Hull Zero Three (20 page)

We crawl along a layer of suspended cables to the opposite side of the chamber cap. Tsinoy leads me to an open hatch, which is crusted with age and jammed with disuse. Beyond stretches a maintenance corridor, smaller than most, more of a pipe and filled with debris, some of it cemented to the outboard curve from a succession of spin-ups, the rest messing the stale air. There’s been no attention paid to this part of the hull for a long time.

“Nobody’s been here,” I say, as much as my wit and energy allow. I still feel the sting of rejection, but something clean and sensible in me has taken the upper hand. “Where does it go?”

“I don’t know,” Tsinoy says, and reduces to a minimum diameter, then squeezes along the pipe ahead of me, just barely fitting. “Nell wanted me to bring you back this way, that’s all.”

Our pace is slow. The ratcheting, keratinous scrape of her ivory plates and spines grates on my nerves. But I feel safer the closer I am to her. The pipe leads past a number of circular holes opening to hull voids, darkness and broad, empty volumes, silent and cold.

“This part of the hull is dead,” I murmur.
“Maybe,” Tsinoy says, barely audible through her own bulk. She twists and I pause, then push myself aft to allow her to reorient and back up. “Wait,” she says. All her sinews and muscles rearrange, but something discourages her efforts. “I can’t fit,” she says. “You’ll have to go. I’ll instruct you.”
She flattens against one side of the pipe and tells me to squeeze past—a difficult trick in narrow quarters, made even worse by the fact that I’m working my way forward
against
her spines and plates, some of which are razor sharp. She accepts the gross indignity of my elbows and hands and hips pushing down those protrusions. My clothes become torn and sliced—and several gashes open in my chest and legs—but I manage to shimmy past and feel out the pipe beyond, and then, in the near-darkness, illuminated only by the faint glow of small blue organs around Tsinoy’s jaws, I see a gap in the side, just large enough to admit one midsized human being.
“Maybe this is why Nell asked for you,” Tsinoy suggests. “Kim wouldn’t fit.”
I ignore that as a joke—but if I can judge the Tracker’s tone, and likely I can’t, it may not be a joke at all. I grab the edge with my fingertips and tell her to give me a shove—not too hard. I still manage to stick halfway through. For some reason, I think of honeypots—(can’t quite remember what honey is, except it’s sweet and amber and sticky). “I could go for some
honey
,” I say, but Tsinoy doesn’t hear me. Another brusque shove from her paw-claw and I’m through, sliding into a small cubic chamber. It seems familiar. I’ve been in a place like this before.
Tsinoy helps by shining her blue “headlamps” into the cube. The opposite wall looks rubbery, with five swelling bulges arranged in two rows, three and two. There’s a rich, slightly sour smell in the close, still air. I’ve smelled it before, but the air was much colder in that first room in Hull Zero One, the place where I was pulled into this life.
This chamber is well above freezing.
“A birthing room,” I say, shaking with the memory. “What’s the hull making this time?”
“Pull them out,” Tsinoy says. “Rip the skin of each cell.”
I look. “I don’t think they’re finished.”
“Nell says we need as many as you can save.”
For a long moment, I feel pure terror. “Nell says… but who tells her? Destination Guidance?” This is worse than seeing my lover’s face on Mother’s long, productive body. There’s something primally wrong about interfering with the growth of something patterned by the gene pool. But any outraged moral sense seems very much out of place.
Tsinoy’s ice-colored teeth knock against the lip of the hole. “Pull them out.”
“What are they?”
“Use your fingernails,” she suggests with a ratcheting sigh.
I try this and, to my surprise, rip through the membrane. It’s remarkably easy, even with my puny nails, like tearing a thin sponge. The bump parts and a grayish, shining sac emerges, filled with fluid—and something small and lumpy, about as long as my forearm. I see the outline of a small head. It moves.
“Leave the inner membrane intact but separate the cords, then pull it out,” Tsinoy says, and from somewhere she produces gray bags, five or six, shoving them through. They drift across the cube.
“What if it isn’t ready?” I ask, my voice small.
“Pull it out, then the others.”
The inner sac is tougher, slicker—hard to grab—but after a twisting tussle, I dig in, brace my feet against the rubbery wall, and tug harder. The sac emerges with a sucking
plo
, falling into my arms, followed by a tangle of flimsy, tumescent, fluid-filled cords.
Inside the sac is what appears to be a young human. A
baby
, squirming and making soft sounds. The connective cords, still pulsing, are attached to a venous, purplish lump at one end of the sac. I rotate the sac, puzzling out how to separate the cords.
“Use your teeth,” Tsinoy suggests. I glare back at her, then twist again, and after a moment, to my infinite relief, the cords simply pull off, leaving seeping dimples. Then the cords withdraw, exuding blobs of fluid that I do my best to avoid inhaling.
The baby in the sac struggles reflexively in my arms.
“Now the others,” Tsinoy says.
I stuff the sac into a gray bag. “Leave it room to breathe,” Tsinoy tells me. I open the cinch a little and pass it back. Tsinoy takes it through the hole.
Four to go. After too long—and a bout of severe choking from inhaling a blob—I manage to half-birth the remaining four—all alive, all squirming.
The cords separate. Inside the gray bags, they grow quiet. I pass each to Tsinoy. “Who will feed them?”
“Nell says they’ll last long enough in the sacs.”
“Long enough for what?”
The Tracker withdraws and allows me to exit, just as the membrane wall closes up and swells outward, filling the cube, bumping my feet.
The hole closes. The hull has finished with this area.
I see no sign of the infants and with shock realize that Tsinoy is slightly larger. I have to say the worst possible thought flashes into my head, but she quickly demonstrates that she’s taken them under her spikes, where she can keep them warm and safe.
“They’d grow to adults if we let them, inside the sacs,” I say as we return the way we came. “That’s where
I’m
from. Like that. You, too, I suppose.”
Tsinoy squeezes back down the pipe to the chamber cap. I wonder if she has maternal instincts. I would no longer be surprised. Me, I feel something deeper than I can express.
“We’re taking them forward, right?” I ask, wiping my fingers and palms on my pants. “We’re not just going to hand them over to Mother…”
“No,” Tsinoy says. “Forward.”
BAD WISDOM

The cables web outward several hundred meters from the huge bulkhead’s center. We climb hand over hand across the transparent face, like insects on a great blue-green eye. Within the water-filled tanks, gelatinous blue curtains undulate between diamond-glinting spans of turbulent air. I’m intent on following the Tracker, paying little attention, when something dark slips past on the other side. A sharp angle throws sapphire drops that are absorbed in another curtain, and the whole—as I try to make out what I just missed—slops into oblivion, hiding all. There’s more than water in these tanks. I concentrate on the depths beyond, confused. There might or might not be greater shadows lurking there.

“You saw that, right?” I ask. My voice clips itself around the cap chamber, impossible to predict where a sibilant or a consonant will return next.
Tsinoy and I exchange a look. Her eyes are dull red, tired, discouraged.
In our last few meters traveling across the bulkhead, I peer through a mass-saving deletion and see for the first time that a shining, transparent access tunnel leads down the center line between the tanks, thrusting through the middle of the hull, perhaps its entire length, like a glass rod suspended between six huge, sluggishly fizzing bottles.
At the center of the bulkhead, the tube ends in a round, jade-colored hatch. “We’ll return this way,” Tsinoy says, and moves her hands over the hatch surface. It splits in thirds, and the parts pull up and out, revealing an entrance to a clear transport sphere about three meters wide. We slide into the sphere. Its surface is hard and cold. In our presence, a small blue cube begins to sigh, stirring fresh air. The hatch closes. Tsinoy fixes her eyes on mine, then casually folds all but one of her limbs, and with that one grabs a curved bar. I do the same. There’s no warning before the sphere seals shut and begins to move down the tube.
“This way, we’ll reach the bow in a few minutes, rather than a few hours,” Tsinoy says.
That makes architectural sense. Everything around and outside the water tank is a complicated tangle of piping and corridors—like those leading to the revived birthing chamber. “A tramway,” I say, as if bigger words have the power to dispel my ignorance. I’m pressed back as the bubble accelerates, arms and legs fanned, hands clutching—comic.
The surrounding beauty is extraordinary but alien, utterly
marin
. I feel as if the container around all that melted, refined moon-water is as evanescent as soapy film, a bubble that will maliciously pop and we’ll be lost in blue suffocation.
Tsinoy seems to hang over me. She does not like this place. Neither do I. Her eyes scrutinize me. “This is the journey Mother didn’t want you to make. Look well, Teacher.”
So I’m being judged again—about to pass or fail yet another of an infinite variety of challenges and tests.
More shadows within the churn… My throat constricts.
I see another. Alive and huge. It’s swimming through the tank to my left, at the sphere’s one o’clock, tracking our motion. It resembles a gigantic rubbery spring, tens of meters wide, pulling forward with a jerky, screwlike twist. The outer edges of the thick coils push out fins that sweep like fishermen’s nets through the liquid. Red-ruby eyes—like the Tracker’s, only bigger, with oblate dark centers—poke out from the sweeping fins.
It’s at least a hundred meters long, though that’s hard to judge—it can contract, after all, like a spring. Within the helix long, flexible blades thrust in like pale bony swords or teeth—
balee
, perhaps. The blades trail bubbles as the monster swims along with us, following our motion.
I can easily imagine the helix-knife’s eyes are watching, eager for me to join its slicing frolics in a world’s endless blue ocean. It doesn’t matter that I’m tiny. Tiny things are its business.
As it slowly loses our dreamlike race, I notice white, fleshy shreds trailing from the baleen. It has already twisted and chewed its way through something alive. And where there is one Killer on Ship, there have always been more.
Ship has rotated to begin years of deceleration. The secret parts of the Catalog offer complete suites of alternatives for desperate travelers. Pick and choose from a prearranged list. Find answers to all your problems.
A terminal solution.
“We picked a star,” I tell Tsinoy. “We’ve found our new planet. It’s rich with life-forms—even intelligent beings. We can’t stop now. We can’t go back.”
Tsinoy’s snout flexes. Her eyes close. The infants are silent. I hope they haven’t been smothered.
I think of our friends in the bow. “What the hell are they doing up there?” I ask.
“Nell has taken control—partly. She sent me aft to find you and retrieve the new ones.”
“New ones? Not enough crew?”
“I don’t know,” Tsinoy says. “I don’t think she asked for them.”
“Who told her the babies would be there? Why bring me back and not Kim?”
“She says that after the first system was chosen, Ship was damaged. The conflict began.”
“Damn it, Ship’s memory was damaged or nearly destroyed, so Ship unloaded all its dirty secrets into us. But something happened. Some of us didn’t go along with the picture. We split up to fight it out. Did Destination Guidance start the war?”
“I don’t know,” Tsinoy says.
I’m ripening like a fruit, connecting the dots on my interior map. Nell wanted me to see this. I am a key part of the plan. Long before arrival—after Destination Guidance has made its choice and is presumably dead and gone— Ship creates imprints for prep and landing crew, complete with all the necessary instincts, emotions, and patriot
loveoflie
—Ship-bred life. All imbedded with the patterns of Earth.
Ship would have been instructed to prepare detailed and customized imprints for the arrival crew. My imprinting would have included an updated, in vitro education about the nature of the chosen system, the star and its world or worlds. I’ll help Earth’s children understand why we have to destroy a planet in order to live on it. Someone else will make the monsters, the factors, the killing organisms… someone given the proper hormonal flows and mindset, a master of biology—shaped for a desperate time and unwavering in her protective passion.
Mother was put in charge of exploring the most hideous Kladistic phase spaces, selecting, creating the necessary factors, and testing their efficacy.
And here they are, all around us. Planets have oceans, which can harbor competitive life—competitive, intelligent life. Solution: turn your shipboard water supplies into artificial oceans, filled with Killers.
Me? I’m the Teacher. I’ll justify their use. I’ll join in the abomination, wholeheartedly, without guilt….
Except that there
is
guilt. Some of us are at cross-purposes with our intended design and function—Kim, Nell, Tomchin. And Tsinoy.
Most tellingly, Tsinoy.
I jerk and twist my head around. In my quest for large shadows within the tanks, I’ve missed schools of little black shapes, equipped with sharp, rotating fins like sawblades with shining diamond teeth. Then—finger-sized things that seem to be nothing more than eyes and depending tiny mouths. I have no idea how they kill. Perhaps they act as scouts.
And scattering these schools, as if in festive play—agile torpedoes equipped with nightmare, head-mounted arrays of fangs or scythes or other cutting implements. There are also aqueous variations on the spiny claw-claspers with grinding mouths. They don’t make sense in any sane ecological system. All of them are pure assassins.
Liquidaors.
Grim humor seems inescapable. Teacher is supposed to be cheerful, clever, charismatic. All the girls love Teacher. But my body is numb, my thoughts like icy needles. I simply want to be Never Born.
NeverMade.
I turn my head right, to another tank, and witness the passage of a ponderous, gray-green eel more than twenty meters in length, with tiny button eyes and a shrewd pout of a mouth. The eel reacts to our motion, shuddering and lancing out. In a void between spiraling waves of liquid, sheets of fire writhe—
lighning!
No sense putting your most deadly weapons in the same arena only to kill each other before their time arrives. Hence, six tanks.
Tsinoy makes an odd sound—not quite a growl, not yet a whimper. I look left and follow her gaze back to the tank that contains the helix-knife. As if one of those monsters is not enough, there are now five. They’ve joined nose to tail in a single, long, rolling, flexing coil. The coil inverts, and the tips of flexible knife-teeth furiously scrub the wall of the tank, as if trying to reach through to us. Practicing to obliterate some distant native ocean floor. I can see it: chained helix-knives destroying the heart of a planet’s life from its very foundations—and then themselves quietly dying, sinking, leaving the ocean waves to roll on, clear, pristine, and sterile.
Welcome to the truth of our world—a massive seed shot out to the stars, filled with deadly children. A seed designed to slay everything it touches.
The sphere speeds through a supporting bulkhead and a hollow, dark space surrounded by huge pipes, and into a ghostly, livid glow, where it slows and stops. The blue cube sighs and the sphere opens. We are allowed to leave.
We have returned to the forward tank chamber.