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 died.
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.
Kumar and Ishikawa take charge of the egg. “What do we do with it?” Ishikawa asks.
“Get it home,” I say. “After that—whatever we can, wherever we end up.”
“Looks like they’ve equipped it for a few months, at least,” Ishikawa says.
Joe says to me, and aside to DJ, “You’ve got to learn what she plans.”
Then they all embrace us, a most unexpected response, as if we’re heading off to our own deaths.
I ask Ulyanova for permission.
Vera emerges and takes us behind the curtain, through the thick wool and fog. Despite the changes and death elsewhere in the ship, the illusions beyond the curtain are still there: the tile floor, the hallway, and now, cold winter sunlight through the window at the end of the hall. The air in the apartment has chill currents, mixing with the heat from the radiators.
We are greeted warmly by a skeletal Ulyanova, and spend time with both of them in that steam-heated apartment. The mood seems relaxed, casual, despite the starshina’s appearance. Vera watches me closely. Ulyanova sits me down in an overstuffed chair and pulls up a stool. She might as well be a corpse, with her lips drawn back, her eyes like those of a lemur, her skin pearly gray and showing signs of cracking. Vera looks only a tiny bit better.
They serve us soup and tinned fish, mackerel in tomato paste. Tastes good. Tastes real.
“I am here,” Ulyanova says. “Ghosts are here. They still make plans, as if I agree, and I follow their plans.”
“Right.”
“Ship still listens as if I am Guru. But ship is about to do what it has been instructed for decades to do—make journey downsun, cross to other side of system, far quarter of Kuiper belt, to visit another new planet. Along the way, we will pass close to Mars and then Earth to pick up Gurus and their most favored Wait Staff. Once we retrieve all of the Wait Staff and Gurus, their ships will be available to carry you where you wish to go.”
“Convenient,” I say.
“I plan well, right?”
“You plan well. We are grateful.”
“Do not be. I am now more than half monster. You cannot guess what knife edge I will fall from, any second, and slice plans. Verushka and I are both monsters—but we remember.”
“We will stay here,” Vera says sadly.
“To finish,” Ulyanova says. “This is our home. We have friends, out there.” She points through the window to the Russian winter, the lowering butter-colored sun and bunched, snow-packed clouds.
“It’s a dream,” I say.
“A good dream for old soldiers,” she says. “Bilyk is very bad. He will not survive return to Earth. Tell Litvinov we have a place for both here. And a job he can do.”
“I’ll tell him,” I say.
“Now this is what will happen around Mars, around Earth,” Ulyanova says. “Ship will demand that all Gurus and their servants return, or destroy themselves, in preparation for new dispensation, new show.”
“All the old shows have been canceled?” DJ asks.
They both nod.
“Fucking righteous,” DJ says.
Vera smiles.
“This will be ship’s last journey,” Ulyanova says.
“As we discussed?” I ask.
“After you leave, I will fly into sun,” she says. “Wait Staff, politicians, generals who never fought—men and women who made great money from wars and deaths—we will share big party behind curtain. Make fancy places for them to live, to feel they have escaped. Earth is moving away from their influence. Already there is anger. So last refugees of war wait for us to save them.”
I mull this over, looking at the plate of cookies, the butter, the cup of tea.
DJ has put down his cup.
Almost against my will, I have to say, “Sometime back, you told me you knew the real reason the Gurus did all this. Can you tell me now?”
It seems that if one of us touched her, she would crumble. But she moves with grace, and her look toward Vera is still alive enough to convey affection.
“Yes,” she says. “Ghosts tell me Gurus are like game wardens. They make little wars, allow little kills, to protect us against bigger passions. Without them, we would kill ourselves.”
Vera adds, “But Gurus lie.”
I squint at the watery sun outside the window. “Yeah.”
Ulyanova rises from the stool. “Journey downsun will bring deep sleep, as before. Only I will feel the time. Time weighs heavy—bad memory.”
Vera takes my arm, lifting me from the overstuffed chair. DJ gets up as well.
Gray and dusty, Ulyanova looks at us sadly. “Go home and tell,” she says. “I hope you will land where you need to be. And I hope Earth is alive when we go back.”
“You don’t know?” I say.
She shakes her head. “No saying from brain, from ghosts. And at some point, ship must offload spent-matter reserves.”
“Ship lets you do that?”
“Ship knows how to make more, if needed. But can travel without—and do not want it in sun.”
I had forgotten about that. “Or Earth,” I say.
“Will find best, safest place. Go now.”
And we go. Back to the others, to the nests and to the ribbon spaces. So many more questions to ask the Queen! But we will not meet again. Perhaps she and Vera prefer the ship’s illusions. I would, if I could convince myself …
All wars end in whimpers. And those who serve the Gurus most faithfully, most selfishly, never learn. They rise again and again to the emotions that lead to self-destruction. There is not nearly enough energy to exact vengeance.
We could say we were manipulated. Only true in part. We lie to ourselves like cocks in a pit. We bloody enjoy death and destruction. Sex is obscene. War is holy. We’ll have only ourselves to blame when it’s all over, humans and Antags, that we could be such fucking dupes.
But Gurus lie.
Maybe without them, we’ll find a different balance, live a different history.
“How long have they been fucking us over?” DJ asks.
“Since caves,” Vera says. “Long time.”
The edge of the curtain is near. I hear groans, babble. We emerge and DJ is instantly on alert, pistol pointed at something unexpected, a shadowy broad X ahead of the asterisk, a figure—mostly naked, sprawled—
Human. Emaciated, bleeding, impaled from two directions. Litvinov emerges from behind the X, brandishing another long, sharpened cane, with a face of fury, about to finish the job, while Borden and Joe and Tak and Ishida and Ishikawa look on, unmoving, unmoved.
They, too, have blood on their arms and hands.
The figure stares at them with the last of its energy, its life. I don’t want to recognize it, but I do. The flattened nose, thin, interrupted eyebrows, a rictus of long pain now sharp and undeniable, eyes almost colorless, as if having spent years in darkness …
And a nearly transparent body, showing all its bones and veins, not from darkness but from so many journeys, so many arduous adjustments to chemistry and physics just to stay alive. Champion of champions, the last gladiator on this awful ship, he holds up one hand. The other is pinned to his chest by one of Litvinov’s canes. He clutches, at the last, a kind of knife, found or shaped somewhere, the chipped blade glittering. He lets go, and it spins off to chime harmlessly against a ribbon.
This is Grover Sudbury. Our nightmare, the man we condemned, the man Joe sent to this hell—
His head wobbles to see who else has arrived, and he greets DJ and me with a crooked half grin, of pain or recognition I will never know.
“I’m done,” he says through bloody spittle, eyes like milky opal. “I’m the last one. I don’t want to do it anymore. They’re all dead, and I’m done.”
Litvinov props his feet against a ribbon and shoves the final cane forward, into Sudbury’s chest. The cane splits and shivers into fragments.
Sudbury spasms. His breath escapes with a sound like sandpaper. He stops moving. Litvinov drifts back from the impact. We all seem to retreat from the awful mark, the pierced, racked, wretched example of soldier’s justice.
Complete silence before the asterisk, the corpse’s X.
“Bilyk died while you were aft,” Borden whispers, as if we’re in a church.
DJ says, “I think he came to give up.”
“I think he wanted to go home,” Borden adds.
“Fat chance,” Tak says.