My eyes are open, though I’m still in darkness. I’m wearing a loose kind of pajama bottom. I fall against a wall and back my way around a circle. I’m in a small, cylindrical room. A can. Tuna, not sardines. If I spread my arms, I can touch both sides. I have no idea how much time has passed. I’m comfortable enough, though my body still throbs and aches. It’s dark in here. Dark and close.
“Joe? Jacobi? Commander?”
No answer. Where are we?
Have we left Titan?
I feel the peculiar vibration that tells me the female Antag isn’t far away. I pick up a jumble of her deep thoughts, then more overtones, and no doubt she can feel some of mine. Images and emotions. She’s hard at work—maybe she’s in the control room, but I can’t see what that looks like. My vision and hers still don’t sync.
But her fellows are ragging her. Some hate her for getting close to humans and not killing us. Our being here puts a tremendous strain on their command structure, their camaraderie. So many want us dead.
Even putting that aside, I don’t think she has a lot of respect for me, for us. After all, they were able to capture us alive—and even though that was what the bug steward wanted and she had told her superiors that was what should happen and everyone in her crew signed on to that course of action—
Even though we surrendered reluctantly, and two of our Oscars tried to break and run … we didn’t really put up a fight. We chose the coward’s way, right?
How old is Antag culture? That kind of shit thinking usually passes after a really bad war or a few thousand years of scouring the countryside and raping and killing peasants. After a while, that kind of thinking gets stale.
But they’re in charge.
The female delivers another sip of precious knowledge. We’re on the move; our cans (we’re all in ventilated cylinders like this one) are going to be packed into a transport, awaiting an opportunity to rendezvous with a much larger ship, that dangerous puzzle ship, even now swooping down from behind other moons. Antags do like to hide behind moons. But she insists this is not one of their ships. Makes no sense. She shows me that leaving Titan was less difficult than leaving Mars. Duh. That’s why we hardly felt it.
Will my air last that long? That really pushes a button. I remember being told back in basic that you’d be flunked out if you got iffy in tight situations. No claustrophobes allowed. Skyrine training leads you into lots of trials that involve confinement, being closed in, squeezed tight, sometimes for days or weeks. But usually while asleep or waiting to be dropped, when adrenaline and our favorite drug, never given a name but we called it enthusiasm, kept you up and prepped.
But that’s a long time ago. We’ve been through a lot since then and this fucking can is too much. It’s tough to quit a panic once engaged. All I manage is to stand flat against the wall and shiver all over. For the first time in my life, I’m asking God to just kill me. Get it over with now. I’ve lost all interest in whatever will come next, because I’m IN A FUCKING CAN and can’t get out.
Then another kind of panic grips me. If I survive, I think, I’ll never be what I was before—whatever and whoever I was before. Shithead before, but at least I was a semifunctional Skyrine and a faithful member of the Corps. What will I be in a few hours?
Just when I’m about to lose the last of my dignity, my discipline, I am bathed in a kind of autumnal light. A kind of opening is revealed through which I see something, through which I can experience the outside and try to control my fear—
It’s in the overtones. It’s my connection with the Antag female—Bird Girl.
I try to remember where I’ve heard that name, Bird Girl. My mother read me books all the time. I was five or six when she started us on bigger novels, usually from the base library, but sometimes from bargain bookstores. I try to recall the titles—something to distract me, and it helps by bringing another round of memories, this time so sharp and sweet I can almost forget the can.
I feel myself wrapped in a blanket, nestling up against my mother’s warmth and hearing her voice as she reads. Crickets chirp outside, a breeze puffs the curtains through the window screen—the last dry heat of day fading into Fresno night. We haven’t moved to San Diego yet. My mother and father haven’t gotten their divorce. These are good times, cozy times. I feel secure and happy.
Bird Girl. This may be where I first heard that strange name. Mom read me Vance and Le Guin, Martin and Tolkien, of course, but there was also this book set in South America that told about a girl in a big green jungle. It takes me hours to remember the name, then it just pops up. Green Mansions. Rima was the bird girl’s name. I feel so clever, I want to tell Joe and DJ, but I doubt they’ve ever heard of the book.
Mom’s reading to me continued even after my father left us and my behavior went downhill, exasperating her, but when she read to me, we could imagine better times and places. She moved us down to San Diego. Started dating the string of crazy dudes. But she still found time to read to me. I think now, digging deep, that the love of reading I picked up from her—that, and Joe’s influence—is what kept me from becoming a narcissistic monster. As she read she mused, talked about our life, tried to explain what she was feeling—I didn’t always want to know about that. Embarrassed the hell out of me sometimes. She drew out lessons and revealed a kind of wisdom she rarely applied to her own life, but passed to me nevertheless, along with those stories—a kind of mother’s milk full of immunization against the insanity that all too often surrounded us.
When she found a new man, of course, all that was put on pause for a few weeks, so I didn’t actually like any of her men, and she knew it and that added to our strain.
But for right now—
Listening to the overtones coming from the liaison—
“Hey, Bird Girl,” I whisper in the darkness, in the can. “Read me a story. Give me something. We’re partners, right?”
My words must come wrapped in their own overtones, a haze of comfort and the sound of crickets, the heat of a Southern California summer—and so many strange words. Maybe Bird Girl knows about Tolkien and the others. Maybe she was told to study us as a culture. Maybe she’s a scholar of humanity.
Yeah. Right.
There’s a pause, a kind of mental question mark, and then I get another round of overtones. I desperately reach for them, like grabbing flowers out of a falling bouquet, so sweet because they’re not in the can with me. Most of it turns out to be bug memory, a constant flow of old history and planetary geology. Bug steward is still there, acting between Bird Girl and me, coordinating this ancient flow—and maybe trying to give me some relief.
But there’s also a young memory and it has to be from Bird Girl, because nothing about bug steward is young—
Very sharp—
A tangled ball of wings and grasping hands. Momma Antag has just hatched five babies, and they pile up against one another in a soft bowl, mewing and thrashing and waiting for something to be deposited in their barely open beaks. A tube drops down. Momma doesn’t regurgitate—maybe it’s not Momma—
It’s not. This is a place where they make soldiers.
The infant soldiers eat. It’s pea soup and salt and anchovies, by the taste, or at least the smell. Ecstasy. Not in the least cozy from my human perspective, but it’s one of Bird Girl’s favorite early memories.
Fair exchange.
The overtones fade. For a long, long time, I resonate again between panic and trying to reach out in our weird, four-part thought space—DJ, Bird Girl, the steward, and me in four hypothetical corners—and get relief, plus answers …
DJ is barely there. I think he’s actually asleep. I don’t want to dig into DJ’s subconscious, which is mostly old movies and memories of porn, so I avoid that part.
And then—
I feel a pressure down my centerline, pooling around my feet like I’m in an elevator cab. We’re definitely on the move. I can stand, but it’s easier to squat and press my back against the cylinder wall. The pressure grows on my butt and feet. I focus on that pressure, that sensation. Something’s going to change.
After a while, I stop squeaking like a mouse and rise from the bottom, then float up inside the cylinder until I bump my head. Somehow that’s better than just sitting. We’re still in orbit, I guess, but no joy on getting the can open. We’re waiting for that big powerful ship, but it’s not here yet.
The ship we’re all stuffed into at the moment is little more than a light transport, the last of those that once delivered weapons and reinforcements to Antags on Titan. The Antags retrieved their survivors and the few remaining catamaran squid. I get a kind of doubled picture/impression of these remarkable creatures swimming in Titan’s deep icy slush, the supercold, super-saline fluids, and wonder how that makes sense, how they survived—
But I know now that the squid are not native to Titan. They belong with the Antags! And how many Antags remain? Not many. They’ve dumped the falcons and the smaller weapons that faced us across the walls of the archive—Bug Karnak. Those are all gone.
The big ship that’s supposedly out there is not one of the ships that deliver Antags to Mars. Those are much smaller, less powerful, and slower. This one is bigger than big and stranger than strange, and for some reason no Antag is really at all sure it will allow us inside, or how the Antags will take control and fly it, but if everything works out right—if we acquire or earn infinite amounts of luck—we will meet with it soon and be transferred over.
So Bird Girl informs us, DJ and me, reluctant to reveal even this much. She’s doing it only because she’s also scared, and that resonates with our fear. Still, bug steward approves of the resonance. We’re truly related, the steward observes. Proof of some ancient concept, some ancient—
I lose the rest of that overtone, which seems to come out of nowhere specific—the depths of the saline sea, Bug Karnak, maybe—
Or the squid? Did I just touch the mind of one of those? Or something even stranger …
The starshina.
I shudder.
This new and strange ship, if our luck holds, will take us very far away, very swiftly, because of a haze of branching green minds … whatever the hell that means.
Ulyanova again—just briefly. Like tiptoeing over razor blades. I want that to stop, really I do. I try to blink in the darkness. How do I know when my eyes are closed?
Fascinating stuff, no?
But I’m still in a fucking can.