The Stars Are Legion(85)

“Sorry,” Casamir says. She glances over at Das Muni. Reluctantly hands her a skinned bat-bird. “I do appreciate it, even if you tried to fucking drown me.”

Das Muni takes the offering in her long fingers and sets the bloody thing in her lap.

“We thought you dead,” Arankadash says to Das Muni.

“A spirit saved me,” Das Muni says.

Arankadash nods. “I understand.”

Casamir grimaces but, after a quick look at me, says nothing. We all create the stories we need to survive. Let Das Muni and Arankadash have theirs.

When we are rested, we start the long walk up the waterway. When the space opens up into a broad, watery plain that runs off in many directions, I suggest we follow the main flow of the river.

“It’s always going to flow downward, right?” I say. “To the center of the world. So it makes sense to follow it back up to wherever it’s coming from.”

The watery plain is teeming with biting bugs. We itch and scratch at them. My skin blisters, and when the blisters burst, little larvae squirm out. I should not be bothered by this after everything I’ve seen, but this feels like a grave imposition.

It’s Casamir who stops the second cycle in and screams and screams, though. It’s not a scream of fear but one of frustration.

I plant my feet in the spongy plain and I scream too. Das Muni echoes me, then Arankadash, and for several long minutes, we are a group of four women screaming at the top of our lungs in the middle of a buzzing bog. We scream until our mouths fill with bugs, and then we stop.

And we carry on.

After a time, the waves of biting insects subside, and we camp on a bit of higher ground near a long plain of water. While Arankadash and Das Muni make camp, I walk down to where Casamir is by the water.

She stands at the edge of the milky lake, throwing stones. “What’s wrong?” I ask, expecting a long and convoluted story, a rant about Das Muni’s table manners, or some snide remarks about Arankadash.

“I’m pregnant,” she says. “I was hoping it would wait a little longer. But I guess not.”

“Oh.” I put my hands in my pockets. “What do you . . . Is it all right to ask what you have?”

“It’s only been a couple times,” she says. “Usually you get pregnant when the world has a need, I guess. It’s some great organ thing, like what Arankadash has, only it grows much bigger. We kept the last one for some time, did experiments on it. They aren’t living, not really. They’re part of the world, I think. I think they replace parts that wear down.”

“Shouldn’t you always have them, then?”

“What?” Casamir says. She stops throwing stones. “Are you mad? I’m not giving myself over to some god, some creature bigger than me. I own what I am. Nobody else.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“Maybe what Das Muni has is useful,” she says grudgingly, “and maybe Arankadash is so desperate for a child that she’ll try to nurse that thing, but that’s not how things are for me. I’ll just get rid of it.”

“You can do that?”

“You can do anything you want,” Casamir says. “It’s your flesh, you know. If there is cancer eating out my arm, you wouldn’t tell me I can’t cut it off.”

“These things don’t seem like cancer.”

“Don’t they? How do we know, really, what they are or what our purpose is? We take it all on faith. But every level is the same. They all rationalize it by saying it’s something they don’t understand, but it’s necessary. I reject that. No one’s in charge of my fate but me.” She jabs a finger at my belly. “You know that, or you knew it, clearly.”

Casamir wanders off as we all bed down, telling us she’s going to forage. I lie awake with Arankadash as she rocks her pulsing offspring in her arms. She sings it a song in her language, something soft and very soothing.

“Casamir’s pregnant,” I say.

“Yes,” Arankadash says. “It’s easy to tell.”

“I can’t.”

“You are blind to a good many things.” She raises her head from the thing in her arms. “It’s odd, isn’t it, that you are the only one not to become infused with a spark of life, here on this long journey?

“Is it?” I ask. “How often do people get pregnant?”

“It depends on the will of the Lord,” she says. “When it needs something, it gets it from us.”

“How?”

“How is there air to breathe?” Arankadash says. “It’s like that.”

“It sounds like we’re slaves to this ship,” I say.

“This world,” she says. “No. It gives us shelter and food. It shields us from the black horror of the abyss that lies in wait for us after death. It keeps us warm and protected. We are as much a part of the light as it is a part of us.”

I remember the great metal door that Casamir cracked open, and the Legion of worlds above, and the corridor of giant bodies whose purpose I hope I’ll never know.

No, this is all very wrong. If I were a god, this is not how I would create a world, by enslaving everything that lived in it. Or would I? I gaze up at the ceiling. The world is a living thing, yes, but is it more than just a collection of organs and flesh and fluid? Is it conscious? Sentient? Is the world a literal god, some creature that’s captured us the way Casamir’s captured those women in the cages? I imagine us circling the misty Core of the sun for generation after generation, locked in a battle not just with ourselves but with the terrible things growing around us and inside of us, tying us so closely to themselves that we cannot exist without them.