A Grey Moon Over China (19 page)

It weaved from side to side and slid forward, the bearers chanting and swaying. Coming up against the banner of the Earth, Pham paused and the snake’s head weaved in front of the paper, then reared up as high as it could and plunged through it.

Pham skidded to her knees. After an awkward moment she recovered her balance and stood, then the snake slithered through the banner of the Earth behind her.

Confronted with the moon a moment later, the snake slid up along the banner’s face but drifted to one side, so slowly that the middle and tail began to catch up with the head and coil across the road. Still the head didn’t move. The crowd grew restless. The head drifted the other way, and the body coiled tighter behind it. Finally it coiled so tightly that it forced the whole front end of the snake to smash through the banner sideways.

The crowd shouted its relief, and the snake headed drunkenly onward toward the stars.

Then suddenly the snake swept sideways across the roadway, only to whip back in the other direction a moment later. On the second swing it stopped abruptly in the center of the road with its nose against the black banner, as though transfixed by the stars. It stared and it stared, and the minutes crept by.

Then slowly the head rose upward. It rose higher and higher and the crowd held its breath, until suddenly it reared backward and, with an awful sound of crumpling paper, Pham pitched face-forward onto the ground. The snake’s head crashed to the roadway and skidded forward, coming to rest with its nose inches away from the blackness, staring with empty eyes into the glittering, unconquered stars of space.

The crowd fell silent.

The body of the snake started to come apart. Elliot shrugged off the snake’s middle and Chan sat down hard on top of it. Charlie Peters pulled the unconscious Pham out of the snake’s head and picked her up, cradling her in his arms.

Across the roadway sat Madhu Patel on his stool, watching me. Chih-Hsien was next to him, staring down at the snake.

T
he procession had come to its unpromising end at four in the afternoon, and the corridors had grown quiet in the two hours since. Somewhere above us, the night and the full moon crept across the Pacific toward us.

I’d spent the last hours in the darkened manufacturing chamber, remembering its days of feverish activity, and then the day that the machines had stopped.

The Europeans had not revealed our ability to disable the batteries. Whatever their reasons, they’d limped back home and said nothing. For months afterward the world had continued to buy the priceless power cells, becoming ever more dependent on them.

Then finally the United States declared its intention to take control of the technology behind the batteries, and attacked us by both air and sea. We crippled their batteries en masse, and the attack failed. But the word was out.

A week later Charlie Peters told us that all two and a half million line items needed for launch were in inventory. Around-the-clock meetings followed.

The week after, we severed our ties to the world. And we sent out a warning, something I’d once sworn I wouldn’t do. Sitting alone in the Operations room, I pressed a key and held it down for sixty seconds. For sixty seconds the world’s batteries stopped.

Infamy, they called it. Sixty seconds that would be remembered for generations to come.

Three hundred seventy-eight million batteries died. Lights dimmed and went out, cars stopped, work platforms and low-flying aircraft crashed, hospitals and computer towers ground to a halt.

There had been few backups. The batteries had been perfect.

The world was stunned, then angry, as it came to understand the depth of our betrayal. The market for radio shielding soared until we announced that, from here on out, a new signal broadcast continuously by us was required periodically by the cells to keep them on—that if the signal were interfered with or our island destroyed, the cells would soon stop. We were vilified and condemned, and feared.

We sealed ourselves off and waited.

Chih-Hsien Chien had been forced to stay with us. In the end he’d been eager to do so, a fact which in itself was worrisome. We used him to communicate with the Chinese government, now at war with its own people. Through Chih-Hsien we reminded them that their ships could be stopped easily if they made a move toward the tunnel before allowing the rest of us safe passage.

We remained on civil terms with the Commonwealth and North American colonization contingent, but had lost contact with the Europeans.

As Patel had asked, we assured the world that the plans for the batteries would be transmitted from our ships just before passing through the torus. There were, in any case, whispers that the Indonesians were close to discovering the cell’s principle for themselves. It wouldn’t be surprising; I was, in fact, surprised it had taken so long.

In the meantime we tested the ships and retested them, and checked and rechecked the payload. On board were a combined 86,000 tons of food, heavy equipment, MI, grasshopper and spider drones, and frozen embryos. And dirt—the upper eighteen decks of each ship weren’t really decks, but were a quarter-mile-long by eleven-foot-wide spiraling garden.

The dry stores and gardens could support more people than we’d originally planned. Polaski’s projections of 1.5 children to each of sixty-one percent of all possible couples, to equal exactly fourteen people per ship, had come to nothing. There were fewer surviving children than planned, while at the same time there were many more adults: We’d become increasingly dependent on imported talent, especially payload experts drawn away from the consortia. There would be 2,400 of us in the end.

Children with disabilities would not be placed in institutions on Earth as we’d intended, but would be brought along in specially equipped quarters. Polaski had talked vaguely about just leaving them behind on the island, but Chan and Patel had quickly silenced any discussion of it.

“Everything else,” I’d said to Bolton a while later, “we leave behind.”

“Oh?” He was fishing from the lip of an opening he’d blown in the wall of the island, against all regulations. Rain spattered on his face as the wind picked up, and made a noise against his empty bucket.

“Yes,” I said, “all of it. The fighting, the poverty. The
banqueros
. The stink of the place. There’s nothing we need here anymore.”

“I wonder,” he said, peering over the ledge at his line, “if that’s really what you mean to leave behind.”

I looked at the whitecaps through the rain, out across the ocean Bolton had yet to catch a fish from.

“I don’t think we will, in any case,” he said, and wound in the line. “Someday we’ll look up to find it’s still there.”

I thought of the gun coming up in Major Cole’s hand, and of the old man in his bungalow, of my father in the doorway of our shack with a piece of dung in his hand and tears in his eyes.

“Piss on it, Bolton,” I said. “I just want to go.”

P
atel was out by the opening that evening, after the procession. The airfield was deserted, swept by fitful eddies of trash, lit by the dusk sky. He sat on a stool near his flying work platform, his crutches nearby. Next to him was an empty stool.

“I thought you would come,” he said. He held a handkerchief in his lap and stared down at the mists lying on the water, his face wet with tears.

“What’s the matter, Madhu?”

“I am doing very well, my friend. Thank you for asking.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat and watched the mists darkening below us. Clouds gathered above.

“What is it, Madhu? You’re crying.”

“Ah, yes, that. Well, it is not an easy thing to explain.” He dabbed at his eyes.

“But I will try. You see, Eduardo, a short time ago I was resting in my room and thinking about this terrible day, when all at once Allah spoke to me.

“He said ‘Madhu’—He calls me Madhu, you know, because there are so very many Patels in the world.

“ ‘Madhu,’ He said, ‘many people have died today, as you know. And among them were some who found in their lives much hardship and sorrow, but who passed away before they could weep for their own unhappiness. That is a bad thing, Madhu. For while Paradise is a fine place, it is not so good to leave behind in the world grief for which no one has wept.

“ ‘Come give me your help,’ He said. ‘Come help me weep for them, before their grief finds new hearts to dwell in.’ ”

I was conscious of Patel’s warmth beside me, and conscious of the ocean swelling and falling beneath the mists. It was at its lowest tide, just turning against us now as the moon approached from beyond the horizon.

“I think perhaps He called to you, as well, Eduardo, but you could not hear him in your gloomy room filled with machines.”

“No.”

Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t hear anything at all. “We’ve been here
too long, Madhu. I walk through the corridors sometimes, and I feel like I’m in a grave. I haven’t seen a sunset in five years.”

“Yes.”

The first glimmer of moonlight touched the horizon.

“I don’t know what to do, Madhu.”

“Yes.”

Wind licked upward from the ledge and tugged at us, then slid away again.

“Do you think the world will let us go?” I said.

“Oh, yes. I think we are like their own children to them. We have taken all they have to give, and now they are angry with us. Yet in their hearts they wish us Godspeed. I think they will try to stop us, Eduardo, but they will let us go.”

He rocked back and forth on his stool for a while, then stopped.

“Do not let it happen to you, my friend.”

“What’s that?”

“Do not allow your life to pass, before you have wept for your own sadness. I say this to you especially. I say it thinking of Katherine Chan, and the distance between you, just when she needs you the most.”

The mists on the water began to glow. The sky turned a deeper black.

“You see, Eduardo, I believe that you are a compassionate man. But I think sometimes your compassion is lost in a sadness, and I fear that anything that speaks to you of that sadness, you will destroy. Perhaps even I should not speak to you of it, but—well, now I have, so it doesn’t matter. In any case, I think there may not be another time.”

“But you’re coming with us, Madhu. It won’t be that long before we’re somewhere else—you know that.”

“Ah, my young friend. The place you are going, Allah has already let me see it with my own eyes.”

He fell quiet then, worrying the handkerchief in his hands. The world outside had become nothing more than blacks and greys—an ashen glow behind the mists, a wash of moonlight on the clouds, a blackness in the distant sky.

“Do you remember a dream you once told me of, Eduardo, in which we come upon ourselves out among the stars?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Good. Because sometimes we do not recognize ourselves, out there where it is so empty. And I must tell you, Eduardo, it is an empty place Allah has shown me.”

The moon climbed above the horizon. It rose in perfect silence, swollen by the mists to an immense size, a pitted, colorless grey. The haze on the water glowed, throwing a ghostly incandescence onto the clouds above.

In the dream Madhu had mentioned, dim shapes waited for us out in space, and gradually took on our own faces as we approached. But while I could find the faces of all the others, I couldn’t find my own. There was only Pham, naked, smiling, beckoning. Even in my waking hours I carried that image with me, and sometimes it came between me and Chan.

For now, Patel and I sat on our stools next to each other, our shoulders touching. The moon swelled above the mists, below the clouds, pulling free of the ocean. It was huge and powerful, frozen in time, cold and grey as ash. Patel shivered.

“That is a not a good thing we are seeing, my friend.”

He was quiet for a minute.

“When I was a little boy,” he said, “we lived in Bilaspur, in the north of Himachal Pradesh. Himachal was a place of splendid green hills and good soil. It took its name from the Himalayas, which rose to the east of us.

“Across the great mountains lay the steppes of China. Once in a long while, in the evening when my mother carried me in her garden and sat on the bench and held me, a cold mist would settle along the Himalayas, and a full moon would rise up behind it. It looked then as it does now, like ashes on the snow. My mother would shiver and hold me tighter, then, and she would say, ‘There is a grey moon over China, Madhi, and it will bring us no good.’ ”

He gripped the handkerchief in his lap, working it between his hands.

“I think I am a little bit afraid, Eduardo.”