Take Back the Sky Page 6

  But having my life and death, my relations with friends and enemies, the saving and the loving and the hating and the killing …

  Having that spread around and laughed at, commented on by Guru audiences, critiqued like a TV show—

  “Are we sure this is all on the level?” Jacobi asks, looking past the others at Joe. Joe shifts their attention adroitly, with a nod, to me, with the evaluative expression I’ve always hated. The same expression he used when we first met on that concrete culvert. The same expression he used before we went to take care of Grover Sudbury.

  He wants me to answer.

  And God damn us both, I do. “It’s real,” I says. “As real as anything in this fucked-up life.”

  “Who’s seen the broadcast? The cable feed?” Jacobi asks. “Whatever the hell you call it.”

  “I may have,” Kumar says. “It is what finally pushed me into Mushranji’s camp in Division Four.”

  “Where did you see it?” Litvinov asks.

  “In a Guru domicile in Washington, D.C.,” Kumar says. “A door alarm failed and I entered without being noticed. I saw a room filled with war, and in the center, like an orchestra conductor, a Guru who looked human. It noticed me and quickly changed shape, then tried to wipe my mind of this memory, but apparently that failed as well.”

  “They’re not perfect,” Joe says.

  “No,” Kumar says with regret. “I almost wish they were.”

  “What was it?” Ishida asks him. “What was the show?”

  “Fighting between Oscars and Antagonist weapons on Titan. Spectacular, fully involving—looking at it, just from the corner of my eye, I was there. It took me days to recover.”

  This is still sinking in for the others. Loss of illusions is a long, hard process, and Kumar has not been the man we’ve trusted the most.

  “They’re actually broadcasting a show?” Ishida asks in disbelief. “Broadcasting from where? What kind of antennas—to where? How do we even ask the right questions?”

  Kumar says, “It is the belief of the people within Division Four, and it is my belief, that the signals begin in your suits and are edited locally, to be delivered by some means—perhaps this ship—to the outer limits of the solar system to be sent on their way. We have yet to confirm any of that, however. I must emphasize, the Antagonists on this ship seem to be part of that group fighting and dying to change things. Analogous to the group of us that Mushranji helped create and organize—and supply.”

  “Antags still hate our guts,” Jacobi says.

  “Also true,” Kumar says. “But they have sacrificed many in their own civil war, and many more fighting to save us. I hope we will soon learn their final disposition.”

  “There’s a word for what they’re doing, the Gurus, living off blood and misery,” Tak says. “They’re blood-sucking parasites, like mosquitoes.”

  “Worse,” Borden says. “Mosquitoes need to eat. This is war porn. Who is out there, caring not a damn, getting off when we fly to our deaths—paying to see!”

  I’m fascinated by the change in her features. This is no longer the disciplined, all-together commander we’ve come to expect. This is a frightened, angry mother, disgusted by what someone is doing to her children.

  “We used to think the aliens would be like angels, or like demons,” Kumar says. “I was raised on those fantasies. But Gurus are neither. They are in show business—arranging to get us to kill each other in ingenious and protracted ways to provide entertainment for heartless armchair rats.”

  “Jee-zuss!” Jacobi exclaims. She’s dug her nails into her hands.

  DJ says quietly, “We’re no angels, either. Snug kids and their mommas and poppas eat dinner in front of the TV and watch us die on the evening news. Leaders push their causes over our mangled corpses. Civilians get off on our dying and blood and salute us in airports. Gurus didn’t show up and recruit us until recently, right?”

  Kumar doesn’t know how or even whether to answer.

  “We’re perfect for this shit,” DJ says, flicking his sharp eyes between us. “Doesn’t matter what you call it—it’s been going on for thousands of years. I read the Iliad.” He waves his long fingers, arms still marked with red lines. “Happy little soldiers, paid rich in blood and shit and sometimes even respect.” He snaps one of those akimbo civvie salutes. Having finished this tirade, packed with far more eloquence than we are used to from DJ, he folds his arms and looks through the mesh as a couple of bats bring up a hose.

  “What do we do when we get out there?” Ishida asks, also tracking the bats.

  “If,” Tak says.

  “Out where the Antags live. Will they let us fight with them, let us help clean this up and put it right?”

  There it is. Our team wants to fight some more. I wonder if this was Kumar’s plan all along.

  “What’s it like out there?” Ishikawa asks.

  “Venn? What do you get from your connection?” Jacobi asks. I shake my head. DJ seems ready to leap in, but I give him a hard look. Right now, we’re in limbo, but judging from what little I’ve been fed, we’re going to have to get used to a whole new scale of weird. And I don’t want to add to anyone’s confusion, not now.

  “What kind of worlds are they from? What do they look like?” Jacobi persists, as if they still might trust me or DJ to know the score.

  “It’s confused,” I say.

  “Fuck that!” Jacobi says. “We need to know.” But she’s barely whispering and her expression has lost focus. Then, as if they’ve reached their limit, they all break loose and scatter across the cage. Some gather mats and wrap up in them.

  The bats look on in confusion. Are they supposed to spray the mats, as well? They nicker and knock on the cage, as if to warn us. We ignore them.

  Joe pulls me and Litvinov and Borden together. “We can’t keep on like this, on the inside with a view to nowhere. Can you pass that along to the Antags?”

  Litvinov looks around at our scattered survivors. “We are not crazy minks in trap,” he says. “Tell them that.”

  “I’ve been trying,” I say. “It’s not exactly a two-way street.”

  “What do you get from Bug Karnak?” Joe asks.

  I’ve been wondering about that myself. “Nothing much,” I say. The last few hours there’s been something peculiar about our circumstances, about this ship, that is either blocking the steward or making it go silent—withhold judgment. Or the signal is simply losing its strength. Maybe we’re already too far away.

  Or …

  What I’ve been dreading—the destruction of the archives—may be well under way.

  “What about DJ?” Joe asks.

  Borden says, “He’s been dealing with this since Mars.”

  Ishikawa passes close on a personal Ping-Pong exercise from one side of the cage to the other. “Heads up,” she says. “Twelve beady little eyes.”

  From a dark corner of the racquetball court, well outside the cage, three larger Antags have joined the confused bats to silently observe. We rotate as best we can off each other, off the cage mesh, an awkward low-g ballet, to face them. I recognize Bird Girl.

  Her translator rasps and hisses. “Choose three,” she says, focused on me. And then she adds, through our connection, an image of the one she especially wants—a surprise. Or maybe not. “We are leaving Saturn.”

  “We’d all like to have a look,” I call out.

  It takes her a few seconds to respond.

  Everyone in the cage is at full alert.

  “Others see later. Choose three,” she repeats, and I feel another something brush the inside of my head, a deeper inquiry—but also a kind of reassurance. Bird Girl believes her fellow Antags are slowly coming to understand the trauma they’ve caused us and to believe it might be counterproductive.

  Litvinov says grimly, “Old debts still need paying. How long?”

  Joe says to me in an undertone, “Be careful.” I know what he means. The shape we’re in, our people may conclude I’m
selecting the first three to be dumped into space. I don’t like being put in such a position, but I drift and climb around the cage and pick DJ, Borden—and Ulyanova. Borden because equality in our fate seems the right tone. Ulyanova because hers was the face Bird Girl showed me.

  When I’m done, the others look relieved—all but Joe, who seems severely pained—then move away from us four and from one another like drops of water on oil to grip the limits of the cage.

  Had I not received the starshina’s image, I would not have picked her. There’s more going on with her, inside her, than I can fathom. I might feel a connection to that weirdness, but without reason or explanation. Or rather—scattered shards of explanation, which do not, unassembled, take any satisfactory shape.

  The hatch opens in the mesh cage and the four of us pass through, Ulyanova last. Vera clasps her hand, then reluctantly lets her go.

  Bird Girl extends with her wingtip hand another rubbery rope about ten meters long. With a shake, she indicates all of us should take hold. Then she and her companions move out ahead, drafting us out of the racquetball court and into another long, curved hallway.

  Being in this ship is like living in a gigantic steel heart—or intestine. That’s it. We’re literally in the bowels of the ship.

  Borden grimaces as she bounces off the tube. Ulyanova continues to look as if we’re all being led to the gallows.

  “Pretty obvious where this ship will be going,” DJ says, gripping the chain and rotating slowly around an axis through his sternum. “What else is out there but Planet X?”

  I ignore him for the moment. I’m getting signals again. Bug steward is sending more tantalizing, brief snippets. Things are changing rapidly down on Titan—nothing good.

  “No, really!” DJ insists to nobody’s stated objection. This is his chance. “What else? They’ve been looking for it since the nineteenth century. It was what pushed astronomers to discover Neptune, but Neptune was weird … tilted over and shit. So they looked for Planet X again and found Pluto. But Pluto was too small!”

  Borden can’t get the rhythm of our movement through the tube. “I’m more concerned about where we’re going right now,” she says, teeth chattering.

  “But that’s the big kahuna! The Antags call it Sun-Planet.”

  Borden looks to me as the rope torques us about. We bounce and correct. “You’ve heard that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Their Sun-Planet is Planet X?”

  “Of course it is!” DJ says. “It swoops down every few hundreds of thousands of years and scatters moons and stuff like billiard balls.”

  Borden drills me with her eyes. “You did not mention any of this!”

  “None of it’s confirmed,” I say.

  “If she tells you something, shows you something, give it to me and Kumar!”

  “Sure,” I say, and she’s right. DJ also looks apologetic. Knowing when to divulge and what to divulge is a real art form in this situation and around this crew.

  And there’s worse to come. I just can’t put the fragments together, not yet. But I’m keeping my eye on Ulyanova because Bird Girl chose her, and because I sense she’s at the center of everything about to happen. I just can’t figure out why.

  The tube widens and the Antags have more freedom to keep us from bumping and bouncing. Our trip goes on for more long minutes, time enough for me to get bored.

  I remember the nighttime lectures under the amazing skies of Socotra that seemed to dwarf both the ocean and the island. The DIs had brought in a crew of professors and they were trying to convert a bunch of grunts into stargazers. Pleasant memory, actually. That’s when DJ became fascinated with the idea of Planet X. Maybe he’s always been the prescient one.

  Ulyanova crawls up the chain and grips my arm. “I feel someone!” she says. “Is not right, is strange!”

  “Yeah,” DJ says. “You don’t know it yet, but you’re one of us.”

  Borden looks back at him, lip curled. More stuff not reported?

  “How?” the starshina asks.

  “Were you ever exposed to the green dust inside the Drifters?” DJ asks.

  She frowns. “Possible,” she says. “Help pick up bodies.”

  “Welcome to the club,” he says. “See things?”

  Ulyanova frowns again, shakes her head. She’s lying. But how, and why?

  And why does Bird Girl care?

  We reach the open end of one tube and emerge on one side of an aggressively amazing space. It takes a few confused seconds to process what we’re seeing.

  Big ship indeed.

  A wide curved landscape stretches beneath us, rising on two axes to a central shaft maybe half a klick away, itself a hundred meters thick. The curved surface butts up against the shaft and then smoothly spirals around it, like the surface of a screw or the inside of a shell. No way of knowing how many turns the spiral makes, or how long the shaft is, but what we can see, upper surface and lower, is coated with a carpet of bushy green, red, and brown vegetation. Enclosing this giant spiral is a blank, almost featureless outer wall. The way the lighting concentrates on the screw itself is mysterious—no obvious source and very little scatter against that surrounding wall.

  Ulyanova makes a growling sound and taps her head, as if to knock some wiring back in place.

  “Oxygen processing?” Borden asks.

  “Or a big salad bowl,” I say.

  “What do Antags eat?” Borden asks, as if we’d know.

  DJ just squints as if thinking hurts.

  Our escorts tug on the rubbery rope and pull us up close, then point their wingtips at a rail running around the outer edge of the screw. From around the long curve comes an open car, empty, automated. It stops right beside us.

  Bird Girl suggests we all climb in and hang on to the straps. We do that. Then, without a jerk, just smooth acceleration, the car whisks us around the long spiral of the screw’s edge—forward, I think, toward the prow of this monstrous ship. Our progress is leisurely. These cars may be made for bringing in the crops or carrying farmers—not for mass transit.

  “We’re being kept in the back of the bus,” Borden says. “Aft of sewage treatment or whatever this is.”

  Bird Girl turns, her four eyes glittering, and says, “Not shit. Not food.” Through our link, she’s trying to convey something about this ship, but to me it’s a muddle, and I doubt DJ has a clue.

  Here it is again—the difficulty of meshing the ways our brains work. We may be relatives, but we haven’t been connected socially or biologically for ever so long—maybe for as long as there’s been complex life on Earth. There’s another conflict as well, an invisible fight to receive and act on information while we’re losing one of our most important sources.

  Bug Karnak is shrinking. Our links are fading, dying.

  I look at the endless acres of whatever sort of growth or crop rises along the spiraling curve.

  “Are they trying to speak something?” Ulyanova asks. “I do not feel it right.”

  Beats us all. None of us feels it right.

  OUTER OF OUTERS

  In fifteen or twenty minutes—no helms, no timekeepers of any sort, how are we supposed to know how long things take?—the transport has wound us fourteen times around the screw and never a difference, never a change—reddish, brownish, greenish broccoli-like bushes. Not food. Not for air. Not to suck up shit and process it.

  Like DJ and Borden, and maybe Ulyanova, who has this puzzled look all the time now, watching the inner shaft and the acre after acre of broccoli … we’re getting hypnotized.

  Then we slow. The rail frees itself from the screw’s edge and lofts over the brushy surface, and for the first time I notice there’s no new upper surface; we’re nearing the end of this particular line and we’re still nearly weightless. If the ship is moving somewhere, it’s accelerating at no more than a few percent g.

  At the end of the screw is an inverted dome, also featureless—gray and smooth. The Antags do not get out of the
transport, so we hang on while it rolls for a couple of hundred more meters. The center shaft of the screw gardens passes up and maybe through that dome, but before the shaft and dome join, there’s a hole in the shaft’s side—no hatch, just a hole. We enter that hole and with a sigh and a jerk, as if hitting a bumper, the transport comes to a halt in darkness.

  The Antags—visible to us now only as shadows—swing away and tug on our cord. More cords and cables have been stretched from the darkness above to a few meters below the transport, and we are encouraged by gestures and Bird Girl’s brief screechy words to climb into a deeper darkness. Antags seem to love darkness. Maybe that’s why they have four eyes. They’re used to darkness and night, or dark ocean.

  Ulyanova stays close to me. Borden stays close to DJ. Three of us with some sort of connection, but one deaf and almost completely blind to the greater messaging of Ice Moon Tea. Borden’s wondering why she’s been allowed to come this far with us, the special ones. Why Bird Girl chose her. Really, it’s because I chose her. There’s something about her we need right now, a steadfastness and stability, perhaps a lack of imagination. Because things are about to get really strange.

  I have to ask myself if Borden knew even at Madigan, even before I came back from Mars, that Ice Moon Tea was important, that some of us were going to be crucial and had to be saved. Well, there’s one more of us now. One down, Kazak—and one up, maybe. Ulyanova. Balance of forces. Not for the first time do I wish that Coyle was still around, still explaining, still bitching. Bird Girl can’t seem to explain the most important things in ways I understand, and we’re both tangential to the information contained in Bug Karnak …

  Which is melting away like a sand castle at high tide. “Inquire” indeed. After being hidden from the Gurus for so many eons, maybe it’ll just wash out with the roaring tsunami of human and Antag forces down on Titan—and leave us literally dumb.