Take Back the Sky Read online

  “I know ship well,” the starshina says. “I dream it. Work is difficult! They fight me, question me, all the time. Here—move closer and help me stay human, will you? Before long trips begin.”

  DJ climbs closer, starts to speak, maybe to save me from the full brunt of that brightly dead look, but Ulyanova simply glances his way—and he’s knocked from the rungs into a nearby cane thicket, where he waves his arms and legs like a fly in a web.

  Nobody dares to move. What more could she do if we actually crossed her?

  She takes a shuddering breath. Then, at her permissive gesture, Vera and I link hands to pull DJ back to the rungs. He favors his elbow, which has been scraped by a broken cane.

  Vera backs off a few rungs and watches DJ and me like a hawk. Literally. As if we’re mice trying to hide.

  “You have questions … ?” Ulyanova asks.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  “In needle at tip of ship,” she says. “Like hypo that will inject us to stars.”

  “Is this a control room?” I ask.

  “It is part of ship’s eyes. Often, brain shows me what it is seeing. I control—but dead Gurus still try to return, take power, change things—and worst of all, talk.” She looks both amused and sad—easy enough in her present condition. “I keep them in brain’s closet. They are not happy!”

  “Ship treats us well,” Vera says brightly, as if that justifies everything.

  “I do not stand in ship’s way,” Ulyanova says. “None of us are problem, not you, not me—not yet. We amuse.”

  “Can you tell the brain, the ship, where to go? Take us back to Earth—now?”

  “Ship goes where it has gone, back and forth and around comet clouds, for thousands of years. This trip, after last delivery, after long journey out to Antagonista planet, it will return to Mars and Earth and maybe Titan, to pick up remaining Gurus.”

  “They’re leaving?”

  This seems to humor her. “They plan different.” Ulyanova favors me again with that ghastly smile. I feel sick with guilt, empathy—not good emotions for a soldier. I remind myself if she fails, or if she turns against us, the starshina could kill us all. It wouldn’t be her fault, but what would it matter?

  I don’t know whether to pity or fear her, but what I do not want to do is tick her off.

  DJ climbs close again, coming back for more. I always knew he had courage but this is exceptional. “We’re on our way to Planet X, right?” he asks.

  She has eyes only for me but answers him anyway. “Next stop is near Pluto, for delivery. Then out to Antagonista world. Then return to Earth. They failed.”

  “Who failed?”

  “Dead Gurus.”

  “Failed how?”

  “Their deliveries did not amuse. But still they hide and plan.”

  “Nasty things,” Vera says. “They are canceled, but always hope.”

  “I tell them what they want to hear. They pay attention. So for now, I control.”

  “Fine,” I say, and brace for her response. “But if we can’t control the ship and take it home, or wherever we want to go—what have you accomplished?”

  Ulyanova regards me with sad triumph. “I stop ship from blowing out air and killing you like rats,” she says. “Is that good thing?”

  “She is Queen,” Vera says, and pats her shoulder, then reassures her, “It is good thing. It is very good.”

  Is Vera truly a friend, an advocate—or a kind of pet?

  “Come with,” the starshina says. “Bring up searchers to help.” She swings toward the nest of spheres. “This is where squad will live,” she says. “Antags will also soon move closer, farther forward, where we can protect from ones we have set free.”

  “Set free?” I ask.

  “Our shame,” Ulyanova says. “When we opened gate, we opened cages. Fighters are free.”

  “But they’re dead!” DJ says.

  Ulyanova lifts an almost bald eyebrow. “Some still live, spread in dark places. Ours and others. Watch for them. They may be on look for you, yes?”

  “Shit,” DJ says. He’s as gray as his overalls.

  “How many?” I ask.

  “Fifty-three,” Vera says.

  Ulyanova shakes her head. “Not so many. More have died, killing each other. They are like wild dogs.”

  This is a fight we don’t need and certainly don’t want. Makes my spine freeze thinking about it. “Can’t you keep us clear of them?”

  Ulyanova looks at us with real sympathy, but suddenly, her smile is wicked. “You are more interesting to ship when you fight.” She shakes her head stubbornly. “I will not change that. It will help keep you alive.”

  Gurus and their ghosts know too fucking much about all of us. They know how to arouse fear, anger, violence—which might as well be complete mastery. It’s their script. It’s their stock on the market. And it’s what makes us worth keeping around.

  For a while, at least.

  Three searchers move up and link arms.

  “This way, please,” Vera says.

  CLOSER TO THE PALACE

  It takes a few hours for the searchers to transfer the rest of our squad from the ship’s midsection, beyond the cloverleaf water park, through the screw gardens and past the ancient cages, all open now, then along the steel vine and into the needle, where we advance along the ribbons, through the clock faces, and slightly outboard to the new black nests.

  Borden and Jacobi assign the cubbies to pairs, except for Kumar, who gets his own. Judging from the reactions, our squad will soon exercise its own choices for nest buddies. Without her Queen, Vera is in attendance off and on, enjoying a break, or just enjoying human company …

  As if in reward, one of the searchers that are always in attendance around the clock faces moves toward our new quarters, reaches into its slung pouch, and supplies us with more “grapes” and cakes and another round of blankets.

  For the time being, most of the Antags will remain close to the hangars where their ships have been moved and re-stowed.

  As the others move in, DJ and I gather Borden, Kumar, and Jacobi in the ribbon space and tell them about the cage fighters. The air seems suddenly frigid, as if the cold of outer space has been sucked into the hull along with the starlight.

  Kumar maintains a studious silence, as he nearly always does. Then he asks, “The searchers will keep lookout?”

  “They don’t fight,” Jacobi reminds us, needlessly.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But they’ll be in the way if the fighters come forward. Ulyanova commands them—but we still don’t know what they can do for her.”

  “What’s she look like?” Borden asks.

  “She’s a wreck,” I say.

  “How long can she keep it up?”

  No way I can answer that.

  Three of the searchers return aft, leaving two to take up station between the clock faces, arms barely rippling, intent on instructions and details.

  “Perfect sailors of a starry sea!” Vera marvels.

  We set up watches around the ribbon space to regularly sweep the five empty cubbies.

  BARELY SETTLED IN, we’re summoned.

  We’ve grown quite adept at moving along the canes and ribbons. The searchers have slung more rubbery cables, so now we hardly need their help. The squad gathers in the ribbon space, where Vera and Ulyanova wait. Forward, two searchers swivel to listen and observe—possibly to protect us, though we all have doubts about what they can do in that regard.

  “Show us where we are,” Ulyanova tells the ship, and the ribbons expand as if carving great slices out of the hull—opening up dozens of long, skewed views to vast clouds of stars—the nebulosities of the Milky Way.

  My God, how long has it been since I last stared up at that great bridge!

  Inside me, something strains—and snaps. I start to laugh. The others look with sour expressions. I can’t explain myself—it’s all colliding in my head, years of walking different worlds, becoming different
boys, different men—looking up at the same sky.

  Rediscovering a singular moment …

  As a grunt on Socotra, studying that arch of a billion suns, I threw away my last tiny fragment of atheism, my last arrogant assurance that I was righteously alone.

  I did not want to be alone, and then … I wasn’t.

  No way to explain it.

  But at that time, the God I believed in was a violent, deadly God.

  There were times on Socotra, at the end of basic, knowing I was going to be a warrior, when I tried to think my way to a suitable death—if I died in battle, or in space, out there! Looking up at the night sky, with hardly any lights for hundreds of miles around, I tried to turn the Milky Way into a direct stairway to Fiddler’s Green, the actual Fiddler’s Green—grunt heaven, Valhalla. Where all heroes go when they die.

  I silently prayed to my new masters, to this violent god, to the generals and Wait Staff and Gurus, the threatened billions of Earth: Send me all the way out there. Send me on a mission to find the place where brave soldiers can fight forever, but when we are grievously wounded, when the guts hang out and blood gushes, the guts get shoved back in, new blood steams lava red in our veins—wounds stitch up, bones knit, and we return to our comrades, our fellow soldiers, to toast the pain, the victory or the loss, and fight again.

  I’d already killed a man, but back then I did not know what actual battle was, certainly did not know what it was like to fight and die in near-vacuum. Eternal war seemed cool. I don’t think that now.

  I stop laughing, catch myself in a single hiccup, try to sober up. “Who sees things in these long strips?” I ask Ulyanova.

  “The searchers,” Vera answers. Ulyanova nods. “It works for their eyes. They can stretch over two strips and see everything. But we can adjust, as well.”

  I look into the widespread four eyes of the closest searcher, trying to estimate the parallax, the distance, but somehow also sensing the intelligence that might be there, might be set free, if it could only get home …

  It does not hate us. It serves and does not resent its service. There’s something potential in that wide, deep gaze—something that could be terribly useful and important—but then the searcher swivels and our moment is lost.

  “Hey,” DJ says, pointing along one wide ribbon, then another. We look where he directs, tilting on cords to adjust our view, and I make out, cutting a crescent from the starry bridge, a faded brownish-gray shadow. For a moment I can almost feel it suspended below our dangling legs. It’s a planet. Looks vaguely familiar, but we’re not used to this close view, or this way of seeing.

  The crescent has a mottled, chunky, mountainous surface thrust between rough expanses of rubbled gray broad plains or maria of smooth white, marked by even bigger, isolated angular mountains like bobbing ice cubes dropped into a sundae. It’s Pluto! We seem to be thirty or forty thousand clicks below its southern polar regions.

  Moving back and forth between a few ribbons, like kids in a planetarium, we point out the crusty borders of large, icy peaks—trying to remember those lectures on Socotra. We recover the names: Cthulhu Regio, Sputnik Planum, Tombaugh—

  But the light is so dim, the sun so far away.

  “Old moon,” Ulyanova says dismissively, then gestures for us to look forward, to where the strips converge, creating a kind of asterisk. Something large blanks the stars out there, in front of the ship, no way of knowing how far. The silhouette is all we’ve got to go on.

  “Looks like a gift pack of railroad ties,” DJ says. “But how big?”

  “Is that the transmitter?” I ask Ulyanova.

  “No,” she says. “This not even Gurus know—I do not know. Something interested only by comets, moons, sometimes planets. Every few thousand years, it moves them around—but nothing else. Brain has records of its activity going back a billion years.”

  “Who made it?”

  She shakes her head. “Ship does not know,” she says.

  “Really?” DJ says. “None of you know all there is to know?”

  She diverts her glare but does not push him away. “Really,” she says. “It is always here—always avoided. Brain does not like it. Old ghosts do not like it, either.”

  “How big is it?” I ask.

  “No size,” she says. “We see it, maybe it sees us—but it has always ignored everything Guru, all the little wars—ignored even bugs, the ghosts say.”

  “Older than the bugs?”

  “Much older.”

  “Cool!” DJ says. “I like it. Maybe it explains Planet X.”

  I shiver, and not just because of the cold. Something to deal with even if we shed the Gurus?

  Or something that makes all of this, all of us, possible?

  Looking between DJ’s enthusiasm and my dismay, Ulyanova seems to soften. She raises her hand to touch and comb her straw-stiff hair. “All will sleep soon,” she says. “Ship will make leap to transmitter, then to Antagonista world. Long leaps. Out beyond is realm of madness—madness and birth.”

  DRIFTING BETWEEN THE ribbons and staring forward at the asterisk where the ribbons meet, for no reason I can fathom, I spend my relaxation time keeping track of that unknown object.

  “Are you God?” I murmur.

  No answer. The object is alone. It does not care. It does what it does, nothing more.

  Keep looking, grunt.

  Joe joins me and I try to explain, but he shakes his head. “I’m full up with weird shit,” he says. I know he’s not an atheist, but he’s never told me what he thinks or believes.

  “Ulyanova says it isn’t Guru,” I say. “That’s got to be important!”

  “Maybe she’s lying. Maybe it’s all Guru.”

  “What do you want, out here?” I ask, angry.

  He touches my shoulder. “There’s so much shit I got wrong,” he says. “It’s going to take a while, I know, but I just want to make it right and get us home.”

  AFTERBIRTH

  Days, maybe a week. Who can keep track?

  For the time being, we’re still parked tens of thousands of klicks beyond Pluto, in sight of that ancient mystery. Looking doesn’t give me any more information, though that moon-shifter out there does look remarkably like a Christmas ornament assembled from model railroad parts.

  No motion, no alarms.

  Bird Girl has been gone for some time and no other Antags have come forward to visit. Maybe Budgie is keeping them busy.

  The squad has been rearranging quarters, as I thought we would, as if that might help pass the time and make a difference. DJ and I share one sphere, where he appears to be fast asleep, curled up in a ball. But his eyes are flicking. Neither of us is sleeping if we can avoid it. We’re waiting for that forced sleep that hasn’t arrived. We all want to be awake when it comes.

  Every few hours, I emerge from our cubby to study the views available through the ribbons, which keep us from being completely blind, like cave fish, up in this needle snout. The clock faces, even when not occupied by a searcher or two, are too cluttered, too abstract—not for the likes of us.

  DJ joins me, rubbing his eyes.

  “Shit, I fell asleep,” he says. “Anything different?”

  “Not a thing.”

  More of the squad emerges, or returns from excursions aft. Going aft makes all of us nervous. Jacobi returns first and looks around with her sharp-eyed squint. She shakes her head. Nothing new there, either. No threats.

  “No sign of fighters,” she says.

  “Tracking Antags?”

  “They’re busy down south somewhere, close to the clover lake. Still not interacting.”

  Negatives are mostly good, I think.

  Now Kumar, Tak, Joe, and Litvinov join us. Kumar’s quiet, as usual. Litvinov just seems depressed.

  “Do starshina and efreitor still control?” he asks for the third or fourth time. “Behind smoke?”

  I say, also for the third or fourth time, “Probably.”

  “Great and powerful wi
zard,” DJ says.

  A searcher waits nearby, in case we need help. We don’t.

  Borden joins us next. “Doesn’t seem solid,” she says, looking at the curtain. “Probably not hard to penetrate. Anybody been behind?”

  Ninth or tenth time for that question. As if we won’t announce it loud and clear, when—if—it happens.

  “Not yet,” I say.

  “And you don’t want to force the issue?” the commander asks.

  “She allows us to see a little of what they’re doing, not much,” I say.

  “They’re redecorating,” DJ says, and makes room between the ribbons for Ishida and Ishikawa. We’re a knot of people holding hands and footing off against the ribbons.

  “Steam heat and hot soup,” I say. “I think we’ll be invited in when Ulyanova is happy with the results.”

  “Do you guys understand how irritating this is?” Borden asks. “Having to get everything through you!”

  “I’ve never believed it would work,” Jacobi says.

  Kumar says, “Using the Ice Moon Tea and crystals, taking a chance that one of us could channel a Guru, was the best hope we had.”

  “Did that work?” Jacobi asks, facetious.

  “Maybe,” I say after a long silence. “We have to trust that the bugs knew more about Gurus than we do.”

  “A hundred billion years ago!” Ishida says.

  “Not that long,” DJ murmurs.

  “Well, then, you tell me!”

  He shrugs. “A long time, not that much.”

  “This ship has been cruising around the solar system, and outside, for ages,” I say. “The most important question is whether the bugs rid themselves of the Gurus way back when … and if they did, whether their tactics can work again.”

  “Any sign we’re being watched by cage dudes?” Joe asks.

  “Nothing yet,” Borden says.

  Litvinov says, “I am curious about screw gardens. Whole ship is filled with them. Maybe we become fertilizer for all the green.”

  That’s a new idea, to me at least. I don’t like it, but it touches key biological points well enough.