A Grey Moon Over China (70 page)

I
ndeed, I was alone in the ship. From one end to the other there was no clue, no possessions left behind, no sign that Kip had ever been on board. No sound came to me but the radios.

“Five minutes,” said Stedback.

“Mr. Polaski? We’ve only got five minutes.”

“Todd, get ready.”

“Um, okay. All right.”

Pham had said that there were two shuttles on board, but there was only one.

On my last pass through the ship I stepped off the ladder to look at the familiar grey of the MI decks, at the frayed fabric on the seat where my
hands had rested, at the indentation left in the back from my head. Or from Polaski’s.

“Three minutes.”

I backed the last shuttle out of its bay and away from the ship. A sound came from the back of the shuttle’s cabin, once and then several times more, but when I went to look it wasn’t Kip, after all.

Pham’s tiny boat was no more than a speck on my instruments, drifting against the grey circle of the torus. A speck against the night, a tiny, transparent bubble against the wall of black ships guarding the approaches to Serenitas.

When I pulled closer, the cargo bins strapped to the bottom of her boat grew visible, the ones that would contain her tools and the seeds, and the first year’s food. In the cabin, Pham sat in the middle of the transparent bubble with her shirt still off and the sun shining in across her skin. The baby suckled while she watched the growing circle of grey and the black ships ahead. The sky was filled with stars.

The radios on board hissed and crackled as I came through the lock. The voices were clipped and angry.

“Mr. Polaski, please! FleetSys is telling us you’re the only one who can release all of a sudden, and our window is slipping.”

“Stedback, find a priest for Christ’s sake—”

Pham turned off the radios. There was only the pulsing of the engines then, as they pushed us toward the tunnel, and the sucking of the baby. I tilted my seat back next to her and watched the torus.

“Like Madhu’s moon,” she said.

When I looked at her, the baby’s eyes rolled up to study me in return.

“Is that who you’ve named him after?” I said. “Madhu?”

“No, Eddie. I name him after you. Edward.”

The baby and I regarded each other for a minute as we considered this.

“Please, Eddie,” said Pham. “He need a father. You come just for us, maybe?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t change my mind. I have to go back and look for Chan.”

She didn’t answer, then after a minute a warning came from the panel in front of us. I turned it off.

“First pass-point,” I said. “I have to go.”

“No,” she said, “pass-points not so important. I won’t need to turn aside.”

“I know you won’t, but I will.”

She tilted her seat to face me, then reached out with her free arm. She put it around my neck and drew me nearer, then her lips pressed tight against mine, moist and soft, her tongue like silk as it traced the sides of my mouth.
She pressed her head against the palm of my hand as I ran it across her cheek and under her hair to pull her closer. It was liquid, hypnotic, endless.

The kiss lasted for a long time, our lips wet and sliding under the stars, the baby stirring between us and her other breast pressing against me, her skin soft and warm.

Then I was back inside my own shuttle and watching her through the porthole as she moved off toward the black ships—naked to the stars, her baby at her breast, a woman clothed with only the sun.

T
here were times, over the years that followed, when I almost believed I had fired the gun myself. Then at other times I imagined that no gun had been fired at all, that I had been alone on that deck from the very beginning. But then I would set down my tea and turn away from watching the rain on the meadows, and see the flute on my writing table, and I would know that I hadn’t been alone at all.

The flute had been with me since I’d picked it up from the deck, leaving only the gun behind, but I’d never once tried playing it. I hadn’t wanted to find out that I couldn’t, I suppose. Or else hadn’t wanted to find out that I could.

A
fter Pham’s boat had disappeared toward the torus I’d turned my shuttle and landed on the western shores of the Boar River Sea. Asile was much too far for such a tiny vessel, and if I’d tried to reach her I would have been left with a choice between food and fuel far too soon.

From acquaintances at the Russian colony on Boar River, I learned that the great fleet had eventually fallen apart, unable to pursue its attack. Individual commanders had tried going up against the drones, but they’d been destroyed or turned aside, prevented by the drones from damaging the torus that formed their only link to Serenitas. Other commanders were called home to bolster defenses against the continuing attacks on their bases. Near the Boar River Sea, battles with the drones flared every time weapons were brought to bear—whether against other humans in regional disputes that originally had nothing to do with the drones, or else each time diehard commanders believed they had finally found a weakness in the drones and sought to prove it.

I’d reached Boar River with few possessions. Worse, it came to dawn on
me slowly that I had reached her possessing little status and few skills that the colonies required. The planet had grown poor during the wars, and its industry had collapsed from mismanagement and warfare: The subsistence economy that had taken its place left little time for anything more than farming.

The resources required for space travel had mostly been appropriated by the colonies’ remaining militaries, which I found I had no desire to join. The technical academies had turned their attention to agriculture, and most engineers found themselves with little to engage them beyond civil works. I found myself, in any case, restless at the idea of working within an organization, if only because the great power and stature I had once held as the founder of the exodus now counted for little, and even brought contempt.

I worked with my friend Nicolai Panov for several months while I made inquiries about Chan’s whereabouts, helping build Panov’s orbiting colonies, but without the resources to make any real progress on them neither of us could pretend that the arrangement was more than charity, and finally I thanked him and began to travel from city to city along the shore. I was anxious, in any case, to find Chan.

The months turned into years, however, and the fast vehicles and aircraft I was accustomed to eventually gave way to moving slowly from village to village on foot, as I found myself increasingly compelled to visit the poorest farmers and fishermen in their everyday lives, and to take my meals with them. But although I asked at every house and at every market, no one recognized the description I gave of Chan.

So I made my living, in those years, by moving from farm to farm and repairing machinery in exchange for food and a place to sleep. I became a tinker, of sorts, a mender of things, passing the days by walking along the shoreline under Boar River’s strange sky, with little human companionship and no money at all.

During the fourth year, after I’d walked the length of the sea to Wallneck and then back out through the dismal poverty of the muddy Lowhead peninsula, I began to ask after the colony’s president, Carolyn Dorczak. But my question was always received with puzzlement, and sometimes suspicion—suspicion of a stranger, I supposed, of a rough-looking man.

“The blue house,” I was told at last.

The blue house stood a way back from the main road, a tidy mud house squatting on a farm outside the city of West Lowhead.

Dorczak’s face was sunburned and worn and her hands callused, but her brown eyes hadn’t lost their intelligence or good humor as she looked me up and down, and studied my small companion and my knapsack filled with metal and wires.

“There
is
no government in Lowhead,” she said. “There are a few military outfits that hire on to the highest bidder, but that’s about it. You see them out at Wallneck, sometimes, or on China-side.”

Harry Penderson wasn’t well. He worked as hard as he could on their little farm, but he needed antibiotics for his lungs and he didn’t have them, so he rested often and kept his words short. He did seem glad to have me with them, though.

“How do I get to Asile, Carolyn?” I said.

She shook her head and pulled her work shirt closer around her.

“I don’t think you do, Ed. That’s a rich person’s game now, and there’s none of us that rich. Not even the mail comes or goes.”

Neither of them had had any word of Chan, and after helping to get the late crops in the ground I left again. I walked out along the muddy beaches with my feet sucking into the clay, still trying to leave behind a single, last doubt.

Had I known, when I’d returned with Elliot for the codes, that I would fail? Had I turned my back on Polaski at precisely that moment so that he could close the tunnel, after all? Had I been, all those years, a man in need of his prison?

Perhaps that was why I had allowed the wars to follow us into space in the first place, and why I’d never really forced Miller’s hand regarding her intentions for the drones. And why I hadn’t tried for the torus sooner, as others had. Afraid that what waited for me there might not hold me back after all, might not hold me responsible for the poverty, or for my father, or the deaths. That it might hold me responsible for no more than myself.

It was the next year in the Christian colonies, along the sea’s south shore, that I came to an adobe shanty near a grove of Eucalyptus. A little girl watched me from over the hedge, while nearby a bicycle leaned against a tree with a leather physician’s bag over its handlebars.

The girl regarded me solemnly. She had light brown skin and soft eyes, and an achingly familiar look.

“Anna? Who’s there?” A woman came out of the house to stand in the doorway. She wiped her hands on her apron and nodded to me.

“Yes?” she said.

I turned to face her. She was still a handsome woman, though there were lines of worry etched in her face now, much as there had been in Elliot’s.

It was Susan Perris, and her child. Tyrone Elliot’s child, whom he’d never gotten to see.

Perris’ eyes clouded when she recognized me, then grew cold. The apron became motionless in her hands, and her face filled with a fury she had to struggle to find words for. Finally she spoke in a hoarse voice.

“These are decent people, here.” It was all she said.

I’d wanted to ask her if Chan was with her, or had even written to her, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to speak and I walked away.

It was several years later that stories came to China-side about independent traders who were building ships again on Asile, and who were reopening a minimal commerce in the system. There was even said to be a small trade with Serenitas.

I returned to the Russian cities at the western end of the sea, where I’d begun, and in time I was able to find a trader who accepted my services as an instructor to her young astrogator, in exchange for passage to Asile. I left Boar River for the last time.

We put down on Asile on rough ground. The port and its valley had been burned during the trader’s absence—the drones, we were told, had come to the next valley and were at that moment pushing back its last defenders. But from the smells in the air, and from the color of the smoke, I wondered if it wasn’t only a wood fire that had gotten out of hand.

Just in case, we moved the ship away from the settlements for reloading, and there I said good-bye. Some days later I joined a train of carts and livestock setting out across the Empty Quarter, hoping to make it to the forested highlands.

Thirty-five years earlier, the Europeans had given Asile the only thing of theirs that remained, which was her name. It was a French word that meant ‘sanctuary,’ but fears had grown that the space-going ships would bring the drones and that it was safe no longer, and more and more groups were leaving the city for the distant mountains. It was a trip that took most of a year, and when we finally wound our way up the western slopes and into the trees, more than a dozen had died.