A Grey Moon Over China (31 page)

An acrid stench broke into my thoughts, and I turned away from the window. The smell was from the putty we used to hold the glass into the domes; as it dried and weakened it let out an acidic stink that seeped through the air filters of the building I was in. I was standing on the building’s third floor mezzanine, an unpainted iron shelf that hung over the vehicle launch bay. The mezzanine was empty now except for a spindly metal table that held my coffee cup and a few pieces of paper. Shafts of light from above the dome slanted through the window and across the bare iron, illuminating a piece of a table leg and a section of the railing at the edge of the bay. My shoes scuffed against the metal decking as I turned. The sound echoed back and forth in the huge space. The technicians had been sequestered until launch, and for the first time it was quiet in the building.

Then against the silence I heard a telltale clicking of metal against metal, and after a pause I heard it again, then all at once a mad clattering rush like the sound of a dog’s toenails against a hard floor as it attacks. I made a move to save my coffee, then changed my mind in time to see the final approach of an aluminum drone—all six of its grasshopper legs pumping madly straight for the table. At the last minute it snapped all of its legs downward to hurl itself into the air. It rose more than high enough to clear the table, but its pathetic forward momentum brought it only to the near edge and it crashed downward, collapsing the table and flinging cold coffee across me and the papers. The two-foot-long drone tumbled onto the floor and landed on its back, its legs still pumping the air. The coffee cup spun to a stop on the iron floor, and the drone went still.

“Too slow by half,” it said. “Don’t you think?”

It was Little Bolton. One day years ago it had for reasons known only to itself attached itself to Michael Bolton and followed him for a full week, coming away with a perfect imitation of his Welsh accent. Less productively, and to everyone’s great regret, it had also at one time attached itself as best it could to Chan’s cat, and from that encounter it had come away proving only that grasshopper drones were better suited to the arts than to
the rigors of feline flight. But with unflagging enthusiasm, it had never stopped trying.

“Telephone call for you, Sir. Shall I ring you through?” It was still on its back, seemingly quite content.

I wiped coffee up with my sleeve. “Yes, thank you.” After a brief clicking, young Roddy McKenna’s voice came from somewhere in the drone’s middle.

“Mr. Torres?”

“Yes, Roddy, I’m here.” McKenna was a blue-eyed and still freckled nineteen-year-old whom I had recently promoted to team leader for the project. He never slowed down or slept or ate much, but just kept working through all hours.

“The entry-path people want to talk with Anne Miller before launch. They say it could cut months off the probe’s turnaround if they knew the drones’ entry protocol. I agree.” His voice was tense, waiting for me to disagree.

“No, Rod. The project’s been insulated from her for six years—you know that. Why do you want to break the rules at the last minute?”

“That’s exactly why, because it’s the last minute. What possible influence on the probe’s design could a discussion with the
entry
people have? The thing’s
built
already.”

I’d promoted McKenna precisely because he was one of the few people who would argue with me; he was also sharp and aggressive. And available—he would never be able to join the more prestigious fighting crews. Unfortunately he was also prone to a muted rage that simmered in the guise of injured arrogance when questioned or doubted. He was hard to manage.

“Look, Roddy, my guess is that you’re right, and that you can see this better than we could at first. But the reason the rule was made was that we don’t
know
whether any of her assumptions could bleed into our project and propagate some flaw that’s in the drones. And we still don’t. Anyway, there’s a credibility issue in the eyes of the military. We’re on shaky enough ground as it is.”

“All right.” That was it, just “all right.” Little Bolton’s metallic belly went on pointing at the ceiling, saying nothing more.

“Listen, Rod, about a half hour ago I saw a couple of fast troopers putting down at the LZ. Who was that, do you know?”

“Colonel Pham with the Fourth Surface-Assault Regulars—SinoChristian boundary dispute. Establishing new borders.”

More likely establishing the highest bidder for her services, I thought.

“They’ll be back here at the big lock in a couple of minutes,” said McKenna. If he couldn’t join any of the line divisions, he studied them endlessly and followed their every movement.

“Okay, Roddy, thanks for your help.”

I turned the drone right side up.

Beyond the mezzanine rail stood the rounded nose of the Serenitas probe. It was a capsule three stories high and nearly as wide, while below the launch building, below ground level, it stood atop two of the massive engines that normally drove our capital ships. Borrowing those engines had been less popular, but only they could do what had to be done: On one single occasion, for exactly 136 seconds, they had to hurl the Serenitas probe forward at a staggering twenty-three Gs.

Access hatches stood open on the nose, revealing the sophisticated electronics inside. For each device visible there were two others like it, redundant and redundant again, built with such care that the years had crawled by unnoticed as we worked. We knew it had to work the first time, and we knew, more importantly, that we would have to
believe
it had worked even if we never heard from it again.

The vessel was painted a light grey and bore the ragged appearance and cheerful logo of the Pikes Mountain Company asteroid mining barges; and like all Pikes Mountain vessels, it had needed christening with large black letters along its bows; my engineers, with a practiced sense of double meaning, had dubbed it
S.S. Sun of Gabriel

Six similar vessels, although dummies with ordinary engines, currently waited in orbit. Shortly all seven of them would be sent on an innocuous outward-bound orbit from the black planet toward the moons of H-v, passing close to the torus the Eurpeans still blocked, but on a course and speed that made passage through it seem out of the question. But with a sudden, compressed communication with the torus and a blindingly fast acceleration, this one ship would break course and be through the torus toward Serenitas before the European pickets could even track it. We hoped.

Once through, it was to identify the third torus, if one existed, that the drones would have built in the Serenitas system, then while looping toward that torus for a return to us, it was to collect every scrap of information about the Serenitas system at every conceivable frequency, talking to the drones all the way. Depending on the existence and position of a return torus, within a year we expected to know whether the planet of Serenitas was ready for us, and why the drones were taking so long to return.

Still, not everyone supported the project. “Torres’ Folly,” someone had called it. As time had passed, the immediate battles and the struggles of staying alive had become all-consuming on the base, and the hope of what Tyrone Elliot called “clean sheets and country music” had begun to die away.

Muted sounds came from outside. A train of troop trailers was disgorging personnel onto the black dirt of the open mall beneath the window.
Whether out of good humor or foul, the mall had been named “Trinity Square”—at this end, reaching all the way to the dome like a church tower, was my tightly secured vehicle launch building, while down one side ran the unmarried personnel quarters and down the other the recreation center, both of them long, low, black-brick buildings. The soldiers pouring from the trailers dumped weapons and body armor into piles on the dirt, then stuffed their acceleration suits in through the barracks’ windows amidst shouting and cheering and the arrival of plastic kegs from the rec center.

“There’s another call waiting for you, Sir, if you’d care to take it.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t heard Little Bolton announce the call. “Who is it, do you know?”

“Me,” said Chan, putting herself straight through. “Are you coming over to watch the show? I know you’re close to launch, but it would be nice if you could. The kids would get a big kick out of you being here.” Her voice was pleasant, out of place in the empty iron building. I looked at my watch.

“Yes, I’ll be there. Um—Little Bolton’s done in another table.”

“Oh, dear.” A pause. “You know you’ve got Dorczak and her delegation coming in two hours?”

“I know.” Chan was stalling. “What is it, Chan?”

“Charlie’s here, Eddie. If you come over, I wonder if you could talk to him a little bit. See if you could get him to go up to the station for a rest. He could go up with the children I’m sending tomorrow, but he won’t listen to me anymore when I bring it up.”

“He doesn’t listen to me either, but I’ll talk to him if you want. He’s pretty strong, though, Chan. I think he’s okay.”

“He drives himself too hard, Eddie. And for no good reason that I know of. Hang on just a second.” She asked a question of someone in the background, then came back on. “Did you know we have unidentified ships inbound?”

“Carolyn’s—”

“No, a couple of hours behind them, from the asteroid belt. No one knows who they are.”

“The duty officer’s been told?”

“They’re the ones who passed the word. Rosler is out there himself, because of Pham’s ships coming in. I don’t like it, Eddie. Will you be here, anyway?”

“I’ll be there.” With a last glance at the troops out on the black dirt of Trinity Square, I headed for the iron stairwell.

“It’s not at all that bad, really,” said an unhappy voice behind me.

“What’s that?”

“The table. ‘Done in’ sounds a bit grim, don’t you think?”

T
he performance was of a never-before-rehearsed “Peter and the Wolf.” When I arrived it was already underway, to the accompaniment of much giggling and cheering from the children gathered in the classroom to watch. Chan stood to one side, supervising the chaos with good-humored patience.

The children in the audience sat mostly in little wheelchairs, wearing a variety of prostheses. They were from the third generation, mostly, casualties of the high gravity or existing genetic damage. Chan planned to move some of them into weightlessness in the orbiting station the following day, a decision as painful for the parents as it was a relief from pain for the children, because once they adjusted to free fall they would never see a planet’s surface again.

I slipped in next to Charlie Peters and tried to sort out the performers. The main character, Peter, was being played by a cheery four-year-old, sitting in a wheelchair and diligently gripping a rope in his right hand. He had a complicated set of braces on his legs and an angelic face, with brown eyes and rosy cheeks and moist lips open in an excited smile. If he had ever memorized his part, he had forgotten it, because the rope and noose, intended for the wolf, remained coiled in his hand to be waved around in his excitement, rocking back and forth in his chair and laughing at the wolf.

The wolf, in any case, had very little to offer in the way of the needed tail. It had only its six telltale metal feet sticking out from under its wolf costume as it padded back and forth, circling and snapping ferociously at the bird. Its coat and head looked perfectly real, with a long pink flapping tongue and glistening eyes that followed the bird’s every move. The wolf also played, albeit somewhat muffled from its speakers under the coat, a perfect rendition of the wolf’s theme on the French horns.

The bird—a spider drone optimistically disguised in three or four paper feathers—played its flute theme and bobbed and weaved and teased the wolf, now and then adding its own innovation of bird calls. If the cast’s fidelity to the plot was imprecise, the music, at least, was perfect.

The cat . . . well, there were two cats. The real cat—the real
real
cat, that is, namely Chan’s cat—had apparently, and without auditioning, adopted the role of the stage cat, obeying some primordial relish involving bird sounds, a relish that had survived un-dampened through its ancestors’ freezing while still embryos. It raced back and forth and hurled itself up at the plastic and metal bird, leaping frantically up and down from the wolf’s
back to get at it. The
actor
cat, on the other hand, another grasshopper drone decked in paper whiskers and tail, sulked at the side of the stage next to the hunters’ wheelchairs, unsure of what to do about being upstaged by its own understudy. It remained gracious enough, at least, to provide the sound of the cat’s clarinet at the proper moments.

Charlie Peters told me confusingly and in considerable detail about each of the children, but now he changed the subject without warning.

“You know, Eddie,” he said, “this reminds me, this business of the wolf up there—” He stopped to applaud, although I couldn’t see at what.

“You’re going to quote something,” I said.

“Oh, dear, am I so transparent? No, I’m going to tell you about children. So you see? You’re wrong. Something that fellow Hesse said about children and wolves. Mr. Polaski, you know. His sort.” He leaned back and folded his arms.

“I’ve lost you, Charlie.”

“Really. Well, one thinks of the wolf as so innocent, you know. Fixed on its prey, single-minded, no qualms, no guilt of sin because it knows nothing
about
sin. The perfect innocence of clear purpose, it is. Like Mr. Polaski, you see, this hollow shell of instinct, with not one shred of real feeling.”