Then why am I still thinking, still trying to solve problems? Thinking. Sinking. I really am sinking. Before I go to sleep, in my head, all by myself, I spout maxims and rules of thumb like a drunk DI at his fucking retirement party. I’m an old man in a young man’s body. That’s what Joe told me years back when we stood in line to recruit. “You’re an old soul,” he said. “And that ain’t necessarily a good thing.”
It’s even more true now. That’s what battle does to you. That’s what …
Shit. I’m forgetting the best stuff. Really clever stuff. It was all so clear just a moment ago.
Someone grabs my helm and shoves another helm in close. Through the visors I see Jacobi. She looks angry. Her lips form words: “I don’t think they like us!”
No shit. So sleepy. I can’t hear much. All comm has been jammed or cut and the suits are too insulated, too heavy. Jacobi’s hands let me go. She’s checking other helms. Poking, looking, poking again—taking a count. Then she half-walks, half-swims through the silty fluid and returns to me. Again she’s trying to say something, but she points emphatically at the wall. Hey! There’s an Antag peering in, checking to see if we’re still alive. Fucking ugly bird with useless wings, except they seem to be able to swim. Or maybe they’re weightless and that’s the only place those useless wings work—in zero g.
Jacobi slams her helm hard against mine, twists my head left, and I see what’s beside the Antag. It’s a big, shadowy mass, slowly morphing or rotating, can’t tell which, but it has long, sinuous arms. For a moment, it looks like a catamaran viewed head-on—two bodies linked by a thick bridge. Each body sports two very large eyes. Arms emerge from the tips of the bodies, below the eyes—slow, lazy arms.
I have no trouble reading Jacobi’s lips through her visor. I’m thinking the same thing: What the fuck is that?
That’s not all that’s new. I see smaller forms that superficially resemble Antags, crawling by the tank on their knees or feet, wings folded, like bats. Never saw either the squid or the little bats on Mars.
Then the silhouettes move off and the tank goes dark. Hours pass, maybe days. How much in the way of sips and gasps do our heavy suits carry? We finally get organized enough to sit up and form a long oval in the murk at the bottom. We could be in a twelve-step program. At Jacobi’s prodding, some of us stand and try to walk, but there’s nowhere to go.
I get lost all over again in trying to remember Camp Pendleton, Hawthorne, Socotra off the coast of Yemen, Skybase Lewis-McChord. Madigan. Why can’t an instauration come along, one of those preprogrammed moments that make me think I’m somewhere else? Compared to this, that would be a vacation. But there’s no such relief.
I can almost imagine those far-off places are still around, and might return to my life—that I’m here but they’re still out there, still real, and some of the memories carry so such detail—
But the damned suit keeps pinching, cutting, insinuating, and that blocks me from losing myself in any memory, any setting, any world I want so badly to re-create. Worse, it keeps diverting me to the pain of my first year as a teenager. Listening to my mom get beat up. Sitting with Harry, her boyfriend, on the couch as he drank beer and smoked and made me watch grisly YouTube videos with him. Accidents, corpses, history shit. Kept him from beating on Mom, but I hated those videos. Made life seem frail and nasty. Poor fucked-up Harry. Maybe he never had a chance.
I don’t want to remember any more about Harry.
TIME IS NOT ON MY SIDE, AND NEVER WAS
More days, or maybe just hours. Couldn’t be days, right? The lights brighten. Antags swim or prance by the walls, peer in, make gestures with their mid-joint wing-fingers. They do have thumbs!
I see no more catamaran squid with their sinuous arms. Could be robots or machines or weapons, but they looked alive to me.
Then the top of the tank opens and those damned spiky metal tentacles reach in and pluck one of us out by an arm and a leg. I think it’s Litvinov, the Russian colonel. The opening closes. We move around, frantically bumping, trying to stay away from the opening.
Can it get any worse?
The tentacles poke back down and explore, roiling the tank’s rippling, foaming surface. In a few minutes, four more suits have been plucked up and out. And now it’s my turn. The cold saline drains from around my suit and a warmer something surrounds me. My joints ache and lungs labor. Pressure has changed. Maybe there’s air outside the tank. Could also mean my suit has sprung a pressure leak.
Then the tentacles relax and release. I’m lying on something but I can’t see what—a table, a rolling cart? I’m moved along a narrow, cramped tunnel that curves sharply off to the left, and then I’m dumped on a slab. The slab is in a small cylindrical room. Two Antags strut around me, then the room quickly fills with the smaller bat creatures, all carrying wicked-looking tools. They climb up and lean over me, over my suit. I can’t move.
But then something sparks in my head—a little communication from the Antag female. She’s making it clear to me and probably to DJ that we’re still not where we want to be. We’re on a small transport ship, in orbit around Titan, and the first thing the Antags are going to do is cut us out of our suits, in case we have secret weapons, in case we can still cause damage, wearing them. The big Antags back off and let the smaller creatures do their work. They surround me, heads bobbing, tools dancing, and make low grunting noises.
I hope they kill me quick.
A scratchy voice, sound not mental, through a translator, says, “Helpers will remove your armor. It will hurt.”
Together, the bats start cutting. Their torch-saws make quick work of the outer shell, which is roughly pulled away, revealing underwear and then naked flesh, with wires stretched taut like guitar strings—
And I’m the frets.
I scream.
The bats work quickly, pulling and extracting and clipping while grunting and whistling, and I bleed all over the table before a bigger Antag sprays on a kind of floury powder that stanches the blood.
When I’m too weak to scream, two big Antags lift me from the table with those damned wing-fingers, shrouded in elastic gloves, and wrap me in gray blankets that fit snug to my body. Where the blankets touch, the pain goes away.
I’d rather die than go through that again.
A big Antag leans over me as I’m carried into another, much smaller room. Expressive damned eyes—two outside, two inside, near the beak. Then I know. This one is the female, my liaison, my connection—those vibrations. Again she does not rely on our private circuit, but uses a translator to tell me in hashy English that the others will also have their suits removed, for her crew’s security but also for our own good.
“They are designed to control you,” the scratchy voice says. “The Keepers are afraid of you.”
“Who’re they?” I croak.
She wipes my mouth with a cloth. “If you join us, you can fight to kill them.”
“Yeah. Sure. When can I speak to my friends?” I ask.
“On a bigger ship, we will find a place for all of you to live together.”
“What about Bug Karnak?” Somehow, through our connection, she knows what I’m talking about.
“It will stay here,” she says.
“But someone’s going to try to destroy it, right?”
The Antag female leans over me, four eyes glittering in the dim light of the cell, beak open to show a raspy tongue. “You will sleep. We are moving to bigger ship.”
She thinks there’s something unusual about this particular bigger ship—I can feel it in the overtones. Something powerful, dangerous, and puzzling.
“Where to after that?”
“Far away,” she adds. “Long journey. Many days.”
“You travel between the stars?”
“We go home,” she says. “If we live.”
Lots of ifs. “Where are you from?”
Through the overtones, I’m left with an impression of something like a big basketball on a bi
lliard table, slowly rolling across gravity-dimpled felt and scattering smaller balls every which way. Makes no sense to me.
Then I realize this might be Sun-Planet.
“You don’t come from another star system?”
No answer to that and pretty soon I’m numb, sleepy all over again—
Asleep.
This time I dream of walking across the dry, brushy hills between the close-packed, apartment-strewn suburbs of San Diego. My mother is walking with me and one of her boyfriends, it’s Harry, goddammit, and he’s packing a Colt pistol in a fast-draw holster slung on his hip. Harry’s about to teach me the basics of high-powered weapons.
Christ. Why can’t I dream something pleasant, something wonderful?
SORRY, CHARLIE
My eyes are open, though I’m still in darkness. I’m wearing a loose kind of pajama bottom. I fall against a wall and back my way around a circle. I’m in a small, cylindrical room. A can. Tuna, not sardines. If I spread my arms, I can touch both sides. I have no idea how much time has passed. I’m comfortable enough, though my body still throbs and aches. It’s dark in here. Dark and close.
“Joe? Jacobi? Commander?”
No answer. Where are we?
Have we left Titan?
I feel the peculiar vibration that tells me the female Antag isn’t far away. I pick up a jumble of her deep thoughts, then more overtones, and no doubt she can feel some of mine. Images and emotions. She’s hard at work—maybe she’s in the control room, but I can’t see what that looks like. My vision and hers still don’t sync.
But her fellows are ragging her. Some hate her for getting close to humans and not killing us. Our being here puts a tremendous strain on their command structure, their camaraderie. So many want us dead.
Even putting that aside, I don’t think she has a lot of respect for me, for us. After all, they were able to capture us alive—and even though that was what the bug steward wanted and she had told her superiors that was what should happen and everyone in her crew signed on to that course of action—
Even though we surrendered reluctantly, and two of our Oscars tried to break and run … we didn’t really put up a fight. We chose the coward’s way, right?
How old is Antag culture? That kind of shit thinking usually passes after a really bad war or a few thousand years of scouring the countryside and raping and killing peasants. After a while, that kind of thinking gets stale.
But they’re in charge.
The female delivers another sip of precious knowledge. We’re on the move; our cans (we’re all in ventilated cylinders like this one) are going to be packed into a transport, awaiting an opportunity to rendezvous with a much larger ship, that dangerous puzzle ship, even now swooping down from behind other moons. Antags do like to hide behind moons. But she insists this is not one of their ships. Makes no sense. She shows me that leaving Titan was less difficult than leaving Mars. Duh. That’s why we hardly felt it.
Will my air last that long? That really pushes a button. I remember being told back in basic that you’d be flunked out if you got iffy in tight situations. No claustrophobes allowed. Skyrine training leads you into lots of trials that involve confinement, being closed in, squeezed tight, sometimes for days or weeks. But usually while asleep or waiting to be dropped, when adrenaline and our favorite drug, never given a name but we called it enthusiasm, kept you up and prepped.
But that’s a long time ago. We’ve been through a lot since then and this fucking can is too much. It’s tough to quit a panic once engaged. All I manage is to stand flat against the wall and shiver all over. For the first time in my life, I’m asking God to just kill me. Get it over with now. I’ve lost all interest in whatever will come next, because I’m IN A FUCKING CAN and can’t get out.
Then another kind of panic grips me. If I survive, I think, I’ll never be what I was before—whatever and whoever I was before. Shithead before, but at least I was a semifunctional Skyrine and a faithful member of the Corps. What will I be in a few hours?
Just when I’m about to lose the last of my dignity, my discipline, I am bathed in a kind of autumnal light. A kind of opening is revealed through which I see something, through which I can experience the outside and try to control my fear—
It’s in the overtones. It’s my connection with the Antag female—Bird Girl.
I try to remember where I’ve heard that name, Bird Girl. My mother read me books all the time. I was five or six when she started us on bigger novels, usually from the base library, but sometimes from bargain bookstores. I try to recall the titles—something to distract me, and it helps by bringing another round of memories, this time so sharp and sweet I can almost forget the can.
I feel myself wrapped in a blanket, nestling up against my mother’s warmth and hearing her voice as she reads. Crickets chirp outside, a breeze puffs the curtains through the window screen—the last dry heat of day fading into Fresno night. We haven’t moved to San Diego yet. My mother and father haven’t gotten their divorce. These are good times, cozy times. I feel secure and happy.
Bird Girl. This may be where I first heard that strange name. Mom read me Vance and Le Guin, Martin and Tolkien, of course, but there was also this book set in South America that told about a girl in a big green jungle. It takes me hours to remember the name, then it just pops up. Green Mansions. Rima was the bird girl’s name. I feel so clever, I want to tell Joe and DJ, but I doubt they’ve ever heard of the book.
Mom’s reading to me continued even after my father left us and my behavior went downhill, exasperating her, but when she read to me, we could imagine better times and places. She moved us down to San Diego. Started dating the string of crazy dudes. But she still found time to read to me. I think now, digging deep, that the love of reading I picked up from her—that, and Joe’s influence—is what kept me from becoming a narcissistic monster. As she read she mused, talked about our life, tried to explain what she was feeling—I didn’t always want to know about that. Embarrassed the hell out of me sometimes. She drew out lessons and revealed a kind of wisdom she rarely applied to her own life, but passed to me nevertheless, along with those stories—a kind of mother’s milk full of immunization against the insanity that all too often surrounded us.
When she found a new man, of course, all that was put on pause for a few weeks, so I didn’t actually like any of her men, and she knew it and that added to our strain.
But for right now—
Listening to the overtones coming from the liaison—
“Hey, Bird Girl,” I whisper in the darkness, in the can. “Read me a story. Give me something. We’re partners, right?”
My words must come wrapped in their own overtones, a haze of comfort and the sound of crickets, the heat of a Southern California summer—and so many strange words. Maybe Bird Girl knows about Tolkien and the others. Maybe she was told to study us as a culture. Maybe she’s a scholar of humanity.
Yeah. Right.
There’s a pause, a kind of mental question mark, and then I get another round of overtones. I desperately reach for them, like grabbing flowers out of a falling bouquet, so sweet because they’re not in the can with me. Most of it turns out to be bug memory, a constant flow of old history and planetary geology. Bug steward is still there, acting between Bird Girl and me, coordinating this ancient flow—and maybe trying to give me some relief.
But there’s also a young memory and it has to be from Bird Girl, because nothing about bug steward is young—
Very sharp—
A tangled ball of wings and grasping hands. Momma Antag has just hatched five babies, and they pile up against one another in a soft bowl, mewing and thrashing and waiting for something to be deposited in their barely open beaks. A tube drops down. Momma doesn’t regurgitate—maybe it’s not Momma—
It’s not. This is a place where they make soldiers.
The infant soldiers eat. It’s pea soup and salt and anchovies, by the taste, or at least the smell. Ecstasy. Not
in the least cozy from my human perspective, but it’s one of Bird Girl’s favorite early memories.
Fair exchange.
The overtones fade. For a long, long time, I resonate again between panic and trying to reach out in our weird, four-part thought space—DJ, Bird Girl, the steward, and me in four hypothetical corners—and get relief, plus answers …
DJ is barely there. I think he’s actually asleep. I don’t want to dig into DJ’s subconscious, which is mostly old movies and memories of porn, so I avoid that part.
And then—
I feel a pressure down my centerline, pooling around my feet like I’m in an elevator cab. We’re definitely on the move. I can stand, but it’s easier to squat and press my back against the cylinder wall. The pressure grows on my butt and feet. I focus on that pressure, that sensation. Something’s going to change.
After a while, I stop squeaking like a mouse and rise from the bottom, then float up inside the cylinder until I bump my head. Somehow that’s better than just sitting. We’re still in orbit, I guess, but no joy on getting the can open. We’re waiting for that big powerful ship, but it’s not here yet.
The ship we’re all stuffed into at the moment is little more than a light transport, the last of those that once delivered weapons and reinforcements to Antags on Titan. The Antags retrieved their survivors and the few remaining catamaran squid. I get a kind of doubled picture/impression of these remarkable creatures swimming in Titan’s deep icy slush, the supercold, super-saline fluids, and wonder how that makes sense, how they survived—
But I know now that the squid are not native to Titan. They belong with the Antags! And how many Antags remain? Not many. They’ve dumped the falcons and the smaller weapons that faced us across the walls of the archive—Bug Karnak. Those are all gone.
The big ship that’s supposedly out there is not one of the ships that deliver Antags to Mars. Those are much smaller, less powerful, and slower. This one is bigger than big and stranger than strange, and for some reason no Antag is really at all sure it will allow us inside, or how the Antags will take control and fly it, but if everything works out right—if we acquire or earn infinite amounts of luck—we will meet with it soon and be transferred over.