A Grey Moon Over China (13 page)

I looked down and spun my rivet. I wanted to go and smack her against the wall.

“Also,” said Polaski, still watching me, “we agreed to leave behind the plans to the batteries—which means there’s going to be more people after the first sixty K. Which means it’s not going to be the picnic people keep yapping about—someone out there’s going to start pissing, and we’re going to be everyone’s favorite target. Which means we’re going to defend ourselves, whether you like it or not.

“We’ve got a plan. There’s things we can do that no one else can, that’ll help us defend ourselves and implement a little law and order at the same time. Which ought to make Patel happy.

“Also—people are going on and on about kids. Well, kids have something to do with defense, so we’re going to talk about them, too.

“The last of the grunts left this morning. So at thirteen hundred hours I want everyone in the vehicle assembly chambers. Is that all right with you, Torres?”

“Fine,” I said, looking at my rivet and not having any idea what he was talking about.

M
adhu and I sat in the center of an elevator’s 160-foot back wall as it trundled to the surface after the meeting. When we’d come in, Patel had waved his crutches and shouted for everyone to move to the sides. Now he sat on his stool and held his crutches between his knees, and as he peered around and made his faces, he lifted the crutches and thumped them down against the floor.

“I watched you as you listened,” he said. “You are just like me, you know.
You were thinking to yourself: ‘How can this be? How can there be this machine that is exactly like me, but which I know in my heart is not like me at all?’ That is what you were thinking.”

He lifted the crutches and brought them down.

“Eduardo, how much kinship do you feel with a moth?”

“Not much.”

“Yes. And how much with a butterfly?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Yes, because it is fragile and beautiful, like you, and so you feel kinship and you protect it. And a chimpanzee, or dog or cat, or a dolphin? Quite a bit, I would think.”

“Yes.”

“Of course. And I feel much kinship with you, because we are just alike.” He leaned out to touch the crutches against a spot on the floor a few feet away, then brought them back and sighed.

“Tell me, Eduardo. How much kinship do you think one of Anne’s drones will feel for you or me?”

I looked at him.

“Yes. Eduardo, when Allah waggled his finger and spoke to Moses about one’s neighbors, it was not a new idea—only a reminder. He had long ago put the commandment deep into our hearts: Those like yourself, take care of them, that you might survive together in the desert.”

He sighed again, then suddenly twisted his neck around to look at the ceiling. He looked back down and thumped his crutches.

“Anne has told her little creatures no such thing, you know. She looks at us and she looks at her creatures, and because their minds are the same she thinks they are no different. So she thinks that they will behave as we do.

“That is what unsettles you, you see. Those creatures will be exactly like you or me, but with not one shred of compassion. They are like Anne, or like any one of us who has had stolen from him the whispers Allah spoke into our hearts before we were born.”

The elevator lurched to a stop. The doors rolled sideways to expose the airfield.

“You see!” he said. “That is why I sit in just this place. For a moment it is like I am very tall, and a window is being opened just for me!”

The doors stopped, and he struggled to his feet.

“So. Be a good friend and bring my stool. I shouldn’t want to lose it.”

N
o heavy weapons!” shouted Polaski into the cold air. “And no armed drones!”

Off through the gloom, like ghosts in the underworld, the island’s one thousand troops applauded from the floor of the vehicle assembly chamber. A thousand faceless silhouettes, nearly all the same size. Only Elliot and fifty or so others were much taller.

Patel sat on his stool next to me. Polaski stood on a table.

“But you’ve all thought about staking claims and protecting trade, and about settling disputes over planetary distances. And you’ve come to the same conclusion I have: The ones that can move the fastest will win. And that means the fastest covering distance
and
maneuvering in space—and both of those mean high acceleration.”

There was a rustling from the audience. With space tunnels to take care of the long distances, there should only have been short interplanetary runs to endure, under light acceleration.

“But everyone out there’s going to have the same ships we will,” said Polaski. “And those ships put out a hell of a lot of thrust. So it’s not the ships—it’s how much acceleration the crews can take. So when the time comes we can be like everyone else—soft from weightlessness and small planets, with helpless little children born in freefall—or we can be ready.

“Look around you. We’re ahead of everybody else already. We can take higher thrust, and we can field higher-G companies than anyone else.

“But it’s the next generation we should be worried about. They’re the ones who’re going to be fighting age when things start to get nasty. So we’re going to make sure they start out the strongest, and we’re going to make sure they stay that way.”

Patel shook his head next to me, and spoke quietly. “No,” he said, “that is not what children are for. He is not saying what he is thinking, that one.”

“There are 972 of us,” said Polaski. “We plan to launch 128 ships of our own, which means 1,800 people. As many of the rest should be children as possible.”

A roar of approval from the audience.

Children—how many of us had given up on the idea, unwilling to bring them into the same world we’d found ourselves in? And how many years had we thought it would be before the ships were ready, before we’d completed the journey to someplace safe where children could become a reality?

Still—how many of us had heard what Polaski had really said? I myself was increasingly uneasy. I was losing control of the mission, and it had scarcely begun.

But I also knew I would never try and stop it.

“You can conceive these children and bring them to term any way you want,” said Polaski. “You can raise them yourselves, or give them away. And
everyone will get his chance. But at least for this initial period, we’re going to be using a high-thrust centrifuge. Those parents and donors who score the highest will be allowed to conceive.”

He paused to wipe a wrist across his mouth. “We’ll also be testing the children,” he said. He stepped down abruptly and walked off into the gloom.

It was a long time later before the crowd had dispersed. Patel hadn’t moved, so Bolton and I stayed where we were.

Finally Patel sighed and reached for his crutches.

“And the Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “I will give it to your offspring.”’ ”

He held the crutches in his lap and stared into the empty chamber.

I’d heard him quote from that passage several times before, yet it was to be years before I learned that there was a final line, one that he never spoke.

He got his crutches under him and stood up.

“My mother loved me very much, my friends,” he said. “We were poor, and I could not walk like my sisters and brothers, so she carried me in her arms. For long hours in the day and sometimes at night, when I was awake from the pain, she held me and took me where she went. She loved me very much, and I was very happy.”

He stared broodingly into the distance, then lowered his head and began his labored stumping across the chamber.

K
ip didn’t play his flute that night. Few people were in the upper cavern at all, because of the cold and because of what hung from the ceiling.

Polaski’s security troops had found a man with a transmitter that afternoon, a Greek-American soldier driving past the opening with it clipped to his belt. That they had spotted the transmission at all was impressive; it would have taken a most intricate system of inward-facing antennas to pick up such brief signals. Or a well-developed network of informants.

Polaski had ordered that the man be stripped naked and thrown from the opening. Two MPs had refused and had been removed from the force, but others had done his bidding. Men I didn’t know.

Then at dusk what was left of the man’s body had been brought back up and hung from the base of one of the buttresses.

I paced on the runway for a few minutes, not looking up, then grew cold and rode an elevator back down. I felt the chill all the way to my bones, along with the uneasy turn our future was taking. I wanted my bed and my rest, yet I didn’t look forward to lying awake for one more night in my tiny stone chamber. Nor even to sleeping, for I’d come to dread the dreams.
Night after night I’d scarcely slept, and increasingly I experienced moments of anxiety and disorientation among the endless miles of wet, black walls and artificial lighting, and a claustrophobic hunger for green hills and open sky that intensified every night when the daylight from beyond our one opening to the real world finally failed.

The elevator doors rolled aside in the lower complex to reveal the roadway running to the assembly chambers, three miles away under the shelf. Parked along the sides were hundreds of heavy vehicles and aircraft, along with the big cradles that would eventually hold the drone ships. I started across the open space, then paused, thinking I’d heard a sound from ahead. A sound I knew?

But no, there was nothing beyond the hum of the security cameras as they panned along the roadway.

Then a quarter mile further on I heard it again, and I stepped into a narrower side corridor to wait, feeling suddenly unsure of my ground. The air in the smaller corridor was dank and still, the stone walls barely visible in the red night lights.

A moment later quick footsteps came from the other end of the little corridor, and all at once Pham stepped into view. She saw me and stopped, although somehow I was sure she’d already known I was there, then after only the briefest hesitation her face brightened. She started toward me and flashed a smile.

“Mr. Torres!” she said. “I not see you, but I am happy you are here.” She hesitated again for a moment, as though not sure she should be bothering me. “There is something I would like to say to you. Please, you listen? You are not so busy?”

I waited, not wanting to deal with her but at the same time feeling some inexplicable flicker of relief—excitement, even?—at finding her there in the midst of what was otherwise such a brutally cold and anonymous space.

“No, please,” she said, “it is fine.” She came closer. “We have a secret, okay?”

A secret? The word struck me to the core, and I wondered if I had even heard her correctly. It had always seemed to me as though we had something in common, and certainly she acted that way, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was—and all at once hearing it spoken out loud in this otherwise soundless tomb added to the eerie feeling as she approached that the two of us, alone suddenly in the island’s underground labyrinth, were not only of the same mind but somehow of the same flesh, that the reason she was here was that we were on the verge of being, in some elemental way, rejoined. I knew that this was just a figment from out of my dreams, that it was only Pham coming to talk to me, but in my
exhaustion the vision was so compelling that I backed away until I was up against the wall, my heart pounding at the strangeness of my own thoughts, at the disorienting but unshakable feeling that I was watching my own self step closer and closer from out of the gloom.

She reached my side and put a hand on my arm, then reached up to whisper something. Her lips brushed my ear, and whether just from the anticipation or from the contact itself I recoiled from the almost electric intensity of the touch of her skin, hitting my head hard against the stone as I did so.

I didn’t know what she was doing, or why, and I was starting to pull away when her fingers increased their pressure my arm. At first it just seemed to be a gesture to keep me close to her as she spoke, but when I pulled away harder her fingers clamped down with such force that it drove the breath out of me and brought tears to my eyes. It was some particular spot, just above the elbow, where she ground the nerves and bone together with extraordinary strength.

And there she held me, pressing the length of her body ever closer up against me. Then, very slowly, while I fought to regain my breath and hold myself frozen in place because of the pain, her other hand moved between my legs and squeezed me lightly.

“So you want to make fuck-fuck with me, hah?” Sarcastic, deliberately crude. A slap in the face of whatever trance she’d had me in about secrets and some kind of common existence. Her fingers on my arm ground ever harder against the bone; painful white light stabbed up behind my eyes, and her tongue slid into my ear. “Make babies, hah?” Whispering, now. “Or how you like it, Mr. Torres? Maybe in back, I think, yes?”

Again I started to pull free, but this time held myself in check with an effort. I knew she could move so fast that trying to get free would play into her game, whatever it was. It would be something she was expecting, and I wouldn’t do it. But despite the pain I was hardening under her strokes, and I knew she could feel it.