But having my life and death, my relations with friends and enemies, the saving and the loving and the hating and the killing…
Having that spread around and laughed at, commented on by Guru audiences, critiqued like a TV show—
“Are we sure this is all on the level?” Jacobi asks, looking past the others at Joe. Joe shifts their attention adroitly, with a nod, to me, with the evaluative expression I’ve always hated. The same expression he used when we first met on that concrete culvert. The same expression he used before we went to take care of Grover Sudbury.
He wants me to answer.
And God damn us both, I do. “It’s real,” I says. “As real as anything in this fucked-up life.”
“Who’s seen the broadcast? The cable feed?” Jacobi asks. “Whatever the hell you call it.”
“I may have,” Kumar says. “It is what finally pushed me into Mushranji’s camp in Division Four.”
“Where did you see it?” Litvinov asks.
“In a Guru domicile in Washington, D.C.,” Kumar says. “A door alarm failed and I entered without being noticed. I saw a room filled with war, and in the center, like an orchestra conductor, a Guru who looked human. It noticed me and quickly changed shape, then tried to wipe my mind of this memory, but apparently that failed as well.”
“They’re not perfect,” Joe says.
“No,” Kumar says with regret. “I almost wish they were.”
“What was it?” Ishida asks him. “What was the show?”
“Fighting between Oscars and Antagonist weapons on Titan. Spectacular, fully involving—looking at it, just from the corner of my eye, I was there. It took me days to recover.”
This is still sinking in for the others. Loss of illusions is a long, hard process, and Kumar has not been the man we’ve trusted the most.
“They’re actually broadcasting a show?” Ishida asks in disbelief. “Broadcasting from where? What kind of antennas—to where? How do we even ask the right questions?”
Kumar says, “It is the belief of the people within Division Four, and it is my belief, that the signals begin in your suits and are edited locally, to be delivered by some means—perhaps this ship—to the outer limits of the solar system to be sent on their way. We have yet to confirm any of that, however. I must emphasize, the Antagonists on this ship seem to be part of that group fighting and dying to change things. Analogous to the group of us that Mushranji helped create and organize—and supply.”
“Antags still hate our guts,” Jacobi says.
“Also true,” Kumar says. “But they have sacrificed many in their own civil war, and many more fighting to save us. I hope we will soon learn their final disposition.”
“There’s a word for what they’re doing, the Gurus, living off blood and misery,” Tak says. “They’re blood-sucking parasites, like mosquitoes.”
“Worse,” Borden says. “Mosquitoes need to eat. This is war porn. Who is out there, caring not a damn, getting off when we fly to our deaths—paying to see!”
I’m fascinated by the change in her features. This is no longer the disciplined, all-together commander we’ve come to expect. This is a frightened, angry mother, disgusted by what someone is doing to her children.
“We used to think the aliens would be like angels, or like demons,” Kumar says. “I was raised on those fantasies. But Gurus are neither. They are in show business—arranging to get us to kill each other in ingenious and protracted ways to provide entertainment for heartless armchair rats.”
“Jee-zuss!” Jacobi exclaims. She’s dug her nails into her hands.
DJ says quietly, “We’re no angels, either. Snug kids and their mommas and poppas eat dinner in front of the TV and watch us die on the evening news. Leaders push their causes over our mangled corpses. Civilians get off on our dying and blood and salute us in airports. Gurus didn’t show up and recruit us until recently, right?”
Kumar doesn’t know how or even whether to answer.
“We’re perfect for this shit,” DJ says, flicking his sharp eyes between us. “Doesn’t matter what you call it—it’s been going on for thousands of years. I read the Iliad.” He waves his long fingers, arms still marked with red lines. “Happy little soldiers, paid rich in blood and shit and sometimes even respect.” He snaps one of those akimbo civvie salutes. Having finished this tirade, packed with far more eloquence than we are used to from DJ, he folds his arms and looks through the mesh as a couple of bats bring up a hose.
“What do we do when we get out there?” Ishida asks, also tracking the bats.
“If,” Tak says.
“Out where the Antags live. Will they let us fight with them, let us help clean this up and put it right?”
There it is. Our team wants to fight some more. I wonder if this was Kumar’s plan all along.
“What’s it like out there?” Ishikawa asks.
“Venn? What do you get from your connection?” Jacobi asks. I shake my head. DJ seems ready to leap in, but I give him a hard look. Right now, we’re in limbo, but judging from what little I’ve been fed, we’re going to have to get used to a whole new scale of weird. And I don’t want to add to anyone’s confusion, not now.
“What kind of worlds are they from? What do they look like?” Jacobi persists, as if they still might trust me or DJ to know the score.
“It’s confused,” I say.
“Fuck that!” Jacobi says. “We need to know.” But she’s barely whispering and her expression has lost focus. Then, as if they’ve reached their limit, they all break loose and scatter across the cage. Some gather mats and wrap up in them.
The bats look on in confusion. Are they supposed to spray the mats, as well? They nicker and knock on the cage, as if to warn us. We ignore them.
Joe pulls me and Litvinov and Borden together. “We can’t keep on like this, on the inside with a view to nowhere. Can you pass that along to the Antags?”
Litvinov looks around at our scattered survivors. “We are not crazy minks in trap,” he says. “Tell them that.”
“I’ve been trying,” I say. “It’s not exactly a two-way street.”
“What do you get from Bug Karnak?” Joe asks.
I’ve been wondering about that myself. “Nothing much,” I say. The last few hours there’s been something peculiar about our circumstances, about this ship, that is either blocking the steward or making it go silent—withhold judgment. Or the signal is simply losing its strength. Maybe we’re already too far away.
Or…
What I’ve been dreading—the destruction of the archives—may be well under way.
“What about DJ?” Joe asks.
Borden says, “He’s been dealing with this since Mars.”
Ishikawa passes close on a personal Ping-Pong exercise from one side of the cage to the other. “Heads up,” she says. “Twelve beady little eyes.”
From a dark corner of the racquetball court, well outside the cage, three larger Antags have joined the confused bats to silently observe. We rotate as best we can off each other, off the cage mesh, an awkward low-g ballet, to face them. I recognize Bird Girl.
Her translator rasps and hisses. “Choose three,” she says, focused on me. And then she adds, through our connection, an image of the one she especially wants—a surprise. Or maybe not. “We are leaving Saturn.”
“We’d all like to have a look,” I call out.
It takes her a few seconds to respond.
Everyone in the cage is at full alert.
“Others see later. Choose three,” she repeats, and I feel another something brush the inside of my head, a deeper inquiry—but also a kind of reassurance. Bird Girl believes her fellow Antags are slowly coming to understand the trauma they’ve caused us and to believe it might be counterproductive.