A Grey Moon Over China (39 page)

All of the wall screens went blank, then the one in the center filled with tiny glimmering stars, Serenitas Prime large in a lower corner. Then with a shift in perspective the scene snapped in closer, and the big star dropped off of the picture; Fiedler glanced up at the screen then back at the keys. Again the picture snapped in closer—as though the viewer were traveling farther out through the system—then again, and again, until I was sure that any object in the picture would have to be hundreds of millions of miles outside of the system itself.

Chan caught her breath as the image pulled closer for the last time. There was what looked like a fine, even sprinkling of dust across the screen, each tiny grain a faintly highlighted, uniform black shape, glinting against the deeper black of space. There were thousands of them. Miller stood up and set her little notebook on the table. “The drones,” she said.

Fiedler glanced at her, then reached down to pick up Kelly’s sheet of paper again. He studied it for a minute, then took off his glasses and turned to Miller. “No,” he said.

After a minute he leaned down again to Kelly’s keyboard, then with a rapid ticking the scene flicked in closer and closer until the screen was filled with the fuzzy outline of an oddly misshapen, bullet-like object, made from some eerily reflective black material—a bronzed black, almost translucent, like black chrome.

Then the screen shifted to a black-on-white computer-generated outline of the object, which began to rotate through all three dimensions. An accompanying scale showed the thing to be big—not as big as our own capital ships, but close. Reference lines appeared and the thing was quartered and sliced, and the screen filled with fine spectrographic displays and columns of symbols. Fiedler and the other scientists watched as it evolved, then shook their heads in unison, in disbelief.

“Cobalt, selenium . . .
lanthanides
, for Christ’s sake. What the devil is that hull made of?” The line drawings blinked out to be replaced by the red-on-blue of infrared, which then zoomed in on the hot plume behind the hull; once centered, the chemical analyses reappeared.

“That exhaust has got isotopes in it we’ve never even heard of. Look at that stuff! And look at this.” The screen blossomed with layers of curving field lines and flickering digits. “That thing’s got a magnetic field you wouldn’t believe.”

“Mr. Torres.” It was Roddy McKenna’s voice. I tore my eyes away from the screen just long enough to see that he was still looking at his own console, apparently unaware of what was happening in the center of the room.

Anne Miller ignored him. “Perhaps the drones—” But her voice faded away as Fiedler turned his hollow eyes on her and shook his head again to cut her off.

“Those are substances neither we nor the drones could ever have made, Ms. Miller, not in hundreds of years. But it doesn’t matter. Look at this.” He reached for the keys and the picture switched back to infrared, and the ship steadily expanded to fill the entire screen. The image blurred as it grew larger, and details became almost indistinguishable. But what could be seen was that, under the skin of the hull, the forward two-thirds of the ship was segmented by a faint honeycomb pattern, with each of the open spaces in the honeycomb no more than a couple of feet across. And in the center of each space was a glowing shape.

“Those aren’t your drones, Ms. Miller.” He stared at the shapes along with the rest of us, and another minute went by. “They’re warm-blooded.”

A moment passed in a kind of suspended animation, then the auditorium around us felt suddenly too big. I had a sense of being on the ceiling, looking down onto the cluster of men and women huddled together in the dim light from the screens, all facing silently forward, all thinking the same word but not saying it. Minutes ticked by, and I felt sympathy for them, staring at the frozen image of the blurred ship and its warm cargo.

Miller looked uncomprehendingly from one of us to the other, her face frozen in a rictus of denial.

“Your drones are gone, Ms. Miller,” said Fiedler.

She shook her head stiffly, her hand groping for the back of her chair.

“Aliens!” said Polaski.

A
cceptance came slowly and at a price, paid in the coin of our own significance. Comprehension, on the other hand, lay in an uncertain future, a dubious luxury.

Again and again we resisted the facts, and every time the noose only tightened: The materials we’d seen, the designs, the engines—all of them whispered
“alien, alien, alien.”
Then always the last, insurmountable fact, the one which in other circumstances should have seemed so natural, but which instead mesmerized us in image after image, ship after ship: the warmth. For where the cold of the drones had spoken of a frightening indifference, this warmth now spoke of intention.

That others existed while we humans played blindly at our intrigues, filled with our self-importance, was a knowledge that chafed like the humiliation of a drunk, remembering how incautious he’d been the night before—how unsophisticated, how undefended, how naked among strangers.

Each of us reacted in some way. Even those who were convinced of their own indifference clung to that conviction with renewed vigor. Others armed themselves more visibly, wearing weapons around the base like totems. Some took new lovers, as though spurred to intimacy by a sudden sense of mortality, while others abandoned old lovers in confusion, embarrassed by the intimacy they’d already shown. Some displayed unaccustomed generosity and even valor, while others grew sullen and mean-spirited.

All of us had at some point in our lives considered the possibility that we weren’t alone. Some had studied the statistical probabilities involved, while others had researched the problems of shape or language, or speed, or evolutionary paths. Some had formed unshakable convictions and others a cherished ambivalence, yet we had all missed the starkly personal nature of the thing. We’d been like people who lie awake in the dark and wonder
whether the doors are locked, and idly note the improbability of intruders, then hear the scuff of a shoe next to the bed.

Polaski wanted to fight. He may have believed it necessary, or he may simply have sought reaffirmation of who he was in the clash of sword against sword, that tonic against self-doubt that had driven men for a hundred thousand years.
“And I beheld a white horse,”
Peters said about Polaski the day we found the aliens, finishing his earlier quote from Revelations,
“and he that sat on him was given a crown, and he went forth to conquer.”

Polaski had also apparently answered for himself the question that others still avoided: What, exactly, had happened to the Europeans and the drones?

We stayed in the auditorium a long time that afternoon, numbly re-crossing the same ground through picture after picture. Most of us never noticed that Anne Miller had suffered a stroke. Only Bolton and Throckmorton saw her, and between them they helped her up and carried her to the infirmary, where the medics later reported a mild ischemia due to rheumatic fever and myocardial infarction. There was the risk of another, they said, but it didn’t merit the risk of surgery. After several days they allowed her to return to her rooms to rest, and I visited her there on most evenings.

For a time I wondered whether I felt some responsibility for the events that had ended her life’s work, but more and more I sensed an empathy for her, as though we shared some special knowledge about her and her drones.

On the sixth day, during the planet’s night, I brought her a tray and sat by her bed as she ate.

“I’ve never seen you wear a hat before,” she said, picking at her food and looking up with an old woman’s eyes.

I took off the cap and put it in my lap. I was looking out through the bedroom door and into her workroom, at the slender metal case containing the drones’ communications codes. It was like a forgotten prop, dulled suddenly by insignificance, lying on the dusty stage after the show is over.

“You said yesterday that you thought the drones were just hiding, Anne. Have you thought any more about that?” An uneven whistling drifted in through the bedroom door. Elliot had walked over with me but hadn’t wanted to come in, so he sat in her outer doorway, whistling tunelessly.

“Madhu used to wear hats,” she said, her fork half-raised and forgotten. “White hats, with his white suits, when he was a young man. He was very dashing.” Her old eyes flickered up to mine then down to her plate. She set the fork back down quietly.

“How long ago did you know Madhu?” I said.

“Oh,” she said, lacing together her fingertips. “Since I was a girl. He pretty much raised me after my mother died.” She frowned and looked down at her hands again.

“I’m sorry. What happened?”

She pushed her plate away. “Would you take my tray, please? Thank you.” She smoothed the white blanket out across her lap, then stroked it with both hands as though reassuring it about something. “My mother and I lived in East Oakland, Edward. That was a very bad place at the time—I’m sure it still is. We had a single room with a curtain across the middle. The other side of it was where my mother brought her men.”

Her hands stopped and she looked up with a hint of bitterness. “An awful bunch of men, men with perspiring black faces, all of them. Big faces. Mostly wearing guns, the way men in Oakland did. Some gave her money, but a lot of them just took to beating her while I listened from the other side of the curtain. Then she’d lie there for days and drink.”

She gave a short laugh. “One of them finally killed her, one of those men. I didn’t even know she was dead until a neighbor came for me. Mrs. Ida. She took me on a bus and begged to have me stay where she cleaned house, for a professor in the good neighborhoods.”

She smiled and began picking lint off the blanket. “That was Madhu, of course. He really couldn’t walk very well.” She paused for a minute, then looked up.

“I don’t know whether the drones are still out there or not,” she said.

After that she seemed to lose track, then finally with an effort pushed herself up and reached for her water glass on the case by the bed.

“Madhu helped me into a grade school, and when I was older he let me use the terminal in his study. He used to sit for hours and watch me, then one day he moved me into a better school. I think he was a little troubled about it all, though.

“Later, when I was on my own, I worked on robotics—military drones. That worried him. When I visited him he’d tell me that if there was ever a chance of the machines hurting someone, I had to picture it being him. He told me that over and over.”

Her eyes clouded. “I hated him for that. When I went to work at China Lake I tried telling him what we were doing was different, because we were defending ourselves against armed men. Men with guns. But still, I had a hard time not thinking about him being killed by each thing we built.”

She looked up—Elliot was standing in her bedroom door.

“We got company,” he said.

“All right.” I made Miller some tea, then followed Elliot into the dark
square. Under the light across from us two people were waiting in a car. We trudged across the dark square toward them.

“It seems,” I said to Elliot, “that in Anne’s book you’re the wrong size and the wrong color.”

“Not a whole lot I can do about that.”

“Afraid not. Well, look at this.” Slumped in the front seat of the open car were Harry Penderson, the asteroid miner who had found the drone before signing on with us, and Carolyn Dorczak, gazing at the dome overhead.

“Hello, Tyrone,” said Dorczak. She stuck an arm out the side. “Hi, Ed—cheer up. I like your hat.”

Penderson made no move to start the car, so Elliot and I leaned on the wall next to them, under the light. “Hello, Carolyn,” I said. “Harry.”

“Hi.” He chewed on his lip and gave Dorczak an inquiring look, then shrugged when she didn’t say anything. “The lady wanted to see you guys,” he said. “What can I say?”

Dorczak rolled her eyes and sighed. They acted like a married couple after a fight, though they couldn’t have known each other for more than the few minutes since she’d landed.

“Well, hell,” she said, “
I
don’t know what I’m doing here. The whole system’s lost its little mind, as far as I can tell. That nut case of yours, The Mercenary Emperor himself, Polaski the First, has suddenly got this hard-on for building new toys and going in after our little alien visitors, instead of leaving well enough alone.” She glanced at her watch. “And he and Bart are in thicker than fleas, so here I am, carrying Bart’s briefcase and looking like I know what I’m doing.”