“No,” said Polaski, “I don’t think we want you pissing in the soup even that much, do we, Torres? Look at you. And everybody always thought you were so good with this system, thought I depended on you. Now we’ll see.”
The radio squawked.
“Mr. Polaski,” said Stedback, “we’re going to have a pretty short window for this maneuver, so if you’ve got a reason not to be giving the go-ahead, you need to let us know.”
“Maybe he’s taking that nap, after all,” said Peeber.
“Stow it, Peeber,” said Stedback. “Todd, you’re number two on the list, so I’d suggest you call up your checklist now and be prepared to give the word.”
Polaski picked up his gun again and gripped it in both hands. His face had lost expression now and his voice was flat.
“All right, Torres, here we go. Open the front of your suit.” He motioned with the gun.
Not too far. Every second sealing it back up’s going to count.
“All right,” I said.
But far enough so it doesn’t look stupid when I reach in.
“Now the automatic,” said Polaski. “I know you’ve got it. Okay, put it down on the deck, push it away. Remember, Torres. I may put a hole in the skin, but I’ll still have time to get to another deck, and I’m going to empty this revolver into you on the way. There you go, nice and easy.”
Slide it as far as you can . . . there, over by the ladder. Can’t afford to trip on it in the dark.
“Okay, Torres, straighten up. Hands where I can see them. FleetSys!”
“Yes, Mr. Polaski.”
“Modify authorization top-list to allow attack orders by me only. No one else—no polling or any of that.”
“Your exclusive authorization will require the system administrator, or the administrator’s password, Mr. Polaski.”
“Password is ‘Saint Catherine.’ ”
“Password is correct, Mr. Polaski. Concurrence is now required by one other fleet officer. I believe only Mr. Torres is available.”
“You got that right.” Polaski brought the barrel around to point at my forehead. “He’s right here.”
“Mr. Torres?” said FleetSys. “If you wish to relinquish authorization, please state that fact in a complete sentence.”
“He wishes,” said Polaski. He fingered the hammer. “Don’t you, Torres?”
This is the hard part.
I took a deep breath.
“I concur in granting Mr. Polaski exclusive authorization to employ fleet weapons.”
Polaski’s mouth twitched and his thumb slid up to pull back the hammer.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Torres,” said FleetSys, “but your voice shows excessive stress. Please take your time and repeat your statement.”
Polaski’s eyes clouded and he leaned forward, his hands gripping the revolver more tightly than ever. Then a flicker of hesitation crossed his eyes, and he let down the hammer.
At least he’s figured that much out.
“Take it easy, Torres,” he said. “Just relax. But you’d better relax good.”
Yes . . . eyes closed, deep breath. Sun hissing off the ground, a pool of clear water . . . the rush of pebbles in a brook, a gate standing open, an airplane arriving over the jungle—
I opened my eyes to see Polaski watching me and the revolver pointed at my forehead, just as it had been twenty-five years ago on the island. It’s even the same gun, I thought; nothing has changed.
“I concur,” I said, “in granting Mr. Polaski exclusive authorization to employ fleet weapons.”
“Very well, Mr. Torres.”
“Good for you, Torres,” said Polaski. “And now I think we’re through.”
Yes. And now, Polaski, you’re the only one in the fleet who can give orders. Not me, not your minions. It’s a heavy burden, isn’t it?
Radios crackled in the background. Ten minutes left.
“Isn’t there something you’re forgetting, Polaski?” I said.
Buy time for one last rehearsal. Drop straight down, left arm back to the levers to seal off the deck, so Polaski can’t get off it. Two levers. Above-deck seal and below-deck seal. Four paces to the left—don’t slip on the gun—unclip the helmet with the right hand, take a deep breath.
“And what might that be?” said Polaski. He pulled back the hammer.
Left hand on decompression safeties—remember there’s three of them. That’s right, Tyrone, I owe you for all the blindfold drills. Then head down—he’s crazy enough to shoot blind. Final reach for the fire suppression panel and the air release lever. Thirty more seconds without air to get the suit fastened and the helmet on.
“You’ve forgotten,” I said, “that you can’t authorize anything if you can’t breathe.”
Simon says.
“And you can’t see in the dark.”
Deep breath.
“FleetSys,” I said, “turn off all lights.”
Polaski’s eyes widened and the gun wavered as he looked around. I tensed for the drop.
But nothing happened. Sweat gathered on my forehead and my legs cramped, but the seconds crawled past and FleetSys remained silent.
The gun came back around, and then FleetSys spoke:
“ ‘Stern awful lice,’ Mr. Torres?” it said. “Your words are not clear.”
I stood frozen in place. Heat spread through my bowels and nausea welled up in my stomach. Polaski’s hand shook as he pulled back the hammer one last time.
“Too clever,” he whispered. “Always trusting your machines, Torres, never getting your own hands dirty. Too bad.”
The barrel came up and steadied, and his finger tightened.
But with the blast that followed, he himself was thrown violently up against the bulkhead and twisted as he struck, then collapsed out of sight behind the console. His gun clattered to the grating, then into the MI bays below. I could no longer see him or the gun, but from his face in that final, brief moment, I knew that he was not alive.
The blast had come from the opening to the lift. Yet the deck by the lift was empty. Only my gun was there, though not quite where I’d left it, and now with a wisp of smoke coming from the barrel. And Kip’s flute, discarded on the deck nearby.
The ship was quiet. If it was Kip who had come, it was to disappear only moments later into the bowels of the ship. But why? Other than his flute he had left no sign of himself, no mark, as indeed from where I stood there was no remaining sign of Polaski, either. There was no sign of any person at all, except for me.
It was as though, in that one, final moment, Polaski and Kip had destroyed each other. Or, perhaps, as in some mysterious implosion of physics, they had in that one moment given up all illusion of substance, and had formed some new thing that I could not see at all.
I
ndeed, I was alone in the ship. From one end to the other there was no clue, no possessions left behind, no sign that Kip had ever been on board. No sound came to me but the radios.
“Five minutes,” said Stedback.
“Mr. Polaski? We’ve only got five minutes.”
“Todd, get ready.”
“Um, okay. All right.”
Pham had said that there were two shuttles on board, but there was only one.
On my last pass through the ship I stepped off the ladder to look at the familiar grey of the MI decks, at the frayed fabric on the seat where my hands had rested, at the indentation left in the back from my head. Or from Polaski’s.
“Three minutes.”
I backed the last shuttle out of its bay and away from the ship. A sound came from the back of the shuttle’s cabin, once and then several times more, but when I went to look it wasn’t Kip, after all.
Pham’s tiny boat was no more than a speck on my instruments, drifting against the grey circle of the torus. A speck against the night, a tiny, transparent bubble against the wall of black ships guarding the approaches to Serenitas.
When I pulled closer, the cargo bins strapped to the bottom of her
boat grew visible, the ones that would contain her tools and the seeds, and the first year’s food. In the cabin, Pham sat in the middle of the transparent bubble with her shirt still off and the sun shining in across her skin. The baby suckled while she watched the growing circle of grey and the black ships ahead. The sky was filled with stars.
The radios on board hissed and crackled as I came through the lock. The voices were clipped and angry.
“Mr. Polaski, please! FleetSys is telling us you’re the only one who can release all of a sudden, and our window is slipping.”
“Stedback, find a priest for Christ’s sake—”
Pham turned off the radios. There was only the pulsing of the engines then, as they pushed us toward the tunnel, and the sucking of the baby. I tilted my seat back next to her and watched the torus.
“Like Madhu’s moon,” she said.
When I looked at her, the baby’s eyes rolled up to study me in return.
“Is that who you’ve named him after?” I said. “Madhu?”
“No, Eddie. I name him after you. Edward.”
The baby and I regarded each other for a minute as we considered this.
“Please, Eddie,” said Pham. “He need a father. You come just for us, maybe?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t change my mind. I have to go back and look for Chan.”
She didn’t answer, then after a minute a warning came from the panel in front of us. I turned it off.
“First pass-point,” I said. “I have to go.”
“No,” she said, “pass-points not so important. I won’t need to turn aside.”
“I know you won’t, but I will.”
She tilted her seat to face me, then reached out with her free arm. She put it around my neck and drew me nearer, then her lips pressed tight against mine, moist and soft, her tongue like silk as it traced the sides of my mouth. She pressed her head against the palm of my hand as I ran it across her cheek and under her hair to pull her closer. It was liquid, hypnotic, endless.
The kiss lasted for a long time, our lips wet and sliding under the stars, the baby stirring between us and her other breast pressing against me, her skin soft and warm.
Then I was back inside my own shuttle and watching her through the porthole as she moved off toward the black ships—naked to the stars, her baby at her breast, a woman clothed with only the sun.
Epilogue
T
here were times, over the years that followed, when I almost believed I had fired the gun myself. Then at other times I imagined that no gun had been fired at all, that I had been alone on that deck from the very beginning. But then I would set down my tea and turn away from watching the rain on the meadows, and see the flute on my writing table, and I would know that I hadn’t been alone at all.
The flute had been with me since I’d picked it up from the deck, leaving only the gun behind, but I’d never once tried playing it. I hadn’t wanted to find out that I couldn’t, I suppose. Or else hadn’t wanted to find out that I could.
A
fter Pham’s boat had disappeared toward the torus I’d turned my shuttle and landed on the western shores of the Boar River Sea. Asile was much too far for such a tiny vessel, and if I’d tried to reach her I would have been left with a choice between food and fuel far too soon.
From acquaintances at the Russian colony on Boar River, I learned that the great fleet had eventually fallen apart, unable to pursue its attack. Individual commanders had tried going up against the drones, but they’d been destroyed or turned aside, prevented by the drones from damaging the torus that formed their only link to Serenitas. Other commanders were called home to bolster defenses against the continuing attacks on their bases. Near the Boar River Sea, battles with the drones flared every time weapons were brought to bear—whether against other humans in regional disputes that originally had nothing to do with the drones, or else each time diehard commanders believed they had finally found a weakness in the drones and sought to prove it.
I’d reached Boar River with few possessions. Worse, it came to dawn on me slowly that I had reached her possessing little status and few skills that the colonies required. The planet had grown poor during the wars, and its industry had collapsed from mismanagement and warfare: The subsistence economy that had taken its place left little time for anything more than farming.
The resources required for space travel had mostly been appropriated by the colonies’ remaining militaries, which I found I had no desire to join. The technical academies had turned their attention to agriculture, and most engineers found themselves with little to engage them beyond civil works. I found myself, in any case, restless at the idea of working within an organization, if only because the great power and stature I had once held as the founder of the exodus now counted for little, and even brought contempt.
I worked with my friend Nicolai Panov for several months while I made inquiries about Chan’s whereabouts, helping build Panov’s orbiting colonies, but without the resources to make any real progress on them neither of us could pretend that the arrangement was more than charity, and finally I thanked him and began to travel from city to city along the shore. I was anxious, in any case, to find Chan.
The months turned into years, however, and the fast vehicles and aircraft I was accustomed to eventually gave way to moving slowly from village to village on foot, as I found myself increasingly compelled to visit the poorest farmers and fishermen in their everyday lives, and to take my meals with them. But although I asked at every house and at every market, no one recognized the description I gave of Chan.
So I made my living, in those years, by moving from farm to farm and repairing machinery in exchange for food and a place to sleep. I became a tinker, of sorts, a mender of things, passing the days by walking along the shoreline under Boar River’s strange sky, with little human companionship and no money at all.
During the fourth year, after I’d walked the length of the sea to Wallneck and then back out through the dismal poverty of the muddy Lowhead peninsula, I began to ask after the colony’s president, Carolyn Dorczak. But my question was always received with puzzlement, and sometimes suspicion—suspicion of a stranger, I supposed, of a rough-looking man.
“The blue house,” I was told at last.
The blue house stood a way back from the main road, a tidy mud house squatting on a farm outside the city of West Lowhead.
Dorczak’s face was sunburned and worn and her hands callused, but her brown eyes hadn’t lost their intelligence or good humor as she looked me up and down, and studied my small companion and my knapsack filled with metal and wires.
“There is no government in Lowhead,” she said. “There are a few military outfits that hire on to the highest bidder, but that’s about it. You see them out at Wallneck, sometimes, or on China-side.”
Harry Penderson wasn’t well. He worked as hard as he could on their little farm, but he needed antibiotics for his lungs and he didn’t have them, so he rested often and kept his words short. He did seem glad to have me with them, though.
“How do I get to Asile, Carolyn?” I said.
She shook her head and pulled her work shirt closer around her.
“I don’t think you do, Ed. That’s a rich person’s game now, and there’s none of us that rich. Not even the mail comes or goes.”
Neither of them had had any word of Chan, and after helping to get the late crops in the ground I left again. I walked out along the muddy beaches with my feet sucking into the clay, still trying to leave behind a single, last doubt.
Had I known, when I’d returned with Elliot for the codes, that I would fail? Had I turned my back on Polaski at precisely that moment so that he could close the tunnel, after all? Had I been, all those years, a man in need of his prison?
Perhaps that was why I had allowed the wars to follow us into space in the first place, and why I’d never really forced Miller’s hand regarding her intentions for the drones. And why I had
n’t tried for the torus sooner, as others had. Afraid that what waited for me there might not hold me back after all, might not hold me responsible for the poverty, or for my father, or the deaths. That it might hold me responsible for no more than myself.
It was the next year in the Christian colonies, along the sea’s south shore, that I came to an adobe shanty near a grove of Eucalyptus. A little girl watched me from over the hedge, while nearby a bicycle leaned against a tree with a leather physician’s bag over its handlebars.
The girl regarded me solemnly. She had light brown skin and soft eyes, and an achingly familiar look.
“Anna? Who’s there?” A woman came out of the house to stand in the doorway. She wiped her hands on her apron and nodded to me.
“Yes?” she said.
I turned to face her. She was still a handsome woman, though there were lines of worry etched in her face now, much as there had been in Elliot’s.
It was Susan Perris, and her child. Tyrone Elliot’s child, whom he’d never gotten to see.
Perris’ eyes clouded when she recognized me, then grew cold. The apron became motionless in her hands, and her face filled with a fury she had to struggle to find words for. Finally she spoke in a hoarse voice.
“These are decent people, here.” It was all she said.
I’d wanted to ask her if Chan was with her, or had even written to her, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to speak and I walked away.
It was several years later that stories came to China-side about independent traders who were building ships again on Asile, and who were reopening a minimal commerce in the system. There was even said to be a small trade with Serenitas.
I returned to the Russian cities at the western end of the sea, where I’d begun, and in time I was able to find a trader who accepted my services as an instructor to her young astrogator, in exchange for passage to Asile. I left Boar River for the last time.
A Grey Moon Over China Page 50