A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  “No clip. I didn’t think you Mercenary Planet types would be that stupid. Shit.”

  I caught the gun and kicked myself right-side-up again, feet facing the green floor.

  “No loaded weapons on the station. They’d go through the skin.”

  The whole attack had taken just seconds, and now he was back to looking around the room, running a hand through his hair. His hair was wiry with patches of grey, cut short and flat across the top. The stubble on his face was mostly grey.

  “What’s your name?”

  He watched me and worked his bottom teeth across his upper lip for a minute. “Harry Penderson. Vancouver.”

  “How did you know it was still cold?”

  “Hell, we couldn’t work on the thing with our suits on, so we had to bring it into our cargo hold. But I tell you, that son of a bitch was so cold it just sucked down the temperature in the hold until we were working in our suits most of the time, anyway. My wife was the one—”

  “Your wife?” We’d missed that.

  “Dead. Couple of months ago—froze to death. Kid in her belly, too. Fucking Chinese batteries quit too soon. That’s when I ended up with the Coalition—one of their ships picked me up. Lost my boy, too. Twelve.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Happens.” He chewed on his lip, his gaunt face tense and his eyes darting to my clothing off and on. Looking for the clip.

  “How did you end up out here, Mr. Penderson?”

  He snorted. “Cattle car out of Saskatchewan. Gangs took our house, so we didn’t have much to lose. Through the tunnel with a couple of weeks worth of air left . . . put into the big Russian floating colony like a slaver hitting the docks. Didn’t have a whole lot of options . . . took up with a tin-can mining freighter trading heavy metals to the colony in exchange for batteries and food. Cheaper hauling the shit in from the asteroids than dragging it up from the surface, I guess.” He looked away again and ran a finger absently along the scar. “Had to kill a woman trying to sell my son.”

  “You started to say something about your wife working on the drone.”

  “Yeah. She’s the one with the brains when it comes to electronics. Was. It was her figured out how to talk to it, if you can call it that.”

  “How so?” He held a hand to the wall to stop his drifting. He looked wary again.

  “Well, I’ll tell you—what’s your name? Torres? Dealing with that thing wasn’t like in the movies, no sir. In the movies you’ve got these rogue computers or these aliens, and maybe they speak a different language, but pretty soon that gets straightened out and everybody starts talking. Or maybe things are really radical and they don’t even use words, but use lights or smells or something. So you’ve got to translate. But I tell you, even in those movies ninety-nine percent of the communication process gets taken for granted. Not with this sucker. This thing was a real eye-opener. And I’m supposed to know better.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Can I have some water?” I unclipped the squirt bottle from my belt and pushed it toward him. “Professor of Journalism. University of Vancouver.” He took a drink and hung onto the bottle. “Tenured. Anyway, first of all, we had to play games with receiving and transmitting antennas for a long time just to find a medium. Finally we found out it was zapping out some kind of coherent signal on one frequency—though we never did figure out what the signal was—so we aimed back all kinds of shit on the same frequency. The only signal protocol it finally matched, though, was plain-language text—a character at a time, same thing we use all over the system. Except it didn’t use English.”

  “You weren’t transmitting in English?”

  He wiped his wrist across his grey stubble and dried it on his t-shirt. “We were. What it started using was a whole mix of languages and terminology. A lot of the references were unique to this system, though, so we figured it’d sat out there all those years listening and learning the languages, although it got them all mixed up. We thought it was pretty strange that you people built the damn thing and didn’t even teach it a regular language.”

  Didn’t we?

  “So you’d use English and it would answer you in something else?”

  “Well, that’s the first problem. It didn’t answer us, period.”

  “I thought you said it did.”

  “I know, it’s weird. Look, ask me a question.”

  “Right now, you mean? Any question?”

  “Yeah, just ask me a question.”

  “Um, okay. So what did you do with the drone in the end?”

  Penderson floated close to the far wall, his eyes glancing around the room and sometimes at my clothing, but not at my face. He didn’t answer my question. I waited a full minute for him to make his point, but he never did. “So what’s all this got to do with the drone?”

  Still he didn’t do anything. “Look, you told me to—”

  “I’m in need of location.”

  He wasn’t looking at me when he said it; he’d drifted around so he was looking the other way. I didn’t know what he meant.

  “How do—”

  “I’m in need of location.” I’d lost him completely, so I waited. Minute after minute crawled by, then finally he pushed himself around and looked at me.

  “Pretty hard to talk to, isn’t it?”

  He looked more frustrated than I was.

  “It’s breaking all the rules, isn’t it? Rules like: If you ask a question, I answer it. And like we take turns, and we use the listener’s context, so he understands what the hell we’re talking about. And still, that’s not the half of it. There’s some assumptions about just being creatures that this thing didn’t have. Like realizing that it was an object of our experience the same way as we were objects of its experience. It finally sank in to us that it didn’t know that—its world existed only as part of itself. And consider this: Humans always assume that actions have purposes. There’s intentionality behind every act. Think about it: That’s pretty basic—signals are aimed at an antenna in order that someone do something. The signals don’t just exist. And not only that, but we always assume that the purposes of the actions are to make some kind of progress—to get somewhere worth getting to for the individual or the species.

  “What you never realize is that, in the movies, sitting across the conference table exchanging colored lights with green-speckled aliens, all those assumptions are already made. No sir. More than half a million words must have gone back and forth between us and that fucking drone, and it took that long to realize what the word ‘alien’ really meant. I tell you, dealing with that thing was spooky. It was like we didn’t even exist, beyond serving to provide it with the one piece of information it wanted.”

  “Which was?” Penderson had been getting tense, and now he looked wary again, and worked at his teeth for a while with a clouded look in his eyes.

  “Well, that got real complicated, see, and we went around and around trying to make sense of why it was saying what it was. But in the end it got pretty clear, and I’ll tell you, we were close to deciding that this wasn’t one of your drones at all.”

  “From your description, it had to be.”

  “Yeah, well. What it was saying over and over boiled down to this: ‘Query: origin of signal producers.’ Meaning us—and all the other people whose signals it had been listening to over the years. We explained over and over every way we knew how, and it never did understand.”

  “Maybe it was more damaged than you thought.”

  “No, sir. That thing was smart—I mean very, very smart. That wasn’t the problem.”

  “It could have been—”

  “Look, you’re about to start going over the same ground we beat our heads against day after day. Don’t bother. There’s no way around something that got real clear in the end, and you’re just going to have to take my word for it. That goddamned drone of yours—which was supposed to be out here clearing the way for humanity, as I understand it—had no fucking idea what hum
an beings were. And it wanted to know—bad.”

  Somehow for the last few minutes I’d known that was what he was going to say. It was because of a memory that was coming back to me as he spoke—something that had slid past during the excitement of the drones’ launch, sixteen years earlier.

  I needed to talk to Miller.

  “What was your interest in the drone, Mr. Penderson?”

  He shrugged. “Thought we could sell it. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “So what did you do with it in the end?”

  “Hell, we got it out of there.”

  He sounded disgusted. “It was cooling down the bay too much, and I suppose it was getting too warm to last much longer, anyway. Can’t say I minded getting rid of it, though.”

  “So how’d you get involved in this attack on us? You said you’ve only been with the Co ali tion a couple of months.”

  His leathery face tightened and his eyes narrowed as though he was going to jump me again. “You’re pretty good at asking questions, aren’t you, Torres? Keep on changing the subject, don’t let on anything. Don’t worry, I’m not going to jump you again. That was just for fun, anyway—I don’t exactly have anywhere to go.”

  “So why the attack on us?”

  He shrugged again. “I didn’t have a whole lot of choice, Mister. It gets real hungry out there.”

  “When we’ve cut your friends out of the other ship,” I said, “and taken a look at all of you, we’re going to put you back out there in one of your two ships.” His eyes narrowed a little more and he turned away, as though he regretted showing his hand about being hungry.

  “You want to sign on with us?” I said. He stopped where he was, and didn’t look at me.

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He raised an eyebrow in my direction and then turned farther away, then began arching his back to stretch his muscles. “So what’s in it for me? Black lackey to the great mercenary empire?”

  “You’d be safe most of the time. Food and warmth, people.”

  His grizzled face was struggling between interest and caution, and he looked around at the corners of the room and tried hard to relax. Finally his shoulders dropped and he turned to face me.

  “Hell, yes, I’ll sign on. That sounds really fucking good.” His loneliness showed through in the lines of his face for just a moment, however much he tried to hide it.

  “All right, stay here. Someone’ll come to get you.” I groped for the edge of the wall padding to turn myself around, then pulled my way out into the central corridor. Penderson’s guard was floating alongside the doorway, a young and disgruntled-looking man armed with a stun gun. When I came out he was upside-down to me, watching the empty corridor. I told him to get Penderson out of the can and escort him down to the surface to report to Chan. Although I needed to go down myself to talk to Miller about Penderson’s story, I still needed to spend some time on the can.

  Early that morning the Serenitas probe had made it through the torus. Before dawn all of the teams had gathered to monitor the outbound telemetry and watch the pictures coming back from its trip to the torus, and we had struggled together through the painful sight of the giant European weapons flaring into life and rotating around toward the probe’s cameras. But the probe with its breathtaking acceleration had been faster, and for the second time in my life I had watched a tunnel hurl closer and swallow me whole. This time, however, the picture and the telemetry had stopped abruptly, and in the sudden silence of the control room the long, hard wait began.

  The corridor that the guard and I were floating in was nearly fifty feet across, a poorly lit, cavernous, cylindrical tunnel of crudely welded and unpainted iron that ran down the center of the quarter-mile-long can. Like the corridor, most of the can was as unadorned as it was big, and uninsulated, scarcely heated. Only the children’s quadrant had clean air, paint, and enough emergency pressure seals.

  The little room behind me that Penderson had been brought to for our meeting was one of a number of changing and equipment rooms that dotted this part of the iron corridor. They in turn served an enormous room whose giant door was below us around the corridor wall, a room more than a hundred feet in each of its three dimensions, completely empty and with all six sides padded and indistinguishable from one another. It was the can’s sporting room, and while any number of games had been designed to be played in it, its unshakable if unconfirmed reputation was for sexual recreation in freefall.

  Neither the guard nor I had moved, both of us listening to an approaching clamor of voices and the sound of boots slamming against the iron walls, and the hissing of jets. The jumbled wave of echoes and whispered scuffing and sharp clanging preceded a shadowy tangle of figures approaching along the corridor in the distance, with the dim shapes of people and equipment flickering in the bright jets of flame that strobed against the sides of the rust-colored tunnel. As a boy I had once watched a friend try for the border through a sewer tunnel echoing with the baying of dogs, and the feeling here was the same.

  “So!” Pham had seen me before I saw her. “Mr. No-Balls—you miss all the fun, hah?” She came streaking up the corridor ahead of the crowd to catch herself on a rung partway around from where I floated. She was wearing her tight black suit along with her big gun and a stun rifle, and a portable burner strapped to her back and a heavy chest shield with a smoke mask hanging around her neck. Her face was streaked with grease and soot, and her eyes were glassy and jumpy as she looked up and down the corridor.

  “Hello, Pham. Is this the other ship?”

  “Yah, shit. Finally we cut these dumb-heads out. They in there with gas and fucking traps. Couple of my people not so good.” Her head whipped back to watch the chain of fifty or so prisoners, bound and clipped to a cable and kept to the center of the corridor by her soldiers. She seemed agitated and her movements were jerky. She was talking too fast. “What you doing up here—you don’t come up to can so much, hah?”

  “Prisoner named Penderson. He signed on—you stay away from him.”

  “Yah, okay. No problem. What the fuck I care?” She wiped distractedly at her face then suddenly twisted and launched herself down to the corridor wall below us to open the big padded door to the sporting room, then shot back up toward the approaching procession. Both Pham’s troops and the prisoners looked in bad shape. Groups of medics floated along next to a dozen screaming burn victims, trying to spray the wounds and fasten on pressurized saline canisters. Pham shouted instructions at her troops and began separating out prisoners she wanted held temporarily in the sporting room, and others she wanted segregated for individual questioning. The medics tried to argue on several of her choices, but she snapped back at them irritably and threatened them, so they held their tongues and did their best. I nodded to the guard next to me to go ahead and move Penderson out.

  T

  hat night I awoke suddenly, as though disturbed by a sound. The cubicle was still lit by its red nighttime lamp, and my watch showed an hour before the start of the day. I floated against my tether waiting for the sound to repeat, sniffing at the air for smoke or gas, but there was nothing.

  I knew I wouldn’t fall back asleep, so I dragged off the sack and pulled on just my pants and jacket, then floated out through the cubicle’s opening. The can was perfectly quiet at that hour, and the air against my chest was cold. I pulled my way along the side tunnel into the dim central corridor, drifting in the empty space. Just as I reached it the sound came again, so clearly etched against the silence that it sent a chill up my spine.

  Tick.

  But it was only the sound of iron walls contracting—sharp and clear and harmless. My nerves settled and I pushed off toward one of the rungs in the wall, then looked down the corridor. In both directions it disappeared into the poor light on rusted walls. I picked what I thought was the longer direction, then launched myself forward as fast as I could.

  The rush of air was exhilarating—a freedom and
suspension of effort never found on the surface. I pictured rushing naked through outer space, then just as quickly realized the irony of feeling such freedom inside a cold iron tunnel, its impenetrable walls looming in the shadows ahead and behind. It left me with an almost painful lightness of heart, suspended between a numb and insensible past and future.

  Tick.

  The whisper echoed along the corridor and stole away the image, and I spread my jacket to catch the air and tumble. The end-wall loomed up in front of me and I twisted to catch it with my feet, then pushed back the other way. A rectangle of light caught my eye, then, and after a minute I made out a doorway ajar with light spilling into the corridor. For a moment I was surprised by the size of the door, then with a shift of perspective realized where I was; it was the door to the sporting chamber. I spread my jacket again and drifted to the wall, wondering why anyone would be in the giant room so early in the morning and with so few of its lights on. I caught the edge of the padded door and swung it open.

  Tick.

  At first I thought Pham was dead. Her body floated at the center of the empty space, turning in the poor light, and for a moment I felt exposed and alone in the presence of her death—but then I saw that her eyes were open and watching me. They were heavily lidded, but they focused on me and followed me as she drifted in languid circles.

  She was completely naked. Her head was back and her arms and legs floated at her sides, the hard muscles relaxed and sleek under her skin. Her body had been oiled over every inch from her temples to her feet, and the light shone from her cheekbones and her slack lips, from her oiled breasts and the hollows of her hips, from her thighs. She looked sated, drifting without thought, yet her eyes held out the same seduction as always, pulling at me where I floated in the doorway. On her arm, a darker area showed against the olive skin, abraded from the constant air syringes.