And what’s about to be revealed is frankly horrifying. It may save us, but at what cost? Assembling the same fragments in his own head, DJ’s starting to look faintly unhinged, even more lost and puzzled than Ulyanova.
Ahead lies a great circle of seven circular openings, each maybe thirty meters across. The Antags pull us through the closest and then draft us another hundred meters—until the gloom brightens. I think we’ve been corkscrewed around the outer diameter of this part of the ship, but how they knew which opening to choose, and why, is still a mystery.
Sunlight glimmers through transparent slits that rise for several dozen meters along the outer wall, showing us that here the ship’s hull is exposed to space. The Antags jerk hard and our cables curl into loops, then grow taut again, as we pass into another large chamber, this one stranger than the last. It contains a series of great, dark soccer balls, wrapped in a conical net …
We’re pulled sharply outboard into a long, cathedral-like side chamber with dark gray tiers but no seats—a big, bizarre medical theater. For all its size, only three other Antags occupy the tiers, spaced out, separate, as if they bought different tickets or don’t like one another. They watch us closely with glittering gray- and green-rimmed eyes.
My attention turns to the apparent reason we’re here. Bird Girl is fulfilling her promise. Behind us as we entered, but quickly dominating, this weird theater opens wide to a direct portal at least sixty meters high. Beyond the portal slowly moves the orange and tobacco-colored ball of Titan. This confirms what we already did not doubt, that we’re in orbit and maybe about to shove off.
Titan at great leisure slides clockwise out of view. The spaceship is rotating. Beautiful, but I’ve seen it before. I look back at the tiers. The Antags, all but Bird Girl, are wearing light armor. I sense the three in the gallery are not happy we’re here. Not happy about any of this. I get from Bird Girl that these are important individuals, the equivalent of commanders or generals—one might even be a commander in chief of this particular combat theater. And the reason they’re here is that Bird Girl is being put on a kind of trial. They’re judging her. They’re judging us.
But she has power over them. How?
We hear far-off booming noises, liquid noises, and then a kind of buzz-saw thrumming whine that sets my teeth on edge—hard to imagine in a ship so large. We’ve rotated far enough that we can see a broad curve of Saturn’s rings, then Saturn itself—too large to fit inside even this theater’s broad view.
Another round of liquid noises and again the distant buzzing. The important, silent Antags reveal neither surprise nor appreciation, hardly any indication they’re alive. Tight discipline. I doubt they’ve ever spent more than a few minutes in the presence of humans, and that in quick, nasty combat.
But right now I don’t give a shit about protocol or Antag feelings. I’m impressed all over again by what lies beyond the window. I’ve seen it before but never presented this way, and I’m still capable of awe. The rings and the immense yellow and gold gas giant cradled within are mesmerizing. The light on the rings, intersected by the planet’s shadow, reminds me of the shine off old vinyl records. Even though the rings are hundreds of thousands of klicks away, I can make out the braids formed by tiny moonlets navigating between the larger rings. Skips in the record—God’s favorite songs, played over and over.
Across its visible surface, Saturn shows incredible, subtle detail—faded pastel yellow bands, storms big and small revealing brown depths, an overall softening haze that seems to end abruptly against the blackness of space. Beyond the curve of night, thunderstorms light up the murk. Some flashes are bright enough to compete in daylight. I wonder that anything could ever survive down there. Maybe it hasn’t—ever or now. The ocean moons make even more sense as the origin of life.
Bird Girl sticks out a wing and draws our attention away from Saturn, away from the gallery, and with a little flourish, toward her. The longest, claw-tipped finger at the wingtip moves along her beak, almost to her eyes, and she has our full attention—but why? What’s she up to?
Borden tracks our former enemies like a rabbit watching a circling hawk.
Slowly, like a magician, with the inboard hand of her opposite limb Bird Girl raises a long object like a cheerleader’s baton. First she touches and then twists a round knob, four eyes shifting. She points again to her eyes, then to my eyes, then to Ulyanova’s, then back to hers.
“Four, two,” the translator rasps.
Bird Girl draws an X in the air. The knob lights up and projects doubled ghosts. Our eyes aren’t easy targets for Antag displays—four into two. She then covers half of the knob with stretchy tape.
Finally, she lifts her left wingtip finger, shapes an oval in the air, and into that oval the knob projects a map of the outer solar system—Uranus and Neptune beyond Saturn, then, beyond Neptune, a long void, followed by a brief, grazing flyby of Pluto and its moons, then outward farther still—across a seemingly endless gulf, empty but for unimaginably distant clouds of stars.
The image swirls to show us the receding solar system, the sun alone bright, the rest indicated by arrows and orbits. This display has now taken us too far out to see most of the planets.
We watch, transfixed, as Bird Girl sweeps us all in a long, long arc over what lies beyond the diffuse region of dust and moonlets and comets beyond Pluto—chunks of primordial ice spread thinner than mosquitoes on a winter lake, most of the chunks no bigger than gravel (I think, it’s hard to guess and impossible to read) or even a grain of sand, but some are truly massive—great dark spheres hiding in deep space, more than a hundred billion kilometers from the sun; many times the size of Jupiter but not cold and apparently still too small and dark to attract the attention of Earth.
Then the view moves out farther still to circle a black void, a shadow-haunted world scribed by reddish map lines, five times more massive than Jupiter and ten times the diameter, its density far less than water—like a great cosmic balloon. A balloon with a nuclear core. I can almost feel that unborn star pulsing at the heart of this monstrosity, this enigma—this impossible thing.
Planet X.
If that really is the Antag home world, they’re not interstellar visitors. They’re near neighbors, astronomically speaking. They’ve apparently been out there all along and we on Earth never noticed.
“That is ours,” Bird Girl says. “That is our life. We will not get there without you.”
Borden is ignoring the documentary and studying the view, frowning deeply, a common expression for our commander. “Where’s our pursuit?” she murmurs.
Good question. We seem to be alone out here, facing no obvious threats, yet all along we’ve been harassed by both sides, intent on wiping us out with all our knowledge.
“She’s trying to tell us—” I begin, but Borden is having none of this. She covers my mouth with her hand.
“Think, goddammit! Why are they taking so long to get the hell out of here? Ask her!” she insists.
The translator works for any of us, but no sense adding to the confusion. “Where are the other ships?” I ask. “Why are we waiting?”
The translation is quick. A bristly outer layer like soft porcupine quills rises around Bird Girl’s wing-shoulders and the back of her head. She looks behind us at the distributed trio up in the tiers. The Antag commanders issue melodious commands and then, with all the dignity they can muster, not much in my eyes at least, flap their limbs and depart through a forward, funnel-like exit.
Bird Girl stays with us—banished to our company. “We have no quick danger,” she says through the translator. “But we do not control. We cannot leave yet.”
“What does that mean?” Borden asks.
“We do not control.”
Borden gives me a sharp look, as if this is my fault and I’ve been deficient all along. “How can they not control their own ship?” she asks.
“Others do not see this ship,” Bird Girl says. “No other ship will attack.”
?
??Jesus!” DJ says. “It’s been in my head all along! I’ve been an idiot!”
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell Bug Karnak’s data dumps from memories of bad dreams, and the steward has not always been helpful in laying down boundaries between the two. But now it’s becoming more and more clear—
We’ve been clued in, through fragments waiting for our need, for our necessity, to join up, to take shape, and the shape they finally assume is a confirmation that this large ship is very old, and tinged with menace and uncertainty—a dire, ancient bug memory that can only be labeled “Guru.”
“This is Keeper ship,” Bird Girl confirms. “Dark to our forces and yours. We have taken Keepers prisoner and brought them here. One knows her.” She points a mid-wing digit at Ulyanova. “They were joined on Mars. Together, they can help us guide ship home.”
We turn our unwelcome attention to the starshina, the stern-faced, serious young woman with hardly a clue to what she really is. But now my own fragments are starting to come together. The instaurations, the meeting at Madigan, something behind the observation mirror implanting and perverting me …
I know at least a little about what could be inside our starshina, tormenting her.
“You’re the one?” DJ asks with comic wonder, like he’s discovered the punch line to a joke in a stack of playing cards. “You’ve been linked to a Guru! Jesus … How can that happen? They used tea on both of you?”
Ulyanova draws her shoulders square and cocks her head as if listening to a conversation in a distant room. “Did not know … ” She’s frightened by her own doubt. “Not my choice!”
“Maybe not,” DJ says. “But if it’s true, it’s worth at least a couple of pay grades.”
“Venn!” Borden insists. “What the hell are we facing?”
“Bird Girl could be right,” I say.
“Could be? We were told the Gurus didn’t have ships anywhere near this big. And how the hell could Antags find, much less board a Guru ship?” She diverts her anger to Bird Girl, whose quills barely shift. Borden’s voice has become shrill, and realizing this, she pulls back and swallows hard. “What in hell have I got us into?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” I say.
Titan rotates back into view, looking like lumpy pastry dough stirred by a huge stick. Massive disturbances are taking shape in the orange and tobacco overcast. The centers of the disturbances open to reveal huge cracks in Titan’s surface. Through those cracks rise flashes of blue and orange, impossibly bright, impossibly large. Our diminishing communication with the steward, our shrinking connection with Bug Karnak, makes awful sense.
Bird Girl winks with her outboard pair of eyes, which I assume means, do we feel it, too? The loss?
We do.
Together, our forces and the Antags—those still under Guru influence—are grinding through Titan’s icy shell and churning the deep oceans, finishing the destruction of Bug Karnak. In all our heads, the steward DJ and I and had almost come to know, to anticipate and expect, to rely upon, is dying by falling chunks and increasing silences. Subjects are winking out. Untapped potentials are marked as blanks, then simply closing up, going away.
In Fresno, I once watched a library burn and tried to feel the pain of the books, the loss of their stories—the loss of my mom reading those books to me. I couldn’t. Now, I do.
It hurts.
Bird Girl’s translator addresses Ulyanova. “You must show us how to go through puzzle gate, how to reach ship’s control, or all ends.”
Ulyanova hasn’t had much time to feel the potential of her connection. She and DJ and I are points on a polygon. How many points there are, ultimately, I don’t know.
Bird Girl raises a small ridge of soft quills and elegantly ripples her wings a full beat. Then she rises to the funnel-shaped exit and jerks on our rope, which we’re gripping like a lifeline.
And away we go.
But not before we get one last broad look at Titan, lightning lancing from cloud to cloud—dust and volcanic plumes of water and ice being swept under by a dense shroud of heated gas.
“Gawd almighty,” DJ says, wiping away tears, moving his lips in prayer at the end of what we had never really understood in the first place: the influence of the archives. Our links with the liaisons and the steward. The wisdom of the bugs.
Our reason for being out here.
AFTER KARNAK
Bug Karnak didn’t have time to contribute much to our info about this vessel, only that parts of it looked familiar and that the bugs may have encountered similar vessels once upon a time—might know more about them and tell us more about them if we simply observe more, exchange more—help the fragments come together.
As for getting more information from bug steward—
That’s no longer possible.
I’m not sure if it’s an actual shock or just another bloody brick in a wall of cruelty and confusion, but we’ve been dragged to another cube-shaped racquetball court and another round cage suspended by cables.
There are people inside this cage. Or rather, they were people once. A sour, stale smell tells us all we need to know about their present condition.
Bird Girl tugs on the rope, making us loop around each other. We swing past the cage. Inside are clumps of tangled mummies, black and brown and gray. As Bird Girl warned us, based on the evidence clumped in this identical trap, we’re not the only humans on board, but we may be the only live ones.
Borden absorbs the view with a darkening of her face that could be prelude to a heart attack, but I know it’s just more rage—rage pumped up and then barely suppressed by discipline and training. All along, since she sprang me from Madigan, I’ve had a difficult time figuring the commander. That may be because for Borden it’s not so much honor and duty but closeted fury that keeps her going. An urge to vengeance. And not vengeance on our former enemies. There are people and things back home she’s gunning for.
Borden hates Gurus. I pity them all, despite the strong suspicion that none of us will ever see Earth again.
More important to our fate, if the starshina is part Guru, how much longer can she stay human, stay useful to the Antags?
“How many are there?” DJ asks. We try to tally but it’s not easy. The bodies are in bad shape, and not just from decay. They appear to have died while engaged in desperate hand-to-hand. Biting. Rending. Ripping. Severed, shriveled limbs drift slowly across the cage, along with blackened scraps. Some of the bodies are still tied in combat knots, limbs embracing torsos, fingers tight around necks, wrestling holds so much like coitus—others, just plain inexplicable. Last-ditch. Chaotic. Most still wear clothes, pants and shirts dark with old blood. Shoes are not in evidence. A few of the scraps have escaped the mesh. We bat at them with instinctive grunts of pity and disgust.
“Seventy or eighty,” I guess.
DJ covers his nose and mouth with one hand, keeping his other hand on the knotted rope. Borden is beyond expression but her body is stiff and her jaw waxen.
“Didn’t they feed them?” Ulyanova asks, but I doubt they were trying to eat one another. A few, I see, are draped with banners or ribbons covered with symbols I can’t read. Maybe they had all been pressed into some sort of competition, strong against weak—and the Gurus handed out prizes.
“No women,” Ulyanova says. “Maybe all men.”
“How can you tell?” DJ asks. “Not much of the fun parts left.”
She gives him a perplexed look.
“Did Antags kill them?” he asks, but we already know better. These poor bastards were put in a cage and left to their own devices until the fighting made them too weak to live. The Gurus could have recorded their combat and their agonies. Makes sense if this is a Guru ship. Plenty of studio space. Plenty of program opportunities.
Wonder who was the last one and what he was thinking, and how long he lasted after he’d won and the fighting was over?
Ulyanova looks startled. “Getting stronger!” she says.
/> Whatever she’s hearing isn’t coming from either of us or the steward. Those signals have faded to nothing. Bug Karnak is blown to bits, melted down, buried in ice and Titan’s interior magma. What the starshina’s hearing seems to be from a source much nearer—but we have no idea how all this works.
Ulyanova swings close. “Antagonista are frightened!” she whispers. “No control, no way out … and something wild bad up front.”
Borden’s darkness has gone pale. Her jaw juts. Our prospects aren’t improving. What if Gurus were and are still smarter than bugs? Could they reverse the whole weird, tricky process? Like turning a telescope around.
Are they already looking at us through Ulyanova?
A WORLD OF SHIT, WITH RAZOR BLADES
The three ranking Antags wait for Bird Girl to catch up. We’ve gathered the looping cable between us and clump about three meters behind her. So far we’ve managed to avoid bumping into structural elements—columns, beams, bulkheads, all smoothly sculpted, no signs of manufacture or refinement, like surfaces in a computer rendering.
“Big fucking ship,” DJ says, belaboring the obvious. “But we’re still back in the tail. Maybe we just passed the asshole.”
The translator renders this for Bird Girl. A sidewise glance from her two inner eyes is her only response. Blessedly, we’re beyond the corpse smell. The air here is smooth and cool.
Slow as always, I mull over another obvious data point: Gurus breathe terrestrial air, at terrestrial pressure, even on their own ship—even way out here. Is this their native atmosphere? At the very least it’s what they suck in while they’re here, and that makes the ship human and Antag compatible …
But what do Gurus breathe when they’re at home?
Do Gurus have a home?
And now that the ship is infested by Antags and humans, can it flush out the good air and pipe in the bad, can it fumigate to get rid of us like rats? Or is that too blunt and obvious? After all, how interesting is extermination without conflict, without pitting us against one another? Without cages and corpses and shit?