“Sunrise,” she said.
The single wistful word did not connect and he turned slowly toward her. Moreau stared straight into the flash curtains, still drawn against the night, still drawn against the chance of a blinding explosion.
“It’s almost time for sunrise.” Her voice filled with quiet awe, as if she had made a remarkable discovery. Her hand reached childlike toward the curtain and tugged at a dirty corner. Through the peephole, stars still twinkled enticingly at them. But the stars no longer shone out of inky blackness. Their background carpet had turned to a deep, regal purple. Local time in their ocean wilderness was about six a.m. In a few minutes the sun would pop suddenly out of the subtropical sea. Moreau slowly let the curtain return to its place and sat back in her seat.
The two of them were silent for several moments, entranced by the same thought. Destiny had granted them a night flight—a 10 p.m. departure from Spokane, a journey through the winter Arctic darkness over a slowly spinning earth that turned man’s clocks toward an identical 10 p.m. appointment at a faroff city. There, they were to ignite a manmade sun they would not see and make a final nocturnal run toward oblivion long before their own life-star rose again. They had changed that destiny, if only in the most fleeting way. They sat in respectful silence now, uncertain how to accept the simple blessing of a sunrise. Kazakhs spoke first.
“Just thinking about it stops you in your tracks, doesn’t it?” he said quietly.
Moreau turned and looked at this man beside whom she had flown for so many months and seen only in one dimension, just as she had acted out her own life in only one dimension. “I don’t know if I want to see it, Kazakhs,” she said. “It’s as if it might promise me too much. ” Kazakhs thought she sounded embarrassed.
“It promises you another day, Moreau. No more. No less. Be glad it’s there. Be glad the sea’s there. Be glad something’s there we couldn’t screw up.” His voice choked, almost imperceptibly. He paused, thinking of his father, thinking of the love-hate, thinking of the brute innocence and the raw wisdom, both of which he had rejected, but both of which had left their indelible mark. “I’m glad. I’m glad Halupalai’s there.” He paused again, not looking at her. He seemed far away. “I’m glad you’re there,” he said very quietly. “Here,” he added in a whisper.
Moreau felt the tears forming again. She fought against them and lost. Beneath the sleeves of her flight jacket the hair tingled on her arms, brustling against fireproofed fiber. She was shaking. She reached out, unthinking at first, and touched his arm. Then she clenched it. Then she clambered suddenly, awkwardly, half out of her steel seat, one leg tangling in the steering column, the other snarling itself in the mesh of the eight white engine throttles between them, her arms stretching past Master Caution lights and Bombs Released lights. She wrapped both arms around him, tucking a white helmet beneath a white helmet, and held him tightly. He fumbled briefly, shaking, too, and then he held her. For a moment—the quickest flutter of time not measured in Zulu—they embraced and the solitary shuddering of the one absorbed the lonely shuddering of the other till neither shuddered.
Then, as abruptly as it had begun, Moreau withdrew. She stared, frightfully embarrassed, into the grungy curtains. Numbly she took the wheel and pressed the trembling out of the bomber as they had pressed the trembling out of each other.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“Why?” he asked.
The question was put with such utter simplicity it required no answer. The bomber droned south, both of them staring into the dirty curtains. Minutes passed before Moreau asked, “Do you think we’ll see another sunrise?”
“I don’t know, Moreau,” Kazakhs replied. “I think we’ve both missed too many sunrises—too many days—already.” Together they reached forward to draw back the curtains.
Neither of them spoke. The scene was flawless—as if man had never touched it. On Moreau’s side of the aircraft the sky, stretching west toward Asia, remained the deeply regal purple of their earlier glimpse, stars still twinkling. But as their eyes passed left, toward the east and home, the sky and the stars faded into violet and then soft mauve and then faint blue. Slightly above them, wisping freely at perhaps forty-five thousand feet, a few delicate strands of cirrus clouds caught the first fiery hints of day. Below them the ocean spread endlessly in surreal ripples. After a moment, to the far left of Kazakhs, the orange arc of the sun peeped out of the sea, then emerged rapidly. It was, without question, the most beautiful sight they had ever seen, the searing rays dashing along the horizon, the sun springing back into their world.
“Hey, Halupalai,” Kazakhs radioed into the back of the compartment. “You have to come up and see this, buddy.” Halupalai’s voice returned evenly. “No, thanks, commander. I’ll wait.” The pilot’s heart sank.
Kazakhs watched a moment longer, until the sun sat like a great orange egg on the edge of the earth, the planet’s atmosphere seeming to hold it back briefly, compressing the orb into an ellipse. Then it burst free, full and round. Kazakhs turned and pulled the red filter from his viewing screen, replacing it with green for daylight flying. They would fly with the windows exposed now. They needed to see. He carefully stripped the medical tape and his one-fingered glove from his old filter and placed it on the new. He edged the plane slightly right, keeping it in its southwesterly drift. Moreau watched and then replaced her filter, too. She chuckled lightly, although no humor was attached to it. “Green filters,” she said. Kazakhs looked at her questioningly. “The green screen reminded me of you and your silly computer game.”
Kazakhs grinned. “Space Invaders. I felt like killing you in the alert room.”
“Why’d you take it so seriously?”
Kazakhs shrugged. “Passed the time.”
“It was more than that.”
“Yeah, it was. It was a lot like life. Like what we’re doing. I wanted to beat it.”
“But you couldn’t.”
“No.” Kazakhs paused thoughtfully. “That was the hook. You could never beat it.” He paused again briefly. “You said it. The better you got, the better it got. So you just kept feedin’ it quarters. Funny, I think I had that damn computer game’s secrets figured out better than the Jap who programmed it. I got to the point where I lost only to random malfunctions. They were programmed into it, too.”
“Programmed malfunctions?”
“Yeah. The shits, huh? How do you beat programmed random malfunctions?”
Moreau stared out the window into the false peace of the Pacific. “You think that’s what we’re in now?” she asked quietly.
“Sorry?” Kazakhs missed the subtle shift in direction.
“You think the world’s in a programmed malfunction?”
Kazakhs stared at her but said nothing. He understood. He had no answer.
“You learned everything about that game except the ultimate secret, Kazaklis,” Moreau said without rancor. “You never discovered the secret of the narcotic.”
Again Kazaklis said nothing. But he had sensed that secret, too.
“You just keep shoving money into it, getting better and better, discovering new secrets, developing new strategies, escalating your ability, escalating your mind’s technology.” Moreau paused. Her voice grew still more pensive. “Every time you escalate, the other side escalates. You advance. The adversary advances.” She slipped almost unnoticeably into a language of equal-versus-equal, man-versus-man. “You got better. He got better. You cracked one secret. He sprang another. You slugged in money. He responded. But the escalation never stopped. You could never win, Kazaklis, no matter how good you got. That was the secret. The only way to win was to stop.”