We put down on Asile on rough ground. The port and its valley had been burned during the trader’s absence—the drones, we were told, had come to the next valley and were at that moment pushing back its last defenders. But from the smells in the air, and from the color of the smoke, I wondered if it wasn’t only a wood fire that had gotten out of hand.
Just in case, we moved the ship away from the settlements for reloading, and there I said good-bye. Some days later I joined a train of carts and livestock setting out across the Empty Quarter, hoping to make it to the forested highlands.
Thirty-five years earlier, the Europeans had given Asile the only thing of theirs that remained, which was her name. It was a French word that meant ‘sanctuary,’ but fears had grown that the space-going ships would bring the drones and that it was safe no longer, and more and more groups were leaving the city for the distant mountains. It was a trip that took most of a year, and when we finally wound our way up the western slopes and into the trees, more than a dozen had died.
From the last rise on the trail, the plateau opened up before us, silver with its lakes and green with its millions of acres of pine. The air was cool and moist, and clouds gathered along the far ridge fifty miles away, where Michael Bolton and Elliot and I had lain together one morning and looked out on a bleak dawn.
I was to spend the rest of my life on the Bolton Uplands, yet in all those years I never found anyone else who knew where the land had gotten its name. But at least the name was known.
There were a hundred small settlements on the highlands by then, mostly families raising fish and livestock, and for the next year I made my way among the villages. I told people that I was looking for a woman, and I described her, and told them that she wrote programs for machines or else looked after children. People listened and nodded sympathetically, but none knew her by my description, even though I was sure that my memory of her hadn’t failed in any detail.
Then one evening I stopped in the middle of the road, then after a moment retraced my last few steps and climbed a narrow gravel path to a small, one-room wooden house standing empty at the edge of a meadow. A gate across the path stood open, fallen to one side, but the house itself had been left in good order by its owner, or else tidied up by a neighbor after the owner had left.
After exploring the meadow and its little barn in the last of the light, I swept the dust out of the house with a rickety straw broom and fixed a meal from the food I’d brought with me, and gave a little to the cat. It was the same cat that had been sitting out in the road at the foot of the path when I’d first approached that evening, the cat that had started to cry in the twilight as I’d started to pass it by. When I’d changed my mind and retraced my steps toward the path, it had rushed up the path ahead of me, circling back now and again to rub against my leg—although all the while keeping a wary, feline eye on my unpredictable little companion.
Early the next morning, at the sound of a dairyman’s bell, I pulled on my boots and made my way back down to meet the cart, bringing with me such odds and ends as the man might take in payment for a little milk for the cat.
Part way down the hill, though, I stopped. Next to the path lay a little clearing I’d missed in the dusk the evening before, with a gravestone in the center. I knelt down to inspect it more closely.
But I’d already known the night before, from the cat, with its grey fur and its peculiar green eyes.
KATHERINE MIAH CHAN, 2008–2064. R.I.P.
She’d died just the year before, even as I’d been climbing the road to the highlands.
And I hadn’t even known her whole name.
I
t was during those days that the traders began coming directly to the highlands, trading scarce equipment for our wood, although they left some of us afraid that their ships would cause the drones to follow.
I sought out those traders each time I walked into town carrying my mended goods, because I knew that some had been through the tunnel to Serenitas and back, and had brought stories of its green pastures and blue oceans.
I always listened to their stories, and then I would take them aside and ask them if in their travels they had ever come across a young man by the name of Edward Pham. He was a young man, I said, who walked with crutches and might have been with his mother, a slender and pretty Vietnamese woman in her middle years. But none of them ever had.
The house where Chan had lived stood near the eastern slope of the highlands, and on some of the mornings when I couldn’t sleep I made my way across the meadows to the ridge, and from there I watched the dawn creep in across the desert, always seeming to hesitate for a moment as it passed a blurry scar in the distance.
At other times, once or twice each year, I walked to the ridge in the evening just as the sky turned grey. For there was a special time on Asile, the night of two moons, when her greater moon and her lesser moon drifted into the darkness together, both of them full, the small one behind the other and a little above. On the highlands it was said that the greater moon, drifting large and grey against the night, was God’s soul, and that the silver jewel behind was a tear in His eye.
T
he afternoon had passed now since I’d woken so suddenly from my morning’s reverie, and during the hours in between the clouds had finally let loose with their rain. I still sat at the table by the window, and looked out at the puddles and the widening ripples that mingled together in a blur of endings and beginnings.
I’d been reminded of Pham by an encounter in town the day before, an encounter that had brought about the decision I’d made that morning. It was a small decision, to be sure, of the sort that’s available to an old man, but it was a decision nevertheless and I found that it brought me some comfort.
Outside, water from the meadows coursed down the path and twisted around the posts of the old gate. It pattered against the windows, and inside left shadows of lines and circles on the creased photograph of Serenitas now hanging on the wall. A lively scrabbling sound came closer across the wooden floor, then a familiar voice.
“Do you really think she’ll come?” The scrabbling stopped by my chair. “It’s a bit wet, is the thing. I’ve just been out myself to see.”
“I think she’ll come,” I said.
“Another log on the grate, then, do you think?”
He didn’t wait for my answer, but scrabbled across to nudge another log onto the fire. He came back.
“Shall I throw out the cat?” he said.
“Are you nervous, Little Bolton?”
“Nervous? Preposterous, of course not. Now then, what next? You haven’t forgotten the kettle again, have you? You always do, you know, and then there’s no water.”
He hurried across to check, then worked his little legs onto the porch one more time to peer down the path.
My little shadow—the noise in the back of the shuttle when I’d finally left the fleet behind, the stowaway as panicked at the prospect of being left alone on Polaski’s ship as I had been glad to find him. My inexhaustible traveling companion, whose strange little footprints next to mine surely ringed the Boar River Sea to this day, and whose voice and manner were as much a sustaining memory of Bolton and Chan as they were an irreducible and painful reminder of their absence.
“Not yet,” he said, and promptly scurried back to the porch to check one more time.
That morning, after stopping on my way back up the hill to catch my breath, I had turned around and called out to the woman who lived across the way. She stopped, and I asked her to tea. She was as surprised as I was, I think, but she did seem pleased, and she did say she’d come.
It was a decision born of loneliness, I suppose. Loneliness, because on the day before, I’d made my way into town to find work, and as so often I’d stopped a trader to ask him about Serenitas. And as always I’d listened as he spoke, and as always I’d asked him about the youth; a handsome and quick young man, I’d said, with his pretty mother beside him.
The trader gave
my question some thought, accustomed as he was to requests for news of families, but in the end he shook his head and turned away, leaving me to start my long walk home alone. But then he reached out and stopped me, and told me that while he didn’t recall the young man I’d spoken of, he did remember something else from a great many years before, when he’d first arrived on Serenitas.
He’d stopped one evening by the side of the road, he said, to drink from a well by a house. As he’d lifted the bucket to his lips, he’d seen a woman much like the one I’d described, standing a short distance away in the twilight. He’d lifted a hand to call out, but when he saw that she wasn’t alone he’d held back, not wanting to intrude.
She was standing in her garden facing a little away from him, he said, toward the mountains. In her arms she held a child, and together they were watching the rising moon.
About the Author
Thomas A. Day was born in the town of Bremen in post-war Germany, and raised on diplomatic posts around the world, including Berlin, Chile, and the Middle East. Educated in the sciences, technology, and business, he has worked as a senior manager in the aerospace industry, a now-and-again nighttime cargo pilot, and a freelance software developer in the artificial intelligence field. He currently works as a forensic software and intellectual property analyst, serving as an expert witness in high-stakes technology litigation. He lives with his wife and two sons in Portland, Oregon, and is currently completing his next novel, Ivory Gull.
Visit the author’s website at www.thomas-day.us.
A Grey Moon Over China Page 51