Borden takes it all with relative calm. Maybe our talk did some good. Who can suss out what’s really going on, what’s really about to happen?
Tak is a master of his own sort of calm introspection. I would have expected no less. Jacobi is perhaps the least at ease. Litvinov and the remaining Russian, Bilyk, show little more than resignation. Vera and Ulyanova are still not present.
One of the searchers accesses a satchel looped around its starboard hull and draws out replacement clothes. The outfits seem tailor-made—by squid? They could be excellent seamstresses, right? The outfits are handed to us as individuals, and while searcher “faces” and gestures are still impossible to read, there’s a kind of tenderness to the whole ceremony, mixed, maybe, with Bird Girl’s display of what might be observant humor. I’ve noticed in our connection that there is humor in her, though it’s tightly bound to embarrassment—ours, not hers—and the potential for falling out of line, for humiliation, losing social position—not fitting into a perfectly obvious status quo.
Ishida and Ishikawa speak in Japanese, cocking glances at the squid, at Bird Girl, and nodding sagely. I wonder what they’re saying? Tak joins them and they seem to enjoy a joke on all of us. This irritates Borden.
Then I see the similarities—cockeyed similarities. Borden’s only human. Bird Girl is also human. Being called human is funny that way—a stretchable label that covers a multitude of common sins. Our Antag representative is not deliberately cruel, not sadistic, but there’s a touch of the challenger and even the bully about her, as if she’d rather be anyplace but here, tending to us, despite our clueless clumsiness—our evil nature! We who used to be killers of her kind and who still are, back around Mars and Saturn. How far she’ll go to arrange for and enjoy our embarrassment has yet to be determined.
In their natural habitats, and outside of protective armor, neither searchers nor Antags need or wear clothes. Do they think us weak for our shivering nakedness? Weak and funny? But they’re accommodating our obvious needs for the first time, replacing the near-useless pajamas and arranging for us to be covered.
There’s surprise among our group as we realize the new clothes fit and are comfortable. We struggle to put them on, but only against the necessity of weightless motion. The new duds are comfy enough, but they’re still just pajamas. I’d feel better in fatigues, but little chance of that.
“We are leaving Saturn space,” Bird Girl tells us all through the translator. “What we both came to Saturn to study has been destroyed. Both sides will take credit.”
She’s getting that sarcastic tone down pretty well. I wonder if Antags are just naturally a little angry. That would make them even more human, no? Easier to understand.
“Can you still feel the old knowledge?” DJ asks her.
Bird Girl looks at me—is this a question it will be useful to answer, maybe for the others? I try to nod my approval. She’s still not very good at reading human expression. But then, I can’t read her well without retreating into our link, which is not always open.
“I no longer feel the old knowledge,” Bird Girl answers. “Do you?”
DJ seems to try to listen. “Nope,” he says.
Nothing, not even shrapnel. The last residuals are melting in my head like ice crystals in a warm breeze. I might miss those bits, but I won’t miss the Guru bombs—if they’re still there, which…
They do not seem to be.
“As we move out to where comets are made, there will be study of one outer world. You call that Pluto, small, like a lost moon.”
“Always happy to learn more about Planet X,” DJ says.
“Pluto isn’t Planet X,” I say.
“Not now,” DJ agrees.
Joe is quiet. Stealth Sanchez. Even as a teen, there were days when he went away, hid out, only to pop up when I least expected him. He’d usually say something about having a girlfriend or going to a party in the Valley, but I never knew what to believe. My attitude toward Joe has softened quite a bit.
I ask Bird Girl what Ulyanova’s doing.
“Ship has schedule: Pluto, then the transmitters, then Sun-Planet. Your companion helps guide ship’s planning.”
Still Guru. But where? Is there a wheelhouse on this monster?
I ask Bird Girl how long such a journey will take.
“I am told, for Earth, five times around the sun.”
“Who tells you that?” No answer. “What’ll we do to pass the time?”
“We will not notice the time.”
“How’s that done?”
“That is what searchers tell me,” Bird Girl says. “They have done this often and often. We will learn.”
Then she shows us another projected chart of the outer regions, swooping us out to Pluto, which is accompanied by one large moon and a handful of smaller moons.
At this stage in the delivery of her data, her impressions, all Bird Girl is receiving from the searchers and maybe from Ulyanova, something unexpected and even a little scary, for her, crawls up between us, interrupting the impressions of Pluto.
This object, on the projected chart, is an unlabeled, wavering smudge, not presently active in any obvious way—and definitely not alive or carrying living things. Whatever it is, it’s not far from Pluto, doesn’t do much, may not seem important, but has no explanation. According to the orbital track, after we reach Pluto, but before we reach the transmitter, we’ll come quite close to this mystery smudge.
“Is it a Guru object?” I ask.
No answer. Our squad is taken back to quarters. We resume what passes for routine, going from sleep to sleep, being fed by squid, watched by their huge eyes as we emerge from our mushroom hole nests to chat and stare pointlessly at the stars in the star dish, telling one another we’re making history, which impresses nobody, not even me, because the distances and the numbers are so far beyond anything humans can work with, and we’re not anywhere near traveling between the stars, which supposedly the Antags had done, part of the big lie we have been fed since the Gurus arrived—arrived this time around—and when I tell that to Bird Girl, she experiences something like amusement, crossed with guilt and self-judgment, because her enemies have been so deluded and ignorant, and that is not honorable—
And we sleep and eat and sleep again, and gather and separate, and gather again, and I guess it’s been about four weeks since we passed through the gate, and I wonder what’s happened to Ulyanova, whom none of us have seen since.
All of which seems to mush up and fade from memory.
And suddenly—
Months have passed. Things feel very different out in the canebrake, around the searcher quarters and our quarters. We’re fed, repeat our dull routines, and most of us believe nothing new has happened, nothing at all has happened.
But I know different. Lately there there’s a touch of Ulyanova in my thoughts, something about an apartment and steam heat, Moscow winter—as if she’s teasing her only contacts now other than her internal Guru and the ship’s squid. But then again, what I’m feeling may not be her at all. It might be me imagining what her life was like, once.
Maybe there’s been a Guru on this ship all along and it’s pretending to be Ulyanova. At this point, would I know the difference? Could I know?
But we’re far, far from where we had been during our last “briefing,” and when we look at the concave “window,” we seem to slide through star-backed, dusty darkness at very high speed. We see at least the simulations of nebular cloud structure. Looks compelling and cool, broadly 3-D, which makes me doubt it’s straight-out real.
Likely this display is simulated for the benefit of the searchers’ big, wide-spaced eyes.