Hull Zero Three (3 page)

The girl looks my way, one eyebrow lowered in disapproval, holds a finger to her slightly twisted lip, and nods, as if we understand perfectly well what we need to do next.
I shake my head, clueless. But I’m all she has.
The voices inside the tube grow louder, insistent. Maybe they’re calling to us. The girl isn’t about to risk revealing herself, so I keep quiet as well. I have to trust her, though if worse comes, I suspect she’ll not hesitate to sacrifice me, use me as a shield or a decoy.
The whole situation falls into a profound quiet—all but the shuffle and clunk of slowly moving, colliding objects behind and around us.
Perversely, I again notice my hunger. I wonder if the furry armored thing has any parts that are edible. My mouth starts to water with what little spit I can muster. Maybe that’s why it was killed and lacerated—to liberate chunks of food. The blood may taste bad but the rest of it good. If that’s so, then why isn’t the void swarming with hunters, diners? A Ship this size—if it is a Ship—should carry thousands like the girl and me. Hungry thousands, trying to survive in pointless chaos.
The girl points to the fistula—the opening. She jabs her finger and opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Then I see what she means.
The fistula is shrinking. All the debris is shifting in one direction—to our left. We’re moving as well. We’re going back to being heavy. The girl unfolds her arms and legs, looks for an opportunity to push off. I follow her motions and try to calculate the vectors of tons of broken objects. More bodies come into view, one or two human, most not, some much larger, unfolding long chains of armor plates—carapaces, I think.
All dead, not moving.
Except for one.
Until now, it must have been at the far side of the void, listening for movement. I glimpse it in the gaps. The gaps are closing as the debris is compressed to one side of the void, with me in it—along with what I’ve just seen, a sinuous, eel-like creature, many times my size. Thick bands of limbs spaced along its length flex in unison. A huge circular maw at one end pushes out a cone-shaped rasp, studded with glistening, silvery teeth.
The dead black cleaner comes between us. I’m on one side, the long eel on the other.
The girl is flying toward the fistula, which is now less than two body lengths wide.
I see my opportunity and kick against a curved beam, but the beam rotates under my foot. Its mass is less than I calculated—very light, in fact. My opposite motion is barely a crawl. I windmill my arms and legs. The fistula is six or seven body lengths away.
The long thing with the big mouth has tried taking a gobbet out of the sixlegged beast, but shivers violently, undulating in the collapsing cloud—
It all tastes bad, I guess.
A big flat sheet of something with broken, melted edges comes into view, angled just right if I kick off the leading edge—but I have to swim, push air, grab a small soggy chunk and throw it, increase my speed any way I can.…
The chunk is a severed hand. No matter.
The long eel has wrapped part of its length around a big gray object and suddenly stabs at me with its toothy rasp, and from the end of the rasp thrusts out a snapping beak. The sheet is almost within reach. I hope it’s massive. It wobbles on a rolling, complex axis. Then, mercifully, it hides the raspy, beaky eel from my view.
Last chance. I stretch my legs, connect solidly with the edge of the sheet, kick as hard as I can, and arrow toward the fistula.
The sheet spins and moves off in the general direction of a new heaviness. The fistula is just wide enough to drop through.…
I glide toward it, arguably toward the safer option, hungry, scared out of my wits. I see it behind me again, the toothy snout and beak so close!
I can smell its acid, sour-sweet breath—
I’m through! I slam into the far surface of the tube, then scramble for purchase with my raw knees and feet and hands to get out of the way of what I know is coming—
The rasp and head thrusts through the fistula, beak snapping, teeth gnashing, meshing, gnashing in reverse, then withdrawing behind thick lips, the whole apparatus sphinctering shut. The top of the long thing’s body whips in my direction. I see the little girl and behind her, other figures—but I have to get out of the way.
Then an awful noise—the fistula tightens around the thing’s neck. Cartilage crunches, flesh is squeezed to bursting. The long snout shivers, and the lips pull back again, spasmodic, uncovering the beak and teeth. It squeals, then jerks and twists, and explodes a gassy breath just a hand-span from my kicking foot….
The fistula has closed.
The snout and a length of carcass writhe free inside the tube. The beak snaps off the tip of my little toe. I cry out at the pain. My feet slip in a spray of more black fluid. I’m drenched in the stuff. I finally give up and just fall to the floor, gasping.
Weight is returning. We’re sliding, pushing back along the tube. The severed toothy head seems to follow me. I kick it as hard as I can, again and again.
Then the writhing and snapping stops. It’s over. Heaviness is back. I’m alive, the little girl stands a few meters away… and behind her, gripping her arm and shoulders, three adults. At first, I think they’re like me. But they’re not. They’re not like either of us. Everyone seems frozen, as if this monster might come back to life—but the tooth-snout is decapitated. It’s dead.
Good name, that. Tooth-snout.
No end of surprises.
COLD FOLLOWS HEAVINESS

The girl looks at me with her big gray eyes. In a line behind her stand three tall figures dressed in ribbons and rags. They’re different colors, one BlueBlack with a flat, broad face; the second is brown, thin-headed, with reddish markings. The third, the tallest and skinniest, has pale pink mottled skin and a flat, knobby crest of bone reaching from where its nose might be to the other side of its head. The nose appears to be in the middle of its forehead. It snorts.

All are damp, dripping. All smell sweaty, bitter. The girl seems to think they’re beneath her notice, even as they grip her shoulders.
Together, they seem to be waiting for someone to take a family portrait.
The girl turns her eyes away, resigned, and wipes her nose. “It’s going to get cold soon,” she says.
The three don’t hesitate. They grab her up and run along the length of the tube, away from me and the dead tooth-snout, with its exposed radula. I watch their backs for a moment, the flapping of their rags, not sure whether I have any astonishment left in me.
Radula.Wheretheheldoesthatwordcomefrom?I’dlookitupifIwere you….

“I guess this means you’re not worth eating,” I say to the tooth-snout. Then I get up. I can hear heavy slams. The bulkheads are going up. Best not to get left behind. Unless, of course, the three have snatched the little girl to make a meal of her. In any case, I have to follow, if only to save her—though I’m almost hungry enough to join in.

This is where madness begins. No water, no food, skin snatched away by freezing cold from my back, feet, knees, elbows—heavy exertion—nonstop terror. Missing tip of toe. Everything hurts.

I manage to run. I look back only once. Sure enough, the bulkheads aren’t far behind. The tooth-snout carcass is slammed to the top of the tube, split again, and hidden from view.

I seem to run forever. Second wind is nothing to third and fourth wind. Eventually, I expect, I’ll just fall over and die and not even notice the difference, because my seeing, my hearing, all that’s left of
me
, is totally isolated from what my body is doing.

It’s pretty monotonous. Makes being alive seem more of a boring burden than a promise of better things. Curved tube—hundreds of meters of it. Then more curved tube. And finally—still more curved tube!

And no sign of the three and the little girl. I can see pretty far ahead— maybe another hundred meters.
I begin to notice other variations. Glim lights in the wall form brighter broken lines. Occasional circular patches twenty centimeters or so wide, hard to make out, radiate striped designs.
Maybe these are road signs: stop, go, turn,
di
.
e
Behind me, the lights dim. Cold air is chapping my flying heels and pumping calves. Then, to my right, I see a door actually open—grow from a dark dot to a dimly lit oval. Smaller than the fistula but big enough to admit someone my size. There’s a room beyond, with corners and edges. I glimpse shapes inside, nothing moving….
My lungs let out a moan in the midst of the constant gasping.
No need to stop and investigate. Didn’t need to see that. Nothing but bodies scattered under a low ceiling. Maybe I’ve come full circle and this is where I started. Maybe this is all there is.
But I don’t think so.
This thing is
bi
.
g
Meters, kilometers—length and measure are coming back to me. I’ve run at least three kilometers since being snatched out of my sleep sac. (I must have been sleeping, otherwise, why the Dreamtime?) Three kilometers, but I doubt I’ve made anything like a complete circuit, judging from the curvature of the tube. It could be a gigantic squirrel cage.
Something’s waiting for me to fall over, something that likes lean, tired, smelly meat—meat still scared shitless.
No shit. No pee.
No reason for either.
I see all four of them now. They’re far away—the length of a
footbalfiel
.
d
Small but clear. They’re standing just as they were before, the girl held between them, and all watch me run. Everything behind is painfully cold, scary dark. The tiny surface lights under my pounding feet are dimming to that dead umber that will no doubt be the end of me, and before I can even remember my name.
If I have a name.
Not much strength left. I stumble, fall, get up, try to run again, then just fall over and lie there. Bulkheads slam. My skin is freezing to the surface. I almost don’t care, but with the last of my energy, I roll, a futile gesture….
Then hands grab me and tug me the rest of the necessary distance. More food for everybody, I guess—but might as well let the food carry itself as far as possible.
My head bobs from my neck.
Then… it doesn’t hang anymore. I feel the odd forward and backward wobble, the upward tug—the release of tensions in back and shoulders, followed by drifting—bumping. The three big ones release my legs and arms and resort to pushing me along, floating me into the new warmth.
“
Footba
,” I say to them. “
Hel.Radula.Recedin
. Remember your new words, students—there’s going to be a quiz.”
The little girl shoves her face close to mine. She looks angry. “Shut up,” she says. “You don’t know
anything
yet.”
“We’re on a Ship,” I murmur, lips loose, head lolling. I point with both hands. “That’s
fore.
That’s
aft
.”
She slaps my face—hard.
TEACHER LEARNS

Teacher is being a pain,” she says to the man with the bony ridge. His voice in reply is a deep honk followed by a whistle. I’m floating between the four, waiting for them to try something. Wondering if I have enough strength left to defend myself. “Who are
they
?” I ask.

The girl wipes her nose again. “They came to the heap and took me from the cleaner. Then they killed the cleaner. The cleaner isn’t very dangerous—it’s a nuisance. It just wanted to collect me and leave me in the heap. I could have escaped.”

“Maybe they wanted to eat it.”
The girl makes a face. “Cleaners taste awful.”
The three pay little attention as we resume moving along. They leave me to push and kick in the weightlessness to keep up. Amazingly, I still have some strength, but my skin hurts like fury, and I keep shuddering with painful dry heaves.

They’re looking ahead, looking for something—something they lost, perhaps.
“Is this all of them?” I ask the girl between heaves.
“All I’ve met,” she says. “I’ve already given them names.”
“You haven’t given me a name.”
“You’re always Teacher.”
Ofcourse
, I think. My curiosity as to this point is nil. My throat is sore, my eyes feel like they’re on fire, and the black fluid crusted all over me is starting to raise little blisters. “I need to wash this stuff off,” I croak.
“It’s factor blood. Don’t worry about it,” the girl says. “You’ll probably be dead soon.”
“Factor?”
She gives me a pained look. “Factors. The cleaner, the swim-worm.”
“Oh. What about water, food?”
“Nothing so far,” the girl says. “We’re probably
al
going to be dead soon.”
“So it’s over,” I say.
She shakes her head. “It’s never over. We keep looking.” She holds out her book. “Maybe we’ll find one of these for you.”
“A book?”
“It’s how we know anything at all,” the girl says. “They have books, too. Except for
him
.” She points to the pink one with the bony crest, the only one who’s tried to talk. “That’s Picker. He can’t find his. Whatever he’s learned will be lost.” She gives me a squint.
“Cleaners…” I can barely talk, so my question or whatever I thought I was going to say goes unsaid. I move and think and keep it all to myself, which is just as well, because I’m becoming delusional.
Becoming.
I manage a raw chuckle.
Then the Blue-Black fellow with the flat face performs a sort of quivering wiggle and makes an extraordinary series of whistles—really pretty. The pink, crested fellow acts excited, too, and emits his own warble-honk.
They see something.
I twist my head. At the very end of what I can see of the curving tube is a large opening, another fistula—and this time it’s on the left side.
“That might go forward,” the girl says. “We have to get there before it closes. Keep up with us. And watch out for a big wind.”
“Terrific,” I say. A breeze creeps up from behind. It doesn’t cool me—I have no sweat to evaporate. If there was heaviness, I wouldn’t make it this time. But weightless, I’m just barely able to stay about four body lengths behind the others.
The closer I get to the opening, the stronger the breeze, until it becomes a wind. The three big fellows reach the hole first. They form up like an acrobatic team, gripping arms and shoulders and spanning the tube with their feet to brace themselves.
The girl bumps into their arms and hangs on. Her hair lufts. “Good,” she says. They hold her out by one spindly arm—and let her go. She pushes her feet together and vanishes into the hole as if diving into a pool.
Bouncing along the tube, I try to hold back, skidding hands and feet, but I’m alone and it’s not enough. I arrive at the barrier of arms and legs. I have no idea what’s causing the suction or where the opening is taking us—but I’m almost equally concerned that something will reach out and snatch me from behind.
I reach out. “Do it quick!” I shout. But I don’t really mean it.
The brown fellow with scarlet markings—
scarle!
lovely word—takes hold of my arm. The team rearranges, and together, despite my clinging, desperate hands, they drop me into a roaring tunnel.
I fly through. The tunnel opens like the bell of a trumpet to a bigger space. A moist, lateral wind has taken hold of me. I’m flying. I look back and see the team of three flow one by one into the chasm. I can’t see the girl, but the three are about fifty meters behind me. We move along at the same speed. The opening vanishes behind us in the murk. The bigger space is dimly illuminated. I can finally see that it’s a conduit—another curved, circumnavigating tube, but broader, deeper.
Cicumnavigaing.
Going all the way around… Ship.
There’s darkness inboard, something slick and glistening outboard. The air is wet on my face and lips. We fly through a kind of rising mist that feels wonderful on my skin. I try to get a drink by sucking, but it doesn’t work. I just cough. I guess that’s progress, but where’s the real water—where’s the food? Then in the general roar I hear a sound more beautiful than anything I’ve heard before—a slurping, gurgling rush. It has to be water, a lot of water. The sound comes from outboard—from the glistening surface.
The curved walls channel an entire rushing river, perhaps ten or twelve meters wide.
The girl reappears down the line, through the mist. She’s grinning and doing spins. Looking at her makes me shut my eyes. I’m terrified, but the smell of water makes me crazy. My whole body wants to dive into the glistening surface. A river can’t hang weightless in a trough, can it? Yet the water keeps to the channel. It has weight—
But we don’t. We’re blowing along like fluff in a breeze, suspended above the rushing water. The air currents are faster at the center, slower near the walls. The girl “swims” outward with vigorous motions of her arms and feet, slow but effective progress that she reverses once I have passed.
Knob-Crest—Picker—gives a hoot of appreciation.
Behind me now, the girl reaches out to the three, still joined hand to arm, and uses the Blue-Black fellow to pull herself in. He makes more musical whistles. The brown fellow with scarlet markings—Scarlet-Brown—and Picker draw in their legs, catch him up, and they all spin together.
It’s comical and wonderful, but I’m so thirsty I can’t stop myself from making little shrieking noises and grabbing wherever and whatever I can, just to reach the water. I kick and flail against the wind, the center of the spinning pair.
Just right. Now it’s like I’m diving toward the water.
“No!” the girl shouts. They grab my ankle at the end of a kick and pull me toward them. All of us move outward and slow.
The girl is performing a kind of twirling handstand a few centimeters above the angled side of the channel, lifting slowly toward the center. I’ve never seen anything so wonderful and mysterious—and I still don’t care. I kick against the passing wall, aiming for the channel, change direction and spin about…
Again I’m heading straight for the water at about a meter per second. The girl does this amazing maneuver, tucks in her legs and arms, spins about to present her legs, and kicks against the angle of the channel wall. This shoots her toward where I’ll be in a couple of seconds—which might mean I won’t reach the water, so I wave her off. But she collides with me and grabs my foot and uses her momentum to knock me off course. Now we’re both moving down, but also passing over the water to the opposite channel wall.
Only now do I see how fast the water is moving. It’s a weird taffystreaming blur. I can make out currents, mostly parallel to the channel walls, but also whirlpools that rush past, relative to the girl and me, at about a hundred kilometers an hour.
I’ll die, but I don’t care. I’ll die wet. I’m philosophical about the entire gambit. It’s going to be a close thing either way. The girl knows more about this sort of flying than I do but seems to actually be risking her life for me.
Maybe it’s a game.
I start laughing. “We’re going swimming!” I shout.
The girl looks along the length of my leg and body—she’s still hanging on to my foot—in a kind of anxious pity. Her face seems so mature, so experienced—maybe I’m the child and she’s the grown-up.
The wind has pulled us toward the center. The water is right below us. I stretch out my hand. I’m totally insane—the smell of it is like a promise of heaven. My hand touches the stream, and instantly I’m in intense pain, hand wrenched, whole body spinning head over heels, the girl at my foot also swinging, scared—
But the dynamics of our new, combined shape pushes us outward. We strike the opposite sloping wall of the channel and carom back in a tangle, but farther from the channel, lifting over the water—and still, of course, moving briskly along the tube.
My hand feels like it’s broken, but I suck at the moisture left on my fingers—very little of it, actually. Hardly worth the effort.
“That isn’t how it’s done,” the girl says when she’s caught her breath.
“I could have made it,” I insist, and kick against the breeze, hoping to return to the channel.
“The water’s in a trough,” she says. “The trough is spinning free of the walls. That’s why the water stays in the trough. It’s going really, really fast. Look.”
She points across the channel to the three fellows on the other side. Picker is holding out a stick and honking above the roar and hiss as if relaying instructions. Blue-Black responds in high whistles.
He’s going to thrust the stick into the spinning stream.
“That’s Pushingar,” the girl says.
I have no idea where she’s getting her names, but they stick.
The others grab hold of Pushingar’s feet. The stick goes in and they all spin like tops but remain above the channel. And a few splashes are liberated by the stick, forming quivering, shimmering globules.
Where’s the third fellow, Scarlet-Brown?
He comes out of the shadows behind us, arms out, hooting in ecstasy. He’s kicked out over the channel, off the opposite wall, and is now rather expertly arrowing toward a fist-sized pearl of water pushing along through the air. He opens his mouth—it’s an impressive mouth, filled with broad yellow teeth, big canines, and even bigger incisors—and grabs a great big drink. He scoops the rest of the broken globule into his outstretched tunic.
“What’s his name?” I shout above the roar.
“Satmonk,” the girl says.
The other two intercept Satmonk, and they rebound, join hands, and float together, scooping and aiming drops and globules with hands and feet, moving their heads to Pushingar’s midriff, where he’s busy wringing out the tunic.
All drink greedily.
“That’s how it’s done,” the girl says. “But unless they give us a little shove, it’s going to take a few minutes to cross to where we can join them.”
“My fault,” I say, my lips and tongue just moist enough now to manage a few words.
“Can’t be helped,” the girl says. “Everything here is about waiting and seeing and being patient. Otherwise, someone else fills in your book. Or worse— the book gets lost.”
She points to the channel, the rushing taffy-silver currents, the swirling whirlpools.
“
Scarle
,” I say. “It means ‘red.’”
She ignores me, floating just an arm’s length away. For a moment, her eyes become heavy-lidded and she’s lost in her own kind of self-induced calm.
Patient.
I’m really starting to like this child.
It turns out the three fellows—Picker, Pushingar, Satmonk—are happy to bound around some more over the spinning channel. In a few minutes, they’ve done the stick thing again—it’s fine sport, they’re hooting and whistling and honking—and more big beads of water wiggle past. I open my mouth and get wet—my whole head—but by some miracle, I also manage to drink deep without filling my lungs and drowning.
The water tastes funny—my lips and cheeks tingle. But it’s wet, it’s very cold, and after a few more collisions, my thirst is gone. I rub my face with my hands, trying to scrub away the filth—the factor blood that still clings to me. It’s no good. I’ll need a cloth.
And, of course, some clothes would be good. I’m still naked and even I don’t like it. Everyone else has clothes.
Knob-Crest, Picker, drifts beside me, hands behind his head, lounging in the middle of the stream of air. We still have to be careful. The currents can be unpredictable, especially where the surface of the stream whips up turbulence.
It’s the stream’s undulations that are grabbing at the air above the channel, dragging it along and creating the suction that pulled us into the tube and the wind that now rushes us along. The center can be tricky. The turbulence sometimes tries to knock us toward the rushing stream. But the three fellows and the girl are experienced, so here we are, close to the relative safety of the sloping channel wall.
Scarlet-Brown, Satmonk, pokes the girl. She opens her eyes. We’ve made something like progress. We can push against the flowing air, using the shapes of our bodies, the motions of our arms, to adjust and maintain position.
Picker looks me over with an expression I can’t even begin to read. He reaches up, covers his forehead-nose, and manages to say, in a nasal tenor, “How about food?”
I give him a big smile and hold up my thumb.
“No show teeth,” he says. “It’s rude.”
I draw my lips tight. “Hell, yes,” I say.
“Not hell. Ship. Big, sick Ship. Food soon.”
There’s another opening coming up. It might be on the opposite side of the conduit from where we dropped in. A chance to exit, and also to continue moving forward.
The look on the girl’s face tells me that getting out of the spinning channel is the hard part. She points to her two eyes, then to me, then to the others.
“Watch and learn—quick! Or you’ll go around again and again—and you’ll drown.”
Together, they start to carom along the channel walls, at angles to the slipstream… slowing, slowing, the exit is coming up, with its inviting trumpet mouth. I try to learn from watching them, manage to keep up, and then we all grab and leap in a great big tangle.
There’s one final maneuver I still don’t understand, a kind of whirl around the bell of the trumpet, and then we’re scrambling like children climbing a sandhill, against the breeze flowing from that side—
And we emerge into an even bigger space, away from the trumpet mouth, away from the channel and the rushing, wonderful, terrifying water.
“Great!” the girl shouts. “Sometimes it takes three or four tries.”
“How long have you been doing this?” I ask.
“Don’t know,” she says. “Across four rivers. But this is the farthest forward I’ve gone—and managed to take my book with me.”
I don’t know what she means about the book. I don’t know much of anything, really. I’m ignorant, useless, and I have no idea why this makeshift team is still pulling me along.
Suddenly, I’m scared again. I’m literally a fifth wheel.
Maybe I’m still food.
BIG IDEAS