Tick. The sound whispered up along my legs, leaving a cool trace against the skin. I felt the cold air against my chest through the open jacket.
It seemed natural, somehow, to find Pham in that room, as though I’d always known she would be there, waiting in the half-dark. I watched her turn, arched backward at the waist, head thrown back and turned to one side to watch me, the few lights glistening off her oiled skin, black hair floating free and dark eyes following me. I pulled myself in past the doorway. She didn’t move or change expression, but just watched me and waited.
But a movement elsewhere in the chamber caught my eye.
Tick.
This time the sound traced across my skin like a scalpel.
A man floated in the corner of the room, someone I’d never seen before. He was naked as well and floated against the padded walls in the corner, his skin oiled like Pham’s. His head bumped against the pads, pressed against his shoulder at an impossible angle. His eyes were open and empty.
Tick.
One more time the sound, like a metronome. But not counting out the time—holding it still, frozen in place.
Pham drifted so that her head pointed down, her lidded eyes still following me upside down. As I watched her drift I felt strangely reassured by the man’s presence. It seemed right that he should be there and that he should be dead, as though anything less would have left her unattended and diminished.
Tick. The sound stirred in my loins and the cool air reached in through my clothing. But slowly I pushed my way back out through the door, and with an effort broke the lock of her eyes.
Tick.
I pushed my way up the corridor, leaving the sound to slide past me and race ahead along the iron walls.
T
hree days later I rode to the surface with Priscilla Bates, the can’s commander, enjoying her ordinary company while I tried to shake the image of Pham. Bates was an attractive woman now in her early forties, with pale skin and light hazel eyes and long brown hair—one of the few women who still let it grow. She’d become one of our better operations commanders, but she shied away from combat, complaining of painful joints. She took duty in charge of the can whenever she could.
Back on the surface she joined Chan and me, and the wiry and cautious Harry Penderson, for a visit to Anne Miller in her quarters under the main dome. The four of us walked along the dusty black alleyways, preceded by a pair of six-legged drones who marched solemnly on opposite sides of the alley. They dragged their feet to kick up as much dust as possible and played a heavy rendition of the Funeral March from Mahler’s First Symphony, plopping down their big feet in time with the music.
“I don’t get it,” said Penderson, eyeing the drones uncertainly. “Why do they do that? I’ve never seen a frivolous machine before.”
“It’s not frivolous to them,” said Chan. “You see, they’re allowed to give themselves points for learning new things. The more intricate and symmetrical a thing it is, the more points they add to their score—and they’re programmed to get that score up as high as they can. So in effect they take pleasure from doing things like that.” Bates and I both sighed, knowing what was coming and having heard the whole argument dozens of times before. I looked away and thought again about Pham floating in the dim light.
“I wouldn’t call it ‘taking pleasure,’ ” said Penderson, frowning first at Chan and then at the drones in their clouds of dust. “Not if they’re just machines, and not if it’s just the way they’re programmed.”
Chan sighed, too. “That’s all it is with us, Harry, on some level: neurons firing and glands squirting—the programming of instinct. But . . . no, come on, don’t get your feathers up. I think it’s wonderful that something like pleasure could be made out of ordinary flesh and blood. Don’t look at me like that . . . you’re not any less alive for being real, Harry—those interactions are so many levels removed from what you really feel that it has nothing to do with who you are.” Unlike Chan, the rest of us still balked at the idea of being ultimately so mundane—however far removed our selves were from those basic interactions—and we jealously guarded some threatened sense of our own vitality. We also tended to fall unerringly into the mistake Penderson was about to make.
“You sound like this Miller woman,” he said.
The little drones stopped in unison on a rumble of tympanis, and solemnly tapped their inside feet in time to a funereal pause before continuing.
“No,” said Chan. She was resigned. “That’s not true. Anne Miller isn’t interested in how the sparkle and mystery of life is created—she’s interested in how intelligence is created—that tiny, insignificant little part of us that reasons. Don’t confuse our being real and comprehensible with our being rational, Harry—that’s the mistake she makes. She thinks that the source of everything worthwhile is intelligence—sophisticated, compact, and effective, maybe, but still intelligence stripped of all else. Her belief is that with enough of the right kind of decision-making rules you’ve got a human being—when all I’m saying is that with a pile of glands and neurons and instincts, and a lifetime of being loved and cared for, you’ve got a living creature worth being. Like us.”
The little drones timed the brooding end of the movement perfectly to make a two-column, parade-ground pivot and stop in a cloud of black dust at either side of Miller’s door. Then, in a trick that had been making their rounds, they turned around and lifted themselves onto their rear legs with their front legs extended in front of them, lions rampant guarding the door. “Giddy-up,” said one, and we knocked and pushed our way in.
Miller had turned sixty the year before, and her age had begun to show in her face and her hair. And as usual these days, it took us a while to interest her in our presence, and to distract her from her papers and her screens. But finally she listened long enough to hear Harry Penderson’s story.
“Well,” she said finally, “that particular one may not have known who we were. Not all the drones have the same knowledge, you know.” She spoke a little vaguely and her eyes wandered back to her papers now and then.
“Anne,” I said, “let me ask you a couple of questions. When we were back in the Solar System waiting, and the first messenger drone went back to the Solar System with the news that terraforming was under way here and that the torus was open, did it know why it was going back, and why it was delivering the news?”
Miller was shaking her head even as I asked the question.
“No. Basic programming. Unconscious instructions. ‘Why’ only has to do with plans they develop themselves, the methods they themselves design for carrying out the instructions they take as givens.”
“Okay, then what about this: After that drone went back to the Solar System and started receiving your new instructions, where would it think those instructions were coming from?”
She frowned at the question. “Again—it wouldn’t have ‘thought’ anything. The instructions were sent to it embedded in special communications codes that took the instructions straight into its memory, bypassing any processing.”
“Then when it returned here to Holzstein’s and disseminated the new instructions to all the others—where would the others have thought the information was coming from?”
“Same thing—embedded in those same special communications codes. For them, the instructions just suddenly existed.”
Bates was wandering around the room blowing dust off of things.
“Like being given directions under hypnosis?” she asked.
Miller looked surprised at the idea, but nodded. “Yes. Very close.”
“By the way, Anne,” I said, “where are those communications codes kept? You’ve never mentioned them before.”
She pointed to a slender metal briefcase slipped in among her books and memory blocks on the shelf.
“Okay. Now I’ve just got a couple more questions. Anne, would one of your drones be capable of taking a look at those European cannon ships and identifying them as weapons?”
She jerked her head up, then slowly looked back down at her papers; she knew why I was asking.
“It’s possible. Not very likely, but possible.”
“All right. Now let me ask you this: When we arrived here in Holzstein’s System, the torus here had a record of two vessels being sent back to the Solar System. Remember? Not one. And the second one was sent back to the Solar System after the first one returned here to Holzstein’s with your new instructions. Have you ever figured out why?”
Penderson was watching me intently. Very few people in the system knew how little control we’d had over the drones.
Miller didn’t answer, but ran a hand absently across her papers.
“Okay, then I’ll tell you what I think happened,” I said. “For a long time I thought it was something about your new instructions that caused them to send another drone back to the Solar System without letting us know about it.” Miller was shaking her head tiredly as I said it. She knew it wasn’t true. “But what I think now is that after the first drone came back here to Holzstein’s from the Solar System, and obeyed its programming and unconsciously passed along your new instructions to the others, it proceeded to describe what it had seen on its trip. Namely another system—Earth’s solar system—filled with activity and with hundreds of huge white machines breaking out of their orbits to chase it back toward the torus—heading for what it thought of as its own home system. Remember, not one of those drones had ever been outside of its protective ship before it reached Holzstein’s System. It’s where they were born.” Chan and Bates and Penderson had stopped where they were to watch me, but Miller went on idly rifling the edges of her papers.
“So what would the other drones do when they heard this story? They’d send another drone back to take a close look at those approaching ships. And when they’d gotten that look, we all know what they did—the perfectly reasonable thing. They left. En masse, hours before we were expected to arrive.”
Miller was nodding slightly, as though she had known all of this long ago and was tired of thinking about it. I looked at the others. “I don’t think we’re ever going to see those drones back here again, no matter how long we wait. I think they’re parked in Serenitas System, probably doing their jobs, but not about to come back here. They may even have concluded that their ‘instinctual’ return to the Solar System is what drew us toward them, and they’re not about to make that mistake again. But all of this probably also means that there’s no reason why we can’t go ahead and join them—assuming we can get at the torus. Though no matter what we do, we’d better make damned sure the drones don’t ever see huge weapons like those coming at them again.”
I looked at Miller. “You may have programmed them to be just like us, Anne, but that may also be why we’ll never see them again.” She understood what I was saying, but even then, as I watched her, I had the feeling that she knew something more, that somehow she’d thought this through even further than I had.
“But Ed,” said Bates, “surely the messenger drone knew who we were, and what all of our ships were for?”
Miller closed her eyes.
“Ah, Priscilla,” I said. “You weren’t in the Operations room back on the island when the drones launched. There’s something Anne said, but no one heard her—”
A scrabbling sound suddenly came from the door, then it burst open with the two little grasshopper drones tumbling in after it and scurrying to the side. There was nothing else in the doorway except the empty alleyway and the swirling dust glowing in the sunlight—and the crunching of boots approaching through the gravel. The footsteps got louder, then all at once Michael Bolton stood in the doorway, wearing an imposing military uniform but looking dustier and more tired than I’d ever seen him. Penderson tensed and took a step toward the door.
“Easy, Harry,” said Bates. “He’s one of the good guys. Michael Bolton, Harry Penderson.”
Bolton took a step in and leaned back against the doorway, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead.
“Pleasure’s all mine,” he said, not moving to shake hands.
“I thought you were off-planet,” I said.
“Was. I’ve had a bit of a fire under my tail for a couple of days, though—just put down. Picked up a whisper and thought we’d best get back. I take it you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what? Did you make contact with the Europeans?”
“Would have . . . remarkable what these frightful togs will do. But no, it’s moot now.” He pushed himself off the doorpost and brushed the dust from his jacket, then stepped forward and held out his hand to Penderson. “Pleased to meet you, Penderson. You look like you could do with a stiff drink. Hello Anne, Priscilla.” He gave Chan’s hand a squeeze, then turned and sat down in a chair, stretching his legs stiffly in front of him. “Wretched buggers, those Europeans. They’re pulling out, you know. Going through the tunnel.”
We stared at him as he idly plucked pieces of something out of his gold braid. Finally he looked up again. “Seems they were a bit discomposed by your probe, Torres . . . took it to mean we were about to go through ourselves. Suspicious bastards, aren’t they? Lou Fiedler’s just confirmed it—they’re abandoning the third planet. They’ve pulled back all their pickets, which have themselves already gone through, by the by. All those bloody big cannon of theirs.”
F
or the first time in years, that night, I dreamed about the cavern and the passageway leading away from it. There was someone in the cavern with me, though—just behind me and to one side, watching over my shoulder and whispering in my ear.
“You see . . .” My mother’s voice. “The demon’s right in front of you now. Naked. Don’t go.”
“Don’t you see the light, though? At the end of the passage, like the moon? I can reach it.”
“You reached for love once, Eduardo, and killed your father. You reached for power once, too, and killed an old man who’d done you no harm. Then you reached for freedom, and killed Madhu. Stay here with me, where it’s safe.”
“But I didn’t reach for the baby, and it died, too.”
“Stay.”
“I’ve already sent out the probe.”
“And you see—death has followed it already.”
SIXTEEN
The Gospel According to
Sun of Gabriel
P
ham slammed her metal cup onto the table, spilling bitter liquid, and pushed it across the pitted surface to a confused Roddy McKenna.
“You want to be powerful guy? Okay, you drink that. You drink it all quick like, no pussy feets or someone fuck with you, hah?” She looked away with a frown and sucked at the liquor on her knuckles, snorting now and then as if to remind herself of McKenna’s inexperience, lest his fascination with her warrant some sort of self-consciousness on her part.
The two of them sat across a table from each other at the far end of the recreation center, while Tyrone Elliot and I sat with our backs to the bar and our feet up on stools, watching McKenna struggle with the mysteries of life according to Colonel T. Pham. Eight months had passed since the launching of the probe into Serenitas, without a word back.
“I knew a fella in Louisiana, once,” said Elliot, tossing back his own drink and belching. “Followed a mule around for forty days and forty nights . . . figured the mule musta known something, it was so quiet and serene, like.” He groped around behind him for the jar. “Finally got tired of stepping in mule shit and came back home to his wife and kids.”
The four of us were the only ones in the room—Pham and McKenna at one end, and Elliot and I at the other. Afternoon light filtered through the windows that had been cut into the black walls, but otherwise the room was dark. Back in the shadows near Pham and McKenna an obese pig rooted under the tables, grunting and rummaging for scraps. No one knew where it had come from; the story was that it had wanted a drink so badly that it held its breath and ran the two miles across the surface from the farming domes.
&nb
sp; Down at the other end McKenna suddenly doubled over, then straightened back up with an effort.
“That’s pretty good stuff,” he said, gripping the cup and struggling to keep the liquor down.
“Bullshit.” Pham lurched across the table and snatched back the empty cup, while McKenna tried to keep his eyes off her snake-like body leaning toward him. “That stuff kill you. You telling me what you think I want to hear. The world fuck with you real quick, buddy boy, you do that. Run around being sucker, thinking maybe if you just a little bit better guy, then boss-man, or father-man or priest-man finally see you there and say Yah, okay, you good enough now. Shit.” She stared into the cup and tapped it impatiently on the table, as though trying to remember whether she’d already filled it again.
Next to me Elliot sighed and re-crossed his legs. “Sad, ain’t it. Spark beat out of a pretty woman like that. Even if she is so short.” He scratched his chin and looked at me. “ ’Course, you probably agree with her, don’t you? You short, depressed people always stick together, I noticed.”
“I just wish she’d leave him alone, is all. He’s got no business being in here.”
“So? Prove her wrong. You’re the boss-man, ain’t you? When was the last time you told him he’s doing okay? Here we got the whole system beating on us asking when the probe’s coming back and are we gonna say it’s safe to follow the Europeans or not, and that kid thinks it’s all his fault ’cause ol’ Sun of Gabriel ain’t come back.”
“Aieee! Fucking pig!” At the other end of the room the waddling pink shape had reached Pham’s table, snuffling at the bench leg and urinating noisily into the dirt. Pham’s shout didn’t have any impact on it at all, so she threw back her head and drained her cup, then flung it at the pig. It clanked against the beast’s forehead between its little black eyes, but still it paid her no attention and went on sniffing at the bench. McKenna pulled himself unsteadily to his feet to lean across the table and watch.
A Grey Moon Over China Page 26
