Jacobi and Ishikawa take Ishida and Tak off to one wall of the cage, where they grip in a four-petal flower and quietly talk. Kumar watches from his curled position across the cage. He’s saying little but tracking everything, especially Litvinov’s exercises.
Then the flower breaks and Ishida crosses the perimeter of the cage. She adjusts her tack by changing her center of gravity like a circus gymnast. Impressive.
Then she spreads her arms and legs to slow her spin and glides up beside Kumar.
“Tell us about Division Four,” she says. The former Wait Staffer turns his head to stare back at her, and blinks. The gouges and scars along her formerly polished body parts, added to the pink lines of withdrawn wires and other scars on her flesh, give her a fierce, tattered look that’s more than a little scary.
And maybe a little sexy.
I hope we’re not coming apart. I have to admit that before we landed on Mars, and after, I thought she was kind of awesome, but none of that matters now. I just want all of us to be allowed to keep it together, stay sane, fight again.
Win this time.
Kumar seems to relax and relent. He waves for us to gather around. DJ wakes up, extends an arm, and marches with his hands along the mesh to join the condensing pack. Borden seems to materialize beside Joe. Litvinov and the Russians, including Ulyanova, arrive last.
Kumar’s voice is low and hoarse. For the moment, it seems we’ve got back some of our cohesion—but who knows? It all depends on how much Kumar feels the need to keep us ignorant.
“None of you, possibly excepting Master Sergeant Venn, has ever met a Guru or had much to do with Wait Staff until recently—correct?” Kumar asks.
Litvinov says, “Russians give Wait Staff tours, on Mars. Starshina was there.”
“Ah,” Kumar says. “Perhaps she will contribute?”
Ulyanova doesn’t react.
“The commander’s hung out with you guys, hasn’t she?” Jacobi asks, referring to Borden. Borden keeps her eyes on Kumar but says nothing—possibly waiting for him to reveal something she doesn’t know.
“Just me, until she met Mushran,” Kumar says. “She was not involved in political decisions on Earth or elsewhere until the last few months. What I am approaching, on a roundabout, is describing to you what it is like to deal with Gurus and their representatives, to carry out their orders without truly understanding their goals.” He sounds as if the loss of Mushran has put all this on him and he feels the weight.
“We’re listening,” Jacobi says.
“Good. Listen critically,” Kumar says. “I think it will soon become important.”
“What do Gurus look like?” Ishida asks.
Kumar affords her another blink, then a small grin. “Do you believe I have seen them? Seen them as they really are?”
Ishida nods intently.
Borden says, “I know you’ve seen them.”
“I, on the other hand, am not so sure,” Kumar says. “The Gurus who interact most with humans are about the size of a large dog. These have four walking legs and four arms, rather like canine caterpillars. Their faces are broad, with small, sensitive ears. Their eyes are large, like a lemur’s, possibly because they want us to think they’re nocturnal.
“Whatever we thought we saw, it early became apparent to the more discerning Wait Staff that the Gurus are talented at creating illusions. They have shown themselves capable of altering both physical shape and how we see them. How much of what we have witnessed is in fact real, I do not know. I doubt anyone knows.”
“Wait Staff fooled?” Ulyanova asks, looking up and shifting her look around the group as if to see how astonishing this might be. “You do not see from inside? Or see outside clear?”
“I am not sure what you mean,” Kumar says.
She smiles her strange smile and waves her hand—continue.
“Are they ugly?” Jacobi asks.
“We never saw them so. Usually, as I said, they appear cat- or doglike, with multiple limbs but pleasant faces, evoking a certain domestic familiarity, likely to make us feel a positive connection—to establish affection.”
“They look like pets,” Ishikawa says.
Kumar nods. “It is the highest privilege to be in the presence of a Guru,” he continues. “They evoke peace of mind, calmness, stability, loyalty. Neither Mushran nor I, nor our closest colleagues in Division Four, spent more than three years working with them. If you serve in the presence of Gurus for longer than three years, betrayal of any sort becomes unthinkable.”
“But for you—thinkable?” Tak asks.
Kumar gives a small shrug. “It was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Sanchez who brought back to Earth the first Martian settler exposed to the Drifter’s green dust.”
“I’m right here,” Joe says. Kumar looks past him, past us, like we’re living through a bad haunted-house movie and Joe is one of the ghosts. He doesn’t trust Joe, I think. That makes me trust Joe more—for now.
“That was five years ago,” Kumar says. “The settler was smuggled past all security in ways about which I have not been informed—perhaps because I myself still do not arouse trust.”
“No kidding,” Jacobi says.
Kumar is unfazed. “It was this settler who first told a select few about the ancient pieces of memory buried deep in the Drifter. At first, none of us believed, it seemed so fantastical, so opposed to the history taught us by the Gurus. There was discord in the divisions, but word slowly leaked to our top leaders, and then, we presume, to the Gurus. The settler was stolen from our care. I learned later he was executed. That was our first shame, but also the first indicator of how desperate the Gurus were to keep this information away from Earth and from our fighters.”
“They didn’t want us to know about our origins?” I ask.
“That may have been part of their concern. But also … the knowledge that our ancestral forms on the outer moons of the solar system—”
“We call them bugs,” DJ says, looking grimly serious. “That’s what they were. We get used to it. Mostly.” He’s forcing the issue.
“That’s what you see in your heads?” Borden asks.
“Yeah,” DJ says.
“You?” The commander looks at me.
“Yeah,” I say.
Ishida and Jacobi make disgusted faces. Ulyanova eyes the cage limits.
“The bugs had long ago encountered a species like the Gurus, or the Gurus themselves, and had been led by them to fight many wars.”
Litvinov and the Russians jerk as if they’ve been poked, perhaps realizing something significant. This may be their first hint that the Antags themselves have Gurus.
“The Gurus are that old?” Ishida asks.
“It seems they are. Endless wars, millions of battles, billions of deaths, before our progenitors cleared themselves of that plague.”
“It can be done,” Joe murmurs.
“The bugs, as you call them, settled through the outer solar system about four and a half billion years ago. They took their wars with them. That is about the time Mars and then Earth were struck by chunks of some of their moons. We think that at that time, they were divided into rigid social classes. The Gurus aggravated these divisions and set them against one another. Very soon, the bugs began to fight to preserve class and racial mixes, to exclusively honor a certain social or family unit—or some representative philosophy. Wars over philosophy, or within families, can be the most vicious and long-lasting. Their wars under the tutelage of the Gurus may have lasted a hundred and fifty million years.” He looks at me and DJ and tilts his head. “Is any of this incorrect?”
“Not so far,” DJ says.
Kumar seems amused that DJ should become an expert.
“Did the bugs’ Gurus share technology with them—better weapons, better ships?” Ishida asks.
“Their battles kept them mostly in the outer solar system and the Kuiper belt,” Kumar says. “They did not themselves visit Mars or the Earth. But yes, they seem to have been given insights to help them—but only up to a point, a carefully selected strategic point. Only enough to maintain a balance between opposing forces, with occasional swings of victory and defeat. The Gurus always try to keep things interesting. And the bugs must have fascinated their intended audiences a great deal. We are, perhaps, only a late sequel … an afterthought.” Kumar lets this sink in. “After the debriefing of three Antagonist survivors, under cover of gaining tactical knowledge about the battle situation on Mars—”
Joe won’t meet my eyes. He’s been in on it almost from the beginning. Always coming upon surprises, always ending up in the center of action. And only telling me when I might be useful—or if, conceivably, I might get hurt if I do not know.
“—we combined the knowledge gained from them, with the history outlined by the Muskie colonist who had been successfully exposed to Ice Moon Tea. But that was not all. Even then, we were provided with certain confirming truths by Antagonists who had reached similar conclusions, or had themselves been exposed to the green powder—like the female who speaks her mind to Master Sergeant Sanchez and Corporal Johnson. A number of these brave enemies tried to reach out and warn us. Most died at the hands of our troops—sacrificed as they tried to spread the truth.
“Mushranji sent records of these debriefings to Division One, which promptly buried them—followed by more executions. He managed to keep himself separate from all that, to play as if he were still in the camp of those fanatically devoted to the Gurus. But he carefully enlisted and informed other Wait Staff—making sure that none he approached had spent more than three years in the presence of Gurus. That they had at least a minimal chance of being persuadable.
“And soon, Mushranji had a large enough cadre of the informed and the like-minded that Division Four secretly split from the other divisions, from top politicians and administrators. Soon, we began planning and then directing operations on Mars to confirm the existence of the Drifter, its contents, and its effects on a number of other Martian settlers.
“I fear that because of our tight limits, and our failures, all of you became involved in painful confusion. We were still learning, still trying to understand how we might survive this new and growing base of unwelcome knowledge. Mushranji himself kept me in the dark, ignorant about certain matters, that I might play my part better. I hope he is not lost … ”
“Antagonista take orders from Gurus, too,” Ulyanova murmurs, again with that peculiar expression—an expression of feeling pain in a place one doesn’t know one has. Her companion, Vera, sticks by her like a faithful puppy.
Litvinov looks away and says softly to her, “We knew this must be so.”
“We are not special!” Ulyanova says. “So many have died to be part of special.” Bilyk’s glower deepens. Did he want to be special, too, or is he just reacting to the loss of friends, the end of ideals, the loss of any real reason to fight?
Tak echoes his dismay. “This has been going on for millions of years?” he asks. At Kumar’s nod, his expression crumples. “What kind of evil shit is that?”
“We do not know the occasions when Gurus broadcast these wars,” Kumar says. “There may have been long gaps when old species burned themselves out, like movie stars at the ends of their box-office appeal, and new species found intelligence, only to have the Gurus arrive, or revive, and recruit them.”
“We’re just entertainment!” Jacobi says, words sharp as flint.
“That is the truth of it, in a nutshell,” Kumar says.
Quiet around the group. The big picture, even the nutshell, is more than most of us can immediately process.
“One big, bloody reality show,” DJ says with a sniff. He rubs his nose, his far gaze showing the wear he has sustained. In the second Drifter, on Mars, for a time he had been truly happy. Then that, too, had been taken from him and destroyed—by Jacobi and her team. And now we may be about to lose Bug Karnak, the ancient archive, and our steward.
Ishikawa says, “What I want to know is, who’s paying the cable bills?”
Nobody feels like laughing. What I feel like is punching my fist into something until it’s mush. Finding out over and over again how much of a sucker you’ve been, what your real place is in this nasty old world, is something Skyrines and other fighters should be used to …
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.