“There they are,” Bird Girl says. “That is our reception—a quick death. This is all that remains.”
To see her home world in this monstrous disarray makes her shrink inside. “They fought for years. Some families, old and conservative, filled with honor, fought to keep the archives from changing our relation to the Keepers, our politics and historically revered policies. Cities built to exploit, then to support the searchers—they are gone. All of our unifying efforts seem to have been ignored. Searchers have nearly vanished.”
“How many are left?” Borden asks.
“Wingfuls, if that. There must have been great fear, great hatred.” Her four eyes seem to bore into mine. I can share those emotions, that combination of anger and dismay, because that’s how we’re most alike, Antags and humans—rage and disappointment. Maybe that’s what made both of us attractive to the Gurus. Or that’s how the Gurus shaped us.
“And now… they are gone. The good, the bad, the foolish, the deceived—the wise! All my people are gone. I am full of shame.”
Borden silently studies the view. Ishida’s tears, streaming down one side of her face, are the only sign of emotion in our group. Half of her was destroyed in our war. Strangely, she’s the one with the most empathy for our former enemies.
“A decision is made,” Bird Girl says. “The mimic has done what she promised. And so, after we depart, you will be left here to finish your tasks. There is no place for you down there. But we have duties to perform. Sacred obligations.
“In thousands of centuries, our world will once more travel through the inner space of the solar system. What Sun-Planet will be then… if it will even survive… who can know? But here, and on your world—we ask this of you…”
Three armored females in attendance to the big male are handed a black box about forty centimeters on a side, equipped with a battery pack and canisters. In turn, they give the box to the male, who summons me forward with a broad sweep of his wing.
I receive the box. Ishida and Borden join me and place their hands on the box, as if they know instinctively what’s being given to our care.
I look at Bird Girl.
“We have dual births from each egg,” she tells us through the translator. “Each egg can be configured to seed a family, and this one is so made. These children will be mine, my family’s. You may let them live, if you understand… what we have done. What we are, and what we share. How we have both been deceived.”
“We’ll take care of them,” I vow, and hope I can carry out that promise.
“I think you will raise them honorably.”
“We’ll try.”
“Take what memories are in your heads, or will be when the archives finish with you, and remember what we did for you, in hope of peace.”
We surround the egg.
“And take these as well,” Bird Girl says, as another bag is brought forward. Borden takes it, opens it, and peers inside. She looks up with a puzzled and pleased expression.
“Some of our bolt pistols,” she says. “They look fully charged.”
“Recovered by small cousins from your ships, your bases.”
“I didn’t know they could swim,” Joe says.
“That is why you lost so many battles on Titan,” Bird Girl says. “These, I am sure, will be used to protect.”
She reaches out with a wingtip hand, as if for the last time, to caress the egg in its case. Ishida is crying freely now.
“Tell them how their family died,” Bird Girl concludes, looking toward the transport, the other Antags, the bats, and the two searchers finishing the loading, moving in and out of the lone return vessel.
She raises her joint hand on her injured wing as best she can, and we each touch palms.
“Amen,” Borden says, almost inaudible.
“Godspeed,” Joe says.
Ishida hugs Bird Girl, somewhat to the alarm of the bats—and then releases her.
THE LONG HAUL HOME
The bats escort us back to the hangar and we are released. We watch the sealing away from the aft terminus of the spine-tree’s tramway. Bulkheads are set in place and grow up between us and the Antag transport, beaten and battered, in the hangar. Follows a deep vibration that shivers the air.
The Antags are on their way.
“Suicide!” Borden says.
“Honor,” Ishida says.
We begin the long journey forward.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Borden warns, as we each take a pistol and check it. All functional, all well maintained. I think I’d like to have some of those cousin bats go with us. “We’re not out of this yet.”
No place in our pajamas to hide or store the guns, so we carry them open. And between us, we protect the box containing the egg.
The tram vehicles are as tough to hang on to as before, and the journey is made even more arduous by more changes along the tree, plus what must be a major reshaping of the ship’s hull, difficult to understand from our point of view—like rats on an ocean liner.
Throughout, spring-steel threads unwind along the branches and the trunk, filling the spaces between with a curly metallic fuzz—leaving swerving tunnels that barely allow the trams to move forward—while cradling the growth, the ships and weapons, as if they are seeds inside a gigantic pod cramming itself with death and destruction.
I wonder what Ulyanova is contributing, if anything, to these changes. I wonder if she’s even still alive. I hear nothing from the bow, nothing from her world behind the dense curtain. The archives on Sun-Planet also have little to say now, fewer fragments to add—but for one overall impression, a kind of courtesy extended to visiting scholars—the confirmation that in time, Sun-Planet will survive, and will indeed pass through the lower system, between the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, and likely will once again scatter moons and rearrange human affairs. That’s orbital mechanics—possibly set in place by the shifter of moons and worlds.
I hope DJ is hearing that as well. I hope Bilyk has improved and they can talk. Christ, I feel tiny. Tiny but inflated with huge emptiness where answers might be, perhaps should be—cavernous silences, presaging the ignorance and quiet to come.
I suppose in their own way the bugs were as arrogant and clueless as any gods. What an inheritance! What are we left with?
An egg. Jesus help us all.
We make our winding, devious, tortured passage from the hangar forward and see that the screw gardens are the only constants, obscured as they are by the winding fuzz. There are many more of them. The largest seem to have split and rearranged, perhaps to balance their influence around the ship. The few hamster cages we can make out through the metallic foliage, between the fruiting machines—the new growths and their packaging—the cages that had once been filled with death—have been crushed by growth, folded and crumpled, perhaps to be recycled. For now, they have no use.
The sets have been rearranged prior to the next production.
Every dragging bit of our journey forward fills me with an itching anticipation that the last of the cage fighters are waiting somewhere—hiding. They were never organized, I think. But that’s no answer. I wonder if the last survivors are now the greatest fighters on this ship, perhaps between all the worlds—and the most ruthless. Or the most aware of what it means to fight a never-ending war.
Ishida is the first to see another body in the curling growth—caught up in the steel fuzz, being slowly propelled aft for whatever fate, recycling or expulsion, that has met the searchers and the other dead. This body is so decayed it is difficult to tell what it might have once been, or how it died.