Take Back the Sky

by Greg Bear

  Kumar and Ishikawa take charge of the egg. “What do we do with it?” Ishikawa asks.

  “Get it home,” I say. “After that—whatever we can, wherever we end up.”

  “Looks like they’ve equipped it for a few months, at least,” Ishikawa says.

  Joe says to me, and aside to DJ, “You’ve got to learn what she plans.”

  Then they all embrace us, a most unexpected response, as if we’re heading off to our own deaths.

  I ask Ulyanova for permission.

  Vera emerges and takes us behind the curtain, through the thick wool and fog. Despite the changes and death elsewhere in the ship, the illusions beyond the curtain are still there: the tile floor, the hallway, and now, cold winter sunlight through the window at the end of the hall. The air in the apartment has chill currents, mixing with the heat from the radiators.

  We are greeted warmly by a skeletal Ulyanova, and spend time with both of them in that steam-heated apartment. The mood seems relaxed, casual, despite the starshina’s appearance. Vera watches me closely. Ulyanova sits me down in an overstuffed chair and pulls up a stool. She might as well be a corpse, with her lips drawn back, her eyes like those of a lemur, her skin pearly gray and showing signs of cracking. Vera looks only a tiny bit better.

  They serve us soup and tinned fish, mackerel in tomato paste. Tastes good. Tastes real.

  “I am here,” Ulyanova says. “Ghosts are here. They still make plans, as if I agree, and I follow their plans.”

  “Right.”

  “Ship still listens as if I am Guru. But ship is about to do what it has been instructed for decades to do—make journey downsun, cross to other side of system, far quarter of Kuiper belt, to visit another new planet. Along the way, we will pass close to Mars and then Earth to pick up Gurus and their most favored Wait Staff. Once we retrieve all of the Wait Staff and Gurus, their ships will be available to carry you where you wish to go.”

  “Convenient,” I say.

  “I plan well, right?”

  “You plan well. We are grateful.”

  “Do not be. I am now more than half monster. You cannot guess what knife edge I will fall from, any second, and slice plans. Verushka and I are both monsters—but we remember.”

  “We will stay here,” Vera says sadly.

  “To finish,” Ulyanova says. “This is our home. We have friends, out there.” She points through the window to the Russian winter, the lowering butter-colored sun and bunched, snow-packed clouds.

  “It’s a dream,” I say.

  “A good dream for old soldiers,” she says. “Bilyk is very bad. He will not survive return to Earth. Tell Litvinov we have a place for both here. And a job he can do.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I say.

  “Now this is what will happen around Mars, around Earth,” Ulyanova says. “Ship will demand that all Gurus and their servants return, or destroy themselves, in preparation for new dispensation, new show.”

  “All the old shows have been canceled?” DJ asks.

  They both nod.

  “Fucking righteous,” DJ says.

  Vera smiles.

  “This will be ship’s last journey,” Ulyanova says.

  “As we discussed?” I ask.

  “After you leave, I will fly into sun,” she says. “Wait Staff, politicians, generals who never fought—men and women who made great money from wars and deaths—we will share big party behind curtain. Make fancy places for them to live, to feel they have escaped. Earth is moving away from their influence. Already there is anger. So last refugees of war wait for us to save them.”

  I mull this over, looking at the plate of cookies, the butter, the cup of tea.

  DJ has put down his cup.

  Almost against my will, I have to say, “Sometime back, you told me you knew the real reason the Gurus did all this. Can you tell me now?”

  It seems that if one of us touched her, she would crumble. But she moves with grace, and her look toward Vera is still alive enough to convey affection.

  “Yes,” she says. “Ghosts tell me Gurus are like game wardens. They make little wars, allow little kills, to protect us against bigger passions. Without them, we would kill ourselves.”

  Vera adds, “But Gurus lie.”

  I squint at the watery sun outside the window. “Yeah.”

  Ulyanova rises from the stool. “Journey downsun will bring deep sleep, as before. Only I will feel the time. Time weighs heavy—bad memory.”

  Vera takes my arm, lifting me from the overstuffed chair. DJ gets up as well.

  Gray and dusty, Ulyanova looks at us sadly. “Go home and tell,” she says. “I hope you will land where you need to be. And I hope Earth is alive when we go back.”

  “You don’t know?” I say.

  She shakes her head. “No saying from brain, from ghosts. And at some point, ship must offload spent-matter reserves.”

  “Ship lets you do that?”

  “Ship knows how to make more, if needed. But can travel without—and do not want it in sun.”

  I had forgotten about that. “Or Earth,” I say.

  “Will find best, safest place. Go now.”

  And we go. Back to the others, to the nests and to the ribbon spaces. So many more questions to ask the Queen! But we will not meet again. Perhaps she and Vera prefer the ship’s illusions. I would, if I could convince myself …

  All wars end in whimpers. And those who serve the Gurus most faithfully, most selfishly, never learn. They rise again and again to the emotions that lead to self-destruction. There is not nearly enough energy to exact vengeance.

  We could say we were manipulated. Only true in part. We lie to ourselves like cocks in a pit. We bloody enjoy death and destruction. Sex is obscene. War is holy. We’ll have only ourselves to blame when it’s all over, humans and Antags, that we could be such fucking dupes.

  But Gurus lie.

  Maybe without them, we’ll find a different balance, live a different history.

  “How long have they been fucking us over?” DJ asks.

  “Since caves,” Vera says. “Long time.”

  The edge of the curtain is near. I hear groans, babble. We emerge and DJ is instantly on alert, pistol pointed at something unexpected, a shadowy broad X ahead of the asterisk, a figure—mostly naked, sprawled—

  Human. Emaciated, bleeding, impaled from two directions. Litvinov emerges from behind the X, brandishing another long, sharpened cane, with a face of fury, about to finish the job, while Borden and Joe and Tak and Ishida and Ishikawa look on, unmoving, unmoved.

  They, too, have blood on their arms and hands.

  The figure stares at them with the last of its energy, its life. I don’t want to recognize it, but I do. The flattened nose, thin, interrupted eyebrows, a rictus of long pain now sharp and undeniable, eyes almost colorless, as if having spent years in darkness …

  And a nearly transparent body, showing all its bones and veins, not from darkness but from so many journeys, so many arduous adjustments to chemistry and physics just to stay alive. Champion of champions, the last gladiator on this awful ship, he holds up one hand. The other is pinned to his chest by one of Litvinov’s canes. He clutches, at the last, a kind of knife, found or shaped somewhere, the chipped blade glittering. He lets go, and it spins off to chime harmlessly against a ribbon.

  This is Grover Sudbury. Our nightmare, the man we condemned, the man Joe sent to this hell—

  His head wobbles to see who else has arrived, and he greets DJ and me with a crooked half grin, of pain or recognition I will never know.

  “I’m done,” he says through bloody spittle, eyes like milky opal. “I’m the last one. I don’t want to do it anymore. They’re all dead, and I’m done.”

  Litvinov props his feet against a ribbon and shoves the final cane forward, into Sudbury’s chest. The cane splits and shivers into fragments.

  Sudbury spasms. His breath escapes with a sound like sandpaper. He stops moving. Litvinov drifts back from
the impact. We all seem to retreat from the awful mark, the pierced, racked, wretched example of soldier’s justice.

  Complete silence before the asterisk, the corpse’s X.

  “Bilyk died while you were aft,” Borden whispers, as if we’re in a church.

  DJ says, “I think he came to give up.”

  “I think he wanted to go home,” Borden adds.

  “Fat chance,” Tak says.

  MARTIAN RETURN

  Down around the sun, time and space are heavy. The screw gardens and their thoughts slumber, surrounded by the sins of warmth, light, and billions of years of closely watched history.

  The ship slows, bogged by those densities, those changes.

  Takes forever.

  And then—we’re almost there.

  After our first sleep, our longest jump, Ulyanova does as she said she would, and makes a pass close to Mars. We receive two transport ships, one for passengers, another for spent matter, which we witness from the ribbons.

  We aren’t told much about either, even when Vera appears outside the ribbon. She offers the opportunity to begin our departures here, to return to Mars, and to my surprise, Joe, DJ, and Jacobi are ready to go. They’ll spread the word as best they can about what’s happened, if they’re allowed to survive.

  Joe and DJ and I say our farewells quickly enough. Joe asserts we’ll see one another again, that he plans on getting back to Earth and beginning a new, more normal existence—if Earth is still Earth, if we are still welcome anywhere. I hope when do meet again that he’ll explain it all to me, explain what we’ve been to each other, but doubt any explanation will make much sense to either of us.

  DJ says he’s heading down to the Red because we might still get communiques—that’s what he calls them, communiques—from what’s left of the archives down there, but I doubt it. All I get are silences. Maybe that’s good. Maybe bug ancestry is nothing to be proud of. Bugs fought. We fight. Maybe bug knowledge is something to be surpassed, grown out of. Maybe we’ll go it better without them or the Gurus.

  Jacobi surveys us critically, then says, “Fuck it! No excuses,” and hugs us all, to my surprise. “Brothers and sisters,” she adds, and departs with Joe and DJ.

  Ulyanova gives the transports time to depart.

  And then we’re off.

  HOME IS THE HUNTER

  Kumar has vanished. Litvinov is nowhere to be found. I presume the Russian went through the curtain, as Vera had suggested. Maybe Kumar has gone through, as well. Maybe he does not want to live in a world without bugs or Gurus or some other influence—or he cannot bear the thought of having to explain.

  That leaves the last of us Skyrines, and Commander Borden. The journey to Earth’s orbit is brief enough. A nap, as it were. Who’s there to wait for me? We’re eager to be done with the fighting, the adventure—such as it was. I think we’ll part ways as soon as we touch down.

  On Earth, there’s … Christ. What? A chance to get back to normal? There is no returning to what we were. Even if we know where we are, we still won’t know who we are. The people I met, whom I could imagine living with after—so many changes! So much space between me and Teal and her child—and how old will they be? How much time between me and Alice? I think a lot about Ishida, but how could that ever work? We both share so many hard memories. What will we do, any of us?

  I have no idea how much time I’ve spent out here, real or unreal.

  HOME FROM THE STARS

  Earth is still down there. It looks real. It looks alive. Borden suggests they probably can’t see us, yet, but more transports are rising, dozens of them, some quite large—Hawksbills!

  “Here come the Wait Staff and Gurus,” Ishida says.

  I think they’re delivering their passengers near the new ship’s midsection, where, perhaps, quarters similar to ours, or better, have been arranged, spun out of the steel wool—maybe displacing a few ships or weapons. Fancy digs for monsters.

  Vera informs us that one transport is being readied to take passengers back to Earth. Maybe we can get down without being blown to pieces. Maybe they’ll take us prisoner and debrief us at Madigan or wherever.

  AND THE CHILD HOME FROM THE WARS

  Right now, I’m a fraud. I do not want to have killed anyone or anything. I do not want to die like a soldier and end up in Fiddler’s Green. I want to die the death of a dreaming child.

  Someday, if God will honor a solemn request, I’d like us all to join up at Disneyland in Anaheim. A great big reunion of old enemies, old friends, old warriors. We’ll meet in the parking lot, where I last saw my aunt Carrie, before she went off to die in the Middle East, and stroll between the ticket booths and up the steps, past the flower gardens, to climb aboard the old-fashioned steam train …

  But first, I’d explore the train station and listen to the conductor’s ghost—a balding mustached guy from a really old western, speaking behind a window, probably wearing a vest or an apron … telling us where we need to go next to have fun or just relax. “This way, boys and girls … to the happiest place on Earth!”

  So sappy it’s painful.

  We’ll shake hands and talk, and then just sit in silence before strolling to the other rides, the other celebrations. The restaurants. The gift shops.

  Silly idea.

  Silly ideas keep me going.

  WE HAVE THREE packages with us, cargos of life and death. We still have the egg, which is humming along happily in its battery-powered box. Borden is being quite protective. I think she may be making plans for her career after the wars.

  And we have two bodies. We made bags from shed membranes around the terminus of the tree, using strips of cane, like natives on an island. Best we can do. We’re bringing home Bilyk and we’re bringing home Sudbury.

  Tak helped us wrap them up.

  Both of them.

  We board the last transport, a Hawksbill, where we are met by a young, capable-looking pilot, whose name, we are told as he greets us at the portal, is Lieutenant JG Robin Farago.

  “This has got to be the weirdest assignment ever,” he tells us, then helps us move the box and the bags into the storage bay.

  “Where are you coming from? What the hell kind of ship was that?” Farago asks. “I never even saw it—just got orders and instructions—and there the hangar was, and here you are!”

  “What did you deliver?” Tak asks as the others wordlessly head to the couches to settle in, to lock themselves down and rotate.

  “I have no idea. Transport command said all the ships were full! I wasn’t allowed to look back. But when I did—our passenger deck was empty. What the hell kind of operation is this?”

  We pull out of the hangar, and after that, even we can’t see the Guru ship.

  I’ll take it on faith that it’s off to the sun.

  I wonder if I will ever know.

  The Earth is brown and blue and green and white, all swirled and touched with reflected gold. As we break atmosphere and the couches grow tight, I think back on the people we started with.

  I’m still alive.

  So many aren’t.

  SBLM

  The landing field is empty, no defenses, no notice we’re even here. Lieutenant Farago lands us with expert grace, cracks the hatch seals, and tells us he has no idea why, but there’s nobody here to receive us.

  “Sorry!” he says. “Those wars were so long ago, right?”

  Then a truck pulls up and two Marines get out. Land-based, sea-based, not space. They look young and serious. Here it is, I think—we weren’t expected and this is the first reaction.

  But then the Marines solemnly tell us they’re here to receive war casualties, and Tak, Borden, Ishikawa, Ishida, and I go to the hold with Farago and bring the bags forward. A couple of casualty gurneys are rolled up the Hawksbill ramp. The Marines carefully lay the bodies on the gurneys and drape them with flags—one Russian Federation, the other U.S. of A.

  Ishida asks how they heard about us and what we were carrying. Fara
go says he didn’t communicate.

  “Radio transmission from orbit,” the senior Marine, a sergeant, tells us. “Some Russian, we were told. Are there more Russians up there?”

  We all acknowledge that.

  “Anyway, we’re also told you have a special artifact here, and that a deal has been made for it to be well cared for at a top science facility. We’ve asked for some people to meet us. Should be here shortly.”

  The two Marines look at each other, and then a large isolation vehicle, like those used to transport spent matter, rides up the runway and meets us at the ramp.

  “Any idea what this is?” a female technician asks, tapping the box.

  “A brave soldier gave it to us to take care of,” I say. “We’ll want to see the facility. We want maximum assurance it’ll be well tended to.”

  Borden steps forward and says, “We’re taking charge.” She looks at Ishikawa, who moves up beside her. I knew nothing about this. Why should I?

  “Absolutely, Commander,” the sergeant says. “Uh … mind if we make sure you still hold that rank?”

  “I’ll wait.”

  We wait. Borden’s rank and active-duty status are confirmed, her connections are confirmed—and she assures us Bird Girl’s offspring will be their highest duty, their highest priority, from this point on. Neither Borden nor Ishikawa have ever given me real reason to doubt them.

  And it could be a good career move, a good way to stay important and rise in the ranks. They might make admiral yet.

  Other ambulances arrive and technicians supply us with civilian clothing—all in the proper sizes. And regulation underwear for males and females. Skivvies, modesty panties, sports bras. The pajamas made by the searchers are shed and collected by the technicians. We suit up, no modesty whatsoever, and then stand for a while in the shadow of the transport, not sure what to say. We’ve been through a lot and spent a lot of time together.