A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  After a minute a solenoid slapped home and the arm stopped. The children raced up to peer inside.

  “There’s still three of ’em, Mr. Delgado. No, four. Five!”

  “Okay,” said the man, “you know what to do—five’s more than enough. Give them to the queen, now.”

  The girl planted her tongue between her teeth, then reached into the cage with tongs, drawing out something that she dropped into a jar the boy held out. It was clear they’d done it many times before. They’re being made to grow up too fast, I thought.

  Delgado glanced up.

  “Hello, Mr. Elliot. Mr. Torres, nice to see you.”

  “Hello, Ramón.” I worked my way around the machine. “What are you up to?”

  “Two GBs.”

  “Two GBs?” It sounded like a candy, or a car.

  “Ha!” said Delgado. “I’ve seen that look before. Listen: two . . . G . . . bees. Got it? Okay. We got a notice from Captain Rosler. Mr. Polaski wants to be able to run at two Gs without stopping, so we’ve got to come up with two-G pollinators. Okay, kids, take a break. Whoops, hand me that phone, please. Hello? Yes? Yes, he is, just a minute please. Mr. Torres, it’s Kathy Chan.”

  I took the phone while Elliot unloaded his samples and Delgado logged them in.

  At least a minute after I’d hung up, I was still staring down at the phone. Elliot and Delgado stopped.

  “What, Torres?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say.

  “A drone,” I said finally.

  They looked at me, and then down at the phone, as though hoping it might elaborate. When Delgado spoke, his mouth was so dry I could scarcely hear him.

  “And . . . ?”

  I shook my head. “They’re recording the transmission now. It’ll take some time.”

  We continued to look down at the phone, all three of us now, not knowing what else to do. Ever since the launch, we’d lived with the awful fear that the drones had never even made it to Holzstein’s System, or that they’d made it but hadn’t been able to build another torus to return through. And for all my bravado to Polaski, the same question had haunted every one of us all that time: How long would we wait? And if that allotted time expired, what would we do then?

  But now a drone had returned, and the next, inevitable question hung in the air: Was there anywhere to go?

  I cleared my throat.

  “Go and tell your wife, Ramón. Just Elena, no one else. Wait for the announcement. Come on, Elliot, let’s go. I want to see what the drones and their mistress have to say to one another.”

  People and noise both were filling the MI deck when we got back—Miller, Chan, Polaski, Peters, half a dozen others. Only Pham, who hadn’t been seen for days, was missing. Everyone else was squeezed into the tiny space, poring over a transcription of the drone’s message.

  I glanced quickly at the communications console. OUTBOUND TRANSMISSION ACTIVE flashed on the screen. Other words scrolled past on the data screen, too fast to see. Miller’s new instructions, I was sure, for the drone to take back with it to feed to its fellows.

  We finally moved down to the commons deck, where there was more room, and Chan summed up what we’d learned so far.

  “The drones made it to Holzstein’s and built a new torus. This return messenger hit our solar system very well-positioned for its turnaround for going back, meaning that their new tunnel works extremely well.

  “They found three landable planets, as forecast. Limited terraforming has begun on two of them, the third being too heavy. Both of the viables are colder than expected, and will remain cold even after hydrogen conversion produces an atmosphere and water. Limited equatorial zones will be habitable, at best.

  “Landable satellites were found throughout the system. No life forms were encountered.

  “After the drones set terraforming in motion on the two viables, they appear to have decided there is little left for them to do in such a marginal system, and therein lies some better news.

  “They have identified yet another system—coordinates given below—possessing at least one confirmed, ideal Earth-type. A perfect, already habitable planet. As soon as instructions are received via the returning messenger, they plan to rotate their new torus and send a contingent on to that other system.”

  A gunshot sounded. Elliot was holding a bottle of champagne, unauthorized cargo though it was, and was pouring it into cups.

  I took one and looked down at the swirling liquid, feeling a mixture of relief and disappointment both. And, all the while, uneasiness about Miller and her drones. Why, I wondered. They had performed perfectly. Had they not begun terraforming as claimed? Was that it? Was Miller going to hold this other, reportedly perfect planet hostage, taking bids for passage while we rotted on planets left deliberately fallow? I hadn’t trusted Anne Miller when she’d arrived on our island, and I didn’t trust her now. Not her, nor Polaski, yet I felt them both slipping beyond my grasp.

  “Where’s Anne?” I said. “There—Anne!” I made a noise against the table, and lifted my cup.

  “A toast,” I said. “You are to be congratulated.”

  “Yes,” she said, and raised her cup very slightly.

  That was it, then the noise resumed. The specialists began calculating approach windows to the torus, to be used by us and by the three regional fleets that had made it off Earth in the past year. I slipped onto the lift.

  The communications console on the MI deck indicated TRANSMISSION COMPLETE. The transmitted data had stopped scrolling past, leaving on the screen just the tail end of the outgoing instructions.

  It was in two columns, one in some highly compressed language, and the other in English with her comments, which wouldn’t have been transmitted. A brief section of the comments remained:

  . . . THUS THE CERTAINTY OF DRONE RESISTANCE TO ALIEN FORCE IS TO BECOME A UNIVERSAL CONSTANT OF COLONIZED SPACE. —END MATRIX.

  “Do you find that interesting, Edward?”

  Miller was standing by the lift, leaning back with her arms folded. She was just a year short of fifty now, though the skin of her face remained un-creased and her figure remained slender and graceful in her white jumpsuit. Her hair was cut very close to her head, and her eyes still sparkled along with the silver earrings. She was as elegant and poised as when I’d met her eight years ago, yet just as hard to read. I gestured to the console.

  “Doesn’t this seem a little grandiose to you, Anne? ‘Universal constant of colonized space?’ These are work drones—why this old fantasy of valiant defense against aliens?”

  She took a step closer.

  “Surely you’re aware that our activity must have attracted attention by now,” she said. “All the perturbations from the toroidal projectors? You know the odds as well as I do, Mr. Torres, and I would think you’d be glad we’ll be so well protected—that there will, after all, be some absolutes in the universe.”

  I glanced again at the screen.

  “So what rules did you send the drones in this decision matrix, Anne? What is it, exactly, that they’re going to be capable of to effect this extraordinary resistance?”

  “Why such concern, Edward? You know I couldn’t have loaded these files for transmission without having them reviewed first by someone with password authority. I certainly haven’t been granted such access to the fleet systems.”

  “Reviewed by whom?”

  “Is it important?”

  I leaned back and folded my arms. Something moved in the corner of the deck, up near the ceiling. A little spider drone, with its tiny camera, shifting position as I moved.

  “Just the same,” said Miller, seeming not to notice, “what I’ve sent them is no great secret. I’m having them teach their offspring to be resourceful, is all. Madhu would be proud of me. They’ll be just like us.”

  ELEVEN

  The Promised Land

  A

  lien force, hah! You take Ice-Lady too serious. That woman speak from her ass, and you people sniff aroun
d like pigs.”

  Pham was drunk. She was slumped against the wall of Charlie Peters’ quarters, lecturing from behind glassy eyes. We were waiting for the final approach to the tunnel, and the subject of Miller’s transmission to the drones had come up.

  “Of course we take her seriously, Tuyet,” said Peters with his nearly simple-minded patience. “She has our lives in her hands, yet she is very difficult to understand. That makes her dangerous, and we have every reason to worry.”

  Pham looked up sharply. “What for you say I don’t understand, hah, Mush-Face? Just ’cause you believe bullshit she tell you?”

  Suddenly she jerked her head forward, and began massaging the back of her neck.

  “Ice-Lady not hard to understand,” she said, rolling her head. “I tell you what she like. That woman, what she got is insides all locked up like little-old-lady virgin. ‘Alien force’ maybe what she say, but inside she thinking you, me—everybody human. Maybe we alien to her, hah? She think we get inside her, maybe, fuck her in her insides, so she got to make machines that do what she say and keep us out. Same time, she want to think she okay in the head, so she got to make up story about alien people.”

  She snorted and threw her head against the wall with a crack that made us wince. Her eyes rolled toward the far wall and moved around it with short, jerky movements, the rest of her face slack. Her sleek features were swollen and pale.

  Pham hadn’t taken well to the months of confinement since we’d broken orbit and begun our sweep past the sun. The close quarters and her voracious appetite for distraction had worn at her endlessly. She was less and less poised, and her customary abuse of Peters had soured into a small-minded hostility that grated on all of us.

  “I don’t know,” said Elliot, scratching at his chin and squinting at his playing cards. His eyes were bloodshot from the dry air, and there was a hard black stubble on his dark face. “You make the woman sound confused, but personally I don’t think she’s got a mule’s doubt about what she’s doing.” He drew out a card and set it down deliberately, cocking an eyebrow at Kip.

  “That woman is squeaky clean,” he went on. “She don’t fart or belch or pick her nose, or lust after men. Her cause is good and her shit don’t stink, you better believe it.”

  Kip picked up the card.

  “Mm,” said Chan from behind her book. “ ‘She knows not what she does’—the last of the great innocents, you’re telling us?”

  “Hah!” Pham looked up. “Innocence,” she proclaimed loudly, “lies not in ignorance of our purpose, but in its boundless celebration . . .”

  “. . . however black its nature,” finished Peters with evident relish, “or vast the ocean of our disquiet. Aye, you are right. It’s very appropriate, that.”

  I, in the meantime, was feeling unaccountably bleak. As the moment of our passage neared, the exhilaration of escape had given way to a new certainty that I was in fact leaving something behind, something important and irretrievable. And, too, the cherished fantasy of paradise had now dissolved into the true reality of our predicament: Nothing awaited us but barren planets, all too cold or too heavy.

  “Attention,” said the smooth voice of FleetSys. “Close-up roach to one cheap ass point.”

  Chan slapped a keyboard and glanced at a screen.

  “Close approach to one-G pass-point,” she said.

  “You got to teach that thing a little in-flec-tion,” said Elliot, throwing down his hand in disgust. “A little en-thu-siasm.”

  The one-G pass-point was the point at which aborting our blisteringly fast approach to the tiny hole would require turning the fleet ninety degrees—side-on to the torus—then thrusting in the new direction at one G in order to clear the outer edge of the torus without slamming into it. The ships, if not their crews, were in theory capable of aborting from as close as the six-G pass-point, but the up-coming checkpoint was generally considered the start of the committed approach.

  Peters pulled his big frame out of his chair and stood up. A spider drone darted out from the corner and disappeared down the lift.

  Elliot watched it go. “I wonder about them, sometimes.”

  “Well, all I know,” said Chan, “is that they keep forgetting things. That’s what I wonder about.”

  “I don’t think you got to wonder too much, China-Girl,” said Pham.

  When I didn’t follow the others, Chan stopped and looked at me.

  What deal had it been, I was wondering, that Polaski had made with Miller? Was he the one who’d approved her final transmission to the drones? Did he know what it contained? And what had she given him in return?

  “What, Eddie?” said Chan. “You don’t want to watch the machines thread us through the needle?”

  “No, I have to be there.”

  “Take a walk first?”

  “All right, if you want.”

  The garden path spiraled upward amid flowers, vegetables, and dwarf trees, covered overhead by aerobic plants growing from the sunlight panels. Along the outer wall of the ship the gardens climbed gently, but toward the center they became steeper and then terraced, and finally cliff-like in the middle. At the very center was an open shaft filled with vines and orchids. Kip had run on ahead of us, and his skittering sounds filtered down the shaft.

  “What is it, Eddie?” said Chan.

  I brushed away some ferns and kept walking.

  “Damn it, Eddie, I never know what you’re thinking anymore. And right now we’re minutes away from everything you’ve wanted all along, and you’re acting like a stranger to me again. Is it Polaski? What is it?”

  “Why did he try and warn them, Chan?”

  “Warn them? Oh, you mean Madhu. Oh, Eddie, not again. Look, have you ever thought that maybe Madhu had a some greater purpose than just our own mission?”

  “The night before we left,” I said, “he told me something, and then said I’d destroy him for saying it.”

  “I don’t believe that. Look, every captain in the fleet skipped that head-count.”

  “I don’t get to skip checklists.” I stopped in the middle of the path, then after a moment Chan sat down.

  “Do you remember,” I said, “how he liked that quote from Deuteronomy? The one about Moses being shown the Promised Land?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember how it ends?”

  She hesitated. “No, I’ve forgotten.”

  “He never told us. Pham knew, though. She came out with it the other day, all of a sudden. I don’t know why. ‘Moses went up from the steppes of Moab to Mount Nebo, and there the Lord showed him the Promised Land. And the Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will give it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.”’ ”

  A moment later I realized that Chan was crying. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see the tears where they landed on her hands, folded in her lap.

  “We need to reach the new planet, Chan. The one the drones found—”

  “No, Eddie!” She spun toward me, her face wet with tears. “You can’t do that again! You can’t put off your whole life, and mine, and everyone else’s, waiting for something better. I know you, Eddie. I know what losing Madhu did to you. You’ll be dead to the world forever, just waiting for everything to be perfect. But it’s good enough right now—it may be all we ever have, and there are things I want to do before it’s too late.”

  “Chan, it won’t be that long—”

  “Yes it will! Oh, Eddie, why do you think we’re doing all this—going through all these awful times? What do you think all the hardships have been for? What did Madhu die for, Eddie? And the kids? Do you even know?”

  She took a breath. “Sometimes I don’t think you do. It’s not to build a perfect life for ourselves, Eddie, or to go out and conquer for the greater glory of Polaski and Rosler. No, don’t say anything—it’s not. It’s for the children, Eddie. Did you know that? The kids aren�
��t some tough little high-G soldiers, the means to some perfect end. They are the end, the reason we’re doing all this. And I want to adopt one of the orphans, now, before we make them all grow up. I don’t want to see you setting your sights again on something so far away we can’t reach it, then trampling all over us in your rush to get there. Or is that why it’s always too far, Eddie? So that you can never reach it?”

  Looking at Chan at that moment, maybe because of the upcoming translation, she seemed suddenly very far away, as though speaking from a dream, from beyond a veil. I hardly recognized her.

  “Come on, Eddie,” she said, “deal with it. Deal with whatever it is you keep holding back from, then settle down and take what’s in front of you. You’re going to end up a bitter old man if you don’t, and it’ll be too late.”

  Behind her, Kip looked on uncertainly, rubbing his bare arms as best he could while still holding his flute.

  “Chan,” I said. She looked up. “It’s cold. Tyrone’s got it cold for the fall.”

  L

  ight from the passing decks swept by, turning the lift from light to dark, dark to light, then dark again. Shadows and flickering, framed images of life on the decks, over and over. I held onto the handles and thought about Chan and the child she wanted, but in the strobing light all I could see was the falling baby in the infirmary, and the children in One-Eight as their parents gave up their lives, one after another, to save them from the collapsing vessel. Why, I had wondered time and again. Why had those men and women done it, even for children who weren’t their own, when they knew that they themselves would die? It was an act at once perfectly natural to me, yet somehow indescribably alien.

  Then came an image of the tunnel, swelling before us now to swallow us whole. We would never be the same, I thought. Not I, not Chan, not Tuyet Pham. Only Polaski would be unchanged, his sights set fixedly on the course I’d set him, unencumbered by the doubts that haunted me, unconcerned by the deaths we’d caused.