A Grey Moon Over China (14 page)

“So you like me a little bit, hm? Maybe you don’t hate me so much.” Massaging me with the palm of her hand, pressing harder and then harder still as her tongue worked deeper into my ear. My arm, meanwhile, had gone numb from the pain.

I don’t remember moving. I was angry at my own powerlessness, and even angrier that whatever fleeting and seductive sense of shared existence I’d had for a moment had been so suddenly mocked and cheapened. And for what? Now there was just the pain, and, suddenly mixed in with the pain, movement. Pain that seemed to come from far away, but then not
from far away at all, suddenly very close. And one of us moving. One of us, or both.

A sharp crack from her head. My hand, pressing her face against the wall, hard. Up under her chin, forcing it sideways. Blood on her temple. A sound from somewhere deep in her throat, or from mine. I couldn’t tell.

I don’t remember what I said. I remember my voice, someone’s voice, but I don’t remember what it said.

What I do remember and have always remembered is what I saw in her eyes at that moment. Disappointment. Unbearable frustration. Eyes turned away, toward the wall but not seeing, filling slowly with tears.

M
inutes later I lay in my chamber, shaking. For that one instant I’d been out of control, close to something I wanted no part of.

From what little I’d come to know of Pham, it was a kind of violence that should have belonged to her, that in fact would surely consume her in the end, but not me. Yet here I was hiding from it in the darkened, chilly bowels of our fortress, thinking how to force it away, and even better how to suffocate it in the still darker airlessness of outer space ahead.

Finally I threw off the blanket and sat up, unable to lie still. The movement caused the cot to screech sharply against the stone floor. I drew up my knees and stared past them at the empty opening into the corridor.

A sound was coming from close by, high up on the wall. Inside the room.

Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap.
I stared up into the shadows.

There was something there, little more than a darker shadow against the shadows surrounding it, no larger than my hand. It floated next to the wall high up, the faint sound of blowing air coming from beneath it. It was finding its way toward the opening by tapping against the wall, making shallow, careful arcs in the air before striking it again.

Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap.

“Who is it?” I said, finding the challenge absurd even as I spoke it. But it stopped right away nevertheless and waited, then finally answered.

“Who is speaking?” it said. A cool, clear voice, not quite female.

“Torres, for Christ’s sake. Who are you?” I couldn’t see it any more. “I said, who are you?”

It didn’t move or speak for a long time. There was only the rasp of my own breathing and the whisper of its fan in the darkness.

The gloom shifted a little in the corner where it hovered.

“Yes,” it said at last. “I know you.”

Tap. Tap. Tap.
It had worked its way around the corner and into the opening. I’d been dismissed.

“Who are you?”
I screamed at it, lunging forward to grab the sides of the cot. But the tiny drone had disappeared into the corridor and flown away.

L
adies, Gentlemen, Drones—start your engines!”

Children shrieked with delight as twenty wobbling work platforms rose up from the south runway. The platforms jockeyed for position, tipping precariously.

“On your marks!” No one was anywhere near the marks, but it didn’t matter. The boxy little companion drones, their six legs tucked under them like grasshoppers’, squatted on their platforms and pulled even with the farthest forward humans, evidently deciding it must be legal.

“Get ready!” Stocky little three-year-olds jumped up and down on the seats. Parents lifted infants up to see.

“Go!”

The cavern filled with a manic giggling as the drones shot straight into the air instead of forward, shrieking and heckling and diving at their human competitors. Chan and Patel had spent days teaching them to giggle like that.

Even the delegates from the colonists’ committees applauded, sitting in their little groups with their colored security badges, distracted for the time being from their bickering.

More cheers. One of the drones had crashed its platform into the runway and was pushing it vigorously toward the finish line, stopping every few paces to do a little dance on its insect-like feet. Someone had dressed it in six red tennis shoes. Toddlers tried to get away from their parents and onto the runway for a ride.

“Okay folks, here he comes . . . he’s at the finish line . . . the judges are working hard on a decision . . . here we have it—yes! Ladies and gentlemen, another twenty-way tie! Let’s hear it for the winners!”

The man next to me whistled and applauded. He was our logistics chief, a sturdy, ruddy-faced Irish loadmaster named Charlie Peters, whom we’d
coaxed away from a regular unit during our early days in the caverns, four years ago. He gestured at the quiet south-side runway, speaking in his soft brogue.

“I’m glad we closed it, Eddie. It wasn’t any good last time, everybody jumping each time a transport landed and the doors opened. What the hell if we get a day behind on shipments, I say. This is more important. The poor kids.”

He was right about the last fair. The problem hadn’t been noise from the transports—they ran quietly enough on our batteries now—it was jumpiness about security. There’d been fresh memories of attacks on the planes and on the elevator doors, and too many ugly scenes involving security people nervous about infiltrators. Having the children up for the fresh air had been hard.

Chan and Patel stood near the starting line, talking with one of the drones getting ready to play in the soccer game. It was draped in British racing green. Chan held a hand absently under her growing belly. Two more months.

“Mr. Torres to the command complex, please. Eduardo Torres, if you are on the airfield level please come to the central command complex.”

I nodded to Peters, then worked my way along the stands to the elevators. Chan and Patel backed away from the two-foot-long grasshopper drone, then suddenly, with a synchronized
snick
of oiled machinery, it jackknifed high into the air. It landed less elegantly, but Chan righted it and leaned down to talk to it again.

The sounds of the fair were cut off by the elevator doors sealing shut. With a lurch and rumble the six-minute descent began.

Benches had been installed around the walls, except along the back where they’d been torn out again and replaced by truck tires and signs that read NO STANDING—KEEP CHILDREN AWAY! We learned our lessons.

At the bottom the doors opened with a pop of changing pressure, then a rush of icy air.

The underground roadway outside the elevator stretched away for miles to vanish in an antiseptic light and cold mist. Against both sides, stacked two high in their cradles and end to end until they disappeared in the distance, were the drone ships—sealed, silent, iced over in frost and shrouded in mist.

Vapor rose from nitrogen hoses snaking away toward Miller’s chambers. Carefully separated from the hoses were the optical fibers that hour after hour fed the world’s data libraries into the waiting drones.

The ships were ugly, like enormous, welded steel barrels lying on their
sides, with blunt ends and a dozen reinforcing ribs along the sides. The ends facing me had eight evenly-spaced hatch covers and nothing more, while the far ends with the engine exhausts were covered by the temporary ring of the fan-stage. Each was 155 feet long and twenty-six wide, millimeters narrower than the hole in the torus they would hurtle through at seventy thousand miles per hour.

There were four hundred ships. Lying inside them at –203°C, shaped like ten-foot-long, polished steel torpedoes, waited the real drones. Thirty-eight thousand of them.

I’d come many times to look at the drone ships in recent months, often at night when no one else was there. After the days of heated arguments and angry demands pouring in from around the world, the drones possessed a kind of seductive orderliness and predictability. I watched them for hours.

Now I drove a cart along the cross-island corridor toward the north wall. Cameras followed my progress.

The drone ships had actually been built elsewhere, as had the colony ships in final assembly three miles underground to the east. Anne Miller had programmed the actual drones, always in secret. I spied on her and Polaski spied on her, but if Polaski had learned more than I had about the drones’ programming, he hadn’t let on. I asked, but he never said.

The only manufacturing we did on the island was the quantum batteries. Everything else was built by industrial consortia around the world, in exchange for batteries and the right to market them. It was an arrangement Patel had designed to avoid using hard currency. Still, the consortia dragged their feet, hoping to crack the secret of the cells before having to deliver on the multi-billion-dollar ships.

All the while, the supposedly independent regional colonists’ committees—responsible for the extra colony ships Patel had insisted we finance—were coming under the increasing control of governments and of the consortia themselves, and were demanding greater and greater shares of the ships in exchange for minimal cooperation. At the same time, the leaders of the committees secretly sold off the batteries intended for the ships and lined their own pockets.

Patel’s demands to market the batteries equitably throughout the world were openly scoffed at. Through one contrivance or another they flowed to the wealthiest nations, whose economies were thus staggering under the loss of energy-related jobs—a state of affairs for which we were then blamed and hated. The rest of the world, meanwhile, hated us for not releasing the batteries faster. The consortia hated us for our stranglehold on the technology.

The colonists themselves, finally, hated us for our control of the drones—which gave us final, critical control over the exodus.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, the seven billion souls with no hope of owning a battery of their own or a place in the exodus, suffered. Regional destabilization was worse than even Patel had projected. If the Cold War had served one generation as the backbone of global order, it had been nothing compared to the way the now-collapsing oil market had served the next; yet where oil production had for better or worse been unforgivingly geographic, the battery market had coalesced firmly around existing industrial power. The Middle East tore at itself in search of new demons; Russia once more grew dangerously insular; the Pacific Rim, Beijing excepted, relented in its shunning of the pauperized United States and took its joint revenge on China with its iron grip on oil fields from the Caucuses to Indonesia.

And we were blamed for it all.

I made the turn to the north-wall corridor and stopped by the window of the children’s infirmary. The infirmary was cut into the hundred-foot-thick outside wall of the island, as far from the vulnerable elevators as possible. Medics moved from crib to crib behind the glass.

There were too many children—sixty-eight of them now from a total of fewer than eight hundred. And at that, these were only the ones we’d been able to let live at birth. Like elsewhere in the world there were too many birth defects, often with later complications that even our best scanners and MI couldn’t repair.

Still, genetic defects accounted for only half the children in the infirmary. The rest were there because of the centrifuge.

Polaski had learned that a side-effect of testing infants in the centrifuge was that the test itself allowed them to score higher on subsequent runs. So he’d ordered repeated exposure of two or three Gs for all children, without ever asking me. I’d meant to overrule him, but public resistance to the policy had waned after the attacks on the island had begun, and I’d said nothing.

Now I sat and watched the children play or cry, or just struggle to stay alive. There was no turning back, I thought. I was going to go, and Polaski was going to go, and Tuyet Pham. All of us to a place, I had once thought, where this kind of suffering would be at an end.