The image swirls to show us the receding solar system, the sun alone bright, the rest indicated by arrows and orbits. This display has now taken us too far out to see most of the planets.
We watch, transfixed, as Bird Girl sweeps us all in a long, long arc over what lies beyond the diffuse region of dust and moonlets and comets beyond Pluto—chunks of primordial ice spread thinner than mosquitoes on a winter lake, most of the chunks no bigger than gravel (I think, it’s hard to guess and impossible to read) or even a grain of sand, but some are truly massive—great dark spheres hiding in deep space, more than a hundred billion kilometers from the sun; many times the size of Jupiter but not cold and apparently still too small and dark to attract the attention of Earth.
Then the view moves out farther still to circle a black void, a shadow-haunted world scribed by reddish map lines, five times more massive than Jupiter and ten times the diameter, its density far less than water—like a great cosmic balloon. A balloon with a nuclear core. I can almost feel that unborn star pulsing at the heart of this monstrosity, this enigma—this impossible thing.
Planet X.
If that really is the Antag home world, they’re not interstellar visitors. They’re near neighbors, astronomically speaking. They’ve apparently been out there all along and we on Earth never noticed.
“That is ours,” Bird Girl says. “That is our life. We will not get there without you.”
Borden is ignoring the documentary and studying the view, frowning deeply, a common expression for our commander. “Where’s our pursuit?” she murmurs.
Good question. We seem to be alone out here, facing no obvious threats, yet all along we’ve been harassed by both sides, intent on wiping us out with all our knowledge.
“She’s trying to tell us—” I begin, but Borden is having none of this. She covers my mouth with her hand.
“Think, goddammit! Why are they taking so long to get the hell out of here? Ask her!” she insists.
The translator works for any of us, but no sense adding to the confusion. “Where are the other ships?” I ask. “Why are we waiting?”
The translation is quick. A bristly outer layer like soft porcupine quills rises around Bird Girl’s wing-shoulders and the back of her head. She looks behind us at the distributed trio up in the tiers. The Antag commanders issue melodious commands and then, with all the dignity they can muster, not much in my eyes at least, flap their limbs and depart through a forward, funnel-like exit.
Bird Girl stays with us—banished to our company. “We have no quick danger,” she says through the translator. “But we do not control. We cannot leave yet.”
“What does that mean?” Borden asks.
“We do not control.”
Borden gives me a sharp look, as if this is my fault and I’ve been deficient all along. “How can they not control their own ship?” she asks.
“Others do not see this ship,” Bird Girl says. “No other ship will attack.”
“Jesus!” DJ says. “It’s been in my head all along! I’ve been an idiot!”
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell Bug Karnak’s data dumps from memories of bad dreams, and the steward has not always been helpful in laying down boundaries between the two. But now it’s becoming more and more clear—
We’ve been clued in, through fragments waiting for our need, for our necessity, to join up, to take shape, and the shape they finally assume is a confirmation that this large ship is very old, and tinged with menace and uncertainty—a dire, ancient bug memory that can only be labeled “Guru.”
“This is Keeper ship,” Bird Girl confirms. “Dark to our forces and yours. We have taken Keepers prisoner and brought them here. One knows her.” She points a mid-wing digit at Ulyanova. “They were joined on Mars. Together, they can help us guide ship home.”
We turn our unwelcome attention to the starshina, the stern-faced, serious young woman with hardly a clue to what she really is. But now my own fragments are starting to come together. The instaurations, the meeting at Madigan, something behind the observation mirror implanting and perverting me…
I know at least a little about what could be inside our starshina, tormenting her.
“You’re the one?” DJ asks with comic wonder, like he’s discovered the punch line to a joke in a stack of playing cards. “You’ve been linked to a Guru! Jesus… How can that happen? They used tea on both of you?”
Ulyanova draws her shoulders square and cocks her head as if listening to a conversation in a distant room. “Did not know…” She’s frightened by her own doubt. “Not my choice!”
“Maybe not,” DJ says. “But if it’s true, it’s worth at least a couple of pay grades.”
“Venn!” Borden insists. “What the hell are we facing?”
“Bird Girl could be right,” I say.
“Could be? We were told the Gurus didn’t have ships anywhere near this big. And how the hell could Antags find, much less board a Guru ship?” She diverts her anger to Bird Girl, whose quills barely shift. Borden’s voice has become shrill, and realizing this, she pulls back and swallows hard. “What in hell have I got us into?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” I say.
Titan rotates back into view, looking like lumpy pastry dough stirred by a huge stick. Massive disturbances are taking shape in the orange and tobacco overcast. The centers of the disturbances open to reveal huge cracks in Titan’s surface. Through those cracks rise flashes of blue and orange, impossibly bright, impossibly large. Our diminishing communication with the steward, our shrinking connection with Bug Karnak, makes awful sense.
Bird Girl winks with her outboard pair of eyes, which I assume means, do we feel it, too? The loss?
We do.
Together, our forces and the Antags—those still under Guru influence—are grinding through Titan’s icy shell and churning the deep oceans, finishing the destruction of Bug Karnak. In all our heads, the steward DJ and I and had almost come to know, to anticipate and expect, to rely upon, is dying by falling chunks and increasing silences. Subjects are winking out. Untapped potentials are marked as blanks, then simply closing up, going away.
In Fresno, I once watched a library burn and tried to feel the pain of the books, the loss of their stories—the loss of my mom reading those books to me. I couldn’t. Now, I do.
It hurts.
Bird Girl’s translator addresses Ulyanova. “You must show us how to go through puzzle gate, how to reach ship’s control, or all ends.”
Ulyanova hasn’t had much time to feel the potential of her connection. She and DJ and I are points on a polygon. How many points there are, ultimately, I don’t know.
Bird Girl raises a small ridge of soft quills and elegantly ripples her wings a full beat. Then she rises to the funnel-shaped exit and jerks on our rope, which we’re gripping like a lifeline.
And away we go.
But not before we get one last broad look at Titan, lightning lancing from cloud to cloud—dust and volcanic plumes of water and ice being swept under by a dense shroud of heated gas.
“Gawd almighty,” DJ says, wiping away tears, moving his lips in prayer at the end of what we had never really understood in the first place: the influence of the archives. Our links with the liaisons and the steward. The wisdom of the bugs.
Our reason for being out here.
AFTER KARNAK