“Any idea how much Ulyanova had a hand in designing this?” Borden asks.
“I’d guess she’s just letting the ship follow prior instructions.”
“Which means sending the Antags down to Sun-Planet?”
“That’s what she says.”
“Where there’s nothing left for them,” Joe says.
“And after they’re delivered?” Jacobi asks. “What happens to the ship then?”
“A long trip back to the other side of the Kuiper belt,” I say. “Or… a short deviation, right into the sun.”
“With or without Ulyanova?” Jacobi asks.
“Which would you bet on?” Borden says, and they look at each other with the sublime pessimism of having to anticipate the worst.
I don’t like being put in this spot. “With,” I say.
“All right, then,” Borden says. “Brother and sister of the tea have exchanged confidences.”
“Something’s coming,” Ishida says, and points down the shadowy, spiky center of the tree. A narrow, insectoid car with jointed, grasping limbs at each end is rolling in our direction. It pauses for a moment and reaches out to adjust the angle of a thicker branch, showing considerable persuasion or strength, and then more slowly approaches us. Faceted eyes at the end of long stalks seem to measure and observe.
The car stops a few meters away, ticking.
“Is it alive?” Borden asks.
Before I can hazard a guess, the car starts to move in the opposite direction—aft. We each take hold of a black arm and swing our legs into the cab, trying to hang on as the car picks up speed. We’re on our way, slammed this way and that as it swerves to avoid the thickest and most productive branches.
All around us there’s growth and noise, branches rearranging, more cars passing on the opposite side of the trunk, bundles of raw materials being ferried and delivered to the other branches…
The cell is metastasizing. The ship feels more and more like a gigantic, cancerous lump, producing death and destruction a million tons at a time.
Farther aft, huge objects, the embryonic beginnings of big ships, hang on the outer branches, some hundreds of meters long and still expanding, their hulls not yet closed over. Other, larger grapplers and industrial organelles move new components toward these ships, through gaps in their unfinished skins, and into what I have to assume are the proper positions.
The whole Guru war machine is in full gear, getting ready for a voyage across the solar system and beyond, to a far world where humanity’s new enemies are being fed the old line of imminent conquest and domination…
Recycle whatever you can, right?
THE LAST INSTAURATION
Every second we risk being flayed. We’re getting exhausted trying to avoid the rushing tangles, being brushed by nascent weapons or scraped along the rugged sides of half-finished ships.
Borden, seeing we’ve reached our physical limits, tells us to look for a relatively open space between branches and a slowdown in the tram car’s spiraling, jerking passage—and when those are in congruence, we kick off, away from the branches and growths. The contraction of the ship’s hull has pulled in outboard chambers we never saw until now, and we take refuge in one, if it can be called refuge, since it shudders and slowly spins, some of the walls growing long spikes, as if preparing to grab the other side and tug it shut—and may at any moment be absorbed, and us with it. But for a few minutes we find relative quiet and try to catch our breaths before resuming the trip aft.
I move off a few meters along a barely spiked curve and over a rim between the chambers.
“Going somewhere?” Borden asks from behind.
I wonder where I am going, and why. “In my head… I hear a little fly-buzz,” I say.
“Ulyanova?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Mind if we come with?”
“No…”
The whole cluster of squeezed-down chambers is like the steely pith of a gigantic tropical fruit, with the big seeds removed. As we climb and echo along the walls, crossing over ridges where chambers join, we make sure to keep our bearings so we can find our way back.
According to the buzz in my thoughts, there’s evidence nearby… evidence, and maybe something else.
Ishida, alert and sharp-eyed, spots the evidence first. “What is this crap? It’s not Antag, right?”
Pulling aside a mass of broken canes pushed up against an inner chamber, like a cave inside a cave, we find shreds of fabric. I pull away what might be a decayed coverall. Its tatters reveal three pairs of armholes, two legs, and no neck hole, but an opening in the thorax, the chest, as if whatever wore this peered out from a central eye. The shards are torn, fading, and rotten—pushed around by cane growths like tattered laundry hung on a thousand poles.
The others observe in silence. This may be the migration the Gurus arranged before our war got under way—the previous episode in the season, so to speak, when they laid up a bitter, desperate end for the Antags.
Ishida looks at me.
I’m sweating.
“You all right?” she asks, as my eyesight fades. I hold up my hand, feeling a deep unease spread through my body, as if I’ll collapse or explode—
I can’t help myself. Whatever’s coming, I have to close my eyes.
The air around me changes, warms…
Seems more human. Fresher. I smell fresh detergent, soap, and feel the smooth surface of a sheet against my neck, my bare legs.
My body arranges itself, in gravity, on a bed.
I’m back at Madigan. I look up at the familiar ceiling, look left at the bathroom, look between my legs at where the main room was—is—beyond my bare feet…
And see Ulyanova walk through the door. She appears bright and fresh, untroubled, and at first peers around the bedroom as if she can’t see me—as if the room is empty.
I want to shove off the bed, get away.
But her head turns and she finds me. “There you are,” she says. “No going home for me, ever, but perhaps for you, Vinnie. Now, look… I show what happened on ship, where you are now, long ago.”
She moves her hands with exaggerated elegance, as if she enjoys being a sorcerer, as if this, and creating an environment for herself and Vera, brings her the only joy she will ever feel.
As she performs these moves, the veil seems to fall away, and I see her as skeletal, ghostly, skin almost green—like a corpse in an old crypt.
Eyes large, staring.
And then, the instauration or vision or whatever rises from Madigan’s ground floor to a higher, quicker level. I’m no longer human. I’m crowded with tens of thousands of others into a gigantic metal cavern, in attendance to fresh weapons, new ships, not exactly like the ones being grown along the tree. I perceive that every show must have fresh designs, novel architectures, new and innovative weapons in the hands or other appendages of new breeds of celebrity warrior, to meet and then sate the expectations of the far-flung, jaded audiences so important to the Guru showrunners…
Everything around me gets stirred, then laid out like leaves in a book, each leaf an experience.
I page through, no choice, and become one of the single-eyed, four-armed soldiers massed in drop-ships descending by the tens of thousands to Sun-Planet, our heads—or rather our chests—filled with training we experienced on our own home, one of those very far-flung, dark worlds in the Kuiper belt, far beyond Pluto, and even far beyond Sun-Planet—a remote, tortured world orbiting between three gas giants, constantly being heated and torqued, volcanoes everywhere—