with CO2 and nitrogen, but now those lovely drones have gone and gotten the nitrogen down to seventy-six percent and the oxygen up to over twenty. All those European people are so lucky.” She leaned down to pat Lou Fiedler’s hand then bustled away. “Oh good-good-good-good!” She bustled right out through a far door, leaving Kip smiling and nodding behind her. Excited chatter came from up and down the table. Fiedler said nothing, but was carefully un-crumpling the pages and peering at them one at a time. He was frowning intently.

  “What Europeans, though?” he said, without looking up. It took a while for his comment to sink in, then the room went quiet. Fiedler put down the papers and craned around to look at his colleagues behind him. “I’ve got infrared and deep radar of the planet here, but I’ll be blasted if I see any artifacts—even though I’d have thought the Europeans would have put down on the surface right away. So let’s start looking for their ships and signals out in space somewhere, hm?” He glanced up at the wall. “What’s that?”

  On the screen a large round image was being filled in by raster scan lines sweeping from side to side. The completed rendition ended up in perfect color, and we drew in our breaths at the stunning beauty of the blue and green planet with its gentle wisps of white cloud—seen for the first time close up and with breathtaking clarity.

  “Enough of that,” said Fiedler impatiently, uninterested in what Paradise looked like to the naked eye. The image was quickly re-scanned with a rendition in grey and white, then a pale yellow was painted over it on the next scan; then a third scan shifted the whole thing into what looked like a high-contrast negative. That was the way it remained, although now each subsequent scan rotated the image of the planet a few degrees, like a glowing black and white sphere turning jerkily under a strobe.

  I knew that this was the playback of a deep radar probe, although I couldn’t make sense of the changing patterns. Scientists worked quickly to slip bracketing cursors across the image and pull out significant surface formations for their own screens, but after only a few seconds of this the main screen cleared and the radar image moved to one side.

  “Okay, here we go,” said Fiedler, and turned his chair full around to face the screen as it started to fill once more. This time it filled with a complicated planar projection—a view “flattened” for the screen—of a spherical slice of the entire system, centered around the probe, a slice which then raced outward as though through larger and larger layers of an onion, until finally it represented a shell nearly a billion miles away from the sun. Then the slice snapped back down to the probe and raced outward again, and again, each time changing slightly as a new band of the electromagnetic spectrum was studied. The more massive bodies in the system left complicated vortices on the screen each time the computer-generated slice rushed passed them, and at one point someone smacked audibly at a key and froze the image, then slid a bracketing cursor in to snip a piece of it out.

  “What’s that?” said Fiedler.

  “Nothing. I think we’ve got an anomaly, is all.” It was Patty Kelly, sitting in the back. “Much too far out for the Europeans. Go ahead.” The scan resumed and went on and on, while people began to get restless.

  Finally Chan put down her own papers and leaned forward. “Lou? How long had the probe been in Serenitas System before it began this system-wide scan we’re looking at?”

  Fiedler glanced at a page in front of him. “One month.”

  Chan sat back with a frown. “So for the first few weeks the probe wasn’t paying any attention behind it,” she said carefully. “Because, as you know, the first European ships went through the tunnel just days after the probe did, and we know that the torus here in Holzstein’s was perfectly aligned all that time. So the European ships did get to Serenitas System—and they didn’t just vanish. Something happened while the probe wasn’t watching.”

  What Chan was saying made me think of something, and I called out to McKenna. “Roddy? Can we tell if there’s any chance the Europeans already took the next leg and continued on to another system?”

  “No, uh-uh—they didn’t. I was going to say something about that. The probe downloaded a history of all of the Serenitas torus’ activity over the years since it was built, and it’s never been rotated to point anywhere but back here toward Holzstein’s. There’s something weird about that, though . . . I’m still looking at it.”

  “What is it, Roddy?”

  “Really, Mr. Torres, I think I must have made a mistake. I’m not thinking too clearly. Let me keep working on it for a minute.” He seemed confused and frustrated.

  “Here’s something!” shouted a technician. “Coherents on VHF! Just a minute—” People rose out of their seats, then a shriek burst from the speakers.

  “Wrong knob,” muttered Elliot. He winced and tapped a pencil against the table.

  The shrieking stopped abruptly, then instead a wall screen burst into life with streaks of black and white noise. The technician worked frantically at her keys, then gradually the screen resolved into a comprehensible image. No one spoke for a long time.

  “What the devil is that?” said Fiedler. Churning its way across the screen, barely discernable in the grainy and unsteady picture, was an old military tank, valiantly pushing aside drifts of sand.

  “Television,” said Chan disgustedly. “Received by the Serenitas probe from Earth—eighty-six years later, five hundred million-million miles away. I don’t believe it.” The tank began an ominous turn toward the camera, then the technician killed the picture and looked down at her instruments. Eyes drifted away from the blank display and back to the screen in the middle.

  “It’s just as well,” said Elliot. “I already seen the movie.”

  The scanning process on the big display was already up into the super-high frequencies, and there was still no sign of the Europeans’ ships.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Fiedler in bewilderment, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” He looked over at the smaller screen where a group of specialists was still studying the surface of the planet, then watched them and scratched his head for a minute.

  “Kate? Kate, get in here!”

  Salfelder came storming back through the door with a collection of tapes and blocks and papers under her arm and bustled forward. “Yes, Lou, you don’t need to shout.”

  “Kate, the way the atmosphere is now on Serenitas—is it self-sustaining?”

  She poured her collection of paraphernalia onto a desk and put her hands on her hips to look at him and think. “Yes, dear. I should think it is.”

  “Because,” said Fiedler, tapping a fingernail against his teeth, “we’ve found that there are no artifacts on the planet at all. And that means not only no European ships, but no terraforming equipment, either. It’s all been pulled off.”

  Salfelder continued to look at him for a minute, then took her hands from her hips and patted at her hair. “Well, I think that’s very nice of the drones, don’t you? Cleaning up their mess when they’re done?” She winked at Kip and bustled off toward the door again.

  “Where are my drones?” Miller was on her feet, her voice shrill as her head swung back and forth along the table. “You go on and on about these—these European people, and about your goddamned seeding equipment and the air on that damn planet, and no one thinks to ask where my drones are! Are you incompetent bunglers going to tell me you’ve got an entire system out there without a single artifact in it? Some pristine storybook planet just waiting for us in the middle of a billion miles of empty space, without the slightest sign that any creature has ever been there? More than a hundred European capital ships went into that system, y
ou idiots, and more than a thousand drone ships have been out there for twelve years seeding that planet, and you’re going to tell me we’re looking at the Garden of Eden? With proof, no less, that not one single ship has ever even left? You’re going to tell me with a straight face, Mr. Torres, that you believe this—this probe—which I had nothing to do with building?” Her eyes were wild as she looked from one of us to the other.

  What she had said was true: No one had said anything yet about the drones, assuming like me that we’d get to them eventually. But now that Miller had brought it up, it was clear that if we weren’t finding the Europeans, then we weren’t finding the drones, either.

  She leaned on the edge of the table and fought for control of herself, while nearly everyone else in the room looked away or fidgeted with papers.

  “All right, Anne,” I said, “let’s take this one step at a time. I’m sure we’re just overlooking something. Lou? What else should we be checking? How about radiation flux and field strengths?”

  I knew as well as Fiedler did what else there was to check—I had designed the probe myself—and I knew that nothing was going to make much difference when it came to finding ships and drones that should have been smearing every part of the electromagnetic spectrum with their presence.

  “Yes, those,” he mumbled, raising his bushy eyebrows. “Low temperature pyrometry, as well, I think.” Miller watched him steadily as she eased back into her seat, while coughs and the scuffing of chairs came from along the table as people became increasingly uneasy, uncertain what was happening. Fiedler cleared his desk carefully then reached behind him for a new stack of vellum. He adjusted his glasses and licked his finger, but just as he reached out to lift the first page Charlie Peters cleared his throat and leaned over close to us again.

  “And I saw when the Lamb opened the first seal; and I heard, as if it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, ‘Come and see.’ ”