“It’s like a new kind of beauty,” I say. “I don’t know about all the rest. Maybe it’s not important right now.”
“But it will be, right? If I’m going to stay human. And that’s… that’s what I think about you. Are you still human?”
“Mostly,” I say, as if it’s a joke.
“I don’t think it’s a funny question,” Ishida says. “I thought I was no longer a woman, but that turned out to be wrong.” Still watching me. “I feel everything, I feel the old… parts… as if they were still there. But I reach down and they aren’t. Just skin and metal.”
“I’ve heard about that,” I say. “Phantom limbs.”
“Phantom cunt!” Ishida says, with the most brilliant shy smile on half of her face, lighting up her eye and seeming like a prelude to something sadder, more direct and painful. “I dream about it. And someday, I’ll go back to Madigan or Sasebo or somewhere and get the plumbing finished off. Get hooked up. I’ll stop being half a female and be a whole one. They say I can even have kids, through caesarean—through a hatch!” She raises her hand and giggles behind it. “I’d enjoy having a family. I come from a big family.”
“Best of luck,” I say.
“I don’t think any Japanese man will have me,” she says.
“Try a Skyrine,” I say. “They’ve seen a lot.”
“Yeah. Wonder if that would ever work.” She smiles… at me. “What I miss most is just talking. Relaxing. Holding. Until I get hooked up again, right?”
Her need, her expression, her words—so direct. So human and appropriate. I slowly reach out and pull her toward me. We hold each other for a few minutes, nothing much more, and she snuggles into my arm, flesh face against my skin, keeping the metal side away.
“My God,” she murmurs. “You’re hard. That is sweet. That is special.”
I touch her face with one hand, stroking lightly along the boundary between metal and flesh, and then, touching the metal.
“I feel that, too,” she says. “I feel all of my other half. It’s almost normal to me now. Is that Guru tech?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe. But we’d have found it eventually.”
“Sometimes I wake up and think it’s all just the old me. And sometimes when I sleep… I think the metal half is dreaming. I can never remember, but that’s what I think.”
“Then you understand me,” I say.
“It’s like that?”
I nod and keep stroking her faces. Her face. The metal side is warm and…
I get lost in my thoughts.
DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
For days now, Joe’s scalp, DJ’s scalp, Tak’s scalp, and my scalp have all been itching, and we don’t think it’s lice. Feels like team spirit.
Feels like fucking change.
The waiting has become nasty, unbearable. We’ve been making plans to gather up what weapons we can and head aft to find the cage fighters, or whatever’s left of them. Why haven’t they made their move? Any move? We’re bored out of our minds! We’re about to unveil those plans to Jacobi and Borden when everything suddenly speeds up.
It’s Jacobi’s turn to study the “asterisk” and the mystery ornament, and she sees the change first.
Change outside the ship.
“Hey,” she says, softly at first, as if in awe—then louder. “Hey! It’s different.”
DJ and Bilyk and I join her.
“Different how?” DJ asks.
“Major!” she says. “Now it’s hollow in the center, like a donut. What the hell does that mean?”
We study the ornament’s silhouette, the way stars appear around and behind it, and have to agree.
Kumar joins us. He studies the changes with a frown, and shakes his head. “It means nothing,” he murmurs. “It has no meaning!”
“Hasn’t it been out here forever?” Jacobi asks. “Since before the bugs?”
Kumar shudders. “She is here,” he says, and turns.
For the first time in weeks, Ulyanova emerges from behind the curtain, surprising us all. Vera is right behind her, as if carrying her invisible train.
We make space for the pair. “You see that?” I prompt the starshina.
“Brain of ship sees,” Ulyanova says. She spins slowly.
“Brain have an opinion?” DJ asks.
“Planets will be put in motion,” she says. “Soon, one large world, but many, maybe dozens.”
“When?”
“Hundreds of thousands of years.”
None of us knows what to make of that. DJ looks at Bilyk, then at me. Both shrug.
“Has ship seen this sort of thing before?” I ask.
“Yes. Is old.”
“Are there other things out there, like this?” DJ asks.
“In most systems, is at least one.”
“You mean, systems with planets?” DJ asks.
“They move moons and planets,” Ulyanova says coldly. “That is all they do.”
“Got to have power for that!” DJ says.
“Is most powerful thing here, but for sun,” Ulyanova says. Vera is impatient. She wants to get back behind the curtain. “Let us leave,” she says.
Ulyanova says, “Come to tell you, decades ago, mission before Mars and Titan, ship went out to other warm world in Kuiper belt, collected another population—and moved them to Sun-Planet.”
“What sort of population?”
“Excellent warriors. Ship became large to hold them. Soon, it will grow inside, as it grew before bringing humans and Antags to war. It will make more and different weapons, to please larger and different audience. Dangerous times! Brain is restless, eager to return last of Antags, give them chance to fight before all die. Be ready for sleep.”
She and Vera—Vera is immensely relieved—rotate to slip back behind the curtain, leaving us shrouded in mystery without context—except that something has changed that never does, and the Gurus are full of surprises.
Sun-Planet may already be under siege. Does Bird Girl know? Budgie? Do we tell them?
Perhaps not if we value our lives.
Joe looks right at me. Right through me.
“Goddammit,” he says.
We make a desperate move for the cubbies, but before we can all hide away…
Something strange, something wicked.
The leap.
SLEEP OF REASON
There’s no sleep like bad sleep. Just because the universe doesn’t count the total trip time against us, so far as we know, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pass somewhere, somehow. What’s it like to be half-aware of blind blankness for ten thousand years? I’d like to tell you, but there aren’t words.
When we come awake again—fully awake and not just numbly miserable—most of us are scattered, some in the cubbies, a few in the canes, Bilyk and DJ jammed between ribbons—squirming. We pull our squad together and inspect ourselves, creepily convinced we’ve shriveled like the corpses in the cages. But we don’t seem to have changed at all.
“Join the Skyrines and tour hell,” Jacobi says.
Tak comments how different this is from the trip on Lady of Yue, where we came awake fresh and raring to go. Every scale has a different feel, brings a new set of questions.
Like, what’s this thin layer of sparkling dust on our skin and clothes? We all start rubbing, as if we could wipe away everything that’s happened.
“Searcher dust,” Jacobi says. The searchers attend to us like patient servants, silent, respectful. Jacobi isn’t happy with them, however. As they try to help her brush away the dust, she hits them with clenched fists—an exercise in futility. They back off, but do not otherwise react.