A Grey Moon Over China (62 page)

“Earth,” he said.

The following day the torus was turned back toward Serenitas, as though nothing had happened. It remained under heavy guard by the drones.

Nearly a month later, after four months in space, I finally ran across Pham. One of the eight ships in Bates’ ring still had its original gardens, and I found her at the very top level of them, where an open plot of grass baked under artificial sunlight, surrounded by a hedge. I’d gone to the gardens meaning only to visit the lower levels for a moment, but a lullaby was filtering down from above with a familiar tune. I started up the path to see, Kip following behind.

Your tears, you whisper, like rain

Have washed away your dreams . . .

Near the top of the spiraling path the bright sun above trickled down through the foliage, and Pham’s voice became clearer, singing with the same minor tones and lilting inflection her speech always carried, giving the lullaby an odd and haunting sound.

So take me along with a kiss for your fears;

They’re old friends and bring me no harm.

It was the same tune I’d heard more than twenty years ago, from Kip’s flute, the one he still played when he thought he was alone. And finally I placed it. The tune I’d heard in the darkness after the theft, the one Pham was singing now, was a lullaby my mother had sung, too.

Tus lágrimas, como la lluvia . . .

Pham was sitting on the grass in the bright sunlight, leaning back against a carrying bag. She wore only the briefest of shorts and an open blouse, her eyes closed and the baby at her breast, her skin shining with oil.

She opened her eyes when we reached the head of the path.

“So,” she said. “We there already?” She shifted the baby and sat up straighter, pulling the blouse a little closer around her. “No, is okay, Eddie, don’t go. Sit, make company, yah? Where’s China-Girl?”

I sat across from her while Kip dropped down in the grass to look at the baby. Pham watched him for a moment, then looked back at me with a hint of amusement. “So! Your face all full of ‘how she do that?’ I think. Needle-Lady, she make estradiol-something out of nothing, put it in all right places. Baby healthy, what you think?”

“He looks fine. No, we’re not there yet. We’re still a month out.”

The baby heard my voice and turned around, and with a gurgle and a shriek of excitement squirmed out of Pham’s arms and onto the grass, not about to be put to sleep. Under the low thrust he pushed himself onto his hands easily and pulled himself forward, his undersized legs working behind him as best they could. His dark eyes were wide and shining with the adventure, and he smiled, dribbling bits of milk as he babbled his way across to Kip. Kip put down his flute solemnly and lifted the baby into the air, soft and pink against his smooth black hands.

Pham lifted her arms over her head and stretched luxuriously, her face tanned and relaxed, framed by jet black hair cut short in front and long in the back. She leaned back on her hands and slid a foot closer to her to raise one knee, her feet bare and her blouse still open.

“So, you,” she said to me. “If we still got month left, why we go all this way, chasing goose, hah? Old mines bad place, all cold.”

“We have to work out a plan with the rest of the system, Pham. That’s what the conference is for.”

She leaned back a little further and shook her head. “Nah, you just follow Empty-Eyes all the time, like he got something. What’s he got, Eddie?”

“He’s learned something about the drones.”

“Hah! You don’t be so stupid, he just say that. You tell Polaski, go suck his own pecker, hah? Why we go all this way for shithead like him?”

She sighed and lay all the way back. “Ah, Eddie, you still got no balls.”

I
’d been looking for Chan when I heard Pham’s lullaby, and later that day I finally found her in a berth on the can, just waking up.

No one followed ship’s time any longer; the lights were simply kept half dimmed while people wandered in and out of sleep on any schedule. Especially in the cavernous can this created a sense of unreality, as flying platforms rose and fell through the dim central corridor, no longer horizontal now but a quarter-mile-deep, vertical shaft.

I’d come to ask Chan one more time if there was a chance the fleet MI
could reconstruct the lost communications codes, given that it had once used them. But she wouldn’t discuss it.

“Why don’t you just find someone like Bolton and go back and get your codes, then,” she said.

“Bolton’s dead, Chan.”

“I know, Eddie, I know. So are you. So are we all.”

That night, for the last time, I dreamed about being in the cavern underground. The tunnel was still there, and in it the demon was still waiting. Someone still watched from my shoulder, and a figure still stood in front of me, slowly raising his hand. But the figure’s face was clear this time. It was my own.

T
he last time I saw Pham on that trip she was standing by a porthole on one of the iron ships, with the baby asleep in her arms. She was looking out into the darkness with tears on her cheeks. For old friends, she said, and for friends she’d never had.

Then we were on the cold moon of the fifth planet, preparing for the conference. The ground shook with the roar of more ships arriving, while unfamiliar faces rushed past in the causeways interconnecting the old mining structures, carrying papers and memory blocks and terminals, some people still wearing their ship’s suits and hull boots as the heaters struggled to warm the air.

Visible from the windows of the main causeway, smaller causeways snaked out across the pitted surface to the mining control towers—tall, hollow buildings with glass windows in their upper floors, from which the surface robots had once been directed. The weak light from the distant sun, now a tiny disk in the black, washed across the towers and filtered into the causeways, illuminating faded Devanagari characters at the intersections and complicated warnings in Prakrit over the airlocks. Iron bars ran the length of the ceilings, welded haphazardly into place as handholds—gravity on the tiny moon was so low that without hull clamps people tended to float away from the floor and drift.

Polaski spent several days attending to his units after their return from the campaign on the sixth planet, and occasionally he met privately with Bart Allerton and the other emissaries. But we didn’t meet formally until three days later. It was the first time since Boar River that I’d come face to face with Allerton.

The conference table was a long, single slab of steel, tapering near the ends, gleaming faintly in the watery light from the sun and the stars shining
through the windows. Thirty chairs were pulled up to the table, one end of which was reserved for Polaski and the other for Allerton. More chairs lined the walls, set aside for aides and observers. Each place at the table was marked with a neat vellum pad, and a water decanter and cup made from real glass.

The participants milled about deciding on places, or else peering out the narrow strip of windows at the wild hills and strip mines on the surface, turning back toward the room now and then to shake hands and squint at one another in the bad light. Near the door, a boy in a grey and black uniform worked studiously on the electrical box that controlled the lighting, finally giving it up with a frown and sitting back down next to Polaski. Though nearly full-grown, the boy was less than five feet tall, heavy and broad in the shoulder, with expressionless eyes.

Polaski, dressed in a grey and black uniform like the boy’s, reached for a phone and summoned a technician who came and worked futilely on the lighting box. He also gave it up, much to Polaski’s disgust.

I chose a place a good three or four away from Allerton’s end of the table, between Chan to my right and an impatient Lal Singh the Younger to my left. Across from me sat Elliot, who left the room for a moment to bring back an extra chair, which he squeezed in next to him for Susan Perris. Polaski glared at him.

“Piss off, Polaski,” said Elliot. He looked tired, with the hair at his temples flecked with grey and his eyes restless. More and more in the past few days he’d been talking about his plans to go to Boar River with Perris, about the details of farming, but the rest of the time he fidgeted, keeping up his good humor only with an effort.

“Well! Hello there!” Allerton made his entrance and shook hands all around. “Madame Tonova, Mr. Singh, Excellency. Fine weather we’re having, fine weather. Fine morning. What, no lights? We’re going to play fondle-your-neighbor under the table, are we? Well, all right, sounds good. How ’bout that? Ed, good to see you!” He leaned across the table to shake hands.

I looked at the carefully groomed white hair, at the pale eyes and the sincere smile hovering in the gloomy light, then I looked away. Why was I here?

“What’s the matter, boy-o, cat got your tongue? Well, that’s all right, Ed, you’ll sober up after a while. Take my word for it!” He took back his hand and moved to pull back his chair, carefully tugging at the knees of his trousers before sitting down. No one sat in the chairs around the corners of the table from him.

Polaski pulled a garish chrome and brass gavel from his pocket and smacked it hard against the table, then tossed it out in front of him. The impact from the blow, however, had caused him to rise up out of his seat, and he had to grip the table to stay down.

“I wish to speak!” Lal Singh the Younger stood up next to me and stared importantly at Polaski.

Polaski ignored him. “Where’s Pham?” he said. “I want her present and accounted for from now on.”

Singh looked around the table in confusion, thinking the question was for him.

In the meantime, decanters clinked against glasses and chairs scraped against the iron floor as they were pulled closer. Aides against the wall coughed and shuffled their papers.

“Sit down, Singh,” said Allerton, brushing a hand at him in dismissal. “We’ve got the future of all mankind in our hands here, and we don’t have time for grandstanding.”

Singh remained upright.

“Maybe,” I called down to Polaski, “you didn’t invite her.”

“So who do you think you are, Torres?” he said. “Go get her.”

I went on watching him without answering. I didn’t get up. After a minute the silence grew awkward. Singh sat down slowly and peered myopically around the table as the seconds dragged past.

Then finally I screeched my chair back and stood, angry at myself for doing it but at the same time not wanting to be in the room any longer. I walked around behind Allerton and pushed my way through the door. The shouting started up again as the door closed, then the door clicked shut and I was left in the quiet corridor, wondering where to start looking for Pham.

I looked into the dormitories and stood for a while in the vehicle bays, half-heartedly counting suits and tractors, not sure what it would tell me, then finally I went to the windows of the main causeway and stared out at the hellish surface.

It was while I was standing there that a motion caught my eye in one of the distant control towers. For a while when I looked I didn’t see anything more, but then something white flickered in the upper windows. A full minute later it was there again. I made my way toward the narrow causeway leading out to the tower.

At the end of the twisting, windowless causeway, the dim recesses of the lowest floor of the control tower appeared, emptied of equipment and abandoned. Barely visible in the center of the floor was Pham, facing away from me with her hands above her head, looking straight up. Then, by the
time I reached the doorway to the tower, she was bending down with the baby in her arms, holding him near the floor.

Suddenly, with a shriek of delight from the child, she straightened up and flung him into the air. He rose higher and higher, rolling head over heels through the air in slow motion. Ten feet up he rose, then twenty, then suddenly he sailed into the sunlight spilling through the windows, catching the light as he somersaulted among the glittering motes of dust, laughing with delight. Forty, fifty feet into the air, slower and slower he tumbled, rolling through the light with his limbs waving in every direction. Then he was hanging motionless in the air, sixty feet above us, silent with awe as he faced straight down, with nothing to see in the darkness below except Pham’s arms reaching out to catch him.

“Hello, Eddie,” said Pham.

“Hi. Looks like fun, doesn’t it?” The baby began to pinwheel slowly, starting to float back down.

“Yah. Maybe you do for me someday, hah? So, what? You tell Polaski piss off, and he throw you out?”

I didn’t answer for a moment, but watched the baby picking up speed and shrieking again. “He wants you there.”

“I know. Soon.”

“Okay.” I watched for another minute, then worked my way back up the causeway and the conference room, into a shouting match between Lal Singh the Younger and a brittle woman named Xiang, the emissary from the Chinese.

I pictured the baby floating down toward me, alive and excited. I didn’t want to be at the conference. I didn’t want the bickering, or Polaski’s plan.