Hull Zero Three (17 page)

“I’m
intrigued
as well,” I say. Then, to my twin, “Besides, you’re older and wiser, more valuable to these fine people.”
He frowns, then gives in, as if avoiding any contest of manly courage. Or he does not want to make a fight of it. Overplay his hand. I have no idea why these suspicions are growing stronger. “All right,” he says.
We shake hands, then hug. It’s an awkward moment, self-respect dangerously close to self-love. But however much we may look, think, and act alike, we are clearly no longer the same. Affection is not any sort of metaphysical issue. He wants to go; I don’t. Not really. But I’ll go, and he won’t.
“How far aft?” Kim asks.
“To the hub,” the girl says.
Tsinoy is conferring with Nell. They both have their hands on the hemisphere.
“I’m not sure we have any idea what’s really happening,” Nell says. “There’s so much contradictory information.”
The girl looks unhappy.
“Destination Guidance might not have cut the shields after all,” Nell says. “When we started to combine the hulls, the drives shut down. They’re still off. We seem to be executing a turning maneuver. We’re shifting into a long-curve orbit.”
“What’s that mean?” I ask.
“Ship may be approaching the gravity well of a greater stellar grouping,” Tsinoy says. “We can’t see it. It’s behind an arm of the nebula. During such a maneuver, the shields temporarily switch off to reconfigure for the new angle of interstellar wind. They turn on again when the proper angle is reached.”
Nell adds, “The hulls need to be separated again to restart the drives. But given our present circumstances, if the drives resume, we’ll begin not just a course correction but also deceleration.”
“We’ll slow down?” Kim asks.
Nell says, “Ship might be responding to prior programming, not to our threats.”
“A destination has been chosen?” I ask. “Why didn’t Ship Control tell us?”
“Maybe it doesn’t want us to know. Maybe we’re being manipulated. I don’t know the answers.”
I’m still tingling with the shock of this potential revelation. A turning maneuver, rearranging the shields—that’s actually a viable alternate theory. “
They
weren’t trying to kill us—and we didn’t force them to back down?”
“No,” Tsinoy says.
“Then what the hell good are we, sitting up here, thinking we’re in charge?” I ask.
“Clearly,” Nell says, “we’ve got more research to do.” She looks at me and crooks a long finger. “Will you join me in Ship for a moment? Before you go, I need Kim to see something as well.”
“What about me?” my twin asks.
“One at a time,” Nell says.
I approach the hemisphere and lay my hands beside Nell’s. She gives me a long, puzzled look. “Someone in here knows you,” she says softly. “Both of you.”
We go in.
A few minutes later, we emerge. Kim goes next. My twin watches with apparent calm. Does he suspect? Then, Nell invites him into Ship. What she tells him or shows him there, I don’t know.
NEW WORLDS AFT

The journey is not dangerous, the girl says, but it is devious and may take a while. To that end, we pack a lunch and some extra clothes and water. Ship is adapting. There is hope that we can change things—if we are kept informed.

And that is our mission. To find the girl’s mother and learn as much as we can. There are no farewells. We simply take our supplies in gray bags and move aft from the tent-shaped chamber. Kim and I are not complacent—we do not believe there is safety anywhere, but I also do not believe the girl is leading us into a trap. We may have the same approach to differing agendas, but for now, agreement should be possible.

We climb into the hull’s cap chamber, which is immense beyond our previous experience. In Hull Zero One, behind the cap chamber, a single water tank had filled the center of the hull, but here, Kim and I are surprised to find
six
tanks, each as large or larger. Their huge “eyes” are filled with the hypnotic beauty of trillions of gallons of water, interrupted by narrow turquoise voids, smaller bubbles rejoining great ones. Placid. Dormant.

“Why six?” Kim asks. I have no answer—the girl has no answer. Our curiosity is not her concern. She guides us out to the perimeter of the cap chamber. Looking up, I notice a bump in the center of the vast bulkhead supporting the six tanks, what might be a round hatch or access point. I think this could be the entrance to a more efficient route down the center line of the hull, between the tanks, but one we are not taking.

The girl leads us to a corridor that circles around the tank cap. We echo along the corridor until we reach a control pylon, positioned at a junction with another corridor leading aft. The pylon supports a simple flat visual display. This is new to us—but not to the girl. This is her domain. With deft fingers, she calls up our present location, then a map of the spaces we will encounter moving down the length of the water tanks. We are still hundreds of meters below the skin of the hull. The hull, so far, has shown no signs of resuming its high rate of spin, for which I’m grateful. I feel no need of extra challenges.

The display reveals thousands of spherical chambers arranged in rows and clusters around the tanks, none smaller than a hundred meters across. “Forest balls?” I ask.

“Like that, but no,” the girl says.
“What, then?”
“I don’t have the words.”
Kim and I quirk our lips. It’s obvious this hull is different from the one we

were birthed in—but why? The girl
doesn’thavethewords.
As in Hull Zero One, the corridors are lined with bands and radiances.
Again, it seems these must be guides for factors—indicating the corridors were
not meant primarily for human travel. Kim takes an interest in an oval radiance
of black and green lines, about as wide as two of my hands—less than one of
his. I wait for him as he runs his fingers over it. The girl, as always, moves
ahead by ten or twelve meters, then pauses to allow us to catch up. Kim shakes his head and we move on. “No factors,” he says. Brief but
sufficient—we’ve gone some ways and have yet to encounter cleaners,
retrievers, or any of the other peculiarities we met in Hull Zero One. The girl has assumed her characteristic lotus.
“Why no factors?” Kim asks.
She unfolds and stretches. “It isn’t dirty here, and nobody’s dying.” “Why not birth us
here
, then, where it’s clean and things won’t chase us?”
Kim asks. His tone has an accusing edge. Big Yellow has always seemed
remarkably together and calm, perhaps because of his obvious strength, or
perhaps because those are simply innate qualities marked somewhere on his
page in the Catalog.
The girl moves on. “I don’t know,” she calls back.
I think about asking if she’s the one who rescued me after my chilly birth,
but if it doesn’t matter to her, then it doesn’t matter to me. Sentiment and
memory are severely mismatched in our unbalanced and wretched world. Odd how food and water and a clean body—and a few moments of rest—
lead me into philosophy.
Kim touches another oval. “If we could read them, these would tell us
where we are and where to go,” he says.
“Right,” I say. “Anything bubbling up from memory?”
“Not yet,” he says. “You?”
We’re making conversation, putting off the inevitable. We’re both
reluctant to talk here about what Nell showed us. The girl’s hearing is remarkably
acute.
“Well, I’d like to say these are orientation signs used by factors, but there
are no factors.”
He snorts his humor. “What in the hell are we doing here?” “Following,” I say.
“Away from food and water…” He pauses to frown intensely at another oval. “More of these, just around here. That could mean another intersection is
coming up. I wonder if
she
can read them.”
I look for the girl but she’s way ahead, out of sight beyond a curve in the
corridor. Suddenly, Kim pulls me close. “Nell tells me I have to watch you.” I swallow. “I don’t blame her.”
“She thinks you’re the real deal… whatever that means.”
“Thanks,” I whisper.
“Did she tell you about the book in the netting?”
I nod and point to his big hands on my arms. “Looser, please.” “She says you have little bumps on your head, but the other one doesn’t.
You’re not identical.”
“I didn’t check him,” I say.
“Why would he hide his book in the egg? Why not just show it to us? You
did, after all.”
“It’s probably in code,” I suggest, as if making an excuse.
“She figured it out.”
I hadn’t realized Nell was that quick. I feel like a little boy caught trying to
hide a dirty secret—even though it isn’t me, and it isn’t my secret. “Oops,” is all I
can say.
“She didn’t tell me if she read it all,” Kim says. “Just the part about
looking for Mother, and making sure we agree to crunch Destination Guidance.
We all wanted that, didn’t we, at first? All but Tsinoy.”
“Yeah. But he wrote it down like an instruction. Like he was following
orders. So… where did he get his orders?”
Kim relaxes his grip. “What else did Nell show you?”
The biggest discovery of all. I’m still not sure I believe it. “We carry a lot
of Ship’s memory and programming inside us. Maybe more. We’re like safety
storage—a biological backup. Ship is recovering memory from us each time we
enter. Some of the parts that looked burned are growing back. We’re helping fill
them in. Especially Nell and Tsinoy.”
“And me?”
“Not so much. Not yet. Nell doesn’t know where you fit in.” “But she took your twin into Ship, as well as you. Wouldn’t you be the
same?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does Ship need from him? What do you think he’s carrying?” “I don’t know.” I feel uncomfortable coming to any conclusion about my
twin. I’m still not in the clear myself. The way Kim looks at me. The way Nell
seemed to be testing all of us.
The girl has doubled back and waits at a junction with another tunnel. I
don’t feel comfortable talking about any of this in front of her.
I’ve lost any real sense of position. The corridor we’ve been following
moves on for another ten meters, then comes to a rounded stop. “Outboard,” the girl says, and pushes off from the floor, straight up the
shaft. We follow. Less than thirty meters beyond, we plunge into a warm, moist,
shadowy volume of indefinite size. Kim grabs a loose cable, then wraps his ham
fist around my ankle. As if responding to our presence, the volume suddenly
illuminates. We have to shield our eyes against the brightness.
“You should have closed your eyes,” the girl says, a vague small blur close
by.
“Thanks for the warning,” Kim says.
I peep out through my fingers. Details swim into view. We dangle for a
moment on the outstretched cable, then Kim hands me down, and we brace on
the lip of the shaft. I stay close, getting my bearings, and feel safer next to him. We’re perched on the edge of a big sphere, much bigger than the forest
balls or the trash voids of Hull Zero One, large enough that it seems possible it
might reach all the way out through the skin of the hull. It might even bump out
on Ship’s surface, with, I hope, its own observation blister. I’d like to see what’s
happening outside, down on the moon.
The big bright space is not empty. Far from it. Beginning just four or five
meters from the wall, hundreds of milky globes hang in suspension, surrounded
by puffs of shining, translucent branches. The tips of the branches fuzz out in
smaller tubes until the globes seem surrounded by feathery down, like huge
dandelion seeds. There must be millions of them. It’s their refraction of a distant
light source that almost blinded us. We can reach out to the nearest, but Kim
warns, “Don’t touch.”
It looks beautiful—and wicked sharp.
“What’s this?” I ask the girl.
“Mother’s library,” the girl says.
Above, the branches rustle in a rapid, disconcerting dance. Little rods
move along the outer tips on wirelike legs, rotating, pushing aside branches,
then jabbing their tips into each puffy “seed.” The rods withdraw, move along to
the next globe, maneuver through the branches, and reinsert, churning the
contents of the globes.
“I know what this is,” Kim says. “It’s like the root of the Klados—the
library the Catalogs draw from. The gene pool. But it’s too big. Something’s
different. I
know
this,” he repeats in wonder.
“Sounds like you’ve found your résumé,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m a cook. Assistant chef. This is like a diagram of my kitchen.” The girl smiles. “Mother will be happy,” she says.
“The question is, why is it so
big
?” Kim asks. “The places I’m supposed to
work in are much smaller. I mean, genes are
sma
, so why all this?” I think I know, but now is not the time—nor do I like the answer. It’s
tough to discover a conflict in one’s essential being, but I have a big one—a
great big conflict that could rip me apart or turn me into something as bad as
what we’d likely find in the hidden pages of the Catalog….
Or in the pages of my twin’s book.
EverythinghingesonwhatIdowhen wemeetMother.
I push that small voice back into the mental gloom from which it emerged
and we follow the girl along a beam and series of cables, to where this huge
sphere joins with another, smaller sphere—less than forty meters wide and
empty, dark.
A single tube about half a meter in diameter thrusts from the center of the
puffball chamber and through the darkness. The tube’s surface is visibly frosting.
It’s like a delivery chute. A dumbwaiter leading from the big, big kitchen to the
dining room.
“We cross fast,” the girl explains. “No cables, no touch. Just kick off and
fly.”
Kim doesn’t like this. “I’ve never been that graceful,” he grumbles. “It is cold,” the girl emphasizes. “Do not take a breath out there, until
after you cross.”
“Great,” Kim says.
The girl launches from the rim where the two spheres meet. We suck in
air, then hold it. Kim goes next. He’s more graceful than he gives himself credit
for. He vanishes into the darkness, toward a dim beam of light from the far side.
My eyes hurt, staring into the cold. His shadow crosses the light, and a moment
later, I hear him draw a whooping breath.
“Okay!” he shouts.
My turn.
It’s colder at midpoint than anything we experienced back in Hull Zero
One—cold enough to freeze me solid in minutes if not seconds, and the air
seems gelid, denser. Tingling snaps crawl along my skin as well, and I see blue
lights that aren’t there.
Then, Kim’s long arm grabs me again and pulls me back on target. “Good,” the girl says.
Skin tingling, eyes defrosting, all those little blue lights flitting away—I
wonder if I’ve awakened from this long, bad dream and fallen into another,
better one. Not the first time, of course. Hope springs eternal. The air is filled
with sweet scents, funky scents—flower smells and human smells coming and
going in warm waves, more intense than anything I’ve experienced. What I’m seeing, or think I’m seeing, is improbably wonderful. It’s a
weightless town—more of a village, actually, made of hundreds of little round
domiciles both clear and opaque, colored and white, arranged like clusters of
soap bubbles in another curved space. Children work and wander and play
throughout, naked or wearing blue overalls, clutching little jars and long sticks,
pushing food and bottles and other objects through the warm, weightless air like
hundreds of busy little angels. Children everywhere, all female.
Beautiful, identical,
happy.
“Welcome,” our girl says, and something goes out of her—a stiff, stubborn
posture. Compared to the others, she’s grubby, travel-worn, tired. It makes her
look older. “I’m going to go be with Mother now. After I touch her, she will
remember all that’s happened. Then she will meet with you.”
Kim and I clutch a cable on the forward wall of the chamber. The currents
of chill air behind us are blocked. Only the tube from the gene pool passes
through to arrive at a glorious conclusion—a flower of golden rods, each rod in
turn blossoming again.
The girls move around this flower like little bees, taking and carrying away
samples.
What I’ve seen is humbling and beautiful. We are on the outskirts of
Ship’s glorious belly button. Well, of course, neither Kim nor I has a navel. But
the girls do, cute little innies—and Ship does as well, a truly whopping
Omphalos.
This is the beating, vibrant gonad of Hull Zero Three, the very reason for
Ship’s existence and journey. This is where the Klados begins—where all living
things are designed and judged. Mother has occupied the gene pool, making
herself mistress of life itself.
But I still don’t remember Mama.
With all this stimulating visual information inspiring us to pull up
submerged memory and knowledge, why don’t we
rememberMother
Who designed and made
her
“Heads up,” Kim says. I look where his thick, lemon-colored finger points.
“Reception committee.”
Ten little girls, all wearing blue overalls, all moving in a line, hand in hand.
A continuous loop of cable grows from the wall of the chamber, and they grip it
like the safety bar in a roller-coaster car to keep in line and travel to where Kim
and I have been left to gawk. They do not speak. They do not seem to have
much interest in us, and certainly not in our protests as we are corralled and
gently but insistently pushed aft.
“What’s my name again?” I ask Kim.
“Shit, I don’t remember,” Kim says. “You’re Teacher. Sanjay, I think.” The warmth becomes tropical. We are guided over several curving ridges
in the chamber wall, through pillars that rise to support what looks like
intertwined stretches of golden tubing, smooth and translucent, varying in
diameter from a few centimeters to ten or more meters. The whole structure
softly hisses and whishes. It sounds like…
Wavesonaseashore.
Ocean. Salt air, spray, seagulls, patches of decaying seaweed. Wet sand
squeezing between my bare toes. Earth’s primordial gene pool. Swimming in a
lagoon under a hot blue sky… with my partner.
I always liked that sound.
I suppose I never actually swam in an ocean or walked on a real beach
but I like the sound, anyway.
The flowering of the tubes and pipes slips behind us, and there is only a
warm glow of glim lights spaced along the inboard surfaces and the near wall,
shifting and coalescing into polka-dot patterns, lighting our progress like the
glowing skin of a deep-sea creature.
Ahead lies a thick, rough tangle of leafy limbs coated with sprays of tiny
flowers, like living stars, with a light and a life of their own. All the little glowing
things watching, interested, unafraid…
A naked forest ball.
We’re entering a protected zone, to be sure, but this is more of a
welcoming committee—children, the flowering forest. We are not threats. We are
expected. A path opens through spreading limbs. Only now do we see that the
forest’s branches bear millions of tiny thorns, exuding from their tips tiny
greenish drops—likely fatal doses of toxins for the unwary, the unwelcome, the
unescorted.
What lies within the forest ball is very important to somebody—if only to
hersel.
But then, the mother at the navel of our world deserves protection,
doesn’t she?
“Don’t touch
anything
,” I tell Kim. “We’re surrounded by cobras.” “What’s a cobra?”
“Snake,” I say.
“Oh. Long, with teeth, right?”
This inane exchange is in part to compensate for the embarrassment of
being gripped all around by the phalanx of girls, who care nothing for the thorns
and who push against the leafy enclosure in such a way that they must be taking
many pricks without obvious pain or harm.
The flowers, however, exude a glorious, peach-colored mist of scented