Litvinov says grimly, “Old debts still need paying. How long?”
Joe says to me in an undertone, “Be careful.” I know what he means. The shape we’re in, our people may conclude I’m selecting the first three to be dumped into space. I don’t like being put in such a position, but I drift and climb around the cage and pick DJ, Borden—and Ulyanova. Borden because equality in our fate seems the right tone. Ulyanova because hers was the face Bird Girl showed me.
When I’m done, the others look relieved—all but Joe, who seems severely pained—then move away from us four and from one another like drops of water on oil to grip the limits of the cage.
Had I not received the starshina’s image, I would not have picked her. There’s more going on with her, inside her, than I can fathom. I might feel a connection to that weirdness, but without reason or explanation. Or rather—scattered shards of explanation, which do not, unassembled, take any satisfactory shape.
The hatch opens in the mesh cage and the four of us pass through, Ulyanova last. Vera clasps her hand, then reluctantly lets her go.
Bird Girl extends with her wingtip hand another rubbery rope about ten meters long. With a shake, she indicates all of us should take hold. Then she and her companions move out ahead, drafting us out of the racquetball court and into another long, curved hallway.
Being in this ship is like living in a gigantic steel heart—or intestine. That’s it. We’re literally in the bowels of the ship.
Borden grimaces as she bounces off the tube. Ulyanova continues to look as if we’re all being led to the gallows.
“Pretty obvious where this ship will be going,” DJ says, gripping the chain and rotating slowly around an axis through his sternum. “What else is out there but Planet X?”
I ignore him for the moment. I’m getting signals again. Bug steward is sending more tantalizing, brief snippets. Things are changing rapidly down on Titan—nothing good.
“No, really!” DJ insists to nobody’s stated objection. This is his chance. “What else? They’ve been looking for it since the nineteenth century. It was what pushed astronomers to discover Neptune, but Neptune was weird… tilted over and shit. So they looked for Planet X again and found Pluto. But Pluto was too small!”
Borden can’t get the rhythm of our movement through the tube. “I’m more concerned about where we’re going right now,” she says, teeth chattering.
“But that’s the big kahuna! The Antags call it Sun-Planet.”
Borden looks to me as the rope torques us about. We bounce and correct. “You’ve heard that?”
“Yeah.”
“Their Sun-Planet is Planet X?”
“Of course it is!” DJ says. “It swoops down every few hundreds of thousands of years and scatters moons and stuff like billiard balls.”
Borden drills me with her eyes. “You did not mention any of this!”
“None of it’s confirmed,” I say.
“If she tells you something, shows you something, give it to me and Kumar!”
“Sure,” I say, and she’s right. DJ also looks apologetic. Knowing when to divulge and what to divulge is a real art form in this situation and around this crew.
And there’s worse to come. I just can’t put the fragments together, not yet. But I’m keeping my eye on Ulyanova because Bird Girl chose her, and because I sense she’s at the center of everything about to happen. I just can’t figure out why.
The tube widens and the Antags have more freedom to keep us from bumping and bouncing. Our trip goes on for more long minutes, time enough for me to get bored.
I remember the nighttime lectures under the amazing skies of Socotra that seemed to dwarf both the ocean and the island. The DIs had brought in a crew of professors and they were trying to convert a bunch of grunts into stargazers. Pleasant memory, actually. That’s when DJ became fascinated with the idea of Planet X. Maybe he’s always been the prescient one.
Ulyanova crawls up the chain and grips my arm. “I feel someone!” she says. “Is not right, is strange!”
“Yeah,” DJ says. “You don’t know it yet, but you’re one of us.”
Borden looks back at him, lip curled. More stuff not reported?
“How?” the starshina asks.
“Were you ever exposed to the green dust inside the Drifters?” DJ asks.
She frowns. “Possible,” she says. “Help pick up bodies.”
“Welcome to the club,” he says. “See things?”
Ulyanova frowns again, shakes her head. She’s lying. But how, and why?
And why does Bird Girl care?
We reach the open end of one tube and emerge on one side of an aggressively amazing space. It takes a few confused seconds to process what we’re seeing.
Big ship indeed.
A wide curved landscape stretches beneath us, rising on two axes to a central shaft maybe half a klick away, itself a hundred meters thick. The curved surface butts up against the shaft and then smoothly spirals around it, like the surface of a screw or the inside of a shell. No way of knowing how many turns the spiral makes, or how long the shaft is, but what we can see, upper surface and lower, is coated with a carpet of bushy green, red, and brown vegetation. Enclosing this giant spiral is a blank, almost featureless outer wall. The way the lighting concentrates on the screw itself is mysterious—no obvious source and very little scatter against that surrounding wall.
Ulyanova makes a growling sound and taps her head, as if to knock some wiring back in place.
“Oxygen processing?” Borden asks.
“Or a big salad bowl,” I say.
“What do Antags eat?” Borden asks, as if we’d know.
DJ just squints as if thinking hurts.
Our escorts tug on the rubbery rope and pull us up close, then point their wingtips at a rail running around the outer edge of the screw. From around the long curve comes an open car, empty, automated. It stops right beside us.
Bird Girl suggests we all climb in and hang on to the straps. We do that. Then, without a jerk, just smooth acceleration, the car whisks us around the long spiral of the screw’s edge—forward, I think, toward the prow of this monstrous ship. Our progress is leisurely. These cars may be made for bringing in the crops or carrying farmers—not for mass transit.
“We’re being kept in the back of the bus,” Borden says. “Aft of sewage treatment or whatever this is.”
Bird Girl turns, her four eyes glittering, and says, “Not shit. Not food.” Through our link, she’s trying to convey something about this ship, but to me it’s a muddle, and I doubt DJ has a clue.
Here it is again—the difficulty of meshing the ways our brains work. We may be relatives, but we haven’t been connected socially or biologically for ever so long—maybe for as long as there’s been complex life on Earth. There’s another conflict as well, an invisible fight to receive and act on information while we’re losing one of our most important sources.
Bug Karnak is shrinking. Our links are fading, dying.
I look at the endless acres of whatever sort of growth or crop rises along the spiraling curve.
“Are they trying to speak something?” Ulyanova asks. “I do not feel it right.”
Beats us all. None of us feels it right.
OUTER OF OUTERS
In fifteen or twenty minutes—no helms, no timekeepers of any sort, how are we supposed to know how long things take?—the transport has wound us fourteen times around the screw and never a difference, never a change—reddish, brownish, greenish broccoli-like bushes. Not food. Not for air. Not to suck up shit and process it.