A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  Except in one instance: Sun of Gabriel herself. No one knew why she’d been spared.

  Yet for all the evidence, a controversy raged nevertheless among the MI priests, based on a computer-modeled war game that had approached the level of fantasy since Miller’s death: If some of the drones had survived after all, and if they had finally learned the art of defense as Miller had tried to teach them, would they be a match for the aliens if they returned now? Mock battles were waged again and again, but always with uncertain results, and always hinging on a key unknown—would the drones, which Miller had claimed to have made human, have understood the peculiarly human skills of stealth and deception, of feint and surprise? They would need them to wage battle against the aliens, but Miller’s own records left the issue unclear.

  Elliot sealed me into the cold transport. I strapped myself down at the controls, and prepared to guide the machine for the next hour along the difficult pseudo-orbit that would pull it forward along the string of orbiting vessels to pick up Penderson. The massive fleet MI, which resided on the capital ships, was still too far away to instruct my smaller ship’s intelligence, so I was left with manual controls.

  The cold vault of stars hung motionless outside the windscreen, in every direction the same. Glinting flecks of ice in the night, watching me, I could almost believe, waiting for me to release, to begin the flight. Even on Earth I hadn’t been a relaxed pilot, and in space I was far different from the generations that had grown up with little concern for precious up and down. I was better suited to mechanized astrogation below-decks. In these little shuttles, while in deep space, I tended to become disoriented.

  I willed the clock to bring me closer to the planet’s day-side before I had to release, where I would at least have a sense of firm ground beneath me . . . twenty more minutes. I blew on my hands after the cold of the controls, and slipped my headset on.

  “Hey Torres.” Elliot’s voice was accompanied by a pounding on the airlock behind me.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got a passenger out here who needs a ride, just up to the can. Can you do it?”

  “All right.” Company would help, even for the few minutes it would take to reach the can. I released the lock and my ears popped as the pressure changed. After a while I hadn’t heard anything, so I turned around to find Pham floating over the middle of the deck, holding a kit bag in her good hand and looking uncertainly at the seat next to me. She avoided my gaze. Finally she pushed herself aft to grab onto the iron bars of the cage.

  With a sharp jolt through the ship Elliot retracted the big docking pins. I tugged the lever to blow the air out of the lock and start the two ships drifting apart.

  “Okay, Torres,” said Elliot, “you’re clear. Safe trip.”

  “Thanks.” I tried to keep my eyes down on the controls as I set up the parameters for the forced orbit, then rolled the ship upside-down relative to the planet and eased in a light thrust, glancing back to make sure Pham was oriented. When I’d watched the indicators for a full minute and was sure thrust and altitude were stable, I set the alarms and swiveled the seat away from the windscreens.

  Pham had snapped loose a supply case and was sitting on it in the center of the deck, leaning her head back against the bars. She wore loose, dirty fatigues, with her injured arm out of its sleeve. The jacket’s shoulder bulged from the bandages underneath. Her face was thin and pale, her hair long and unkempt. She had an air of being soiled somehow, overused. Against the background of the solid bars in particular she looked worn and unfocused as she shifted her position and tugged at her jacket, turning to look at the walls or the ceiling, at anything but me.

  “How’s your arm?” I said. She seemed not to hear, then finally shrugged without looking up.

  Over the next hour I glanced back at her several times, hunched over on her case, silhouetted against the bars. And I remembered, in disconnected images, a woman with flashing eyes and wild tempers, with insatiable appetites that had driven her and finally consumed her. But now, as she sat and fidgeted listlessly, I sensed that whatever had animated her so mercilessly was still demanding of her one final effort, and that the vulnerable woman I’d once seen looking out of those same eyes, the woman who read Irish poets and talked of having children, was too tired to obey.

  The first edge of the sun inched over the horizon ahead of us, and its weak light spilled across the deck. It crept toward Pham’s feet.

  A

  week earlier Charlie Peters had talked to me about Pham. It was the night before we’d tried for the tunnel, and I’d slipped out of bed and left Chan asleep, and gone up to his quarters.

  “Come in, lad, come in.” A night-lamp glowed between Kip’s bed and Peters’, where he sat blinking into the shadows. He eased his nightgowned knees off the bed and leaned forward to pat the other bed, next to where Kip was sitting.

  “Sit here,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Charlie, I didn’t realize it was so late. I hadn’t meant to wake you.”

  “Come, lad, that’s enough of that. What’s on your mind? I don’t imagine you’ve come to discuss civilization’s troubled past again, hm?”

  “No. Too many dreams, Charlie.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “There’s one, mostly, about a cavern. The damn thing woke me up again tonight.”

  “Perhaps where you live, hm?” His gaunt face hovered in the lamp light, deep lines in his cheeks and age spots on his forehead. He leaned forward and tapped his fingertips against my chest. “In here. So is there a way out of this cavern?”

  “Well, a tunnel, but there’s always something in the way.”

  “Ah. I don’t wonder it’s you, yourself, Eddie. The past you’re always pretending you don’t have. Listen—come, you came here to listen, so listen—you who’d have us believe you left nothing behind when you ran away from home. Well, what I think is that you left everything behind, and that it’s driving you mad.

  “I want you to imagine a child, Eddie, born into terrible poverty. A child whose parents are struggling so hard to provide food that they can provide little else. A child whose father is so troubled by the truth of his life that he’s unable to provide even the dignity and regard a child needs. ’Tis hurtful, Eddie. Hurtful to the child, hurtful to the parents. ’Tis the terrible price of poverty, you know, the destruction of childhood.”

  He ran a hand absently over his bald head, lost in thought for a moment.

  “Now imagine that this child runs away from home, walking a long way and suffering hardship in a tiny boat among the wretched and poor. And imagine that this child loses a father at an early age, a father whose blessing and strength the child is still waiting for so desperately.”

  “Get to the point,” I said.

  “A child like Tuyet, for example.”

  He looked on sympathetically as I struggled with my confusion, then he reached out and squeezed my hand. “Or like you.” On the bed beside me, Kip blew air through his flute without making any sound.

  “I didn’t know, Charlie.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  How was it, I thought, that I knew so little about her?

  “In the dream,” I said, “someone’s standing just behind my shoulder, telling me—”

  “—not to go into the tunnel. Aye, I know. I wasn’t finished. Eddie, a child doesn’t know what to do with so much hurt. He locks it away, along with everything else he needs because the needing of it brings him so much pain. He locks away all of the wonder and joy God gave him, all of the things that make him a child. And there’s something else he locks away, too. When we’re hurt too many times, Eddie, we become angry, and I tell you the anger of a child is a terrible thing. ’Tis a fire that blackens his whole world, and he believes it will destroy everything he loves.

  “I’m sure your mother saw it in you, Eddie. And I’m sure she believed it was something her family couldn’t survive. So she said to you, ‘Don’t be letting it out, boy. Take all
those black things inside and lock them away forever.’ Poverty robs us even of our feelings, you see, the one thing that makes us human.

  “I’m sure you believed you drove your father from his house and killed him, Eddie—it’s what a child believes. And I’m sure your mother’s voice said in your ear all the while, ‘You see! You’ve had your way and you’ve killed him!’ And so you locked those things away, too, and off you ran. But when you do that, you put away all of the laughter and the music, too, and the wonder, and you become a secret person. Only if you are very lucky will there be someone nearby to carry those things for you, and keep them safe.” Kip’s arm brushed against me as he stirred; I had been gradually becoming conscious of the warmth and the smell of him as Peters talked.

  “Well, all that’s fine,” I said, “but what about the dream?”

  “Aye, well, that’s what’s waiting in the tunnel, you know. All of the black and troubled things, all of what we call human sin. And someday you’ll have to accept them, if you want to be human. You’ll have to let your grief fill you up, and you’ll have to weep until you’re exhausted of it. Your loss was real, laddie, and you had no choice in it, but the choice of what you do with it is yours. That’s what’s lying in the balance, now.”

  Together we listened to the humming of the engine.

  “This time when I had the dream,” I said, “there was someone in there with me, raising a hand up toward me. With a gun, I thought.”

  “Indeed? Well, I don’t know. Perhaps not a gun? I’d sooner imagine a balance, as I say: The third beast said, ‘Come and see;’ and I beheld a black horse, and he that sat on him held a balance in his hand. But I really do think there’s no one in there but you.”

  I tried again to picture the figure in front of me, but it remained out of sight in the gloom.

  “I keep thinking we’re not going to make it, Charlie.”

  “Through the tunnel? Well. Tuyet will, you know. And I’m thinking you’ll be free to go with her, hm?”

  Kip had begun a soft, slow tune, one I hadn’t heard before.

  I didn’t understand what Peters meant. “And Chan?”

  He looked at Kip, then at his hands. “She’s down in your quarters, lad, waiting for you. Go.”

  I

  t was a week later that I was sitting in the iron ship with Pham, watching her take a cloth from her pocket and wipe her face, shifting again to get comfortable. The things Peters had said had come to seem increasingly obscure to me, and in the days since, I’d found that I had far more immediate concerns. More than anything, I needed to see the creature that waited for me.

  “Aye, I know,” Peters had said when I remarked on it before leaving the fleet. “For I heard the voice of the fourth beast, and he was saying, ‘Come and see’ . . .”

  But for once, like Madhu before him, he didn’t finish the whole thing.

  The thin light from the sun crept farther across the deck, and touched Pham’s feet.

  L

  ess than two days later Penderson and I were on the second planet, drained by the glare and humidity, surrounded by the crowds and the clamor of West Lowhead—and struggling with the stink; accustomed as we were to years of cool and filtered air, we were unprepared for the texture and stench of human life. We put off the waiting officials and begged for showers.

  Soon afterwards we were in the back of a converted transport racing east along the shoreline, Dorczak and Penderson and I, sitting on soft leather and watching the colony’s president across from us lean forward in his seat and tell us what he believed.

  If Carolyn Dorczak was the best the Americans had produced, the man who’d replaced her was the worst. Tall and athletic, with coifed white hair and practiced sincerity, Bertram “Fightin’ Bart” Allerton was a man who managed perceptions. He managed the world’s image of him, and, in turn, just as scrupulously managed the way in which he allowed himself to perceive his world. And in that height of American arrogance, he deeply believed that he managed the way in which others experienced their own lives, as well.

  “I believe,” he said, locking eyes with each of us in turn, “that this is a profound opportunity. Is there a risk? Yes, there is, there’s a risk. But I believe that when the rest of the world sees that we’ve come to terms with this creature, they’ll look to us for guidance and will recognize that we stand at the forefront of the galaxy’s search for lasting peace.”

  Dorczak turned to watch the shacks passing outside. “We haven’t come to terms with anything, Bart,” she said. “The thing hasn’t so much as twitched since we dropped the cage over it. And don’t think the world hasn’t noticed that it was our base they chose to trash the hell out of . . . the ranchers out there are even saying we had it coming. Ranchers on both sides of the wall.”

  For reasons long since forgotten, the planet was named Boar River. It might have had to do with its unexpected water—the drones had left the planet to the first settlers with the beginnings of a sea, a quarter-million square miles of shallow water and fertile shores.

  A single great peninsula jabbed out into the sea from the eastern shore, a peninsula that the original North American and Commonwealth colonists had claimed—although they’d been able to defend it against takers only with heavy support from us on the black planet. Bart Allerton, during the colony’s difficult transition from Dorczak’s technical command to civil government, had claimed to be the peninsula’s discoverer, and had tried to name it the Allerton Headlands, presumably thinking the name had a rugged flair. More exacting minds, however, had pointed out that a low, marshy spit of sand didn’t qualify as a headland, and so the peninsula had come to be called Low Headland, and then just Lowhead—a kind of inadvertent political compromise.

  Eventually, Allerton’s real ticket to power had come from ending the colony’s dependence on outside help to defend the peninsula’s approaches, a dependence that Polaski had worked hard to foster. To combat the continual encroachment of ranchers and homeless settlers, Allerton had built a wall across the narrow neck of the peninsula, through an area now known as Wallneck. And to combat more sophisticated intrusions, he’d reorganized the colony’s economy to support a defense force, with the largest units based at Wallneck.

  Even then, however, Allerton had known that Lowhead enjoyed longterm security only with Polaski’s and my blessing, and he’d wisely announced to us his intention to stop at a purely defensive military, and had supported treaties under which we handled the colony’s international obligations in exchange for a guaranteed trade in foodstuffs and raw materials. According to Polaski and Allerton, that was where the relationship still stood—and so I was struck by Dorczak’s comment about the ranchers believing that Wallneck had it coming.

  “Mr. Allerton—” I said.

  “ ‘Bart,’ please.”

  “Bart. Why do the ranchers resent the base at Wallneck? I thought they were glad to have it there.”

  He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and his face took on a look of enlightened sympathy for those less worldly than he. “Ed, you need to understand these rurals. They’re good people, mind you, New Zealan-ders mostly, but with all the prosperity they’ve been privileged to enjoy they’ve come to take our strong posture for granted. I’m sure a man in your position understands how these sorts of people can be.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “Well, I have, actually, Ed. But really, you don’t need to concern yourself with internal rumors like this. I’m sure you’ve got much more . . . cosmic things on your mind, haven’t you?” He leaned forward and patted my knee.

  “Carolyn,” I said, “you just said that even the ranchers on your side of the wall thought the base had it coming. Why? I assume you’ve been out there?”

  “Now, Ed.” Allerton’s voice demanded my attention back. “We all know what a good administrator Miss Dorczak is. That’s one good thing about many women, I’m sure you know.”

  Dorczak lifted an eyebrow but went on
looking out the window. I knew it was only because of the influential professional and naval voting blocks that he was forced to keep her on at all.

  “But,” he went on, “we still have to keep things on a need-to-know basis—the cosmos isn’t always such a kind and friendly place, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t, Mr. Allerton, and right now it’s so goddamned unfriendly I don’t have time for your tap dance. I need information on these attacks. Now, what’s going on at Wallneck?”

  “Ed, please. I’m sure you’re an excellent engineer and that you can understand the limitations of rural folk who’ve got nothing better to do than bellyache about their water supply, but being a technical man, like our faithful assistant here”—he patted Dorczak’s knee now—“I can appreciate that you aren’t necessarily experienced in the subtleties of running a real operation. So you let me worry about the ranchers getting out of line, and you tell your boss that if they get to be a problem then we’ll just have to take care of it.” He leaned forward and his eyes widened as he said it, but the rest of his face remained a mask. He sat frozen in that position, not about to be the first one to look away.

  Penderson leaned over and whispered in my ear.

  “Until this alien’s in your hands, Torres, I wouldn’t want anyone getting too uncomfortable about our having a nice long talk with it. So let’s do our sniffing around later, okay?” He turned to Dorczak.

  “I guess the heat’s a little hard on a couple of vacuum junkies like us, as you can tell. But listen, Carolyn, we do need to know about the attack and about this animal before we get out to the base, if we’re going to make any sense of it. All we really know comes from your message: a hell of a lot of dead and wounded, and one animal that got separated from its weapon and got cornered in a cage. What else?”