Take Back the Sky Read online

We feel barely alive when the car stops with a jerk and the limbs fold away, threatening to pinch our hands. We let loose and hear, then see, Antags. They’re drafting away from the ships in the hangar to intercept us. But they are hardly any sort of welcoming committee.

  The air around us flashes with wings, grasping hands, bolt rifles, and pistols. The Antags take quick control of our group. Jacobi offers them our weapons. A bat intervenes to take them and moves off to join the busy mix around the interior of the hangar, where the big male is directing the loading of passengers and cargo. Preparing for departure. Two searchers move between the ships, interacting with the bats, helping carry cargo from one transport to another. Other Antags perch nearby, like a string of crows on a power line, wings folded, waiting. Looks as if they’re packing to return to the planet. What’s left of their home to return to?

  I try to connect with Bird Girl, tell her we’re here to deliver information—but the Antags tie us in cords and jerk us again into bouquets, not in the least gentle.

  The big male interrupts his supervision to make a sweeping gesture with one wing. The armored officers and bats stop their own activity and move out of the hangar to surround us.

  Then Bird Girl emerges from the hangar, assisted by several bats. Her wings are folded, but one is oddly bent as if dislocated. She’s carrying her own bolt pistol and her shoulders are damply fluffled.

  The crowd around us parts as she comes forward.

  “You’re going home?” I ask.

  Her reaction is like a needle into my head. “There is nothing left, but there is an end,” she says, pulling herself into something like dignity, her feathers smoothing. “Honor in completion.” I get her impression of what will come after: vast calm seas, warm lights glowing over water and land, over ice. No enemies except those chosen to bring glory and more honor. Bird Girl’s Fiddler’s Green.

  “You have seen what our world has become,” she says. “Who has told you this?”

  “The mimic,” I say. “I wouldn’t wish it for any of you.”

  “I could feel your sadness,” Bird Girl says. “After all we have done, and what we are now … Our husband wishes me to teach you, so you may teach others, what we were, what we are, and what we are about to become.”

  Joe and Jacobi have moved close, as if to protect me from the crowd—but there is no more anger, no more resentment. They have made their peace, and for these people, these races, that is remarkable.

  What follows next between us is an internal dance, a remarkable exchange of what she anticipates for us—of where humans might go from here, the ship crossing to Mars and Earth, passing on to gather up Gurus and move to the next stage, whatever that will be … but leaving us to join those we feel are family.

  This acknowledgment that we will live, that we might possibly go back to Earth, that Earth might still be there … this brings an end to many decades of deception and folly. The utter betrayal played upon them by the Gurus, the Keepers, is striking deep into the most conservative and warlike members of the families throughout the hangar.

  “Our husband has changed,” she says. “He will ask a favor.”

  For those not on our connection, a bat has set up the guts of an old human helm display to be shared—a kind of courtesy I would never have expected.

  In one great painful sweep, Bird Girl feeds me what they have seen through remotes and the star dish. The surface of Sun-Planet has undergone big changes. The topography is very different from what she was taught on Titan.

  It seems Bird Girl was also something of a nerd, among her kind. Her favorite subjects rise above the rest, the phenomena and characters of home that she had most wanted to experience.

  For the first time, I understand the equivalent of the Antag compass—the normal points and several other coordinates that Antags use, including where heat plumes are migrating way below the crust. Plumes and heat and magnetic field lines affect weather. Sun-Planet has external weather and internal weather. If the hot, pressurized inside fails, the outside fails not long after.

  But the current reality overshadows her studies.

  What they have seen:

  Wide gray prairies and plains, low, layered mountain ranges, and …

  Ruins. If these had once been cities, they seem to have fallen from a great height like chandeliers and shattered, then been kicked around. Walls, facets, fields of debris glisten like broken ice. The arcs of aurorae still flicker through the collapsed remnants of great arches. Apparently these cities once flew. Must have been a wonderful sight.

  Directly below and stretching to the aurora-wrapped horizon, the eastern and western edges of two of the largest of six continents face each other across a narrow isthmus filled with swirling, muddy ribbons, flowing south toward the one great global sea, the watery wall between all the landmasses in the northern hemisphere and the huge equatorial belt of ice. That belt is more than fifty klicks thick in places—a daunting wall between the two ecosystems the bugs seeded here billions of years ago.

  In Bird Girl’s memory, the southern hemisphere is just the opposite of the northern—mostly water fingered with hundreds of rocky, ice-bound ridges of land. But we’re not looking at that yet. We’re surveying northern Antag territories, historical lands and their associated waterways—

  Lands where millions of generations of Antags once swam and bred and fished, spread across the continents, discovered all the requisite technologies, built their communities, their farms and cities, and in time developed a civilization at least as old as our own.

  Only to became entranced by the heart-wrenching stories of the Keepers.

  Thousands of craters interrupt the old map of historical memory, often hundreds of klicks across, as if asteroids or small moons had been dropped from orbit. At Bird Girl’s command, the screen outlines where major cities and government-designated regions once were. She mentally tries to convey some of their names—a phonetic murmur of her mind—and then, one by one, not finding them, scratches them out with blasts of reddish anger. They are amended on the screen as well—blotchy erasures. I flinch at her vigorous rage.

  The destruction on most of the continents comes in the form of asteroid falls, followed by gigantic scorching runs across the landmasses, like claw marks—pointing to huge orbital weapons no longer in evidence. The small oceans now have very different outlines.

  That part of the war seems to be over.

  “Those brought here by Keepers have finished,” Bird Girl says. “None of our cities remain. We find no living of our kind.”

  The big ship’s orbit takes it once more over the belt of thick ice, into a slow, low passage over the southern hemisphere. There’s something cruel and mocking about these sweeps. Are the Guru ghosts, the ship’s brain, squeezing the last reactions out of these heartbroken warriors, facing the bitter truth of their destruction?

  Here, in the southern hemisphere, the display reveals that the clear blue-green oceans cover deep destruction. Trenches and plains are burned out, pitted—so deeply scored that the inner heat and pressures of Sun-Planet itself produce boiling cauldrons. Visible open trenches score the southern pole, spouting streams of plasma into space—replacing the benign and illuminating aurorae with grim prominences, overarching cascades of fire. The edges of these chasms glow orange in the eternal night, like angry welts around open wounds.

  How much of the archives have been targeted? And who targeted them? The new warriors, or the Antags who followed the commands of the Keepers? The latter, I’m guessing, before they fell to the new warriors. After that, with the destruction of the searchers, the archives would have become irrelevant. Without those tuned to their libraries, their destruction is not important.

  Nobody remains to listen. And the steward no longer serves Antags.

  Which is why DJ and I, but not Bird Girl, can still hear its voice. The steward has only us to talk to, and soon, we will leave.

  The one thought that floods me, overwhelming all indignity and anger, I can als
o see in the faces of our small band of Skyrine survivors.

  Fear for what has happened on Earth since we left.

  The display now shows the edge of the equatorial ice, and zooms in to reveal fleets of submarines, ships arranged in starfish flotillas, linked with wave-frothing chains, their upper decks packed with both aircraft and spacecraft. Several of the spacecraft are launching on pillars of spent-matter fire.

  “There they are,” Bird Girl says. “That is our reception—a quick death. This is all that remains.”

  To see her home world in this monstrous disarray makes her shrink inside. “They fought for years. Some families, old and conservative, filled with honor, fought to keep the archives from changing our relation to the Keepers, our politics and historically revered policies. Cities built to exploit, then to support the searchers—they are gone. All of our unifying efforts seem to have been ignored. Searchers have nearly vanished.”

  “How many are left?” Borden asks.

  “Wingfuls, if that. There must have been great fear, great hatred.” Her four eyes seem to bore into mine. I can share those emotions, that combination of anger and dismay, because that’s how we’re most alike, Antags and humans—rage and disappointment. Maybe that’s what made both of us attractive to the Gurus. Or that’s how the Gurus shaped us.

  “And now … they are gone. The good, the bad, the foolish, the deceived—the wise! All my people are gone. I am full of shame.”

  Borden silently studies the view. Ishida’s tears, streaming down one side of her face, are the only sign of emotion in our group. Half of her was destroyed in our war. Strangely, she’s the one with the most empathy for our former enemies.

  “A decision is made,” Bird Girl says. “The mimic has done what she promised. And so, after we depart, you will be left here to finish your tasks. There is no place for you down there. But we have duties to perform. Sacred obligations.

  “In thousands of centuries, our world will once more travel through the inner space of the solar system. What Sun-Planet will be then … if it will even survive … who can know? But here, and on your world—we ask this of you … ”

  Three armored females in attendance to the big male are handed a black box about forty centimeters on a side, equipped with a battery pack and canisters. In turn, they give the box to the male, who summons me forward with a broad sweep of his wing.

  I receive the box. Ishida and Borden join me and place their hands on the box, as if they know instinctively what’s being given to our care.

  I look at Bird Girl.

  “We have dual births from each egg,” she tells us through the translator. “Each egg can be configured to seed a family, and this one is so made. These children will be mine, my family’s. You may let them live, if you understand … what we have done. What we are, and what we share. How we have both been deceived.”

  “We’ll take care of them,” I vow, and hope I can carry out that promise.

  “I think you will raise them honorably.”

  “We’ll try.”

  “Take what memories are in your heads, or will be when the archives finish with you, and remember what we did for you, in hope of peace.”

  We surround the egg.

  “And take these as well,” Bird Girl says, as another bag is brought forward. Borden takes it, opens it, and peers inside. She looks up with a puzzled and pleased expression.

  “Some of our bolt pistols,” she says. “They look fully charged.”

  “Recovered by small cousins from your ships, your bases.”

  “I didn’t know they could swim,” Joe says.

  “That is why you lost so many battles on Titan,” Bird Girl says. “These, I am sure, will be used to protect.”

  She reaches out with a wingtip hand, as if for the last time, to caress the egg in its case. Ishida is crying freely now.

  “Tell them how their family died,” Bird Girl concludes, looking toward the transport, the other Antags, the bats, and the two searchers finishing the loading, moving in and out of the lone return vessel.

  She raises her joint hand on her injured wing as best she can, and we each touch palms.

  “Amen,” Borden says, almost inaudible.

  “Godspeed,” Joe says.

  Ishida hugs Bird Girl, somewhat to the alarm of the bats—and then releases her.

  THE LONG HAUL HOME

  The bats escort us back to the hangar and we are released. We watch the sealing away from the aft terminus of the spine-tree’s tramway. Bulkheads are set in place and grow up between us and the Antag transport, beaten and battered, in the hangar. Follows a deep vibration that shivers the air.

  The Antags are on their way.

  “Suicide!” Borden says.

  “Honor,” Ishida says.

  We begin the long journey forward.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” Borden warns, as we each take a pistol and check it. All functional, all well maintained. I think I’d like to have some of those cousin bats go with us. “We’re not out of this yet.”

  No place in our pajamas to hide or store the guns, so we carry them open. And between us, we protect the box containing the egg.

  The tram vehicles are as tough to hang on to as before, and the journey is made even more arduous by more changes along the tree, plus what must be a major reshaping of the ship’s hull, difficult to understand from our point of view—like rats on an ocean liner.

  Throughout, spring-steel threads unwind along the branches and the trunk, filling the spaces between with a curly metallic fuzz—leaving swerving tunnels that barely allow the trams to move forward—while cradling the growth, the ships and weapons, as if they are seeds inside a gigantic pod cramming itself with death and destruction.

  I wonder what Ulyanova is contributing, if anything, to these changes. I wonder if she’s even still alive. I hear nothing from the bow, nothing from her world behind the dense curtain. The archives on Sun-Planet also have little to say now, fewer fragments to add—but for one overall impression, a kind of courtesy extended to visiting scholars—the confirmation that in time, Sun-Planet will survive, and will indeed pass through the lower system, between the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, and likely will once again scatter moons and rearrange human affairs. That’s orbital mechanics—possibly set in place by the shifter of moons and worlds.

  I hope DJ is hearing that as well. I hope Bilyk has improved and they can talk. Christ, I feel tiny. Tiny but inflated with huge emptiness where answers might be, perhaps should be—cavernous silences, presaging the ignorance and quiet to come.

  I suppose in their own way the bugs were as arrogant and clueless as any gods. What an inheritance! What are we left with?

  An egg. Jesus help us all.

  We make our winding, devious, tortured passage from the hangar forward and see that the screw gardens are the only constants, obscured as they are by the winding fuzz. There are many more of them. The largest seem to have split and rearranged, perhaps to balance their influence around the ship. The few hamster cages we can make out through the metallic foliage, between the fruiting machines—the new growths and their packaging—the cages that had once been filled with death—have been crushed by growth, folded and crumpled, perhaps to be recycled. For now, they have no use.

  The sets have been rearranged prior to the next production.

  Every dragging bit of our journey forward fills me with an itching anticipation that the last of the cage fighters are waiting somewhere—hiding. They were never organized, I think. But that’s no answer. I wonder if the last survivors are now the greatest fighters on this ship, perhaps between all the worlds—and the most ruthless. Or the most aware of what it means to fight a never-ending war.

  Ishida is the first to see another body in the curling growth—caught up in the steel fuzz, being slowly propelled aft for whatever fate, recycling or expulsion, that has met the searchers and the other dead. This body is so decayed it is difficult to tell what it might have once been, or how it d
ied.

  We see only two more bodies as we cross through the regions once dominated by the lake, now obscured by stored material, machinery, ships, and thick fuzz. They look like crushed mosquitoes wrapped in gray cotton.

  Joe moves closer. Borden turns to listen. “Can you hear DJ?” he asks.

  “He’s alive,” I say. “I don’t know what he’s seeing or doing.”

  “Has he been attacked? Or any of the others?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Bird Girl?”

  “They’re already down on her world.”

  If she’s dead, if they’re all dead, then the package we’re carrying, slung between us, may be the most precious thing on this godforsaken ship.

  The mechanical vehicle, with all its manipulators folded, finally reaches the forward terminus, after we’ve long since gone numb, our hands and arms buzzing. It stops, rotates on the track, and seems to deliberately shiver us away, as if it’s done with us. Then it makes a jerking movement in reverse, and we cooperate to join hands, leap, catch ourselves—leap again.

  We’re at the base of where the needle prow once began. The ribbon room is intact and seems unchanged. We climb along the bands of starry illumination, then pause before the asterisk, as if taking in that strange cathedral window one more time, for orientation, for instruction.

  The ribbons now carry imagery from around the ship—the Milky Way, the slowly rotating shadow of Sun-Planet, its belt of ice still visible beneath the continually rolling breakers of the aurorae, like an ocean of light flooding over overwhelming darkness. The air has not changed.

  Beyond the ribbons and the asterisk, the curtain is still there, looking tattered, oddly, as if reflecting the condition of our mimic, the master of all the illusions that hide behind it. This proves to me at least that Ulyanova is still in charge of the spaces and processes important to us.

  We search the nests and find DJ, Ishikawa, Kumar. They emerge from a kind of dreaming nap and gather around us, hopeful we may know what’s going to happen next. Litvinov and Bilyk are not in evidence. I assume the polkovnik is still tending to his efreitor, like a father devoted to his last son.