A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  Had he been drinking? He settled back into his seat, apparently unconcerned that his voice had carried across the room.

  “Revelations 6:1,” he said.

  Fiedler frowned and started to say something, then held back. Peters was uncharacteristically somber, and it wasn’t clear whether he was serious or not. No one else spoke.

  Finally Fielder looked down and licked his finger again, but at that instant we heard an odd, strangled sound from the back of the room. Patty Kelly was on her feet holding a sheet of paper in her hand, her face pale as she stared at it.

  “What is it, Patty?” Fiedler set his glasses down on the desk and twisted around to look. Kelly just shook her head and stared at the sheet in her hand, her other hand frozen in the air next to her as though unsure what to do with it.

  Finally Fiedler groped for his glasses and got up and went to stand next to her, then after a minute his face took on an odd rigidity. He whispered, barely audible, “Not an anomaly at all, then.” He pulled the sheet from Kelly’s grasp and put it down on her desk, then took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. Finally he put his glasses back on and leaned over to her keyboard and began to type.

  All of the wall screens went blank, then the one in the center filled with tiny glimmering stars, Serenitas Prime large in a lower corner. Then with a shift in perspective the scene snapped in closer, and the big star dropped off of the picture; Fiedler glanced up at the screen then back at the keys. Again the picture snapped in closer—as though the viewer were traveling farther out through the system—then again, and again, until I was sure that any object in the picture would have to be hundreds of millions of miles outside of the system itself.

  Chan caught her breath as the image pulled closer for the last time. There was what looked like a fine, even sprinkling of dust across the screen, each tiny grain a faintly highlighted, uniform black shape, glinting against the deeper black of space. There were thousands of them. Miller stood up and set her little notebook on the table. “The drones,” she said.

  Fiedler glanced at her, then reached down to pick up Kelly’s sheet of paper again. He studied it for a minute, then took off his glasses and turned to Miller. “No,” he said.

  After a minute he leaned down again to Kelly’s keyboard, then with a rapid ticking the scene flicked in closer and closer until the screen was filled with the fuzzy outline of an oddly misshapen, bullet-like object, made from some eerily reflective black material—a bronzed black, almost translucent, like black chrome.

  Then the screen shifted to a black-on-white computer-generated outline of the object, which began to rotate through all three dimensions. An accompanying scale showed the thing to be big—not as big as our own capital ships, but close. Reference lines appeared and the thing was quartered and sliced, and the screen filled with fine spectrographic displays and columns of symbols. Fiedler and the other scientists watched as it evolved, then shook their heads in unison, in disbelief.

  “Cobalt, selenium . . . lanthanides, for Christ’s sake. What the devil is that hull made of?” The line drawings blinked out to be replaced by the red-on-blue of infrared, which then zoomed in on the hot plume behind the hull; once centered, the chemical analyses reappeared.

  “That exhaust has got isotopes in it we’ve never even heard of. Look at that stuff! And look at this.” The screen blossomed with layers of curving field lines and flickering digits. “That thing’s got a magnetic field you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Mr. Torres.” It was Roddy McKenna’s voice. I tore my eyes away from the screen just long enough to see that he was still looking at his own console, apparently unaware of what was happening in the center of the room.

  Anne Miller ignored him. “Perhaps the drones—” But her voice faded away as Fiedler turned his hollow eyes on her and shook his head again to cut her off.

  “Those are substances neither we nor the drones could ever have made, Ms. Miller, not in hundreds of years. But it doesn’t matter. Look at this.” He reached for the keys and the picture switched back to infrared, and the ship steadily expanded to fill the entire screen. The image blurred as it grew larger, and details became almost indistinguishable. But what could be seen was that, under the skin of the hull, the forward two-thirds of the ship was segmented by a faint honeycomb pattern, with each of the open spaces in the honeycomb no more than a couple of feet across. And in the center of each space was a glowing shape.

  “Those aren’t your drones, Ms. Miller.” He stared at the shapes along with the rest of us, and another minute went by. “They’re warm-blooded.”

  A moment passed in a kind of suspended animation, then the auditorium around us felt suddenly too big. I had a sense of being on the ceiling, looking down onto the cluster of men and women huddled together in the dim light from the screens, all facing silently forward, all thinking the same word but not saying it. Minutes ticked by, and I felt sympathy for them, staring at the frozen image of the blurred ship and its warm cargo.

  Miller looked uncomprehendingly from one of us to the other, her face frozen in a rictus of denial.

  “Your drones are gone, Ms. Miller,” said Fiedler.

  She shook her head stiffly, her hand groping for the back of her chair.

  “Aliens!” said Polaski.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Baying of Wolves

  A

  cceptance came slowly and at a price, paid in the coin of our own significance. Comprehension, on the other hand, lay in an uncertain future, a dubious luxury.

  Again and again we resisted the facts, and every time the noose only tightened: The materials we’d seen, the designs, the engines—all of them whispered “alien, alien, alien.” Then always the last, insurmountable fact, the one which in other circumstances should have seemed so natural, but which instead mesmerized us in image after image, ship after ship: the warmth. For where the cold of the drones had spoken of a frightening indifference, this warmth now spoke of intention.

  That others existed while we humans played blindly at our intrigues, filled with our self-importance, was a knowledge that chafed like the humiliation of a drunk, remembering how incautious he’d been the night before—how unsophisticated, how undefended, how naked among strangers.

  Each of us reacted in some way. Even those who were convinced of their own indifference clung to that conviction with renewed vigor. Others armed themselves more visibly, wearing weapons around the base like totems. Some took new lovers, as though spurred to intimacy by a sudden sense of mortality, while others abandoned old lovers in confusion, embarrassed by the intimacy they’d already shown. Some displayed unaccustomed generosity and even valor, while others grew sullen and mean-spirited.

  All of us had at some point in our lives considered the possibility that we weren’t alone. Some had studied the statistical probabilities involved, while others had researched the problems of shape or language, or speed, or evolutionary paths. Some had formed unshakable convictions and others a cherished ambivalence, yet we had all missed the starkly personal nature of the thing. We’d been like people who lie awake in the dark and wonder whether the doors are locked, and idly note the improbability of intruders, then hear the scuff of a shoe next to the bed.

  Polaski wanted to fight. He may have believed it necessary, or he may simply have sought reaffirmation of who he was in the clash of sword against sword, that tonic against self-doubt that had driven men for a hundred thousand years. “And I beheld a white horse,” Peters said about Polaski the day we found the aliens, finishing his earlier quote from Revelations, “and he that sat on him was given a crown, and he went forth to conquer.”

  Polaski had also apparently answered for himself the question that others still avoided: What, exactly, had happened to the Europeans and the drones?

  We stayed in the auditorium a long time that afternoon, numbly re-crossing the same ground through picture after picture. Most of us never noticed that Anne Miller had suffered a
stroke. Only Bolton and Throckmorton saw her, and between them they helped her up and carried her to the infirmary, where the medics later reported a mild ischemia due to rheumatic fever and myocardial infarction. There was the risk of another, they said, but it didn’t merit the risk of surgery. After several days they allowed her to return to her rooms to rest, and I visited her there on most evenings.

  For a time I wondered whether I felt some responsibility for the events that had ended her life’s work, but more and more I sensed an empathy for her, as though we shared some special knowledge about her and her drones.

  On the sixth day, during the planet’s night, I brought her a tray and sat by her bed as she ate.

  “I’ve never seen you wear a hat before,” she said, picking at her food and looking up with an old woman’s eyes.

  I took off the cap and put it in my lap. I was looking out through the bedroom door and into her workroom, at the slender metal case containing the drones’ communications codes. It was like a forgotten prop, dulled suddenly by insignificance, lying on the dusty stage after the show is over.

  “You said yesterday that you thought the drones were just hiding, Anne. Have you thought any more about that?” An uneven whistling drifted in through the bedroom door. Elliot had walked over with me but hadn’t wanted to come in, so he sat in her outer doorway, whistling tunelessly.

  “Madhu used to wear hats,” she said, her fork half-raised and forgotten. “White hats, with his white suits, when he was a young man. He was very dashing.” Her old eyes flickered up to mine then down to her plate. She set the fork back down quietly.

  “How long ago did you know Madhu?” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, lacing together her fingertips. “Since I was a girl. He pretty much raised me after my mother died.” She frowned and looked down at her hands again.

  “I’m sorry. What happened?”

  She pushed her plate away. “Would you take my tray, please? Thank you.” She smoothed the white blanket out across her lap, then stroked it with both hands as though reassuring it about something. “My mother and I lived in East Oakland, Edward. That was a very bad place at the time—I’m sure it still is. We had a single room with a curtain across the middle. The other side of it was where my mother brought her men.”

  Her hands stopped and she looked up with a hint of bitterness. “An awful bunch of men, men with perspiring black faces, all of them. Big faces. Mostly wearing guns, the way men in Oakland did. Some gave her money, but a lot of them just took to beating her while I listened from the other side of the curtain. Then she’d lie there for days and drink.”

  She gave a short laugh. “One of them finally killed her, one of those men. I didn’t even know she was dead until a neighbor came for me. Mrs. Ida. She took me on a bus and begged to have me stay where she cleaned house, for a professor in the good neighborhoods.”

  She smiled and began picking lint off the blanket. “That was Madhu, of course. He really couldn’t walk very well.” She paused for a minute, then looked up.

  “I don’t know whether the drones are still out there or not,” she said.

  After that she seemed to lose track, then finally with an effort pushed herself up and reached for her water glass on the case by the bed.

  “Madhu helped me into a grade school, and when I was older he let me use the terminal in his study. He used to sit for hours and watch me, then one day he moved me into a better school. I think he was a little troubled about it all, though.

  “Later, when I was on my own, I worked on robotics—military drones. That worried him. When I visited him he’d tell me that if there was ever a chance of the machines hurting someone, I had to picture it being him. He told me that over and over.”

  Her eyes clouded. “I hated him for that. When I went to work at China Lake I tried telling him what we were doing was different, because we were defending ourselves against armed men. Men with guns. But still, I had a hard time not thinking about him being killed by each thing we built.”

  She looked up—Elliot was standing in her bedroom door.

  “We got company,” he said.

  “All right.” I made Miller some tea, then followed Elliot into the dark square. Under the light across from us two people were waiting in a car. We trudged across the dark square toward them.

  “It seems,” I said to Elliot, “that in Anne’s book you’re the wrong size and the wrong color.”

  “Not a whole lot I can do about that.”

  “Afraid not. Well, look at this.” Slumped in the front seat of the open car were Harry Penderson, the asteroid miner who had found the drone before signing on with us, and Carolyn Dorczak, gazing at the dome overhead.

  “Hello, Tyrone,” said Dorczak. She stuck an arm out the side. “Hi, Ed—cheer up. I like your hat.”

  Penderson made no move to start the car, so Elliot and I leaned on the wall next to them, under the light. “Hello, Carolyn,” I said. “Harry.”

  “Hi.” He chewed on his lip and gave Dorczak an inquiring look, then shrugged when she didn’t say anything. “The lady wanted to see you guys,” he said. “What can I say?”

  Dorczak rolled her eyes and sighed. They acted like a married couple after a fight, though they couldn’t have known each other for more than the few minutes since she’d landed.

  “Well, hell,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. The whole system’s lost its little mind, as far as I can tell. That nut case of yours, The Mercenary Emperor himself, Polaski the First, has suddenly got this hard-on for building new toys and going in after our little alien visitors, instead of leaving well enough alone.” She glanced at her watch. “And he and Bart are in thicker than fleas, so here I am, carrying Bart’s briefcase and looking like I know what I’m doing.”

  Polaski had announced his intention of going into Serenitas after the aliens?

  “Don’t look so surprised, Ed, I’ll bet you couldn’t wait to go along—anything to slip your way in to that planet of yours, hm?”

  “I’d say it’s about time old Polaski was stopped,” said Elliot. “Shoot, don’t look at me like that. I ain’t the first one what thunk it.”

  No one spoke for a while. Penderson tapped out a tattoo on the steering wheel, while Dorczak inspected the buildings around us in the darkness. Finally I turned to her.

  “What about Lowhead, Carolyn. And the rest of the planet? Is this something people want to do?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. People are acting funny. A few of the smarter ones are saying we need to know more, but some of the others are talking about trying to go back to Earth, or else slipping into Serenity System unnoticed, with no weapons. And of course there’re the usual sightings of slime-green alien fleets and what-not. The latest thing is wolf sightings.”

  Penderson turned in his seat. “Wolf sightings?”

  “Yeah, I know it’s a little—”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not that.” He looked at her worriedly for a while, chewing on his lip. “It’s that I’ve heard that story before. More than a year ago. And a long way from where you come from—miners out on H-v’s moons.” He glanced around, first at Elliot, then at me. “Except that the story I heard wasn’t about any ordinary wolf.”

  Dorczak stared at him.

  “A wolf without a head,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Come on, you guys,” said Elliot. “Those kinds of stories are all over the place, and folks drag ’em out when they get scared about something. Why, I knew a fella in Louisiana, once—”

  “Tyrone,” I said. “I need to talk to Roddy McKenna. Now. He started to say something in the auditorium and got cut off, and I forgot about it. Let’s go—research center. Jesus, Harry, hurry.”

  We found the center’s labs still brightly lit and crowded with scientists, working around the clock to coax information from Sun of Gabriel’s massive stream of data. Roddy McKenna was nowhere in sight, but I finally won Kate Salfelder’s attention by standing
between her and a display of Serenitas.

  When I asked about McKenna she just frowned and shook her head.

  “Go and find him, Eddie dear. He’s gone off after that awful woman again, and I worry. He was upset, the way he gets. Said it’s unfair what Mr. Polaski did to her. Said she was going to fight it, and he was going to help.” She wrung her hands in front of her, unable to fathom such a thing. “Eddie . . . he looks up to you so much. But you don’t ever say anything, and then he takes off after that woman, instead. Go and talk to him, won’t you, dear?”

  “Kate,” I said, “the other day in the auditorium, Roddy was working on the probe’s communications with the Serenitas torus, and a couple of times he started to say something. Do you know what it was, or where those records are so we can take a look?”

  She shook her head sympathetically and pointed to a row of desks along the wall. Stacks of vellum were balanced everywhere, with piles of memory blocks strewn about them with meaningless notations on them. Whatever McKenna had found, only he was going to be able to tell us what it was.

  “All right, Kate. I’ll call you when I find him. Come on, Tyrone. Harry, you know how to drive the tractors by now and how to find the landing dome at night—you drive. That has to be where Pham went.”

  We drove at Penderson’s breakneck speed through the black night, and I explained what Polaski had done to Pham.

  She’d been summoned early one morning to a meeting of the military service chiefs and line officers. Included were the senior ship’s captains—traditionally Polaski’s weakest area of support—and the commanders of the space-assault Marine units. The Marines reported to Pham and lived in uneasy coexistence with the officers on whose ships they served. Conspicuously absent, however, were officers from the “Rats,” Pham’s fiercely loyal ground troops.

  “Colonel Pham,” Polaski had said. He had cultivated her meticulously over the years, currying favor with her Rats and Marines, but his tone now was peremptory.