Take Back the Sky

by Greg Bear

  But bugs never met or knew human beings or anything on Earth. Reverse familiarity. Later manifestations of bug civilization helped seed the outer reaches of the solar system, far beyond Pluto, far indeed from the sun. In fact, that’s where all the important stuff was happening, four billion years ago.

  And the searchers, for the Antags at least, are among the most important.

  But how did they become useful to the Gurus? They don’t fight. Can they defend themselves against anybody or anything? How can they be soldiers in a Guru-inspired war?

  Maybe they provide a lagniappe of irony, pity, perspective. There’s a theory so vague I withdraw my hand. The vision subsides. I’m warm, I’m surrounded, it’s not much stranger—maybe slightly less strange, actually—than the quarters we occupied on the Spook, and there’s no impending battle, no fight planned for the day, the month, maybe for years, How long will it take us to get where Bird Girl thinks we’re going? Hundreds of billions of kilometers. Maybe a trillion. We’re definitely out of action for this part of the season, probably for hundreds of seasons to come. Maybe we’ll die inside this monster.

  Inside. We’ve been eaten by an immense Guru ship populated by Captain Nemo’s worst nightmares … but all in all, it’s not too bad. A vacation break from the Red or Titan. Instant death delayed.

  I can’t hear Captain Coyle anymore, but I know what she’d tell me. She’d say, When you get home, Venn, you’re going to be one fucked-up dude.

  I EMERGE FROM my hole and almost bump into Borden. She’s looking reasonably sharp, so I ask her where she got coffee. She gives me a chilly smile. “We need to talk.”

  “I’m still half-asleep.”

  “That’s our problem, Venn. We’ve been sleepwalking ever since Titan. I need to talk to somebody about command structure and discipline.”

  Of course you do, I say to myself. “Happy to listen, Commander, but I’m not sure I’m the right guy.”

  “I’m conflicted about Sanchez. I don’t like his story about Sudbury. Putting our soldiers, any kind of soldier, into the hands of monsters … ”

  “DJ and Tak and I wouldn’t be here without him. He saved our bacon, ma’am, and Sudbury was one mean son of a bitch.”

  “Even so. I can’t talk to Litvinov, he’s too grief-stricken at the loss of Ulyanova.”

  “She’s not dead, Commander.”

  “She might as well be. And she’s taken one of the efreitors with her.”

  “Vera?”

  “We haven’t seen either of them since I don’t know when. That’s part of the problem … I have no idea when this is or where we are, and no actionable about where we’re heading.”

  “Bird Girl says she and her fellow Antags are going home, but most or all of them have never been there. DJ thinks it’s Planet X.”

  “I goddamned well can’t talk to the corporal. He’s too whacked for me.”

  “DJ is smart and he’s straight, Commander.”

  “Maybe it’s my lack, then, but I need to think about structure, about who we are, with somebody I think gives a damn.”

  “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”

  “Who said that—you?”

  “A writer named Wendell Berry.”

  “You read a lot, Venn?”

  “I like to read. My mother read a lot, sometimes to me.” Borden is the current puzzle, I tell myself. Constrained rage, trying to appear so calm on the outside … What does she think we can do? We’re so reduced we could all hole up in a nutshell and leave room for the nut.

  “What about Kumar?” I say. “He’s the civilian authority, right?”

  “I haven’t trusted Wait Staff since before I broke you out of Madigan.”

  “Well, he’s been pretty straight with us—except for that moment trying to remember what the Gurus meant to him. I’ve had my own lapses that way.”

  “Venn, I want to gain traction here.”

  “Tell me what you need, Commander.”

  “We need to reestablish. We’ve long since exceeded our mission, and we’re down to Hershey squirts for orders.”

  “Jesus,” I say, and laugh.

  “I mean it. If we don’t get it together soon, we’ll go fucking native, and that is not any sort of option … is it?”

  “Our enemy is in charge, but they’re no longer our enemy. Maybe you need to speak with Bird Girl.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, goddammit! What’s her real name? What’s her rank?”

  “I’ll ask next time we get together,” I say. Borden’s face is a mask of little-girl disappointment. I did not think she was capable of reviving her inner child, but here it is, she’s in pain, and there’s not a meaningful thing I can do. She’s my superior officer. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation.

  Which proves her point.

  “We need to have a mission,” she says, her voice falling off. She gives me a hard look. I have to think outside the box—that’s a direct order, isn’t it? All my life I’ve assigned leadership and planning to others—to Joe or people like Borden—to our DIs or battlefield commanders.

  “Maybe it’s right in front of us,” I say. “We need to follow the Antags to their home world, get as much information as we can about their relationship to their own Gurus—their Keepers—and acquire as much intel as we can about where the Antags come from and what they have to offer in our effort to free Earth from all this bullshit.”

  She looks squarely at me. “Like you say, obvious. But I’m maybe the least informed of anyone on this ship, the least sophisticated on things Guru and Antag—all book and paper training, right?”

  I don’t respond to that. I’m still pondering what her highest directive was when she sprang me from Madigan. Was she already anticipating—along with Kumar and Mushran—that there would be a Guru mimic in their future?

  “What do you suggest?” she asks.

  “Litvinov and Joe and Jacobi could work with you to create a new set of directives. New orders reflective of our circumstances.”

  “Where would Bird Girl fit in?”

  “Maybe she wants us to contribute to their game plan, their new mission—but so far she’s just providing minimal education … and trying to overcome her hatred.”

  “What about her commanders? Do we have any sense of how they work, militarily, socially?”

  I make a wry face. “I’m not sure, but when we communicate, there’s something not stated—some place inside her thinking where I’m not allowed to go.”

  “Can she wander in your head?” Borden asks.

  “I don’t think so.” Can she? Would I feel it if she did?

  “How many shoes can an Antag drop?” Borden asks, seriously enough, but with more wit than I thought she was capable of. We’re not often allowed to think such thoughts of our sisters in the military, and particularly not of rank, but for the first time, I can conceive of maybe enjoying a social occasion with Commander Borden—going out for drinks if not an actual date. She might laugh at my jokes. I might laugh at hers.

  I’ve been out here a long, long time.

  “Well, the big shoe that hasn’t been dropped is, where are the men?” I say. “Antag males, I mean.”

  “They’re all females?” Borden seems surprised.

  “That’s what Ulyanova says. Even rank is female. But there might be something more to the picture.”

  “A different command structure?”

  “Something odd.” Something big.

  “Odd how?” Borden asks.

  “I do not know, Commander.”

  “Surely not as odd as the squid, right?”

  I shake my head.

  She looks alarmed, then disgusted. “You’re thinking the squid are the males?”

  “No, they’re definitely from a different part of whatever world they all come from. The bugs knew about them in reverse, I mean, the bugs laid down some of the possibilities for the searchers way back when, but … no. They’re more different from
Antags than we are.”

  “Thank God,” Borden says.

  And I have to agree. But what’s lurking in my scattered shrapnel of knowledge, now that we’re so far from anything like Bug Karnak? Now that Bug Karnak has been hammered into silence … Where are the Antag males, and what are they like?

  “Thanks for a sympathetic ear, Venn.”

  “Not a problem, Commander.”

  “Keep me in the loop, okay?”

  “Will do. And sir, I’d be happy to help you understand DJ. He’s a valuable member of our team.”

  She shudders delicately. But then she sucks it up. “Sure,” she says. “We need more understanding, if we’re going to keep it together.”

  BIRD GIRL CONVENES us all in view of the maze of supports and machinery forward of the node where the cloverleaves come together. She’s been joined by two searchers. I can’t keep my eyes off the way they grip and glide smoothly through the canes and a spiderweb of flexible cords. They help Bird Girl find her place at our center and even offer to help arrange us. Once again, we’re treated like flowers, and the squid seem to enjoy the little flourishes of who is planted next to whom, which some of us accept with tense reserve and others with a growing sense of perverse humor. Who can be most cooperative? After you, ma’am. May I pull up an arm, a tentacle? No, I insist.

  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.

  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.