Like DJ and Borden, and maybe Ulyanova, who has this puzzled look all the time now, watching the inner shaft and the acre after acre of broccoli… we’re getting hypnotized.
Then we slow. The rail frees itself from the screw’s edge and lofts over the brushy surface, and for the first time I notice there’s no new upper surface; we’re nearing the end of this particular line and we’re still nearly weightless. If the ship is moving somewhere, it’s accelerating at no more than a few percent g.
At the end of the screw is an inverted dome, also featureless—gray and smooth. The Antags do not get out of the transport, so we hang on while it rolls for a couple of hundred more meters. The center shaft of the screw gardens passes up and maybe through that dome, but before the shaft and dome join, there’s a hole in the shaft’s side—no hatch, just a hole. We enter that hole and with a sigh and a jerk, as if hitting a bumper, the transport comes to a halt in darkness.
The Antags—visible to us now only as shadows—swing away and tug on our cord. More cords and cables have been stretched from the darkness above to a few meters below the transport, and we are encouraged by gestures and Bird Girl’s brief screechy words to climb into a deeper darkness. Antags seem to love darkness. Maybe that’s why they have four eyes. They’re used to darkness and night, or dark ocean.
Ulyanova stays close to me. Borden stays close to DJ. Three of us with some sort of connection, but one deaf and almost completely blind to the greater messaging of Ice Moon Tea. Borden’s wondering why she’s been allowed to come this far with us, the special ones. Why Bird Girl chose her. Really, it’s because I chose her. There’s something about her we need right now, a steadfastness and stability, perhaps a lack of imagination. Because things are about to get really strange.
I have to ask myself if Borden knew even at Madigan, even before I came back from Mars, that Ice Moon Tea was important, that some of us were going to be crucial and had to be saved. Well, there’s one more of us now. One down, Kazak—and one up, maybe. Ulyanova. Balance of forces. Not for the first time do I wish that Coyle was still around, still explaining, still bitching. Bird Girl can’t seem to explain the most important things in ways I understand, and we’re both tangential to the information contained in Bug Karnak…
Which is melting away like a sand castle at high tide. “Inquire” indeed. After being hidden from the Gurus for so many eons, maybe it’ll just wash out with the roaring tsunami of human and Antag forces down on Titan—and leave us literally dumb.
And what’s about to be revealed is frankly horrifying. It may save us, but at what cost? Assembling the same fragments in his own head, DJ’s starting to look faintly unhinged, even more lost and puzzled than Ulyanova.
Ahead lies a great circle of seven circular openings, each maybe thirty meters across. The Antags pull us through the closest and then draft us another hundred meters—until the gloom brightens. I think we’ve been corkscrewed around the outer diameter of this part of the ship, but how they knew which opening to choose, and why, is still a mystery.
Sunlight glimmers through transparent slits that rise for several dozen meters along the outer wall, showing us that here the ship’s hull is exposed to space. The Antags jerk hard and our cables curl into loops, then grow taut again, as we pass into another large chamber, this one stranger than the last. It contains a series of great, dark soccer balls, wrapped in a conical net…
We’re pulled sharply outboard into a long, cathedral-like side chamber with dark gray tiers but no seats—a big, bizarre medical theater. For all its size, only three other Antags occupy the tiers, spaced out, separate, as if they bought different tickets or don’t like one another. They watch us closely with glittering gray- and green-rimmed eyes.
My attention turns to the apparent reason we’re here. Bird Girl is fulfilling her promise. Behind us as we entered, but quickly dominating, this weird theater opens wide to a direct portal at least sixty meters high. Beyond the portal slowly moves the orange and tobacco-colored ball of Titan. This confirms what we already did not doubt, that we’re in orbit and maybe about to shove off.
Titan at great leisure slides clockwise out of view. The spaceship is rotating. Beautiful, but I’ve seen it before. I look back at the tiers. The Antags, all but Bird Girl, are wearing light armor. I sense the three in the gallery are not happy we’re here. Not happy about any of this. I get from Bird Girl that these are important individuals, the equivalent of commanders or generals—one might even be a commander in chief of this particular combat theater. And the reason they’re here is that Bird Girl is being put on a kind of trial. They’re judging her. They’re judging us.
But she has power over them. How?
We hear far-off booming noises, liquid noises, and then a kind of buzz-saw thrumming whine that sets my teeth on edge—hard to imagine in a ship so large. We’ve rotated far enough that we can see a broad curve of Saturn’s rings, then Saturn itself—too large to fit inside even this theater’s broad view.
Another round of liquid noises and again the distant buzzing. The important, silent Antags reveal neither surprise nor appreciation, hardly any indication they’re alive. Tight discipline. I doubt they’ve ever spent more than a few minutes in the presence of humans, and that in quick, nasty combat.
But right now I don’t give a shit about protocol or Antag feelings. I’m impressed all over again by what lies beyond the window. I’ve seen it before but never presented this way, and I’m still capable of awe. The rings and the immense yellow and gold gas giant cradled within are mesmerizing. The light on the rings, intersected by the planet’s shadow, reminds me of the shine off old vinyl records. Even though the rings are hundreds of thousands of klicks away, I can make out the braids formed by tiny moonlets navigating between the larger rings. Skips in the record—God’s favorite songs, played over and over.
Across its visible surface, Saturn shows incredible, subtle detail—faded pastel yellow bands, storms big and small revealing brown depths, an overall softening haze that seems to end abruptly against the blackness of space. Beyond the curve of night, thunderstorms light up the murk. Some flashes are bright enough to compete in daylight. I wonder that anything could ever survive down there. Maybe it hasn’t—ever or now. The ocean moons make even more sense as the origin of life.
Bird Girl sticks out a wing and draws our attention away from Saturn, away from the gallery, and with a little flourish, toward her. The longest, claw-tipped finger at the wingtip moves along her beak, almost to her eyes, and she has our full attention—but why? What’s she up to?
Borden tracks our former enemies like a rabbit watching a circling hawk.
Slowly, like a magician, with the inboard hand of her opposite limb Bird Girl raises a long object like a cheerleader’s baton. First she touches and then twists a round knob, four eyes shifting. She points again to her eyes, then to my eyes, then to Ulyanova’s, then back to hers.
“Four, two,” the translator rasps.
Bird Girl draws an X in the air. The knob lights up and projects doubled ghosts. Our eyes aren’t easy targets for Antag displays—four into two. She then covers half of the knob with stretchy tape.
Finally, she lifts her left wingtip finger, shapes an oval in the air, and into that oval the knob projects a map of the outer solar system—Uranus and Neptune beyond Saturn, then, beyond Neptune, a long void, followed by a brief, grazing flyby of Pluto and its moons, then outward farther still—across a seemingly endless gulf, empty but for unimaginably distant clouds of stars.