The Stars Are Legion(16)

I pick my way back where I came from, but Zan is no longer in the corridor. I suspect she went back to her room. I’ll have to tell her this news later, even if it means nothing to her. The only living things, then, that will understand and appreciate my victory are the witches. Even if they are mad now, they’ll know I beat them. Zan and I are doing the impossible. We are going to save the Legion.

I go down two levels and stop by the alcohol distillery and speak with two bottom-world brew masters. I ask where the witches are—they often drink too much—and the brew masters tell me to try the port observatory near the hangar.

I walk back up to the first level, traveling the great umbilicus that connects the levels of the world, and—wiping the mucus from my skin—I stride into the observatory overlooking the hangar.

A tangled figure crouches beneath one of the massive, misty workstations. Blue and red lights crackle from the workstation’s surface in patterns whose meanings have long since been lost to us. Only the witches seem to make some sense of them; Anat once told me, in one of her drunken reveries, that even her own grandmother thought the lights just a pretty decoration.

On first look, the mash-up of arms and legs and heads beneath the console appears to be several people, but I know better. The witches rise from beneath the console as a single torso on two thick, meaty legs. Two vestigial legs hang off the back of them. This iteration has six arms, only four of them working. The smallest set hangs off the front of the torso, boneless as a vestigial tail.

They see me and begin babbling and juddering.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I say. “I wanted to tell you it worked. Despite you. It worked.”

Their body and heads shake. Then they still. The three mouths gabble at me for a moment in a language I don’t understand, until the far right head hits upon the right words.

“There is an anomaly in here,” it says. “You’ve brought an anomaly from outside the world, and it is contaminating this space. You will destroy the balance of the ship’s systems. You will destroy the Legion.”

“We can’t continue as we are,” I say. “We’re dying. You know that better than we do, yet you stick to that same sorry line. The worlds that stopped importing new flesh died out long ago. We are all that’s left, but we’ve only postponed the inevitable.”

“You are the embodiment of all evil,” the center head says, and the three of them chatter together, clicking and hissing in some bottom-world language that I don’t know.

“New world,” the right says. “The world is too old and must be regenerated, but you cannot see it, can you? Cannot understand your place.”

“We all have a purpose,” left says. The witches lurch toward me, and I flinch. The hands flap at me, reaching for my stomach.

“Not yours!” they shriek.

I step back. “It’s not up to you anymore,” I say. “You’ve failed to preserve the Legion. We must do what you could not. Whoever put you in charge here is long dead, and you’re too mad to be of any help.”

The heads cackle. “Falling apart,” they say, not quite in unison, and they laugh again, the mad little things.

“We have given you all such purpose,” right says. “You are breaking the balance. Treachery and spite. We are here to protect and preserve—”

“You’re preserving death. We won’t be slaves anymore.”

“You’re a villain,” right says, and the witches crouch beneath the console again, their four working arms poking at the guts of it. This may be the sanest thing they have ever said.

Sometimes, they try to repair things, but it doesn’t usually work. Like the Legion, the witches have outlived their usefulness. We are stuck inside a closed system that’s slowly coming undone. Even they know it; they just can’t bear to admit it.

“We’ll be free of you,” I say.

The left head turns while the others remain fixed on their work. “The passengers must pay their way.”

“Pay their way!” the other two heads say, and then the right head, too, turns back under the console, and they ignore me again.

I was wrong to come to them. They hardly remember more than Zan does now. We are all just so much meat to Anat, even the witches.

I won’t be meat anymore.

I walk up to the observation window, the one overlooking the hangar, and gaze at the rows and rows of vehicles hooked into the spongy floor of the ship, gurgling contentedly. There are just four rows of vehicles, though the hangar stretches back and back for over a thousand paces. Heaps of spare parts take up a few areas, but the rest of the hangar is an emptiness, a boneyard for a once-great army, or perhaps . . . something else.

I dream of a world where this hangar is used for some other purpose, when we would ride vehicles out into the blackness between the worlds to help one another, to form alliances, to repair worlds together, instead of what we’ve become: this broken remnant of a once-great Legion.

I look out at the blackness sometimes, when I am allowed to go topside to inspect the cancer or collect detritus pulled in by the world’s tentacles, and I try to imagine the Legion as it might have been in the beginning. One can see the empty spaces where other worlds used to be, the broken lines in their ranks. Anat tells me and my sisters stories of dead and dying worlds she remembers from her own youth, or stories of worlds she has known, and the sheer scope of that, of the loss, is sometimes staggering.