Every second we risk being flayed. We’re getting exhausted trying to avoid the rushing tangles, being brushed by nascent weapons or scraped along the rugged sides of half-finished ships.
Borden, seeing we’ve reached our physical limits, tells us to look for a relatively open space between branches and a slowdown in the tram car’s spiraling, jerking passage—and when those are in congruence, we kick off, away from the branches and growths. The contraction of the ship’s hull has pulled in outboard chambers we never saw until now, and we take refuge in one, if it can be called refuge, since it shudders and slowly spins, some of the walls growing long spikes, as if preparing to grab the other side and tug it shut—and may at any moment be absorbed, and us with it. But for a few minutes we find relative quiet and try to catch our breaths before resuming the trip aft.
I move off a few meters along a barely spiked curve and over a rim between the chambers.
“Going somewhere?” Borden asks from behind.
I wonder where I am going, and why. “In my head … I hear a little fly-buzz,” I say.
“Ulyanova?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Mind if we come with?”
“No … ”
The whole cluster of squeezed-down chambers is like the steely pith of a gigantic tropical fruit, with the big seeds removed. As we climb and echo along the walls, crossing over ridges where chambers join, we make sure to keep our bearings so we can find our way back.
According to the buzz in my thoughts, there’s evidence nearby … evidence, and maybe something else.
Ishida, alert and sharp-eyed, spots the evidence first. “What is this crap? It’s not Antag, right?”
Pulling aside a mass of broken canes pushed up against an inner chamber, like a cave inside a cave, we find shreds of fabric. I pull away what might be a decayed coverall. Its tatters reveal three pairs of armholes, two legs, and no neck hole, but an opening in the thorax, the chest, as if whatever wore this peered out from a central eye. The shards are torn, fading, and rotten—pushed around by cane growths like tattered laundry hung on a thousand poles.
The others observe in silence. This may be the migration the Gurus arranged before our war got under way—the previous episode in the season, so to speak, when they laid up a bitter, desperate end for the Antags.
Ishida looks at me.
I’m sweating.
“You all right?” she asks, as my eyesight fades. I hold up my hand, feeling a deep unease spread through my body, as if I’ll collapse or explode—
I can’t help myself. Whatever’s coming, I have to close my eyes.
The air around me changes, warms …
Seems more human. Fresher. I smell fresh detergent, soap, and feel the smooth surface of a sheet against my neck, my bare legs.
My body arranges itself, in gravity, on a bed.
I’m back at Madigan. I look up at the familiar ceiling, look left at the bathroom, look between my legs at where the main room was—is—beyond my bare feet …
And see Ulyanova walk through the door. She appears bright and fresh, untroubled, and at first peers around the bedroom as if she can’t see me—as if the room is empty.
I want to shove off the bed, get away.
But her head turns and she finds me. “There you are,” she says. “No going home for me, ever, but perhaps for you, Vinnie. Now, look … I show what happened on ship, where you are now, long ago.”
She moves her hands with exaggerated elegance, as if she enjoys being a sorcerer, as if this, and creating an environment for herself and Vera, brings her the only joy she will ever feel.
As she performs these moves, the veil seems to fall away, and I see her as skeletal, ghostly, skin almost green—like a corpse in an old crypt.
Eyes large, staring.
And then, the instauration or vision or whatever rises from Madigan’s ground floor to a higher, quicker level. I’m no longer human. I’m crowded with tens of thousands of others into a gigantic metal cavern, in attendance to fresh weapons, new ships, not exactly like the ones being grown along the tree. I perceive that every show must have fresh designs, novel architectures, new and innovative weapons in the hands or other appendages of new breeds of celebrity warrior, to meet and then sate the expectations of the far-flung, jaded audiences so important to the Guru showrunners …
Everything around me gets stirred, then laid out like leaves in a book, each leaf an experience.
I page through, no choice, and become one of the single-eyed, four-armed soldiers massed in drop-ships descending by the tens of thousands to Sun-Planet, our heads—or rather our chests—filled with training we experienced on our own home, one of those very far-flung, dark worlds in the Kuiper belt, far beyond Pluto, and even far beyond Sun-Planet—a remote, tortured world orbiting between three gas giants, constantly being heated and torqued, volcanoes everywhere—
No bugs were involved in this round of planetary evolution. Here is quite a different style. This world, part of a new initiative, was quickened by Gurus, and now its children have been carried to Sun-Planet, where they have done their very best to destroy the Antags, the searchers, and everything they value. All the current fashion in Guru-supplied entertainment. The couch potatoes out there have grown old and thirsty, in cruel need of newer, more ironic, angrier forms of destruction and apocalypse …
What we and the Antags provided for a time is now old-fashioned, no longer interesting. Betrayal and sabotage may be just what the audiences are expecting.
Time catches up.
I brush over the battles, all the wars on Sun-Planet, with dreamlike speed and precision—not just visual, but with snips of agony, flesh rending and bones splintering, wings shredded—feeling the anguish as the Antags lose cohesion when big males are gathered up and executed by ant-thick hordes of these single-eyed monsters …
The monsters then move on to the southern hemisphere and work to turn the archives into a library without readers.
I participate in the destruction of the crèches that support Antag eggs, each the size of a soccer ball and capable of hatching to produce multiple offspring—a male, several females, the necessary components for a seed-family that can also be integrated into other seed-families and raised as their own …
When the dream collapses and fades to a violent end, I roll up in the bedsheets, and through my tears, can barely make out Ulyanova, still standing in the doorway. I am horrified and blasted by the waft of her Guru psychology, her mask—but also the sad, almost hopeful presence of the starshina I first met on Mars, not so long ago. Protecting as she must. Challenging as she must to keep the ship from killing us.
No hope of anything more.
“This is what brain knows, what ghosts tell me,” Ulyanova says. “I will speak to you one more time, but not as Guru. All your Guru bombs are removed. Even so, you are not out of danger, Vinnie. Ghosts and brain demand interest. If I do not oblige … ”
She doesn’t need to finish.
The room at Madigan vanishes like a soap bubble, and I’m back in the decay and rubble of the old chambers that once contained many of the violent, one-eyed race even now awaiting our Antags down on Sun-Planet.
The great seed-pod chamber begins to split and crack, closing down, being recycled. The spikes join with their opposites and pull.
“We should get out of here,” Borden says.
But we can’t just go back the way we came. Four silhouettes appear briefly along our return route, difficult to see against the central shadows, the spinal tree’s spin of growing branches, moving weapons, and vessels.
Ishida and Borden spot them first, Joe and I last. By this time, they’re upon us, brandishing bladed weapons, canes, and nightmare faces—the two that have faces.
One kicks around the chamber, grabbing and tossing canes and other debris to keep itself pinned to the curve, until it’s tangled with Ishida. A blade clangs on Ishida’s metal arm, another silhouette moves in from another direction, swinging for her flesh half—
But I’m there with a clutch of canes wrapped in rotten fabric, something I’ve assembled in a fraction of a second, and my own trajectory as I kick puts that bundle between the blade and Ishida, soundly thunking her, but not carving.
I have the blade wielder in my hands now, groping up along a skinny chest for something like a neck, as I’m kicked and clawed by anatomy out of a seafood dinner, and then I wrench a tough outer shell almost half-circle below a rim of eyes, and acrid fluid shoots past my ear—
But this thing is almost impossible to get hold of. It’s cutting at my hands when Joe recovers the wrapped canes and swings them over to Borden, who wedges her back against a curved wall, kicks down against Joe’s body, and shoves the tip of the bundle between a scurry of legs and arms …
Prying loose the blade, the pike, or whatever it is, which Borden has used, apparently, in another form, to some effect in training—
She swings it around, still propped against Joe, who’s sliding up a wall, about to fly free, when she passes the blade through the scurry and severs all the grasping legs, then somehow brings herself around as Ishida replaces Joe for prop and ballast—
The commander brings the pike down hard, starting to rise as she does so—and connects with the part I was trying, ineffectually, to strangle. Something flies free. I do not know what it is, because I’ve turned to take a barrage of twisting buck-kicks and sharp fist blows from a serpentine thing with a rippling haze of arms or legs, over three meters long, getting purchase by wrapping its hind portion around a spike growing from the wall. Thus anchored, it rises, long head of six eyes rotating in dismay, into Ishida’s crunching metal grip. I hear but don’t see what happens after that. Joe and I have wrapped our legs around the fourth silhouette, which is humanoid—is it Sudbury? More like a powerful ape with red and orange hair and tremendous hands, hands even now trying to rip off my arm, my legs, but without my cooperation, not quite managing to get a grip. I push in with thumbs and go for the eyes—two only—and rip at the flaps of the cheeks. It’s amazing how much strength you have when you still care, and death is upon you—when Ishida and Joe and Borden are at stake—and where the fuck is Jacobi? The whole melee comes to an astonished, quivering, bloody halt when a bolt carves the serpent’s half-crushed head away, and does double duty with the arm of the ape. The mass separates. Borden is on one side, Ishida and Joe on the other.
Jacobi is three meters away, clutching the pistol we recovered earlier—
And firing three more times before it whines that the charge is gone.
We stare at her in astonishment.
“Somebody made a mistake,” she says. “Thought I’d make sure.”
We push back from the corpses, surrounded not just by their main masses, but by twirling gobbets of flesh, revolving and rotating limbs, strings of internal organs.
None of them belong to us.
We’ve just engaged and taken down four cage fighters, and cannot believe that we’re all intact and alive.
“Any more?” Ishida asks.
“None I can see,” Joe says.
“Where’s Sudbury?”
No sign. Maybe one more.
Jacobi and Borden do brief examinations of our opponents. They’re all dead, but worse, are absolutely painted by old scars. The ape is missing fingers and a lower leg from a previous encounter, and every one of them looks as if they were once much stronger, more capable.
Before the cage matches.
Perhaps before they were all released.
No satisfaction comes with this victory. No glory, nothing but the chance to return to the spinning, fruiting branches and hitch on another car—completing our horror-train ride aft.
What a prize.
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 also 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.