It’s beautiful, ghostly, and I hope quick and strong. I’m resigned. This must be one of the large Killers—not the worst way to go, according to my book.
A brilliant bronze-colored beam shoots across the chamber and spears the hypnotic mass. The beam flicks and cuts the thing in half. The two halves writhe. Its bands of color fade. Black spots appear. The beam flicks again and quarters it. The severed masses catch fire and burn with intense blue flames. I smell caramel and acid. A slow rain of corrosive droplets strikes my body, my face, stinging, hissing.
I scream—and look down. A sharp pain has shot up my right arm. A spear pierces the bicep. There’s a cord attached. I grab the cord, and it jerks through my hands as I’m yanked clockwise, out from under the burning fragments.
The last bits of the glass haystack with the red eye impact the outer wall with a series of gluey
I’m being pulled toward an open hatch—already halfway across. I use one hand to take the excruciating pressure off the spear shaft and try not to scream again. There’s a head and a torso silhouetted in the hatch’s dim orange glow. I see a face. Quizzical, large eyes.
It’s the girl. One of the girls.
She looks vexed. “Come here, you!” she grunts, and reels me in.
TAKING THE BOW
Through the hatch, the next figure I see is large and yellow with greenish accents, like an unripe lemon. Two muscular arms, two tree-trunk legs—human enough in this place. Except for his color and something about the texture of his skin, waxy and finely pitted, he does not remind me at all of fruit. His head is broad, set low on thick shoulders, with wide-set eyes, small nose, and narrow, almost doll-like lips. I say “he,” but of course this is just a guess.
He grabs me gently enough, then pushes the end of the spear. The barbs retract. Swiftly, he pulls the shaft from my arm, then reaches into a gray bag slung around his wrist and smears something onto the bleeding wound. His hands are huge and fast and delicate as a jeweler’s. The bleeding stops, and with it most of the pain.
“He’s Teacher,” the girl says to Big Yellow, and makes a gesture. “I grabbed him back behind the sluice.”
“You sure he’s the same?” Big Yellow asks.
The girl takes my shoulders and peers at me. “Do you know me?”
I favor my arm. My eyes sting, my lips burn—corrosive drops on my face. “I’ve met you,” I say to the girl. “Two of you.”
The girl reaches into her own bag and hands me a bottle of water. “Wash your face,” she says. “We’ve got a place forward where we can fix you up. The others should be coming back soon.”
I’m sure she’s seen me before—this particular me. And I’ve seen her before. “You’re the one who pulled me out of the sac?”
She nods. I find the gesture strangely human, which implies that I’m beginning to regard the girl as something other, though I can’t say why.
“Midwife,” Big Yellow says. His voice is rich. I’d love to hear him sing. I’d love to hear any kind of music. Funny, to think of music now, but I lift the bottle above my head and rinse out my eyes. After a while, they don’t sting as much, and my lips feel better. I drink a little and return the bottle.
“That’s yours,” she says. “I left my book behind. Did you find it?”
“I found it in a bag. Something else stole it. A silvery shape—”
“They don’t exist,” the girl says with a stern look.
“Right. One of you—I think—drew something in the shaft. In blood. What was it supposed to be?”
Pique turns to embarrassment.
“Careful,” Big Yellow warns. “She’s your sponsor. You need her.”
I can accept that—for now. “The shapeless haystack thing?”
“A factor,” Big Yellow says. “I’ve never seen one like it before.”
“A Killer,” the girl says.
“What happened to Picker and Satmonk?”
The girl shakes her head. “They’re strong and friendly, but they don’t last long.”
“And your sister?”
“Don’t ask,” Big Yellow advises.
The girl ignores the question.
I rub my arm. The tugged muscles hurt more than the wound itself. It could have been worse—that shaft could have penetrated bone. “What did you shoot me with?” I ask.
Big Yellow lifts the apparatus, a bent piece of spring—a bow—strung with a twisted length of black fiber. The shaft is a thin, hollow tube; the barbs, more pieces of metal, spring-loaded in roughly cut notches at the tip. Pulling on the cord the right way retracts the barbs. He waggles the bow. It’s broken in two.
“Found it in a junk pile. Now it’s ruined.”
“Sorry,” I say.
He manages a grin. “Have to find another,” he says.
We appear to be in a space actually made for long-term human occupation—unlike the no-frills pads and lockers or even the boy’s tailored space. More style, something on the order of decorated, personalized, even pretty. Nets arranged along the wall support glassy objects of many shapes and colors. The curving inboard ceiling has been painted with pictures of trees and clouds, as if we’re sitting under a leafy bower. This arouses erratic memories of poetry and botany.
Big Yellow and the girl bob slowly up and down on their toes, watching me intently. Waiting for a reaction. I try to smile. “Nice.” I haven’t seen the entire scene, but the human touches are compelling—sympathetic. Somebody lived here for a while—not, I think, my present hosts. The centrifugal tug is no greater here than in the cap of the water tank. I rotate on one toe, like a ballet dancer, arms out, gently push off, rising, then drop to the outboard deck. Bobbing is pleasant. I like it.
Curved rails and cables have been raised and slung in strategic positions from floor and ceiling. The bottom edge of the farthest wall, intersecting the bulkhead to my left, with its hatch, is barely visible beyond the curve of the ceiling. Big. Deluxe accommodations.
The forward wall…
Whoever lived here (or would live here) wanted to keep a constant watch. Like the end of the water tank, this wall is transparent, but fogged by a layer of grime. Someone—perhaps the girl or Big Yellow—has wiped a big oval. Irregular shadows lurk beyond.
I bob and echo to the oval. I’m facing the bow. What I see is even more compelling than the decor behind me. At this point in the hull’s narrowing taper, the conical structure is visible almost in its entirety. The maximum width of the hull, outside where I stand, must be roughly a hundred meters. This room, and those that complete a circle of habitats forward of the water tank, fills about a third of that width and pokes forward toward the bow.
Ten big cylinders—each about fifty or sixty meters long—are ranked outboard to my right. Their skeletal frameworks barely conceal the graceful curves of the shipwrights and tenders and other machines that build and prepare for launch the seedships that will probe and examine the planet, returning with the information necessary to match us to the planet—and the planet to us.
This view awakens too many memories for me to process all at once. I
But a few seconds are enough to show me that the machines in the nose of hull number three are in disrepair. They’ve suffered from much worse than simple neglect. Ship’s mad war has struck the tip of our spear— and severely blunted it. I see the damage mentioned in my book. The cylinders and the embryonic craft within are bent, pitted, burned, blasted. Inboard, training and education units—like the crystal and steel seedpods of giant
