A Grey Moon Over China (36 page)

Tick
.

But it was only the sound of iron walls contracting—sharp and clear and harmless. My nerves settled and I pushed off toward one of the rungs in the wall, then looked down the corridor. In both directions it disappeared into the poor light on rusted walls. I picked what I thought was the longer direction, then launched myself forward as fast as I could.

The rush of air was exhilarating—a freedom and suspension of effort never found on the surface. I pictured rushing naked through outer space, then just as quickly realized the irony of feeling such freedom inside a cold iron tunnel, its impenetrable walls looming in the shadows ahead and behind. It left me with an almost painful lightness of heart, suspended between a numb and insensible past and future.

Tick
.

The whisper echoed along the corridor and stole away the image, and I spread my jacket to catch the air and tumble. The end-wall loomed up in front of me and I twisted to catch it with my feet, then pushed back the other way. A rectangle of light caught my eye, then, and after a minute I made out a doorway ajar with light spilling into the corridor. For a moment I was surprised by the size of the door, then with a shift of perspective realized where I was; it was the door to the sporting chamber. I spread my jacket again and drifted to the wall, wondering why anyone would be in the giant room so early in the morning and with so few of its lights on. I caught the edge of the padded door and swung it open.

Tick
.

At first I thought Pham was dead. Her body floated at the center of the empty space, turning in the poor light, and for a moment I felt exposed and alone in the presence of her death—but then I saw that her eyes were open and watching me. They were heavily lidded, but they focused on me and followed me as she drifted in languid circles.

She was completely naked. Her head was back and her arms and legs floated at her sides, the hard muscles relaxed and sleek under her skin. Her body had been oiled over every inch from her temples to her feet, and the light shone from her cheekbones and her slack lips, from her oiled breasts and the hollows of her hips, from her thighs. She looked sated, drifting without thought, yet her eyes held out the same seduction as always, pulling
at me where I floated in the doorway. On her arm, a darker area showed against the olive skin, abraded from the constant air syringes.

Tick.
The sound whispered up along my legs, leaving a cool trace against the skin. I felt the cold air against my chest through the open jacket.

It seemed natural, somehow, to find Pham in that room, as though I’d always known she would be there, waiting in the half-dark. I watched her turn, arched backward at the waist, head thrown back and turned to one side to watch me, the few lights glistening off her oiled skin, black hair floating free and dark eyes following me. I pulled myself in past the doorway. She didn’t move or change expression, but just watched me and waited.

But a movement elsewhere in the chamber caught my eye.

Tick.

This time the sound traced across my skin like a scalpel.

A man floated in the corner of the room, someone I’d never seen before. He was naked as well and floated against the padded walls in the corner, his skin oiled like Pham’s. His head bumped against the pads, pressed against his shoulder at an impossible angle. His eyes were open and empty.

Tick.

One more time the sound, like a metronome. But not counting out the time—holding it still, frozen in place.

Pham drifted so that her head pointed down, her lidded eyes still following me upside down. As I watched her drift I felt strangely reassured by the man’s presence. It seemed right that he should be there and that he should be dead, as though anything less would have left her unattended and diminished.

Tick.
The sound stirred in my loins and the cool air reached in through my clothing. But slowly I pushed my way back out through the door, and with an effort broke the lock of her eyes.

Tick.

I pushed my way up the corridor, leaving the sound to slide past me and race ahead along the iron walls.

T
hree days later I rode to the surface with Priscilla Bates, the can’s commander, enjoying her ordinary company while I tried to shake the image of Pham. Bates was an attractive woman now in her early forties, with pale skin and light hazel eyes and long brown hair—one of the few women who still let it grow. She’d become one of our better operations commanders, but she shied away from combat, complaining of painful joints. She took duty in charge of the can whenever she could.

Back on the surface she joined Chan and me, and the wiry and cautious
Harry Penderson, for a visit to Anne Miller in her quarters under the main dome. The four of us walked along the dusty black alleyways, preceded by a pair of six-legged drones who marched solemnly on opposite sides of the alley. They dragged their feet to kick up as much dust as possible and played a heavy rendition of the Funeral March from Mahler’s First Symphony, plopping down their big feet in time with the music.

“I don’t get it,” said Penderson, eyeing the drones uncertainly. “Why do they do that? I’ve never seen a frivolous machine before.”

“It’s not frivolous to them,” said Chan. “You see, they’re allowed to give themselves points for learning new things. The more intricate and symmetrical a thing it is, the more points they add to their score—and they’re programmed to get that score up as high as they can. So in effect they take pleasure from doing things like that.” Bates and I both sighed, knowing what was coming and having heard the whole argument dozens of times before. I looked away and thought again about Pham floating in the dim light.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘taking pleasure,’ ” said Penderson, frowning first at Chan and then at the drones in their clouds of dust. “Not if they’re just machines, and not if it’s just the way they’re programmed.”

Chan sighed, too. “That’s all it is with us, Harry, on some level: neurons firing and glands squirting—the programming of instinct. But . . . no, come on, don’t get your feathers up. I think it’s wonderful that something like pleasure could be made out of ordinary flesh and blood. Don’t look at me like that . . . you’re not any less alive for being real, Harry—those interactions are so many levels removed from what you really feel that it has nothing to do with who you are.” Unlike Chan, the rest of us still balked at the idea of being ultimately so mundane—however far removed our selves were from those basic interactions—and we jealously guarded some threatened sense of our own vitality. We also tended to fall unerringly into the mistake Penderson was about to make.

“You sound like this Miller woman,” he said.

The little drones stopped in unison on a rumble of tympanis, and solemnly tapped their inside feet in time to a funereal pause before continuing.

“No,” said Chan. She was resigned. “That’s not true. Anne Miller isn’t interested in how the sparkle and mystery of life is created—she’s interested in how
intelligence
is created—that tiny, insignificant little part of us that reasons. Don’t confuse our being real and comprehensible with our being
rational
, Harry—that’s the mistake she makes. She thinks that the source of everything worthwhile is intelligence—sophisticated, compact, and effective, maybe, but still intelligence stripped of all else. Her belief is that with enough of the right kind of decision-making rules you’ve got a
human being—when all I’m saying is that with a pile of glands and neurons and instincts, and a lifetime of being loved and cared for, you’ve got a living creature worth being. Like us.”

The little drones timed the brooding end of the movement perfectly to make a two-column, parade-ground pivot and stop in a cloud of black dust at either side of Miller’s door. Then, in a trick that had been making their rounds, they turned around and lifted themselves onto their rear legs with their front legs extended in front of them, lions rampant guarding the door. “Giddy-up,” said one, and we knocked and pushed our way in.

Miller had turned sixty the year before, and her age had begun to show in her face and her hair. And as usual these days, it took us a while to interest her in our presence, and to distract her from her papers and her screens. But finally she listened long enough to hear Harry Penderson’s story.

“Well,” she said finally, “that particular one may not have known who we were. Not all the drones have the same knowledge, you know.” She spoke a little vaguely and her eyes wandered back to her papers now and then.

“Anne,” I said, “let me ask you a couple of questions. When we were back in the Solar System waiting, and the first messenger drone went back to the Solar System with the news that terraforming was under way here and that the torus was open, did it know
why
it was going back, and
why
it was delivering the news?”

Miller was shaking her head even as I asked the question.

“No. Basic programming. Unconscious instructions. ‘Why’ only has to do with plans they develop themselves, the methods they themselves design for carrying out the instructions they take as givens.”

“Okay, then what about this: After that drone went back to the Solar System and started receiving your new instructions, where would it think those instructions were coming from?”

She frowned at the question. “Again—it wouldn’t have ‘thought’ anything. The instructions were sent to it embedded in special communications codes that took the instructions straight into its memory, bypassing any processing.”

“Then when it returned here to Holzstein’s and disseminated the new instructions to all the others—where would the others have thought the information was coming from?”

“Same thing—embedded in those same special communications codes. For them, the instructions just suddenly existed.”

Bates was wandering around the room blowing dust off of things.

“Like being given directions under hypnosis?” she asked.

Miller looked surprised at the idea, but nodded. “Yes. Very close.”

“By the way, Anne,” I said, “where are those communications codes kept? You’ve never mentioned them before.”

She pointed to a slender metal briefcase slipped in among her books and memory blocks on the shelf.

“Okay. Now I’ve just got a couple more questions. Anne, would one of your drones be capable of taking a look at those European cannon ships and identifying them as weapons?”

She jerked her head up, then slowly looked back down at her papers; she knew why I was asking.

“It’s possible. Not very likely, but possible.”

“All right. Now let me ask you this: When we arrived here in Holzstein’s System, the torus here had a record of
two
vessels being sent back to the Solar System. Remember? Not one. And the second one was sent back to the Solar System
after
the first one returned here to Holzstein’s with your new instructions. Have you ever figured out why?”

Penderson was watching me intently. Very few people in the system knew how little control we’d had over the drones.

Miller didn’t answer, but ran a hand absently across her papers.

“Okay, then I’ll tell you what I think happened,” I said. “For a long time I thought it was something about your new instructions that caused them to send another drone back to the Solar System without letting us know about it.” Miller was shaking her head tiredly as I said it. She knew it wasn’t true. “But what I think now is that after the first drone came back here to Holzstein’s from the Solar System, and obeyed its programming and unconsciously passed along your new instructions to the others, it proceeded to describe what it had seen on its trip. Namely another system—Earth’s solar system—filled with activity and with hundreds of huge white machines breaking out of their orbits to chase it back toward the torus—heading for what it thought of as its own home system. Remember, not one of those drones had ever been outside of its protective ship before it reached Holzstein’s System. It’s where they were born.” Chan and Bates and Penderson had stopped where they were to watch me, but Miller went on idly rifling the edges of her papers.

“So what would the other drones do when they heard this story? They’d send another drone back to take a close look at those approaching ships. And when they’d gotten that look, we all know what they did—the perfectly reasonable thing. They left. En masse, hours before we were expected to arrive.”

Miller was nodding slightly, as though she had known all of this long ago and was tired of thinking about it. I looked at the others. “I don’t think
we’re ever going to see those drones back here again, no matter how long we wait. I think they’re parked in Serenitas System, probably doing their jobs, but not about to come back here. They may even have concluded that their ‘instinctual’ return to the Solar System is what drew us toward them, and they’re not about to make that mistake again. But all of this probably also means that there’s no reason why we can’t go ahead and join them—assuming we can get at the torus. Though no matter what we do, we’d better make damned sure the drones don’t ever see huge weapons like those coming at them again.”

I looked at Miller. “You may have programmed them to be just like us, Anne, but that may also be why we’ll never see them again.” She understood what I was saying, but even then, as I watched her, I had the feeling that she knew something more, that somehow she’d thought this through even further than I had.