Take Back the Sky

by Greg Bear

  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.

  “I hate how they just don’t get mad!” Jacobi says.

  “Let them be,” Tak says. “They’re not hurting anyone.”

  “They’re fucking squids, goddammit!” Jacobi says. We’ve all gone so far from discipline and training that anything can happen to us, around us, and we wouldn’t know how to react.

  Ishida holds up her metal hand, covered with little bright points. We watch them fade. After the sparkling dust evaporates, leaving only a cool tingle, we wonder if it was ever there at all.

  “Anybody want to swear off having kids?” Ishikawa asks.

  “Solemnly,” Ishida says.

  DELIVERY AND REJECTION

  Ornament is gone, but something else is out there,” Borden says, kicking off a ribbon, rotating around her abdominal axis to search what she can see of the sky. “Not the mover. Don’t see that anymore.”

  We can barely make out a dim pair of gray fans, subtending several degrees of the big sky. Ship is either very close, or the fans are very large.

  “That must be the transmitter,” Kumar says.

  “What are those?” Borden asks.

  Possibly even more surprising, smaller vessels have departed from our monster ship and move toward the gray fans. They’re too far away already and too small to make out details.

  “Are those Antag ships?” Ishikawa asks.

  “Don’t think so,” Borden says.

  “This thing can make other ships?” Ishikawa asks, almost hopeful.

  “No surprise,” Tak says. “They taught us how to build Spook and the centipedes, right?”

  “Are they doing maintenance or dropping off supplies?” Jacobi asks.

  “Maybe they’re delivering tapes for broadcast,” DJ says. Bilyk, who regards Ulyanova and Vera, when they’re around, as if they inhabit some sort of movable nightmare—friends he no longer knows—goggles at this.

  “You still don’t get it, do you, man?” DJ chides him.

  Bilyk shakes his head. “We are for movies?” he asks.

  “Yeah, for movies,” DJ says.

  “Anybody notice we’re no longer necessary for anything?” Ishida asks, her voice small. She’s keeping close to me, as if I can supply some sort of comfort, or at least a solid center.

  I wish.

  Kumar joins Borden and they almost touch the crowns of their heads as they spread out along a ribbon, trying to survey everything that can be seen—a long, narrow slice of sky way beyond the sun, the bridge of stars cutting across the slice, cold and steady—just the same as when we departed. Parallax nil despite our journey.

  “When are we leaving to find the fighters?” Tak asks Joe as we move off from the ribbons, back to the cubbies.

  Joe makes a face. “When we’re through with these fucking leaps
and sleeps,” he said.

  “We don’t make our own schedule?” Tak asks. “What if they move before we do?”

  “You want to go blank, up against a monster?”

  Tak kicks away, disgusted.

  LEAVE NOTICE AT THE DOOR

  A few hours later, the outbound ships have finished their mission. They grow to specks and seem to be trying to return, but one by one blossom into small, brilliant clouds of plasma.

  “Jesus!” Borden says and grips a searcher arm as if for assurance. The searcher sighs like a teakettle but otherwise neither moves, resists, or reacts. The clouds flash brilliant colors, then fade to gray—and spread out until they’re gone.

  “Expendable?” Litvinov asks.

  “Maybe not even real,” Kumar muses.

  “What if they tried to deliver something—and somebody interfered?” Borden asks. She’s got a funny look on her face and starts to hand-over to the cubbies.

  “What if they tried to deliver … and nobody wanted it?” I ask.

  “What are you saying, Venn—we’re no longer A-list?” Jacobi asks.

  “Jesus, my scalp again,” Joe says.

  The others agree.

  “Get ready!”

  Again, except for Borden, no time to get to our cubbies. Our Skyrines hug like koalas. They do not want to make the leap while the searchers are touching them. As if we could get jumbled up with a catamaran squid or two and come out looking like a plate of sushi. Who knows?

  “Crap!” Jacobi says as the blankness descends.

  SUN-PLANET

  My mind slowly tries to boot up. I think I remember the ribbons, expect the waking bodies of my squad, three or four of them arranged loosely around me …

  But first, there’s a funny, dreamlike state where I’m back at Hawthorne, in the bar, listening to Joe half-drunkenly try to explain his views about the giant F-bomb reserves kept stored in tanks near Los Angeles and New York.

  The other grunts and soldiers in the bar are skeptical.

  “Sure, it’s true,” Joe says. “Before the war—the Second World War—F-bombs were strictly limited to military use. Illegal to use them in print or in movies, or in public—unless you were a criminal and didn’t care.”

  “Didn’t fucking care,” says one of our fellow recruits. Might be DJ, but I can’t see him clearly.

  “Right,” Joe says. “But the reservoirs holding the F-bombs were badly constructed. They were porous. Some leaked out into the water supply in New York, and then in Los Angeles. The plume of F-words didn’t get very far, but by the 1960s it was too late—everyone was drinking that water and dropping F-bombs twenty-four/seven. The military couldn’t stop it. So now, not just soldiers—everybody uses them.”

  “But what was the point?” asks another grunt I don’t really want to think about—Grover Sudbury. We’re back before he did his awful thing and we did ours, and then Joe did his. He’s just another grunt in this bar, no better or worse than any other.

  “Soldiers use F-bombs to keep themselves grounded, to remind themselves they’re human, to remind them what they give up when they fight and die,” Joe says. “Helps blow off some of the violence and weird crap that violence shoves into our brains. We use them, and we become better at managing a shitty situation.”

  Sudbury is still skeptical.

  “Now everybody uses them, and look where we are,” Joe says.

  “Where the fuck we are,” says the other soldier.

  I linger on Sudbury’s face. I want to talk to him, to warn him not to act out being a cruel asshole, but the memory-state, dream-state fragments into glassy shards of pain in my jaw, my arms, my chest.

  Now I’m awake, but I don’t believe it. I don’t want to believe. I’ve been dragged from the others and tangled in a cane wall. A few of the canes have penetrated my pajamas and pin me like an insect in a museum. I hurt all over. Worse, my arms and legs, my hands, look lumpy. My entire skin feels hot and bruised.

  I extricate myself from the brake, pull out the canes that poke through my clothes, and after a few minutes, float free—but my confusion is total. I don’t see anyone else. I think I’m alone, but then, I make a half turn and see a searcher a few meters away, slowly rotating in the half dark. It’s been butchered—arms hacked away and hanging by the outer plates, midsection almost cut in half, eyes gouged out. More than one attacker, I think—the squid may be peaceful, but they’re also strong.

  It’s taking me much longer than before to assemble my conscious self, and it’s all tangled with memories I can’t place, like dreams being edited and erased.

  Then a voice rises from a buzzing pool of memory. It’s the first thing I’m absolutely sure about—harsh, hoarse, angry, and putting an emphasis on every single thump I’m receiving. “Never … thought … I’d find … YOU, did you? After what you guys … DID to me.”

  I know that voice. But from where, from when? Was it my mother’s boyfriend? The one I shot? I doubt it. But in my haze I remember Mom lying in bed covered with bruises after he beat her up, and I’m thinking, No more of this—no more of him, not ever, why does she put up with it?

  And now—

  Vera has awakened some of us personally. There’s a look of concern on her face as she shakes us one by one. It takes hard shaking for some—for DJ in particular, but also for Joe and Tak.

  We’ve all just had the crap beaten out of us.

  “What the hell happened?” Joe asks. “Christ, I’m bloody! So are you.”

  “Yeah,” Tak says ruefully. “I couldn’t fight back.”

  He looks at me as he tries to flex life into his limbs. I touch my own face, feeling the swollen lips and cheeks, the crusted blood. We examine DJ. Blood and bruises all over. My sight is returning in a spotty manner, as if I’m looking through a slatted window.

  How did I let it happen? What is this, some sort of sympathetic response, welting and pain as my mind is probed by Gurus? Feels wrong, feels crazy. They say you don’t remember pain, but new pain flares with every move I make. Something or someone struck me repeatedly. Someone I once knew.

  Someone almost human.

  So I lean into the memories and bring it all back—the smiling, heavily scarred face leaning over me in the gloom, the same piggy eyes and interrupted eyebrows, but now with nose almost smashed flat. Long since healed but pug-uglier than I remember him.

  “Did you see him?” DJ asks. “He was laughing. Really enjoying himself. Then the squids moved in and tried to separate everybody. Man, you wouldn’t know they can’t fight.”

  “Someone we knew,” I say. “I couldn’t wake up.”

  “Sudbury! Fucking Grover Sudbury!” DJ shouts, expelling a fine spray of blood. “He and some other fuckers.”

  “Some human, some not,” Joe says through broken lips. He holds his head as if it needs to be glued back together. “The searchers stopped them from killing us.”

  The smile, the words, the delight Sudbury took in striking me with the back of his gnarly hand, over and over.

  Ishida approaches carefully out of the fairy light. She points to the cubbies and cane bridges. “A lot of searchers. Looks like they tried to protect us.”

  “They fought?” Tak asks.

  “They died.”

  Borden emerges from her cubby, the entrance of which has almost been blocked by a dead searcher. She shoves it into a slow, broken-armed spin. “What the hell happened here?”

  “I knew we shouldn’t have waited!” Tak cries out.

  “What do you think, Venn?” Borden asks.

  “It was Sudbury,” I confirm. “Not alone. Another human and as DJ says, a couple of things. Not human.”

  “Not Antag?”

  I shake my head. “Didn’t see any.”

  There are maybe five dead searchers in the ribbon space, up between the clock faces, in the canes—hacked, carved, gouged. Three more are spaced before the curtain, still alive, sighing and flexing. One isn’t moving and is being examined by its fellows. The
plates along its skin are flaccid, peeling away. Who would be strong enough to kill a squid? I’ve felt the grip of their arms and can imagine what they could do to defend themselves.

  Tak runs another inventory on DJ’s face, his hands. Then me. “Did a real number,” he murmurs, flexing my jaw, prodding my cheek. My whole face seems to explode, and I jerk away, but he says, “Nothing broken I can feel.”

  Ishikawa and Jacobi seem barely touched. Ishida checks over Litvinov and Bilyk, but Bilyk shakes her off with an accusing look.

  “Four of you seem to have borne the brunt of injuries,” Kumar says.

  “I still don’t remember,” Joe says.

  Vera shakes her head with cold anger. Then she takes me by the arm. Her hand is tight and wiry, firm. “She will speak with you, if you can go, if you can move.”

  “Just me?”

  “Just you,” Vera says. The others watch suspiciously.

  “I’ll go,” I say. “I can move.”

  “I’d like to come,” Borden says.

  “No,” Vera says, and leads me toward the curtain. The searchers move the bodies and themselves aside. I try to keep from crying out in pain, but Tak’s right, there are no broken bones—I think.

  The curtain gets closer. After what I’ve been through, I don’t want to touch it, or it to touch me. I turn my face aside, lean my head back, and one hand grips the other, to keep it from flailing.

  “No fear,” Vera says.

  We pass through. Feels like thin cotton wool, like a warm breeze. Vera tugs my arm again. “Rules change. Queen can explain!”

  Rules change? Now the rules allow Grover Sudbury to come back from the dead and beat the crap out of me, out of us, and start murdering searchers? Is the ship’s brain breaking free of Ulyanova and trying to kill us all and regain control?

  Vera seems to read my mind. “Ship does not care,” she says. “Ship goes, ship makes. It makes for Queen, for starshina. She is waiting.”

  The smoky fog swirls and for a second I feel my stomach heave up emptiness … but then my feet touch floor. Flat floor. Things have reliable direction, up and down. I stand. The nausea fades. Ahead, a plaster wall shapes itself and corners with the floor. The floor spreads before me a paint of cracked, chipped, dirty black-and-white ceramic tile. The tile acquires a shallow depth and detail. What’s left of the grout is dark with dirt, as if it’s never been scrubbed.