A Grey Moon Over China (54 page)

“Someone should look at that leg, Charlie.”

“No, Eddie, they’ll be wanting to make a fuss. It’s not worth the time to an old man who has little enough of it left.”

Something hissed past my ear and slammed into the wall ahead of us. A shout came from behind, then a ragged form hurried past, struggling for footing in the dust.

It was Pham. She turned to look back as she ran, then stumbled and fell. She twisted around to look behind her. Her hair was tangled and her face bruised, with smears of dirt and caked blood under her nose.

She glanced up at Peters. “What you staring at, priest?” Her voice was scarcely audible. She struggled to her feet and fell again as another stone smacked into the ground next to her. Behind us, Rosler snickered.

“Come on, princess!” he shouted. “Come on, you can do it. Let’s see you run!” He pushed past us and followed her down the alley. “Run from your post, run from me. Let’s see how far you get,
Princess
!” His next stone struck
her temple and drew more blood as she limped around the corner into the square ahead.

Peters gripped my arm, but said nothing.

Ahead of us a tractor pushed the alien’s cage off its dollies into the dirt, over in a far corner of the square. The creature held exactly the same position as it had all along, motionless and eyeless in the center of the cage, watching us all.

Pham and Rosler had disappeared, and the square was left deserted as the tractor pulled away. It was the square outside Miller’s old quarters, where I’d stood talking to Penderson and Dorczak the night Miller had told me about Patel. The door to her quarters hung from one hinge, the gloomy workroom behind it nearly empty after the evacuation. The few remaining items had been strewn on the floor during the aliens’ ransacking.

The dust churned up by the tractor hung suspended over the square, swirling through the vertical columns of weak, midday sun. Pools of the hazy light glowed on the black dirt, surrounded by the shadows from the dome. The doorways leading from the square, and the alien in its cage were difficult to see.

A soldier stuck his head into the square to stare at the creature, then went back the way he’d come. Peters gave the thing a quick glance, then steered me toward the alley that led to my old office near the empty vehicle assembly building. As we approached the office, voices were coming from inside through the open door, and Peters stopped me before going in.

“Eddie, listen to me. This is a day I’ve always believed would come. I thought I was ready for it, that all of us were, but suddenly I don’t know how it’ll end. You need to know that.” He looked at me intently, if somewhat cryptically, for a few moments, then finally took my elbow and led me inside.

Chan wrapped herself around me and held tight, a shiver running through her as she pressed against me. “God, Eddie. I’m glad you’re back. Things aren’t good.”

I held her for a minute with my arms in under her loose jacket, then finally the trembling stopped and she pulled me out of Peters’ way. Tyrone Elliot, the medic Susan Perris, and Kip were on a seat at the far end. Elliot’s eyes were closed. Piles of books and debris stood against the wall, and on the wall near the door, a faded square on the wall marked the missing photograph of Serenitas.

“What’s not good?” I said to Chan.

“More of our ships are leaving, Eddie. Scores of them. We moved the children to the can to try and keep them safe, but parents are refusing to be separated from them this time. They think everyone in the system’s going
to die, and they want to be with their kids at the end. Even on some of the fighting ships people have got their kids with them, but most of them are just taking their families and breaking out of orbit without even knowing where they’re going. Eddie . . . some of the orphans are asking if the aliens are coming to cut off their arms and legs because they’ve been bad.”

With an exhausted sound she sat down and buried her face in her hands. Perris stared at the floor, while next to her Kip started to cry. Elliot slept. A column of soldiers marched past outside the open door, and then it was quiet again.

From up the alley came a yell and a shout. Peters turned his head to listen. But no more sound came, until a few minutes later when a shadow crossed the door and, while his commandos waited in the alley, Michael Bolton stepped in with Flight Leader and sometime orphanage commander Priscilla Bates. Chan dried her face and Elliot opened his eyes.

Bates stopped near the door and took Peters’ arm while Bolton leaned back against a wall. It was Bates that spoke first.

“The aliens are moving faster than we thought,” she said.

“How long?”

“Less than two hours. More than five hundred ships.”

The room became quiet again.

“I don’t think they’ll attack us or the civilian ships,” I said.

No one answered for a few minutes.

“That’s not actually why we’ve come,” said Bolton. “It’s that I’ve got a rather unfortunate bit of news, I’m sorry to say.” He glanced at me.

“Especially for you, I’m afraid, Eduardo. I’ve got a chap in West Lowhead, is the thing. It seems he’s sent a report, saying a colonel in the colony defense forces—Samuel Becker by name—has formally reported to the president that a light aircraft exploded yesterday while at sea. It was carrying Administrative Chief Carolyn Dorczak and one companion. There was no other word. I’m sorry.”

No one stirred except for Kip, who looked even more frightened than before. Then through the silence came a scream. Pham’s voice, far up the alley. Peters turned for the door.

“I’ll go see,” he said. He patted Bates’ arm and disappeared around the corner with his head down, poking ahead with his cane and paying no attention to the troops who made way for him outside.

Another scream came, followed by angry shouting. I turned toward the door.

“There’s something I need to see,” I said. But it wasn’t the same thing Peters had gone to see.

When I got there, Pham stood unsteadily in the middle of the square,
trying to keep her balance as she wiped the blood from her nose with a hand. Rosler stood to one side with a sneer on his face, while around the periphery of the square men and women stood, having come to see the spectacle, or the alien, or both. Now and then one of them glanced uneasily up at the dome.

“You
follow
me and you
follow
me and you
follow
me!” shrieked Pham. She was bent over at the waist and gasping for breath, straightening up with an effort to shout some more. Yet it wasn’t Rosler she was shouting at.

In the very center of the square, aglow in the hazy sunlight that streamed down to form a circle where he stood, Charlie Peters leaned forward with both hands on his cane and watched Pham intently as she screamed at him.

In the corner, the alien still stood, blind and immobile, watching everyone.

“Everywhere I go, you
there
!” shouted Pham. “You pretend to be nice, but
nobody
nice. You just
watch
all the time. That’s why you here, hah?”

I pushed past the spectators into the gloom of Anne Miller’s work room. Pham’s frenzied shrieks dwindled in the background. Stale dust rose from the floor to block what little light there was. I waved it away from my face and searched among the debris.

Furniture had been tipped over or pushed aside. Piles of old memory blocks and notebooks lay on the floor under a thick layer of dust. Finally in the corner there was a dim outline of light blue, a rectangle like a thousand others I’d seen on shelves in the background over the years. It was a slender binder filled with an untidy stack of paper. I worked it loose from the trash and wiped away the dust, but I was unable to read the cover in the bad light.

I stepped back out into the square. I was about to look down at the cover of the binder when I saw the gun in Pham’s hands. She was down on her knees, sobbing and holding her big fléchette gun in both hands, aiming it at Charlie Peters. Peters stood quietly in his column of light, looking down at her with growing concern as he leaned on his cane. Rosler stood to one side, apparently enjoying the spectacle, while on the other side Bolton and Throckmorton inched closer to Pham.

“You call yourself
father?
” she screamed. “You make fun of me, hah?” She wiped her face on her shoulder and shook her head to clear it. “I know about fathers and priests! You turn your back and make good laugh!
You don’t fuck with me! Nobody fuck with me!”
She raised the gun higher and struggled to hold it steady, screaming and sobbing at the same time. Bolton edged closer.

I thought at that moment that Peters was quietly praying to himself, but from the few words I could hear I came to understand later what he was actually saying, the line that he was finally finishing.

“I beheld,”
he said,
“a pale horse. And his name that sat on him was Death.”
He glanced briefly over at Rosler, then quickly back at Pham. His years of composure finally seemed to have fallen away, and his fear showed through.

Rosler snorted in disgust at Peters’ words. “What are you, the Second Coming or something?” He turned back to Pham. “Go ahead, you dumb little shit, pop him.”

Thinking she wouldn’t really fire, and unable to wait any longer, I looked down at the binder in my hands. But in that very instant the gun exploded with a horrible noise and a blinding flash of light. A sun-like wave of heat from the muzzle swept outward across the square.

And, out in the churning dust, on that strange, bare, black earth, out in the center of his now swirling column of light, Charlie Peters crossed himself quietly and looked down at the bloody remains of David Rosler.

“No,” he said, “not the Second Coming at all. Just an old Irish priest.”

Pham was kneeling in a huddle with her arms in front of her. She was still for a moment, then shook with a small convulsion, and then again. A hoarse sob escaped from her, and she began to rock forward and back with her head still buried against her knees. She didn’t look up as Bolton pulled the gun carefully from her fingers.

When I looked back down at the binder in my hands, my own fingers were trembling—because of the explosion, because of Rosler’s sudden death, and because I had already seen the words on the cover. The words I had known would be there.

HP / Digital Equipment Corporation, Programmer’s Quick Reference. Model DEC-91.

Anne Miller’s computer on the island. Anne Miller’s voice speaking the words: Deck Ninety-One.

The creature in the cage was a child of our own drones.

Then, just at that moment, like a distant, silver thread against the awful silence, a muted cry came from far back among the alleyways. The sound of a woman at the height of passion.

How strange, I thought. Love-making at such a time as this. A tiny life beginning, perhaps, even as Rosler died. Even as Pham wept for her own. A flicker of light in the darkness as the drones drew nearer. Returning, at last, to their makers.

There was no one here but us.

I
t was terrifying, and it was exhilarating. It was exhilarating because the scuff of the shoe by the bed in the dead of night had proved to be only our own child, and terrifying because of the glint of steel in his hand. It was terrifying in the way that only a cancer of the flesh can be, with that ultimate intimacy that preys on men’s minds from within. A creature, as Patel had said, of our own imaginings.