A Grey Moon Over China (48 page)

Together we listened to the humming of the engine.

“This time when I had the dream,” I said, “there was someone in there with me, raising a hand up toward me. With a gun, I thought.”

“Indeed? Well, I don’t know. Perhaps not a gun? I’d sooner imagine a balance, as I say:
The third beast said, ‘Come and see;’ and I beheld a black horse, and he that sat on him held a balance in his hand.
But I really do think there’s no one in there but you.”

I tried again to picture the figure in front of me, but it remained out of sight in the gloom.

“I keep thinking we’re not going to make it, Charlie.”

“Through the tunnel? Well. Tuyet will, you know. And I’m thinking you’ll be free to go with her, hm?”

Kip had begun a soft, slow tune, one I hadn’t heard before.

I didn’t understand what Peters meant. “And Chan?”

He looked at Kip, then at his hands. “She’s down in your quarters, lad, waiting for you. Go.”

I
t was a week later that I was sitting in the iron ship with Pham, watching her take a cloth from her pocket and wipe her face, shifting again to get comfortable. The things Peters had said had come to seem increasingly obscure to me, and in the days since, I’d found that I had far more immediate concerns. More than anything, I needed to see the creature that waited for me.

“Aye, I know,” Peters had said when I remarked on it before leaving the fleet.
“For I heard the voice of the fourth beast, and he was saying, ‘Come and see
’ . . .”

But for once, like Madhu before him, he didn’t finish the whole thing.

The thin light from the sun crept farther across the deck, and touched Pham’s feet.

L
ess than two days later Penderson and I were on the second planet, drained by the glare and humidity, surrounded by the crowds and the clamor of West Lowhead—and struggling with the stink; accustomed as we were to years of cool and filtered air, we were unprepared for the texture and stench of human life. We put off the waiting officials and begged for showers.

Soon afterwards we were in the back of a converted transport racing east along the shoreline, Dorczak and Penderson and I, sitting on soft leather and watching the colony’s president across from us lean forward in his seat and tell us what he believed.

If Carolyn Dorczak was the best the Americans had produced, the man who’d replaced her was the worst. Tall and athletic, with coifed white hair and practiced sincerity, Bertram “Fightin’ Bart” Allerton was a man who managed perceptions. He managed the world’s image of him, and, in turn, just as scrupulously managed the way in which he allowed himself to perceive his world. And in that height of American arrogance, he deeply believed that he managed the way in which others experienced their own lives, as well.

“I believe,” he said, locking eyes with each of us in turn, “that this is a profound opportunity. Is there a risk? Yes, there is, there’s a risk. But I believe that when the rest of the world sees that we’ve come to terms with this creature, they’ll look to us for guidance and will recognize that we stand at the forefront of the galaxy’s search for lasting peace.”

Dorczak turned to watch the shacks passing outside. “We haven’t come to terms with anything, Bart,” she said. “The thing hasn’t so much as twitched since we dropped the cage over it. And don’t think the world hasn’t noticed that it was our base they chose to trash the hell out of . . . the ranchers out there are even saying we had it coming. Ranchers on
both
sides of the wall.”

For reasons long since forgotten, the planet was named Boar River. It might have had to do with its unexpected water—the drones had left the planet to the first settlers with the beginnings of a sea, a quarter-million square miles of shallow water and fertile shores.

A single great peninsula jabbed out into the sea from the eastern shore, a peninsula that the original North American and Commonwealth colonists had claimed—although they’d been able to defend it against takers only with heavy support from us on the black planet. Bart Allerton, during the colony’s difficult transition from Dorczak’s technical command to civil government, had claimed to be the peninsula’s discoverer, and had tried to name it the Allerton Headlands, presumably thinking the name had a rugged flair. More exacting minds, however, had pointed out that a low, marshy spit of sand didn’t qualify as a headland, and so the peninsula had come to be called Low Headland, and then just Lowhead—a kind of inadvertent political compromise.

Eventually, Allerton’s real ticket to power had come from ending the colony’s dependence on outside help to defend the peninsula’s approaches, a dependence that Polaski had worked hard to foster. To combat the continual encroachment of ranchers and homeless settlers, Allerton had built a wall across the narrow neck of the peninsula, through an area now known as Wallneck. And to combat more sophisticated intrusions, he’d reorganized the colony’s economy to support a defense force, with the largest units based at Wallneck.

Even then, however, Allerton had known that Lowhead enjoyed longterm
security only with Polaski’s and my blessing, and he’d wisely announced to us his intention to stop at a purely defensive military, and had supported treaties under which we handled the colony’s international obligations in exchange for a guaranteed trade in foodstuffs and raw materials. According to Polaski and Allerton, that was where the relationship still stood—and so I was struck by Dorczak’s comment about the ranchers believing that Wallneck had it coming.

“Mr. Allerton—” I said.

“ ‘Bart,’ please.”

“Bart. Why do the ranchers resent the base at Wallneck? I thought they were glad to have it there.”

He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and his face took on a look of enlightened sympathy for those less worldly than he. “Ed, you need to understand these rurals. They’re good people, mind you, New Zealan-ders mostly, but with all the prosperity they’ve been privileged to enjoy they’ve come to take our strong posture for granted. I’m sure a man in your position understands how these sorts of people can be.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Well, I have, actually, Ed. But really, you don’t need to concern yourself with internal rumors like this. I’m sure you’ve got much more . . .
cosmic
things on your mind, haven’t you?” He leaned forward and patted my knee.

“Carolyn,” I said, “you just said that even the ranchers on your side of the wall thought the base had it coming. Why? I assume you’ve been out there?”

“Now, Ed.” Allerton’s voice demanded my attention back. “We all know what a good administrator Miss Dorczak is. That’s one good thing about many women, I’m sure you know.”

Dorczak lifted an eyebrow but went on looking out the window. I knew it was only because of the influential professional and naval voting blocks that he was forced to keep her on at all.

“But,” he went on, “we still have to keep things on a need-to-know basis—the cosmos isn’t always such a kind and friendly place, is it?”

“No, it isn’t, Mr. Allerton, and right now it’s so goddamned unfriendly I don’t have time for your tap dance. I need information on these attacks. Now, what’s going on at Wallneck?”

“Ed, please. I’m sure you’re an excellent engineer and that you can understand the limitations of rural folk who’ve got nothing better to do than bellyache about their water supply, but being a technical man, like our faithful assistant here”—he patted Dorczak’s knee now—“I can appreciate that you aren’t necessarily experienced in the subtleties of running a real operation. So you let me worry about the ranchers getting out of line, and you tell your boss that if they get to be a problem then we’ll just have to
take care of it.” He leaned forward and his eyes widened as he said it, but the rest of his face remained a mask. He sat frozen in that position, not about to be the first one to look away.

Penderson leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“Until this alien’s in your hands, Torres, I wouldn’t want anyone getting too uncomfortable about our having a nice long talk with it. So let’s do our sniffing around later, okay?” He turned to Dorczak.

“I guess the heat’s a little hard on a couple of vacuum junkies like us, as you can tell. But listen, Carolyn, we do need to know about the attack and about this animal before we get out to the base, if we’re going to make any sense of it. All we really know comes from your message: a hell of a lot of dead and wounded, and one animal that got separated from its weapon and got cornered in a cage. What else?”

As they talked I watched the passing mud flats stretching out into the shallows. They were like the backs of brown, sleeping animals in the water. The surface was a burnished silver. The sky glared white with high clouds, and now and then wild-looking swirls of grey scudded across it, while hot gusts of wind whipped across the water and rocked the fishing boats lying on the mud. Where the sky touched the horizon the clouds were grey, with sheets of heat lightning rippling through them. It seemed to add to the heat.

Like all of the colonies, Lowhead was poor. Over the years it had become even poorer, and hopes of keeping succeeding generations from sliding into poverty and ignorance had dwindled.

With the shrinking economic base, ongoing attempts to find technological solutions had come to consume a greater and greater portion of diminishing resources, in the end robbing the very poorest of the last of their surplus goods, condemning their children to the very same full-time work in the boats that they’d sought to avoid.

Long before any of us had even considered migration from Earth, colonization planners had run calculations on the minimum gene pool and industrial base needed to sustain a colony. A sufficient gene pool was needed to ensure hereditary divergence instead of convergence, and a sufficiently broad base to the industrial hierarchy was needed to support, down through subsequent levels of manufacturing, the most complex product the colony needed to be self-sustaining.

But on that second count the planners had been wrong. Staggering numbers of products and skills used to fuel Earth’s industry had been taken for granted, and had come to light only when the colonists had found themselves without them. Each product or skill thus lost left some link missing in the industrial infrastructure, a problem compounded when individual
workers were forced into subsistence activity as a consequence, thus falling out through the bottom of the industrial hierarchy altogether.

None of this had meant that productive and dignified life in the colonies wasn’t possible. It simply meant that the dream of a post-industrial, technologically sustained civilization had faded even before the advent of the alien ships. An agrarian life with adequate cultivation of livestock, fish, and grains was possible, but it wouldn’t be for many generations, if ever, that the colonies would be producing gene therapy equipment or even penicillin, or weather computers or asteroid mining ships. And what little was left of those commodities now was falling into fewer and greedier hands.

Along the shoreline lay rusted bits of space vessels turned to use as rude shacks, and, now and then, big oxygen scrubbers propped up on logs, being used for nothing more than to blow air across the fish-drying racks. On the other side of the road lay cultivated fields, occasionally with spaceship docking winches staked to the edges of the plots, dragging plows across them on cables while the farmers followed with sacks of seed, bobbing on the backs of burros. Stands of tough Eucalyptus dotted the fields, with low, spiky rows of specially-tailored Loblolly Pine between them. Gusts of hot wind whipped up top soil. The sky pressed lower.

“The wolf-like creatures weren’t the only kind of animal involved in the attack,” Dorczak was saying. “There were reports of some kind of bird, although no one got a very good look at them. Same charcoal-grey color, silent, no weapons. Maybe just watchers. Colonel Becker says there was something really big, too, in the background outside the hangar, although it never came in among the attackers.”

“Didn’t your people do them any damage at all?” said Penderson. “You must have some pretty good troops out on that base.”

Allerton leaned forward and poked a finger at him. “Abso-damned-lutely We took those mindless little bastards one-for-one, I tell you, and I’ll have the hide of anyone who tells you different.”

“We lost, Bart,” said Dorczak. She shifted in her seat as the car left the shoreline and bounced onto the rutted road leading inland. “Harry, it’s true that these things were pretty easy to put out of commission, but when they were hit with any kind of cutting weapon they just absorbed all the heat, then overheated and collapsed. Impact weapons worked, too, but again they didn’t break the skin—the animals just went skidding around and smashed into things. The labs are still going through the blood, but so far it’s all human. The alien carcasses are gone—these are pretty tidy animals. And Bart, it’d probably be a real good idea if you didn’t confuse headless and mindless just yet.”

“Carolyn,” I said, “if they’re so tidy, how come they left this one behind?”

“No one knows. It did get trapped behind some debris in one of the storage rooms. And it must have lost its weapon, because we couldn’t find it, so it couldn’t cut its way out. But if the others could find every last dead animal, you’d think they could have found a live one. Maybe it’s something about the spot it’s trapped in, I don’t know. Is that why you insisted we leave it where it is, Ed?”