Emerging from the thicket come nine catamaran squid, grappling around the outer reaches. We hear booming and clicking, answered by Antag music and chirps from Bird Girl and her commanders, who rein in our leashes and gather us into a dense, weightless cluster.
The booms grow louder. In the flickering, come-and-go clouds of moonlight flakes, dozens of squid fill the forward spaces, crowding and bumping as they compete for a view. Each is about three meters across, with arms on both outboard bodies that can stretch an additional three meters. On each “hull” they display two amazing eyes, each the size of a human head, gold-flecked sclera almost obscured by large, figure-eight pupils. Again, four eyes—does that mean they’re related to the Antags? Other than the eyes, they could not be more different.
Then the sounds stop. The squid gather around us in silence. I have to think they’re not happy. Their arms quiver and dart back as they reach out to touch Bird Girl, the armored commanders, and then—me, DJ, Borden. It’s here that we all realize that the squid, the searchers, are pushing us gently aside, their attention centered on one individual in our bouquet of humans. Ulyanova.
Bird Girl drafts between us and the searchers and hovers, wings beating slowly. “These are the ones we hoped to find, the ones we need,” she says through the translator. “Keepers use searchers as drivers.”
“Are they friendly?” DJ asks.
“To us, yes,” Bird Girl says.
“What do they eat?”
“Not you.”
DJ grins. Maybe he and the squid will get along.
Ulyanova pushes past us. “They think I am Guru.” She smiles as if they aren’t wrong. “They will take my orders!” The searchers part, then brush her with their tentacles as she passes through them, spreading her arms and pirouetting. Her self-assurance is startling. She seems to pass inspection. Dealing with Gurus, maybe you get used to all kinds of shapes.
I catch a closer look as we’re cabled up again, matched in pairs and quads. Searcher skin seems to be covered with soft plates, like armadillos—a kind of exoskeleton. The plates interlock to stiffen an arm or part of the squid’s body.
The Antags urge us forward, into a deeper and thicker forest of canes. Within the thicket, scattered through the spiral, lie shiny dark spheres, each maybe thirty meters wide. More hamster cages? I don’t think so. More like living quarters. Searchers come and go, pulling and twisting around the spheres and through the canes.
Bird Girl decides it’s time for details. “These searchers cannot fight. They uniquely serve,” she says to DJ and me through our link. I get some of that—peaceable monsters—but what use are they to Gurus or Keepers?
“For Keepers, they know how to work this ship,” she says. “And for us, they swim on Titan and access archives.”
“But none came through the gate,” I say. “Have these been here all along?”
“They are from Sun-Planet,” she says, attached to an impression of wonder, hope, loss—and sadness. “They have been here for much time. But they remember our home, as well.” Bird Girl and the Antags really do feel a relation, an indebtedness, to the searchers, not at all like owners to pets. The relation seems to have overtones of a blood debt. Obviously, when there’s time, more needs to be asked and explored.
“Where are they taking us?” Jacobi asks DJ.
“Someplace where we can get a shave and a shower,” he says, almost as if he believes it.
RUNNING ON EMPTY
Putting one’s self in the arms of a squid requires a courage not expected or taught in basic. We all do it, however, because it’s hard to imagine getting through the canebrake without searcher help—and because the Antags have submitted as well and are even now ahead of us. We don’t talk much. We’re scared, scared to our very guts, in that way that exhaustion makes worse.
It’s dark, it’s weird, it’s Guru—and there are squid.
But nobody gets hurt, and in half an hour we’re escorted through the brake, and what’s on the other side is more what you might expect within a gigantic spaceship—genuine, monumental architecture.
We’re taken across a hollow big enough to hold an apartment high-rise, but filled instead by a wide, undulating coral reef of spun and accreted metal. Judging from the occupants coming and going, like bees flying in and out of a hive, this is another low-g housing tract for searchers. Helping them get around are rope ladders and twisted cane bridges, but more open, with, at the center, a large concave blister that seems to reveal space, or at least blackness and stars. No sign of Titan or Saturn or any moons. About ten searchers are stationed inside the curve of the blister, paying no attention to what’s behind them. They’re on driver duty, I presume.
We’re brought up short on our leashes and again arranged into a bouquet, keeping our distance with outstretched arms and gripping hands, pajamas hiding very little, while Bird Girl takes hold of Ulyanova’s leash and leads her into a searcher congregation behind the starry blister. There, our prize pupil creates a minor sensation of movement, investigation, rearrangement.
“It’s like an aquarium,” Jacobi says.
“I thought squid are mollusks that live in water,” Ishida says.
“We’ve eaten enough of those,” Tak says, and Ishikawa looks unhappy.
“Don’t tell them that,” she says.
“But Bird Girl can read Vinnie like a book, can’t she?” Ishida says.
“Never liked sushi,” I say. “More a teriyaki kind of guy.”
“What’s she thinking?” Joe asks DJ and me.
“Who, Bird Girl or Guru Girl?” DJ asks.
“Either one,” Joe says.
“Bird Girl is feeling pretty good,” I say. “No specifics, but she’s where she wants to be—a slow carrier wave of accomplishment, of good feeling.”
“She’s at the end point of a long strategy,” Kumar says. We’ve all either ignored or tried to stay apart from him after his interlude, including me, hypocrite that I am.
“Maybe she really likes squid,” Ishida says. “Old friends from home?”
“She’s never been home,” I say.
With Vera at her side, Ulyanova’s submitting to a more thorough searcher examination, and maybe already being put to use. She’s the only one of us that seems to have a real purpose. Yet Bird Girl hasn’t stated to me, or to DJ, any change of heart regarding our starshina once her usefulness has ended. I hope it doesn’t come to that. She’s still human, still one of ours—until proven otherwise.
Like me.
Bird Girl leaves her surrounded by searchers to return and address us all. “We will find quarters,” she says. “Will be better than hamster cage. And there is food.”
“Good to know,” DJ says. We look quizzically at each other, since we don’t remember passing that comparison—the hamster cage—on to any of the Antags. Didn’t go through my head. Maybe the bats were listening.
Where are the bats now? I’d forgotten about them. Bats. Birds. Squid. I’d like to shove a few of our DIs into this present situation. They’d go nuts. Serve them right.
“We bring others around, outside, from tail forward,” Bird Girl says, and her eyes do not waver from mine.
“You trust this ship?” Joe asks.
“With searchers, yes,” she says. “The one named Ulyanova outranks all of you, for the time. Are there mating pairs or other considerations?”
Borden asserts herself. “If possible, we’d like to be kept close—but no mating arrangements. Kumarji will explain ranks, if you set time aside.”
“We do not like him,” Bird Girl says. “We are not sure of him.”