A Grey Moon Over China

by Day, Thomas, A.

  And the shuttle was gone.

  D

  uring the night I awoke unable to breathe. There was an awful noise in my chest and my lungs were heaving for air. An alarm was buzzing in the helmet, and in the midst of a growing panic I realized that the alarm had been sounding for a long time, weaving in and out of my sleep. My air was gone. I could feel nothing but the darkness and the cold iron flooring under my shoulders.

  I calmed the rising panic, whispering to myself the words from the manuals. I remembered them in Elliot’s own voice, delivered during his endless training sessions. Slowly, carefully, with every sense stretched to the breaking point, I groped for the bottle on Elliot’s suit and disconnected it. I fitted it to the coupling at my belly and concentrated on feeling the coupling’s threads through my gloves, on feeling the tiny arrow etched on the head of the nozzle, on feeling the tiny ridges on the valve as I spun it open. On hearing the hiss of air burst into the darkness.

  Then finally, one more time, I slept.

  T

  he shuttle had been moved, not destroyed. It had been lifted and then dumped carelessly against the side of the dome to get it out of the way. One of the skids had collapsed under the impact, causing the little boat to list and crushing the engines’ exhaust skirts and the forward battery compartment. The airlock in the tail still worked, and once on board I found that the rear lights, pumps and scrubbers still functioned, but that all of the forward instruments were dead and smelled of ozone and burned silicon. I wouldn’t be leaving.

  I stripped off my suit and washed the gloves and the faceplate, then plugged in the bottles to recharge. Then finally I ate, sitting on the sloping deck and thinking about Elliot, leaning against the wall and watching my hands as they held the food.

  During the night I wept. I wept with a hurt that came up out of my deepest insides, an ache that wrapped its arms around me and squeezed the tears out of me as though out of a wound as I sat with my knees against my chest and my head in my arms.

  The tears were for Elliot, I thought. They were for the children in the infirmary, or for the families back on Earth, or Teresa Delgado, or Charlie Peters’ god. For all I wept, I was sure that the tears were for someone else.

  I have the impression now, remembering the days that followed, of washing my hands over and over, and of leaning against the bulkhead and watching my reflection in the steel door of the food warmer. I stared at my unshaven face and at the stiff black hair, and ran my hands over the rough skin and the greying eyebrows, across my cracked lips. But mostly I remember staring down at the backs of my hands, at the tiny hairs that grew from the rough skin, at the lines worn into the knuckles, at the darker brown of the veins and the slow pulse beating inside them. I stared down at them and remembered looking down at the same hands when I was a child, when they were soft and small, and innocent.

  Then sometime later I dragged all of our air bottles out and returned to Elliot’s body where it lay in the iron tunnel. I lifted his shoulders and walked backwards, pulling him one painful step after another away from the dome. I pulled him until the air was running low again, and then I left him to go back for more. This I did again and again, over many days.

  The drones paid me no attention. They didn’t pause in their work at all, and through those long nights out on the surface, when I lay on the ground awake, I could feel the vibrations of their feet as they passed. Sometimes they brushed into me on their way by. I would lie awake in the dark and feel them pass by on their business, while I worked at remembering Elliot’s face. Sometimes I would see them when I sat up and turned on the flashlight, to shine it down on Elliot to make sure I’d missed no detail, no line or hair that I’d failed to record perfectly.

  A few times, though, I couldn’t recall Elliot’s face at all. No matter how I tried, the only image that would appear was Polaski’s, watching me from a distance.

  “Leave me alone!” I would shout, waving my hands uselessly in the darkness. “You’ve had your way, now leave me alone!”

  But my voice only rang back from inside the helmet—there was no one to hear. In any case, I knew, it was far too late: Polaski had gone on with his destruction, while I had crept off one more time, taking Elliot to his death.

  “The thing I wanted most, Tyrone,” I said one night, “was land. I’ve never had land of my own. There was just the desert at home, and up north there were the streets in the winter and someone else’s seeds to plant in the summer. Seeds the size of your thumb, and I never got to see them grow. We just planted them, one after the other, and the cabrones would give us food. But what I wanted was grown pine trees, and a wooden fence with a gate around my house. I used to lie awake at night imagining the sound of that gate, but now everyone’s gone.”

  Most of the time when I left the shuttle, making one more trip with the oxygen bottles, some of the black scouts would fly up to look, and sometimes one of them would dart forward and land on my shoulder. It would grip the suit in its claws and watch what I watched, see what I saw. The first time it happened I froze, thinking it was a new attack, but after a time during which nothing happened I took a few cautious steps, finally deciding it meant no harm. I couldn’t see it where it sat on my shoulder, even if I turned my helmet all the way to the side, and after several days I forgot about it when one was there. Only when I concentrated could I feel the light pressure against the material of the suit. They would stay in place day and night, and would leave only when I worked my way back into the shuttle’s airlock. Nothing I did while one was on my shoulder seemed to cause the other drones any concern; at least none of them ever came to look.

  One morning I opened my eyes to find myself looking through the legs of the passing drones at a pile of scrap metal being fed into the smelters. Along one side of the pile lay something that caught my eye, and after lying still and looking at it for several minutes I finally recognized the metal case the codes had been in. It lay open and empty, discarded on the pile.

  At other times when I left the shuttle and walked out across the surface, I would discover that I’d become confused about the direction to go in and I would wander lost among the drones, sometimes stopping for hours just to watch. I watched them assemble whole ships in just a few minutes, or else watched whole production lines simply stand up and walk away when they were done.

  I watched four-legged creatures take themselves apart and bolt their pieces to some greater device, thus becoming a part of some other machine.

  Over the weeks I saw entire generations of drones come and go, evolving into ever more refined forms from one day to the next. It was a frightening process to watch, and after a while I laughed at the idea of ever stopping such creatures.

  One day I left the shuttle with all of the air bottles and the last few days’ worth of food. I also carried a sharp piece of metal and the wooden back from some musical instrument. I’d gone back into the dome to find it, the first trip back inside since Elliot’s death, and I’d paused at one point to find myself looking at the headless grey drone in his cage, still standing in exactly the position it had been in when I’d last seen it through the smoke after Bolton died.

  Carrying all of the bottles now and all of the food, a little ways at a time, I spent the next two days covering the twenty miles to where I’d left Elliot for the last time. It was out past the drones, out where the wastes opened up to the horizon. Getting there took the last of my strength and the last of my food.

  Elliot’s face had changed very little. The ice was gone from his eyes, and hundreds of capillaries had frozen and burst in the vacuum, but each time I paused from scraping out a hole in the ground with the piece of metal and looked at him, I believed that he looked just as he had during the twenty-five years we’d spent together.

  The scraping passed in a blur of pain and fatigue, and often I thought that the next stroke would have to be the last. But the sun rose higher and I remained on my knees, taking stroke after stroke with my hands now frozen to the scrap of metal.
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  In the end, though, no matter how hard I tried, Elliot’s grave looked less neat and finished than McKenna’s next to it, and finally I had to stop myself from smoothing it over one more time in the midst of growing delirium and hunger.

  I sat by the grave then, making sure I remembered every aspect of Elliot’s face. I took the piece of wood and hammered it into the mound, then wiped it clean.

  TYRONE ELLIOT, I’d scratched into it. 2005–2051. A GOOD FRIEND.

  S

  unlight leapt across the surface the next morning, lighting up the graves.

  It had been a night filled with voices, so many that I’d believed at times it was the scout on my shoulder whispering in my ear.

  It had been a night filled with faces, as well, floating in front of me as I stood there in the darkness. They were the faces of all the people whose deaths I’d tried to forget.

  I saw my father standing on the ground between the two graves, and for the first time I saw the sadness in his eyes as he returned my gaze. I saw the old man I’d stolen the plans from, the secret plans I’d thought would set us free. Then, for a while, I couldn’t tell them apart, the old man and my father.

  I saw Anne Miller as a young woman, looking out of her window when she thought no one was watching. I saw Michael Bolton at his camp table, night after night, writing the letters I knew he wrote to his sister and brother, the ones he had no way to send.

  I saw Charlie Peters standing on the slope of a hill, reaching out a hand to me. Then, just before dawn, I saw Chan walking away, pulling a shawl around her shoulders as she went.

  The sun glinted above the horizon and the wastelands rippled with shadows and the knife’s edges of light, sweeping closer and then across me from the east to the west, the land not completely real yet but no longer just imagined in the darkness. And in those few moments of half-light I saw Polaski’s face filling the world, and in those moments I came to hate him. I saw his empty eyes mocking me, staring out of that pale face under his blond eyebrows, and I saw his square chin and blunt nose, his colorless lips and pale, blond hair.

  And I knew then that it was the face of a man without substance, and I hated him for it. I hated him for the ambition that had driven me out to that place by the graves, and for the scorn, and the jeers and the threats.

  Yet wasn’t I the one who had fueled him, who had whispered in his ear at every turn? Wasn’t I to be hated as well? Had the child, once huddled and trembling before the dogs in the street, turned around and sold his soul to own a wolf on a chain? Only to say, to all who passed, “There, that is the wolf, over there. Pay no attention to me.”

  But the wolf knew, and mocked.

  Then in that brief moment of uncertain light on the black planet, I saw Polaski raise his gun one last time, and I drew in a breath and opened my mouth to shout at him, to leap forward and rip it from him and tear him apart—and in that instant the sunlight flared across the wastes and dispelled the shadows, and shattered the image of Polaski and his rising hand.

  There was nothing in front of me then but the frozen gravel and the black dust of the surface, stretching out to the horizon. To my left lay Roddy McKenna’s tidy grave with its carved stone, while in front of me lay Elliot’s with its ragged slat of wood.

  To the right of Elliot’s grave was a stool, and on it sat Madhu Patel. He was still dressed in white, and the red rose on his lapel was as fresh as ever. The sun shone on him brightly from one side, lighting up his face with its crisp morning whites and shadows.

  “You seem very sad,” he said.

  The palms of his hands rested on his thighs, and his big lips pursed sympathetically.

  “Not for much longer,” I said.

  “Well, perhaps.” He lifted his hands slightly and set them back down on his thighs. “You must eat, Eduardo.”

  “There’s no more food.”

  “Ah.” He nodded and looked around at the wilderness, at the drones going about their business in the distance.

  “So,” he said. “This is where you have chosen to live. Out where there is nothing.”

  I looked down at the grave, with its uneven mound of gravel.

  “It’s very quiet,” I said.

  “Yes, it is.” He studied me for a minute. “Not a great many trees, though. You loved your friend very much.”

  “I don’t know, Madhu. Sometimes I think I just used him.”

  “Pah! Such arrogance. Do you think your friend was such a simpleton? So gullible that he was taken in by your clever manipulations? No, Eduardo, I’m sure he loved you because he saw in you something to love. If you will just remember that, then that will be his gift to you.” He leaned back on the stool and rolled his eyes downward and stretched his lips and his jowly cheeks down with an effort, trying to see the rose as he adjusted it.

  “So,” he said, and looked up.

  We looked around at the thin light and long shadows across the surface, and watched a flight of drone ships easing their way along the horizon.

  “Madhu?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said we don’t always recognize ourselves, out here in the emptiness.”

  “Yes.”

  “You meant the emptiness inside, like the emptiness in the drones. That we would meet them again, but wouldn’t look at them and see ourselves for what we are.”

  “Yes.”

  “That we’re just as empty.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow, no! My goodness. May Allah be patient with you. Eduardo, you’ve quite misunderstood. What I wished for was that you would look at them and see that you are not like them at all!”

  He straightened up and sighed, and let the air sputter out between his lips.

  “Eduardo, you of all people know that the line between human beings and machines is just smoke and shadows. But what you did not know is that it is love and death that make us different from them—the very things you’ve always wished to deny. Everything you’ve needed has always been within your grasp, Eduardo, everything that made you human, and that is what I wished for you to see. Come, my friend, I see that there are tears in your eyes—but listen. You would have done better, I think, to deny the one who has driven you all this time.”

  I felt the tears on my cheeks and wished that I could reach up and wipe them away, but I could only touch the faceplate with my glove.

  “What are you thinking?” said Patel.

  “That too many of us died. That Polaski and I pushed them too hard all these years.”

  He drummed his fingertips on his knees for a moment and looked around, working his big lips in and out.

  “Polaski?” he said. “Who is this Polaski?” He looked down again and adjusted the rose. “Are you sure there is such a person? Perhaps you have taken to imagining people who are not there, Eduardo.”

  Just as he said this he stopped and sat perfectly still for a moment, then his eyes went wide and he blinked several times, and his face burst into a great smile and he clapped his hands together.

  “Ha! That is very good, ‘imagining people who are not there!’ Wonderfully good—I am such a clever man! Imagine that!”

  And then he was gone.

  W

  hen the sun reached the center of the sky I was still standing in the same place, watching the horizon and listening to the sun as it hissed off the ground. It had been so long since Elliot had died that I was certain Polaski had gone ahead with his awful plan, and I stood in the desert and imagined the blackened wreckage of the torus drifting in space, the fleet decimated, the last of my friends floating dead in the cold. All because I hadn’t stopped him, because I’d come back for an empty box, instead.

  “You’re wrong, Tyrone,” I said, “I do remember. And we did get his truck to turn over. What little was left of it, we turned it over. The two of us.”

  The air in my suit had grown stale, and the ground around me was littered with the empty air bottles, white against the ground. The planet’s surface was a watery grey in the sun, and th
e drones moved silently along the horizon, glinting in the weak light. The silver husks of the domes lay empty on the horizon, and wisps of vapor flickered noiselessly over the smelters and disappeared. Somewhere above me, Boar River and Asile rolled through the darkness, their fleets gone, their voices silenced under the weight of the drones. Earth was a painful and distant memory.

  The hissing of the regulators in my helmet faded away, the sound that had been my constant companion finally noticed only as it died away. The horizon blurred in front of me, and a chill crept up across my feet and into my legs.

  Then, at that moment, the last figure of my imagination finally appeared, facing me as it had so many times in the dream.

  It was a mirror image of me in my suit, the two of us facing each other across the ground, perfectly still. I saw myself reflected back in the bronze faceplate, and it was reflected in mine in turn, one of us inside the other, over and over, indistinguishable. Twenty feet apart on the barren ground we stood, face to face, the memory of my dream now clear in my mind.

  The figure blurred as the hissing of my air dwindled further. The cold crept into my belly and I drew deeply on the last of my air, feeling an icy moment of fear as my head begin to swim. Then the apparition raised its arm.

  Charlie Peters had been wrong: It was a gun that it held in its hand, not a balance, and it was raising it up to point into my eyes. The hissing of my air stopped completely and the cold reached into my heart, and the finger on the trigger of the gun pulled tight. The gun fired, and a bolt of flame stabbed out toward me across the space between us.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Woman

  Clothed with the Sun

  T

  here was a blow to my shoulder, and the little scout who’d been sitting on it smashed into my helmet and pieces of it flew past the faceplate. The figure in front of me threw the gun aside, then her voice cut into my helmet through the creeping fog of anoxia.