by Greg Bear
“She’s playing a dangerous game,” I say. “One move here, another there. If she does something really brash or stupid, the ship could flush us all into space—not just the searchers.”
“Do you know that?” Borden asks, and for some reason that infuriates me, but I just hold it in—and keep biting until blood flows.
We’ve reached a section of this new ship where the last of the fragile cane thickets have spread as if to define a wider volume, only to be crushed by the shrinking hull. Last-minute adjustments by the searchers, before the great dying? Futile, either way.
One more body floats in shadows—spiked on a single jutting cane. This one is neither Antag nor human, like nothing we’ve seen before. Difficult from our distance to discern details, but it has a small, knobby head, large, almost froglike eyes, compact body with four ropy limbs—and its torso has nearly been seared in half. It’s still clutching a bolt pistol.
DJ and Ishida move through the canes, swearing, to recover the pistol.
“It’s an Antag weapon, all right,” DJ says.
“Why was it carrying that, if it couldn’t use it?” Ishikawa asks.
“Don’t toss it,” Tak says. “Maybe Bird Girl will let us arm ourselves.”
“I doubt that,” Ishida says.
Nothing but darkness ahead, no clues.
And then the breeze moving aft carries a swirling cloud of fairy glow. Searcher bodies have been sprinkling the surroundings.
“There!” Ishida says. Her eyes are sharper than ours. A few hundred meters ahead, we see a spray of branches blue-green with searcher dust. We grab hands to form a star, calculate how to kick off all at once, and fly across the intervening space. Joe and Borden snag a branch, then we all scramble inboard to what could be a rail line—a corkscrew curve pointing aft. But the corkscrew ends abruptly, and there’s nothing obvious in the way of transport—nothing like the tram car around the screw garden.
We’re contemplating our next move when we find another body—Antag, one of the armored commanders, caught up in an adjacent branch and mostly hidden by the withered arms of a dead searcher. The Antag’s wings have been left half-spread. All four eyes are open and glazed. She apparently bled out through deep slices along her neck and shoulders—neatly skirting the armor on her breast and thorax.
“How many battles can we fight on this tub?” Joe asks in an undertone.
Borden and Jacobi move off a few slender branches to confer. In the light of more dead Antags and uncertainty aft, they’re reassessing our situation, who to protect, who to reinforce—who to put in danger. I’m glad I’m not making those decisions, but I handicap their choices anyway, and I’m mostly correct.
“Four of us will go on,” the commander says. “Three will return to the ribbon space. We don’t know who’s most in danger, or how protected Ulyanova really is. We can’t risk both Johnson and Venn. I want someone who’s linked to the starshina and Bird Girl with each party. I should have thought of that earlier, but … Fujimori, Johnson, Ishikawa. Back to the nests. Good luck.”
We split up. Joe, Jacobi, Borden, Ishida, and I will continue aft. The pistol goes to Ishida.
“We’ll hand it over to Bird Girl,” Borden says. “Make it a peace offering.”
THE LAST ENEMY
The great intertwine of tram lines, the foremost station, begins about a hundred meters behind the spike ball.
How many times before has this ship gone through metamorphosis? Across four billion years? I can’t believe any ship could last so long. But the ship, as DJ pointed out, has aspects of a cell—a living thing. Maybe it’s a cancer cell and can go on forever.
“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—
No bugs were involved in this round of planetary evolution. Here is quite a different style. This world, part of a new initiative, was quickened by Gurus, and now its children have been carried to Sun-Planet, where they have done their very best to destroy the Antags, the searchers, and everything they value. All the current fashion in Guru-supplied entertainment. The couch potatoes out there have grown old and thirsty, in cruel need of newer, more ironic, angrier forms of destruction and apocalypse …
What we and the Antags provided for a time is now old-fashioned, no longer interesting. Betrayal and sabotage may be just what the audiences are expecting.
Time catches up.
I brush over the battles, all the wars on Sun-Planet, with dreamlike speed and precision—not just visual, but with snips of agony, flesh rending and bones splintering, wings shredded—feeling the anguish as the Antags lose cohesion when big males are gathered up and executed by ant-thick hordes of these single-eyed monsters …
The monsters then move on to the southern hemisphere and work to turn the archives into a library without readers.
I participate in the destruction of the crèches that support Antag eggs, each the size of a soccer ball and capable of hatching to produce multiple offspring—a male, several females, the necessary components for a seed-family that can also be integrated into other seed-families and raised as their own …
When the dream collapses and fades to a violent end, I roll up in the bedsheets, and through my tears, can barely make out Ulyanova, still standing in the doorway. I am horrified and blasted by the waft of her Guru psychology, her mask—but also the sad, almost hopeful presence of the starshina I first met on Mars, not so long ago. Protecting as she must. Challenging as she must to keep the ship from killing us.
No hope of anything more.
“This is what brain knows, what ghosts tell me,” Ulyanova says. “I will speak to you one more time, but not as Guru. All your Guru bombs are removed. Even so, you are not out of danger, Vinnie. Ghosts and brain demand interest. If I do not oblige … ”
She doesn’t need to finish.
The room at Madigan vanishes like a soap bubble, and I’m back in the decay and rubble of the old chambers that once contained many of the violent, one-eyed race even now awaiting our Antags down on Sun-Planet.
The great seed-pod chamber begins to split and crack, closing down, being recycled. The spikes join with their opposites and pull.
“We should get out of here,” Borden says.
But we can’t just go back the way we came. Four silhouettes appear briefly along our return route, difficult to see against the central shadows, the spinal tree’s spin of growing branches, moving weapons, and vessels.
Ishida and Borden spot them first, Joe and I last. By this time, they’re upon us, brandishing bladed weapons, canes, and nightmare faces—the two that have faces.
One kicks around the chamber, grabbing and tossing canes and other debris to keep itself pinned to the curve, until it’s tangled with Ishida. A blade clangs on Ishida’s metal arm, another silhouette moves in from another direction, swinging for her flesh half—
But I’m there with a clutch of canes wrapped in rotten fabric, something I’ve assembled in a fraction of a second, and my own trajectory as I kick puts that bundle between the blade and Ishida, soundly thunking her, but not carving.
I have the blade wielder in my hands now, groping up along a skinny chest for something like a neck, as I’m kicked and clawed by anatomy out of a seafood dinner, and then I wrench a tough outer shell almost half-circle below a rim of eyes, and acrid fluid shoots past my ear—
But this thing is almost impossible to get hold of. It’s cutting at my hands when Joe recovers the wrapped canes and swings them over to Borden, who wedges her back against a curved wall, kicks down against Joe’s body, and shoves the tip of the bundle between a scurry of legs and arms …
Prying loose the blade, the pike, or whatever it is, which Borden has used, apparently, in another form, to some effect in training—
She swings it around, still propped against Joe, who’s sliding up a wall, about to fly free, when she passes the blade through the scurry and severs all the grasping legs, then somehow brings herself around as Ishida replaces Joe for prop and ballast—
The commander brings the pike down hard, starting to rise as she does so—and connects with the part I was trying, ineffectually, to strangle. Something flies free. I do not know what it is, because I’ve turned to take a barrage of twisting buck-kicks and sharp fist blows from a serpentine thing with a rippling haze of arms or legs, over three meters long, getting purchase by wrapping its hind portion around a spike growing from the wall. Thus anchored, it rises, long head of six eyes rotating in dismay, into Ishida’s crunch
ing metal grip. I hear but don’t see what happens after that. Joe and I have wrapped our legs around the fourth silhouette, which is humanoid—is it Sudbury? More like a powerful ape with red and orange hair and tremendous hands, hands even now trying to rip off my arm, my legs, but without my cooperation, not quite managing to get a grip. I push in with thumbs and go for the eyes—two only—and rip at the flaps of the cheeks. It’s amazing how much strength you have when you still care, and death is upon you—when Ishida and Joe and Borden are at stake—and where the fuck is Jacobi? The whole melee comes to an astonished, quivering, bloody halt when a bolt carves the serpent’s half-crushed head away, and does double duty with the arm of the ape. The mass separates. Borden is on one side, Ishida and Joe on the other.
Jacobi is three meters away, clutching the pistol we recovered earlier—
And firing three more times before it whines that the charge is gone.
We stare at her in astonishment.
“Somebody made a mistake,” she says. “Thought I’d make sure.”
We push back from the corpses, surrounded not just by their main masses, but by twirling gobbets of flesh, revolving and rotating limbs, strings of internal organs.
None of them belong to us.
We’ve just engaged and taken down four cage fighters, and cannot believe that we’re all intact and alive.
“Any more?” Ishida asks.
“None I can see,” Joe says.
“Where’s Sudbury?”
No sign. Maybe one more.
Jacobi and Borden do brief examinations of our opponents. They’re all dead, but worse, are absolutely painted by old scars. The ape is missing fingers and a lower leg from a previous encounter, and every one of them looks as if they were once much stronger, more capable.
Before the cage matches.
Perhaps before they were all released.
No satisfaction comes with this victory. No glory, nothing but the chance to return to the spinning, fruiting branches and hitch on another car—completing our horror-train ride aft.
What a prize.
