A Grey Moon Over China (47 page)

The scar on Penderson’s cheek had turned a deeper purple.

“What’s the matter, Rosler?” he said. “Can’t satisfy a real woman? One who’s not hurting so bad she needs that kind of abuse?”

Rosler wiped his nose on the back of his hand and tried to push the hair out of his eyes. “Piss off, Penderson. If I need advice from niggers and wetbacks, I’ll ask for it.”

“All right,” I said. “That’s enough. You’re out of line, Rosler.”

“I wouldn’t talk, Torres. You’re on pretty thin ice, yourself.”

“I said that’s enough. Now, where are we dropping you?”

“Four-Four-Two. It’s a trooper, trailing aft. Meridian plus seven degrees at the hour.”

“All right. Harry, if you’re the better man here, let’s see it in the docking. You’re a professional, remember that.” I knew he wanted to hurt Rosler, but I wanted to get the detour over with. Not so much for diplomatic reasons as that I wanted to get out of the fishbowl and into a well-armed vessel with opaque walls.

We dropped Rosler off without another word, then Penderson maneuvered us forward among the orbiting ships to let me off on the provisioning vessel to which Elliot had docked the modified trooper, the one I would use for transporting the alien. Then Penderson set off on the long ride forward to return the transparent boat to the orbiting can, where I would pick him up on my way to H-II.

The atmosphere-capable transport Elliot had prepared for me was an iron tube of the same type we’d ridden to in Asile with Bolton’s commandos. Its outside was rusted and unpainted, and it floated gloomily in the dark, tied to the larger ship like a sulking child on a leash. Its sides were pitted with dark portholes, and its windscreens were scarred and black, like the eyes of an underwater predator.

Inside, Elliot had pulled out all but the two pilots’ seats. That left a bare, forty-foot-long cylinder with iron decking and exposed conduits, ducts and vent gratings. The after end of the ship had been separated off by heavy, vertical iron bars, with a small hatch cut into the rear of the ship for loading the animal. Although Dorczak hadn’t seen the animal herself when we’d last talked, she’d told us that similar caging had sufficed so far, and that no special atmosphere or other accommodations seemed to be necessary.

I assembled a personal kit from the provisioning ship’s stores, then gave Elliot last-minute instructions for preparing a report on what we’d found on the surface. I hoped to be back with the specimen in less than a week, before the body of the fleet returned, and in a position to make informed recommendations before Rosler dreamed up something new for Polaski, like throwing high-G seven-year-olds into the maw of the aliens’ weapons.

During the disastrous alien repulse at the torus, quick-thinking commanders had ordered spectrographs and radiation counts of the attackers’ weapons—and, more importantly, on the debris from our destroyed ships. Scientists had then re-examined the data returned by
Sun of Gabriel,
looking specifically for that same radiation signature somewhere in the Serenitas System.

And they’d found it. Out near the periphery of the system, not far from where the probe had first seen the alien fleet, was a slender, thirty-thousand-mile-long cloud of hot particles, tightly aligned and pointing out toward Holzstein’s System, the direction from which the Europeans had
been coming. The calculated mass of the particle cloud was sufficiently close to that of the European fleet to serve as proof: Wherever in space the aliens had been before the European venture, they’d known that the Europeans were coming. And they had drawn back to wait.

The next question had been quick to follow: Knowing the nature of the aliens’ weapons and the composition of our original drones and their ships, could we calculate the radioactive signature that the
drones’
destruction would have left? The scientists’ answer was Yes, they could; and in short order they found the drones’ signature as well. Everywhere in Serenitas System that the probe aimed its instruments, the death of the drones was spelled out in expanding, cooling clouds of particles. Decay and dissipation rates gave the timing: They had died over a three-year period, beginning nearly five years before the probe’s visit. The aliens had been unerringly thorough.

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.”