A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  “Piss off, Polaski,” said Elliot. He looked tired, with the hair at his temples flecked with grey and his eyes restless. More and more in the past few days he’d been talking about his plans to go to Boar River with Perris, about the details of farming, but the rest of the time he fidgeted, keeping up his good humor only with an effort.

  “Well! Hello there!” Allerton made his entrance and shook hands all around. “Madame Tonova, Mr. Singh, Excellency. Fine weather we’re having, fine weather. Fine morning. What, no lights? We’re going to play fondle-your-neighbor under the table, are we? Well, all right, sounds good. How ’bout that? Ed, good to see you!” He leaned across the table to shake hands.

  I looked at the carefully groomed white hair, at the pale eyes and the sincere smile hovering in the gloomy light, then I looked away. Why was I here?

  “What’s the matter, boy-o, cat got your tongue? Well, that’s all right, Ed, you’ll sober up after a while. Take my word for it!” He took back his hand and moved to pull back his chair, carefully tugging at the knees of his trousers before sitting down. No one sat in the chairs around the corners of the table from him.

  Polaski pulled a garish chrome and brass gavel from his pocket and smacked it hard against the table, then tossed it out in front of him. The impact from the blow, however, had caused him to rise up out of his seat, and he had to grip the table to stay down.

  “I wish to speak!” Lal Singh the Younger stood up next to me and stared importantly at Polaski.

  Polaski ignored him. “Where’s Pham?” he said. “I want her present and accounted for from now on.”

  Singh looked around the table in confusion, thinking the question was for him.

  In the meantime, decanters clinked against glasses and chairs scraped against the iron floor as they were pulled closer. Aides against the wall coughed and shuffled their papers.

  “Sit down, Singh,” said Allerton, brushing a hand at him in dismissal. “We’ve got the future of all mankind in our hands here, and we don’t have time for grandstanding.”

  Singh remained upright.

  “Maybe,” I called down to Polaski, “you didn’t invite her.”

  “So who do you think you are, Torres?” he said. “Go get her.”

  I went on watching him without answering. I didn’t get up. After a minute the silence grew awkward. Singh sat down slowly and peered myopically around the table as the seconds dragged past.

  Then finally I screeched my chair back and stood, angry at myself for doing it but at the same time not wanting to be in the room any longer. I walked around behind Allerton and pushed my way through the door. The shouting started up again as the door closed, then the door clicked shut and I was left in the quiet corridor, wondering where to start looking for Pham.

  I looked into the dormitories and stood for a while in the vehicle bays, half-heartedly counting suits and tractors, not sure what it would tell me, then finally I went to the windows of the main causeway and stared out at the hellish surface.

  It was while I was standing there that a motion caught my eye in one of the distant control towers. For a while when I looked I didn’t see anything more, but then something white flickered in the upper windows. A full minute later it was there again. I made my way toward the narrow causeway leading out to the tower.

  At the end of the twisting, windowless causeway, the dim recesses of the lowest floor of the control tower appeared, emptied of equipment and abandoned. Barely visible in the center of the floor was Pham, facing away from me with her hands above her head, looking straight up. Then, by the time I reached the doorway to the tower, she was bending down with the baby in her arms, holding him near the floor.

  Suddenly, with a shriek of delight from the child, she straightened up and flung him into the air. He rose higher and higher, rolling head over heels through the air in slow motion. Ten feet up he rose, then twenty, then suddenly he sailed into the sunlight spilling through the windows, catching the light as he somersaulted among the glittering motes of dust, laughing with delight. Forty, fifty feet into the air, slower and slower he tumbled, rolling through the light with his limbs waving in every direction. Then he was hanging motionless in the air, sixty feet above us, silent with awe as he faced straight down, with nothing to see in the darkness below except Pham’s arms reaching out to catch him.

  “Hello, Eddie,” said Pham.

  “Hi. Looks like fun, doesn’t it?” The baby began to pinwheel slowly, starting to float back down.

  “Yah. Maybe you do for me someday, hah? So, what? You tell Polaski piss off, and he throw you out?”

  I didn’t answer for a moment, but watched the baby picking up speed and shrieking again. “He wants you there.”

  “I know. Soon.”

  “Okay.” I watched for another minute, then worked my way back up the causeway and the conference room, into a shouting match between Lal Singh the Younger and a brittle woman named Xiang, the emissary from the Chinese.

  I pictured the baby floating down toward me, alive and excited. I didn’t want to be at the conference. I didn’t want the bickering, or Polaski’s plan.

  Singh was on his feet now, stabbing a manicured finger at Xiang through the gloom. “You say, Madame, that the creatures that have returned to Earth have recognized China’s inherent superiority among civilized nations, and so have not attacked your homeland. I hasten to remind you, however, of the history of atrocities by the Chinese government against her people, stories about which continue to flood this system with every new refugee ship, stories that these creatures most assuredly would have heard if they heard anything at all of Earth. How do you account for this, then?”

  Xiang slapped the table with the palm of her hand, making the water in her decanter jump.

  “Emissary Singh. You of all people must not be so gullible as to believe these fabrications, which unscrupulous parties in this system feed back to these outlaws from Earth, telling them to present them as the truth as a condition of entry—”

  Next to me Chan’s eyes had narrowed at Xiang, and now she let out a hiss between her teeth. Xiang blinked in surprise, then Singh leaned across the table and poked a triumphant finger.

  “Pray tell me, Madame, how these stories have been fed to Earth, when for sixteen years the only torus in this system has been guarded and pointed elsewhere. Earth has heard nothing from us. It has long been a measure of the desperation of settlers from Earth that they arrive in a system about whose conditions they know nothing at all, and it is a further measure of their present terror that they are fleeing to yet another system that for all they know is filled with our dead bodies and the fierce aliens that are attacking them.”

  “Perhaps,” said Xiang. “But the fact remains, Emissary Singh, that these creatures have recognized China as the most peaceable and dedicated member of the community of nations, and that—”

  “China is a member of nothing! Need I remind you, Madame Xiang, that only China and the United States, with their paralyzed economies, refused to recognize the Pacific Community of Nations, leading to your exclusion and to the secession of California. And even here in our new home you do not wish to participate, building instead your radiation weapons—once again, I might add, like the Americans—” He paused to glance pointedly at Allerton.

  Tyrone Elliot chose that moment to stand up. He straightened to his full height with a piece of paper in his hand, and stared at Singh until the smaller man sat down.

  “As of this morning,” said Elliot in his soft voice, “in eight weeks, sixty million people have died on Earth from starvation, most of them on the subcontinent, in eastern Africa, and in the southern interior of China. Another four million have died in the smoke storms in Denver, central Germany, and São Paulo.” He put down his paper and looked up. “And many times this number have died from the drones, all in industrial countries—including, as much as anywhere else, northern and coastal China.” He sat back down and stared at his papers through the murky light, turning th
em in slow circles on the tabletop. No one spoke as the magnitude of the disaster sank in. Condensation dripped somewhere inside the walls, and we listened as the minutes passed.

  Then the door swung open and Pham stepped through, carrying a bassinet in which the baby lay curled up, asleep. As the door closed behind her, her hand shot out and smacked into the electrical box by the door. The baby stirred briefly and the ceiling lights blazed into life, flooding the room with new light.

  “What this? Everybody cheer up, hah? Hi!” Her eyes flashed a smile as she moved to the empty corner seat next to Allerton, touching Perris and Elliot on their shoulders as she passed. She set the bassinet on the corner of the table and sat down, while every eye at the table followed her, and while Allerton gave her a long look of contempt.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “This a baby, Mr. Barnum.”

  “Don’t call me that! What the hell’s it doing here?”

  “Sleeping. Don’t shout.”

  “Christ.”

  Someone else snickered and Allerton stared down the table, trying not to look around for who it was. He drummed his fingers on the table. Xiang leaned forward again, pale and waxen now under the bright lights.

  “The Greater People’s—”

  “Oh, shut up, Xiang,” snapped Allerton. “You’re just pissing everyone off. And in the meantime these drones are attacking every innocent target they can find.” He glanced at me pointedly with the word “innocent.”

  “Yes,” said Singh. “Even our Russian friends here have been better neighbors than you, Madame Xiang, keeping to themselves like gentlemen.”

  “Ahem.” An elderly and pudgy Marina Tonova rapped her knuckles on the table and leaned around Singh to look at me. “Mr. Singh is very kind. But still I have a question for our good friend, here, Mr. Torres.” She started to say something more, but then stopped and blinked across the table at the bassinet. “My, such a sweet child! How old is he? Is a boy, yes?”

  “Yes. Twenty-two weeks tomorrow.”

  “Ah. You are very lucky.” Tonova cast her pleasant gaze on the baby for a minute, then turned back to me.

  “Edvard, why it is you make Nicolai Ivanovich empty his shipyards last year, where he is building habitats, and then you say nothing? He is very good friend with you, and so he does this, but he is very confused now.”

  “I’m sorry. Please extend my apologies to Nicolai, Madame Tonova. It was because, at the same time that I told our captive drone of the fissures on the black planet, I told it about Nicolai’s habitat construction.”

  “You what?” said Polaski.

  “I had a suspicion the drones weren’t interested in civilian targets,” I said. I returned the look Allerton gave me. “Like the habitats, or Sun of Gabriel.”

  This was true only as far as it went. I wasn’t at all sure about human-carrying vessels moving toward the torus.

  “You walked up to our only captive,” said Polaski, “and gave it strategic information?”

  “Hardly strategic. And it wasn’t a captive. It was a plant. I used it.”

  “You used it pretty well,” said Polaski. “Half our commandos are gone now. And what about these mines? You just said they only attack military targets.”

  “Now, now,” interrupted Allerton. “I’m the one that dug out the information about the Indian mines and warned Mr. Singh.”

  “They believed it was a weapons base,” I said.

  Polaski’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know they believed it was a weapons base?”

  I tapped my fingers on the table and looked around at the faces. Pham leaned back in her chair with her hands behind her head and a pleasant smile on her face. The baby slept, and was studiously ignored by Allerton.

  “I learned it,” I said, “by trading the bogus information about the fissures on the black planet.” Only Harry Penderson, who had been with me, knew that this wasn’t true, and Penderson was dead. “Now, as long as you’re on your feet, Polaski, why don’t you tell us about this magic discovery you’ve made about the drones?”

  He started to answer, then folded his arms and paused for effect.

  “They frighten,” he said.

  “They what?”

  “You heard me. A sufficient show of force and they’re frightened off. As well they should be. We’ve got an eye-witness account from the campaign on Six from Commander Todd.”

  He gestured to the black-uniformed boy to his left. “Commander.” The boy stood up solemnly and cleared his throat, and straightened his tunic.

  “During our Fourth Reserve salient flanking maneuver—” he began.

  “How old are you?” I said.

  He looked at me blankly. “Fourteen. Six Gs.”

  “Christ.”

  Pham called down the table, “Hey, Todd, you got first name?”

  Todd frowned and glanced at Polaski. “Jacob,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Pham. “Jacob, I’m sure you are a very good commander. I’m sure you practice very hard. Now sit down. Sorry, I am sure what you say very important. I sorry you have to fight, too.” She looked around the table. “Everybody, listen. China-Girl here, she show me in detail tactics Miller woman teach drones. Drones not frighten. They not know what frighten mean. They also not lose, ever. Like mosquito, they just change, make more mosquitos. No matter what clever plan we got, they learn, come back more clever. They constant, now, like Ice-Lady say. Like police. Not alive, not people we can fight—they are part of the world.” She reached out to adjust the blanket around the baby.

  “But Mr. Allerton,” she went on. “I got question. Why you killing ranchers? And why you making radiation bombs again—”

  “What?” Polaski stood up again, but Pham cut him off.

  “And why those bombs, you aim them at black planet, hah?”

  “How do you know that!” hissed Allerton. He pushed back his chair.

  “Friend tell me,” she said.

  “What friend, you little tramp?”

  “She be here soon.”

  “I said what friend?” He reached a hand past the bassinet to grip her wrist, as though to hold her attention. She glanced briefly down at the baby, but didn’t move.

  “I won’t tell you what friend,” she said. “I make promise.”

  He gripped her harder, now whispering to her as though aware of the spectacle he was creating. The rest of us held our breaths, waiting for her to move. “You’ll tell me or I’ll break you in two, do you understand me?” Spittle flew from his lips.

  “When I make promises to friends, Mr. Barnum, I keep them.” She watched him expressionlessly.

  Polaski smacked his chrome gavel against the table, remembering to hold on this time. “What the hell is all this, Allerton? No one said you were supposed to be manufacturing weapons again—”

  Allerton pushed away Pham’s arm in disgust and turned back toward Polaski. “I don’t tell you everything, Polaski. I’m not some fucking lackey of yours, you know.”

  “That not so good,” continued Pham unfazed, “killing ranchers, just because they know too much, hah?”

  “Don’t you moralize to me, young woman. I don’t go around killing people for the fun of it.”

  “Not Carolyn Dorczak?” I said.

  He turned to stare at me. “That was an accident.”

  “So,” said Polaski, “you were targeting your launch vehicles at us. Hedging your bets a little, Allerton?”

  “It’s okay,” said Pham, still looking at Allerton. “Mr. Barnum here can’t hit anything with them anyway. No one sell him MI and optics he need for targeting—”

  “Ha!” Allerton was triumphant. “So much for your sources, young woman. We can sit ten million miles out in space if we want to, and look through your domes in the middle of the night and see who’s in them—”

  Polaski was on his feet and shouting. “Damn it, Allerton, shut up—”

  “Let it go, Polaski,” said Elliot.

  But Elliot hadn’t underst
ood. Only Polaski had understood, and he already knew. And Pham? Was that why she’d brought it up? Who was this source she kept talking about?”

  And I, of course, had understood as well. And finally I knew what Polaski had really done, the lengths to which he would go.

  Elliot went on.

  “It doesn’t matter, anyway, Polaski. Tell us what your plan is for the drones, then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Polaski sat back down and tapped a pencil against the table for a minute, while Allerton glared at him.

  “We’re going to assemble every ship in this system,” said Polaski. “Six thousand ships in a single wall, moving against the drone’s fleet at the torus.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Elliot. “Come on, Polaski, those drones ain’t gonna back off. All you’re gonna do is get your fleet up against the last pass-point, then they’re gonna start shooting. Then what the hell are you going to do?”

  “If that’s the way they want it,” said Polaski, “then that’s fine with me, too. Because if they don’t back off when they should, then our ships are going to fire in unison—ten thousand square miles of flame and missiles against that one little drone fleet.”

  “Jesus Christ, Polaski,” I said. “You’d hit the torus!”

  “Maybe. But either way, we get the drones.”

  I started to answer, but then stopped, too surprised to speak. I thought I must have misheard.

  “No, Polaski,” I said, “I mean the torus itself—the tunnel. You’d hit the torus. A synchronized broadside isn’t selective enough. It would hit the torus, the projector.”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” he said. “I know what a broadside’s for.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Polaski,” I said, “we can’t go to Serenitas if you hit that thing. No one can! We can’t go anywhere if you hit that torus—we’d be stuck in this grave of a system for life!”

  I wondered for a minute if he was joking. I looked around the table at blank or puzzled faces, feeling my own face beginning to redden.

  “What’s your problem, Torres?” said Polaski. “Except not having any balls?”