BIRD GIRL APPROACHES DJ and me in the tangle around the window, escorted by three searchers. “We do not like this ship,” she says. “It is not honest.”
“Figured that out, have you?” DJ asks, and I elbow him in the ribs. She’s trying to be forthright.
“What’s Ulyanova doing now?” I ask.
“She is behind curtain. She does not communicate with us.”
Curtain? Okay. Strangely, I don’t feel concern, because this much is becoming clear to me: Ulyanova is still on this ship, she’s still in control, active, and she’s going to call DJ and me forward soon. The last few hours, I can hear her in my head like a distant song.
I feel another cold, deep concern, worse than that gut-level fear I had earlier, before the confused passage of ship time. Pluto is coming. The Guru transmitter is coming—a dangerous and important moment. And we’ll soon be near that silent smudge that nobody knows anything about—unknown to Gurus or Antags. Unknown to the searchers.
Why go there at all? I don’t like it.
WE’RE IN OUR soft, warm quarters, half-asleep, when a searcher appears at the entrance. Its tentacles twinkle in the dim light. No surprise, in darkness they, too, kind of glow. They could be responsible for all the elf-light residue, bits and pieces of squid skin, squid dust. Humans shed, too, but it isn’t nearly as weirdly pretty.
Wonder what they look like when they’re at home? Maybe not very different from the way they look swimming along the cloverleaf waterways. Peaceful, graceful—dedicated and working away for the Gurus. Wonder if Bird Girl can persuade them to work for us. Maybe she already has.
There are several of them outside the hole. DJ and I are gathered up, gently but no nonsense. Not that he and I are prone to offer objections. DJ looks resigned to anything as long as it’s over with soon.
The searchers have Bird Girl in tow as well. She’s not moving, not in charge, not drafting us forward with her wings. I miss that, somehow, and wonder what’s changed. They’ve wrapped her in a cinched cover or blanket. All of her four eyes are tightly closed. Unconscious? No link. No information from her about what might be next.
“We’re going forward, aren’t we?” DJ asks me.
“If that’s where Ulyanova is.”
“Christ, she scares the fuck out of me,” he says.
“Why?”
He snorts and gives me a grim smile. Nobody else from our squad is going with us. They’re sleeping like cozy little dormice.
The searchers do their arm-nest thing and sedan-chair us beyond the node, through more canebrakes, following an internal highway that spirals and arches forward. I wish I could have a moment with Joe or even Borden to express my last will and testament—give my love and a soldier’s farewell to Mom if you make it, Commander, won’t you? The tear-jerking moment of every half-assed war movie, because you know this poor SOB is doomed—all he has to do is ask and you know he’s about to fly right out of the frame, right out of the screenplay. The Gurus, expert craftsmen, would plan it that way to keep their audience happy, right? Maximum interest.
But this is a tougher kind of epic. Not much in the way of sentiment. Pure scrap and stain. We should be accustomed to simply and violently ending it all. A lot of our dismembered, carbonized, vaporized friends are out there waiting for us. But this feels different. What can Ulyanova possibly be or do that scares us both so bad?
WE’VE BEEN TRAVELING with the searchers, right behind them, for quite some time. Big fucking ship. None so big as this one, and here it’s filled with screw gardens bigger than any we’ve seen earlier, if size can be estimated in the dim light—and if they are gardens, really, because they seem to enjoy the dark.
More spherical cages become evident, hiding back in other squash courts, other cubical recesses, filled with skeletons, some possibly human, many not—like abandoned and uncleansed graveyards in an old city—proud Guru trophies. Imagine the categories! Best performance with cruelty. Most satisfying vengeance. Most popular caged slaughter.
It’s sobering to think (or to hope) that all these bodies, these dead, were once monsters like Grover Sudbury. Perversity is everywhere. But where did they all come from? There aren’t enough planets, I’m thinking, DJ is thinking. And none of our melted soup of leftover knowledge helps us understand.
That’s all we’ve got to distract us—screw gardens and cages filled with corpses. DJ and I keep silent out of respect, but maybe as much out of terror. Surely these charnel houses carry their own ghosts! What would the ghost of a nonhuman be like? How would it differ from our own spirits of the dead—which of course we all know don’t exist? They’re figments of our imagination. I’ve never seen a ghost, right? Except that I have. And not just Captain Coyle, who wasn’t really a ghost anyway.
Ghosts seem to be able to get around. I don’t know how. Maybe the dead humans up here have already returned to Earth. Maybe they’re lost, drifting in between, dissolving, evaporating. That leads me down more highways of dark speculation—anything to keep alert. Fear and anger are good for keeping alert, though maybe not the best for clear thinking. But I have to wonder—when they destroyed Titan’s archives, and Mars’s, did they destroy Captain Coyle’s last existence?
Maybe now she can become a real ghost. Will that be better?
Enough spooky shit. We have to concentrate on what is immediately apparent and important—that there are dead things aboard this ship that do not come from Earth or anyplace like Earth, that are not Antag or anything like Antag. So who most recently supplied these cages with victims? And are more on the way?
“Maybe they won prizes,” DJ says softly as we’re moved forward, echoing my own theories. “Big ship carries a shitload of fine Guru memories.”
Maybe. But still no explanation for the screw gardens, why so large, why so many?—dozens and dozens arrayed in the dark volumes. Maybe the screw gardens are spooky, too. How the fuck would we know what’s spooky and what isn’t?
This is the Guru’s Rolls-Royce, the limo that takes the most important Gurus where they want to go, their personal conveyance around and beyond the solar system—the way they connect with every show they’re producing for their faithful audience of interstellar couch potatoes.
The show must go on, but who could hold an audience’s interest for hundreds of millions, much less billions, of years? We’re none of us all that charming, all that interesting and suspenseful. We’re none of us movie star material! Maybe it’s in the writing. The Gurus have to be masters of suspense and plot to make our petty little dramas popular.
FINALLY WE COME to an opening in the cane highway, something the searchers can pass through, carrying DJ and Bird Girl and me. The architecture changes. My eyes have a difficult time tracking, and I’m not sure I understand our present surroundings, but that turns out to be because I’m dizzy. My heart is thumping out of rhythm. Something in the air smells sweet. Could be airborne persuasion or nutrients for searchers—not so good for us. To distract myself, I pay attention to searcher skin and how the segments link as they move. These are nothing like terrestrial mollusks.
My heart steadies, my eyes stop trying to cross—and it all clicks into place. Up ahead, nine searchers in charge of a large, dark bundle give scale to a distant bulkhead. The bulkhead is flat gray and hundreds of meters wide. The bundle the searchers have surrounded is wrapped in a tight gray blanket, maybe eight meters long. At their poking, the bulk flexes. A big Guru? No… and in silhouette, it doesn’t look like a searcher, either—more like an Antag, but larger than any we’ve met.