“Neither are we,” Ishida says, but Borden gives her an elbow.
“We’d like a decent service and arrangements for the dead we found,” Joe says.
“They will be incinerated, along with our dead.”
“Dead from Titan?” Joe asks.
Bird Girl blinks all four eyes. “We are told by our searchers that games were arranged for us as well as you. These provoke feelings of guilt in searchers. Arrangements will be made.”
“Thank you,” Joe says. “I understand.”
“Do you?” Bird Girl asks. “I have insight into two of you, and our searchers are, in your eyes, horrible.”
Borden says quickly, “We hope to revise our opinions.”
“Searchers always important, and these have been to our home, piloting this ship. I wish to learn from them and prepare for the journey. We have work to do, and all may be useful.”
She drafts and pulls herself back to the concave, star-filled dish.
“That isn’t the nose of the ship,” DJ says in an aside to me. “Not a direct view.”
“I got that,” I say.
“Ship goes way beyond. Wonder what’s up there—what they all used it for?”
“Kumar, come here,” Borden says.
Kumar climbs forward.
“What’s the chance that Ulyanova can remain independent while channeling a Guru?”
“Zero,” he says. “I’m pitiful, and all I did was look at them, work with them. She has one in her head.”
“Great to hear,” Joe says.
DJ hunches his shoulders. “You know what I’d give anything for right now?”
“A blow job,” Ishida says with rich sarcasm.
“Fuck no. That can wait. A tent on Mars, with some of those Russian food packs, those sausages, those little reindeer ones.”
“Yeah,” Tak says.
“Those were the best, weren’t they?”
The Russians agree. “Blow job would be good, as well,” Bilyk adds. He looks hopefully at Jacobi and Litvinov cuffs him.
INTO THE WEIRD
The arrangements for quarters are interesting. Beyond the starry dish there is indeed more ship. We get drafted through the centerline on our leashes, this time by two searchers, who brachiate like long-armed gibbons from one jutting cluster of canes to the next. I feel like Jane in Tarzan’s arms, only a lot more arms. The canes seem to be arranged in a tube around the centerline, and the searchers move alternately on the outside of one tube, then cross to the inside of the next, deftly avoiding other squid on other tube highways coming and going toward the ship’s unknown and distant prow.
In some places, the tubes are thin and we can see almost all the way to an outer wall, which in this segment has transparencies like very large windows, giving us glimpses of the outboard cylinders, which have their own transparencies. We’re uninvolved enough in our transport that I try to peer through the canes and both transparencies. The outboard cylinders are filled with other screw gardens, lots of them, bigger than the one in the tail. Important. Nonsensically important.
The searchers smoothly shuttle us through an immense cavern. At first, I can only make out blurry patches shot through with flashes of that fairy light—but then I get a real sense of scale. We’re being shuttled over a major e-ticket ride. Guru tech is on full display as we smoothly pass over what amounts to an immense four-leaf clover, the leaves pointing aft, the node, connecting the leaves, about two klicks forward of the trailing edges—the whole arrangement maybe two klicks across. Each leaf’s inner surface is mapped by canals and geographies of walled-off rivers, along with what could pass for a lake, all teeming with hundreds of searchers going about their business, whatever that might be. Makes more sense than the screw gardens—they’re the ship’s drivers, right? They need a place for R&R.
Gravity is not apparent, but the water flowing along the rivers and lake doesn’t drift away. The giant clover doesn’t spin or do anything obvious, but the surfaces of the leaves seem to have their own sticky properties. The searchers in charge of our bouquet make no comments on these wonders, not that we’d understand if they did. DJ and I did not share tea with them and know nothing about their inner thoughts.
Near the node where the leaves come together, we’re taken to a lumpy neighborhood of gray-brown mushrooms, spotted with holes, as if worms have been busy, and for all we know, they have. But we haven’t met any—yet.
The searchers deliver us and deftly, silently move way, tail first, keeping their eyes on us like servants or guards in a royal palace.
“Our bunks,” Borden says.
We untangle from the leashes and explore. The spaces within the holes are equipped with mats and net-bundles of cakes, along with succulent gluey beads about the size of grapes, but bright yellow-green. We’re ravenous and try them all. Not terrible. Almost good.
The walls are spongy, soft, reasonably warm and comfortable—and glow with a soft, bluish sunset light. Best accommodations yet, but what I need most, what all of us need most, is sleep. So we divide along rank and friendship, crawl through different wormholes, wrap up in blankets, and rest easy. It’s an instinct Skyrines have, sort of Greek battlefield wisdom—know what you can change, accept what you can’t, and make do with whatever’s handed to you.
But as I drift into a much-needed and reasonably sound slumber, I can’t stop thinking about those impossible rivers, flowing along the huge, angled cloverleaves—searchers swimming, breaching, refreshing, enjoying themselves—all the while doing something apparently essential to this ship.
A little residual from Bug Karnak stirs and decides to take shape in my foggy thoughts. The searchers are familiar to the bugs—in reverse. Like the Antags, they were designed and assigned. “What’s that even mean?” I murmur, with my hands reaching out as if to grasp these facts. “Bugs never met them, never knew them.”
But bugs never met or knew human beings or anything on Earth. Reverse familiarity. Later manifestations of bug civilization helped seed the outer reaches of the solar system, far beyond Pluto, far indeed from the sun. In fact, that’s where all the important stuff was happening, four billion years ago.
And the searchers, for the Antags at least, are among the most important.
But how did they become useful to the Gurus? They don’t fight. Can they defend themselves against anybody or anything? How can they be soldiers in a Guru-inspired war?
Maybe they provide a lagniappe of irony, pity, perspective. There’s a theory so vague I withdraw my hand. The vision subsides. I’m warm, I’m surrounded, it’s not much stranger—maybe slightly less strange, actually—than the quarters we occupied on the Spook, and there’s no impending battle, no fight planned for the day, the month, maybe for years, How long will it take us to get where Bird Girl thinks we’re going? Hundreds of billions of kilometers. Maybe a trillion. We’re definitely out of action for this part of the season, probably for hundreds of seasons to come. Maybe we’ll die inside this monster.
Inside. We’ve been eaten by an immense Guru ship populated by Captain Nemo’s worst nightmares… but all in all, it’s not too bad. A vacation break from the Red or Titan. Instant death delayed.
I can’t hear Captain Coyle anymore, but I know what she’d tell me. She’d say, When you get home, Venn, you’re going to be one fucked-up dude.
I EMERGE FROM my hole and almost bump into Borden. She’s looking reasonably sharp, so I ask her where she got coffee. She gives me a chilly smile. “We need to talk.”
“I’m still half-asleep.”