Hull Zero Three (4 page)

The chamber we’re in is huge. I can’t see a “top” inboard, and I can’t see across to the opposite side. It isn’t spinning. Once we’re away from the air currents around the trumpet leading to the channel, we can move only by “swimming,” which takes a long time and a lot of effort. I’m hungry enough to consider gnawing on my hands, my arms. Seriously.

“We wait,” Picker says, finger over his high nose. “Soon we walk. Then cold comes and we chase heat.”
The girl nods.
I’ve learned this much. Two of us at least think we’re on a Ship. That word, to us, implies something very big. Maybe it is
sick
, whatever that means—I know too little to judge. My memories from the Dreamtime seem to sync up with some of these propositions. But the memories are woefully incomplete.
As to where we are in the Ship, we seem to still be more or less “outboard,” moving slowly forward, jumping from one circumnavigating conduit to another—different sorts of channels and tubes, with different functions. One of them carries water in a spinning trough. I have no idea where the water comes from or why the trough is spinning. I remember the water’s tingling taste, however, and am already thirsty again.
There are five of us. Three look different, two of us look much the same— though one is smaller and apparently younger. (Why “apparently”? Because she knows a lot more than I do. I seem to be the young one in everything but size.)
And I now think that the three different-looking fellows have been together for some time, are perhaps even more knowledgeable than the girl, and can manage with effort to speak a little of the lingo the girl and I share. In turn, the girl knows some of Picker and Pushingar’s whistle-hoot-speak.
The space inboard—“up,” or above us, when weight returns—is so deep and dark as to be unfathomable. After a long while, I think I can make out big curving struts arranged in interlocking, slender, three-pointed stars. But I can’t be sure. It might be my eyes playing tricks.
Nothing around us is moving.
The rest period is quickly over. The girl has been floating in her lotus. Now she uncurls. I notice we’re moving again, with reference to the outboard surface—the “floor.” Air currents are increasing in the large space.
“Weight’s coming,” the girl says, and whistles something to Pushingar.
“We feel it,” Picker says.
“I think there’s going to be a big wind,” the girl says. “All the air in here will catch up with the spin. We should lie flat until it passes.”
And that’s just the way it is. As we fall the short distance outboard, “down,” the air around us not only gets colder, but also begins moving even more violently than the breeze over the channeled river. Soon it’s gale force—
gale
—and we’re being dragged over the floor, no matter how we try to hold on. Not strong enough yet to lift us up and flip us over.
The real danger is freezing. My skin grows numb. I see Satmonk and Picker crawling ahead of me. The girl is behind Pushingar to my left.
“How far?” I shout. The girl shakes her head. Either she can’t hear me or she doesn’t know. Finally, despite the bitter cold, we all just lie flat on the smooth floor, our weight increasing, giving us better purchase. Besides, the floor is warmer than the wind.
I’m almost at eye level with the omnipresent little glowing beads that faintly illuminate everything. Glims. Glim lights. The whole chamber is spinning up—or the entire Ship. I don’t know which or why in either case.
I’m sick of it. All of it. If this is the way life is going to be, then I’m ready to chuck it all and freeze. But my body disagrees. I start cursing my biological stubbornness. Upon this provocation, new words enter my vocabulary—words a teacher should not pass along.
The wind subsides. There’s a fluting sound from high above, the structure inboard making its own noises, now audible in the slackening of the cold rush. The air above seems to still be pretty turbulent and even colder. Little beige flakes have been blowing around us for the last few minutes. I realize it’s
snow.
Snow is swirling.
We stand. We walk. One by one, beginning with Pushingar, we run forward—I think, I hope. I have no idea where we’re going and suspect neither does the little girl. Maybe Pushingar or the other two know something, but they’re not talking—just running.
The floor is getting very cold. It’s starting all over again, variations on a nasty theme. Chasing heat, staying alive, seeking food—seeking answers really low on the list of my frustrated basic drives.
Minutes of running. Maybe only seconds. But something visible ahead—a wall. A wall curving off in huge sweeps with the floor to either side,
cicumnavigaing
, like the tube and the channel but with actual hatches that have real doors—oblong, about my height.
One of the doors stands open.
The girl sings out her joy. “Forward!” she cries.
We all climb through the hatch, into a rectangular hallway—as at the beginning. The wall opposite is blank, no hatches. Satmonk points to the right. We resume running. I’m mostly stumbling. My head is swimming, my heart thumping. I’m close to the end of my tether.
This time, there are no bulkheads slamming shut to close us off from going back. After a time, I notice rags on the floor—scraps of clothing, bits of other things I can’t identify. I stop. Maybe it’s food. I bend over and pick up something small and brownish, a smashed cube.
The others move on without me.
I sniff the cube. No odor. Squeeze it. Feel it. It’s hard as a rock. I try to take a bite.
The girl has doubled back. She knocks it from my hands. “Not food,” she says. “Not for
you
to eat, anyway. But there’s probably food somewhere near. This is a place that’s made for people.”
Looking in angry frustration at the cube on the floor, at the girl, I realize I’m weeping, but my eyes are dry.
“Keep going,” she says, and tugs at my arm. “We need to get to a warm place. Come on.”
As we walk—she seems to know I’m too worn down to run anymore—she stoops and picks up a larger rag, shakes it out, hands it back to me. “Not too filthy,” she says. “Might fit.”
I look at the scrap in the dimness. It’s a pair of flexible shorts made of thin fabric. There’s a big blood stain on one leg—dark, dry.
“No, thank you,” I say. But I don’t drop it.
“Suit yourself. Nearly everything we’re wearing comes from somebody dead. Just enough to go around.”
If that’s meant to be encouraging, it doesn’t work. Again I feel like lying down, but I know the girl would kick me. We join the others. They’re sitting on the floor, lying against the walls. Satmonk and Pushingar appear to be sleeping. Picker is keeping an eye out ahead. The girl steps over them.
Picker covers his nose. “Been here?” he asks, and then sneezes and shakes his head. Its tough for him to talk this way.
“No,” the girl says. “Never this far forward.”
“Maybe add to book,” Picker says.
The girl makes a face. The others get up and we follow, but we’re not running. It’s not getting as cold here, though the air is chill. Maybe the girl is right.
Then we see the light up ahead is changing. Still dim, but bluer. The blue cast reaches back down the hall.
“Is that a bubble?” the girl asks.
“What’s ‘bubble’?” Picker asks.
Pushingar seems to understand, and a whistling, honking dialogue follows. If I wasn’t dying, I’d have laughed at the comical sounds.
But Picker concludes by saying, “They know of bubbles. Someone made it told.” He almost sneezes, looks sidewise at me, then adds, tapping his nose, “Learn honk!”
“Sure,” I say. I hold my own nose and sort of snort, then warble a horn note or two.
The others laugh—different kinds of laughter. And I thought I was dying. I’m not. I’m still capable of making a joke. Either that, or they’re making the noises their kinds make before they attack and eat you.
I’d sympathize if that was their plan.
But I know it isn’t.
These guys are
human
. Different kinds of my people. How I know this, I can’t say, but before I can catch up with the girl, we’re closer to the bluish light, and I see that the hallway no longer curves up but opens out on each side— expands. The floor ends, but a kind of bridge goes on, surrounded by a cage of rails. The rail on our left supports a ladder at shoulder level.
But none of that is important. The part of the bridge we’re currently walking on—let’s call it a floor, though it’s different from the floor of the hall—is not solid, but made of grating over crossbars and connected to the cage and the long rails.
We can see to either side, and down.
We have to stop and look. Below the bridge is an intense darkness, filled with little tiny lights—not at all like the glim lights. These are pointlike and bright, and there are so many of them I could spend a long lifetime just counting.
“What is that?” the girl asks, her voice a tiny squeak. She hasn’t seen any of this before. Her face expresses resistance to revealing either ignorance or curiosity. She doesn’t like new, large things or ideas—or perceptions.
“It’s
sky
,” I say. “It’s the universe. Those are stars.”
“This
is
Ship,” Picker says. “Big, sick Ship.”
“Where are we?” the girl asks, her voice tremulous.
“A viewing chamber,” I say. “I remember them from Dreamtime.”
And I do, vaguely. All of us would gather in a place like this to look down on a new world. Except I don’t see anything like a new world. But there’s something ahead and below, mostly obscured by the curve in the bridge and the rails. As we walk farther, the object comes into view. We’re moving—it’s moving, and rather rapidly. Soon it will pass right underneath us. I’m confused for a moment, so I stop walking and grip the railing.
“Is that our world?” the girl asks. She seems to remember something out of Dreamtime as well.
The object is passing right underneath—outboard, far down. It’s big, all right—big and mottled white, cracked, cratered, covered with thin, confining bands and stripes. It’s like a huge caged snowball. A very dirty snowball. The cage wraps around the snowball and reaches up in a gigantic strut—curved, graceful, big.
And that strut or support or brace climbs all the way up from the dirty snowball to where we are.
It connects the big snowball to Ship.
The snowball and the strut move clockwise to the other side and pass out of sight. Compared to the size of that lump of dirty ice, Ship is tiny. Ship rotates in some sort of cradle suspended above the snowball—or the snowball flies around us. But that doesn’t make as much sense.
We’re inside a spinning something, probably a cylinder. The spin causes the acceleration and the feeling of weight.
Ship is spinning.
“It’s not our world,” I say.
Satmonk seems to agree, shaking his head, holding out flat hands as if to reject all of it. I
might
know what the dirty snowball is, but I don’t want to make that particular guess. Because if my guess is correct, then Ship is very sick indeed.
The snowball is
muchtoolarge
It comes around again. I make out a sinuous rill along one side, where ice has apparently been dug out, perhaps mined.
Ril
That’s good.
Ril
actually means a small river, but this is all ice. It reminds me of a
snake
, a
serpent
For the time being, what we’re seeing is impressive, it’s frightening, and it’s informative in a stunning, useless sort of way—but it isn’t food.
The bridge isn’t a comfortable place to rest and try to remember, so we continue across until we reach the middle. There, the bridge reaches and then apparently passes through a glassy sphere about forty meters in diameter. The sphere lies suspended on the bridge, over the
bliser
that reveals the stars and the serpent-marked ice ball. This is a place where people are meant to stop, look, and marvel. A resting place.
The dirty snowball again rotates into view and passes beneath, but more slowly. We all feel the now-familiar sensation of Ship reducing its spin—the push forward, making us grip the rungs of the ladder, the bars, each other. As the forward shove lessens, so does our downward tug.
We’re weightless again.
A wind sighs through the larger bubble, swirling around the bridge rails and decking. Without thinking, I realize that I had put on the shorts before crossing the bridge. I didn’t want to die naked and exposed.
The girl lets go of the ladder and floats in front of me. The last of the wind shoves her forward toward the glassy sphere. I let go of the ladder and follow.
The three other humans—Picker, Pushingar, Satmonk—not exactly like me or the girl but capable of laughter and kindness and solidarity, the best human traits of all, follow close behind.
REST AND DIE

The first thing I see in the sphere is a floating body—fully clothed, slowly rotating on an axis through its shoulders. It’s an adult female, I think, but badly decayed or eaten away. There’s no way of knowing what type of human she once was.

“The cleaners aren’t very active here,” the girl says, her lips prim in disapproval. She shoves away from the end of the bridge and intersects the body, then, as the others move toward the opposite side of the sphere, clambers around it and shows us that it’s wearing a kind of backpack. Thrusting her hand into the pack, she pulls part of it inside out—it’s empty. “No book,” she says with a chuff. She kicks violently away from the body, and both go in opposite directions, just as Newton intended—
Newton.

The first name I’ve recovered—a name apparently more important than my own.
That big outboard mass of gray and brown and white very slowly comes back into view, then stops, parking itself “below” us at about two o’clock as I look outboard and forward. Clockwise. Clock hands. Rotation. Degrees and radians. That starts to make visual and other kinds of sense.
I shake my head in mixed wonder and sorrow, and precess until my hand clenches the end of the railing and stops me. I’m looking inboard now, away from the spectacular view, “up” toward a dark, shadowy section of the sphere. There’s stuff way up there—smaller clumped spheres, like magnified foam, each filled with one or more couches, chairs—and dark boxes. Places to rest. Places to explore.
The girl grabs hold of my shoulder. We wobble together until my wrist tightens and damps our motion.
“That woman was coming here for a reason,” she says. “Something didn’t want her here.”
“What?” I ask.
“Not a friend.”
Already Picker and Satmonk have kicked away from the end of the bridge to ascend toward the glimmering cluster. The girl joins them. With my usual finesse, I follow and arrive after a couple of clumsy rebounds.
The cluster’s curved, pushed-together surfaces are fogged by a layer of staticky dust. The cluster looks more and more like a bunch of soap bubbles pushed together—but with an access hole cut between each bubble. More scraps of clothing float in their quiet confines.
The girl is working on opening one of the boxes. She succeeds, but it’s empty. Satmonk is in another bubble, his leg wrapped around a couch as he breaks a box loose of some sort of stringy glue. The lid comes open, and he gives a bird warble and shows it to the rest. I’m at a bad angle, but the others instantly move into his sphere of influence and generosity.
Once again, I’m the last to join them. The girl has managed to save me a large gray bag. Other bags, liberated from the box, have been apportioned, first come, first served.
“Just say thanks,” she tells me, and pulls her own bag close.
The bags are all tied shut with a drawstring. I watch the others, then pull the bow knot—
And out comes a loaf of heavy brownish cake ten or so centimeters long and half as wide and deep—a really big chunk of something that smells fruity and fishy. Fruit I get. The clusters around us are like grapes, in a weird way. I can taste a grape in memory. We eat fruit in Dreamtime.
Fishy
is more difficult. I’m not sure what that really means, though I see
oceans
and silvery creatures in the water. But this is just a distraction. I’m eating the loaf before I give a damn what it smells like.
Also in the bag is a head-sized, squishy oval ball filled with—I hope— water. The cake is dry, and my mouth starts to fill with crumbs I can’t swallow without gagging. The girl shows me how to hold the ball up to my mouth and squeeze. Wherever my mouth is, liquid shoots out. It’s water, all right—about two liters of it, almost without taste.
“Don’t drink it all at once, and don’t eat all of the cake,” the girl tells me.
“Thanks,” I say.
Picker agrees with a nod. His cheeks are packed.
“He looks like a
squi
r
e
,” I say, laughing, spraying soggy crumbs.
“What is squirrel?” Picker honks. He can eat and talk at the same time. I tap my own full cheeks. Again, we’re laughing—laughing, eating, drinking. The cake tastes brown and dry and a little sweet. I can
feel
the food and water in my blood. Wonderful and strange, like I’m a husk filling out with both liquid and energy.
We strap ourselves into the couches within the dusty bubbles. I look through the hazy surface at the decayed body floating near the center of the big sphere.
“Somebody brought all this stuff here before they died,” the girl says. “We should take the clothes. Even her clothes. They’ll fit in one of these bags.”
“Where does this stuff come from?” I ask. “I mean, where do you go to find it and bring it back?”
“Don’t worry about that,” the girl says. “Nothing makes sense until you find your book. Let’s sleep.”
Satmonk is already asleep. Nobody seems inclined to stay awake and keep watch. I really don’t want to sleep. But I don’t have much choice. My eyelids are the only thing about me that has weight.
Too bad.
It turns out to be a big mistake.
REASON IN SLEEP