Hull Zero Three (7 page)

We’ve crossed the garden, gone through the open door, and walk down a short corridor that intersects another corridor, where the boy sweeps his arms in welcome. “This is home,” he says.

The glim lights are bright enough to see clearly but are dim compared to the garden. A long line of doors stretches hundreds of meters to either side. The curve here is more distinct. Chambers open on both sides. The ceiling or inboard wall may be transparent, but looking up doesn’t solve any mysteries, because the inner spaces of the hull are dark. A few small fogged lights, vague shapes, are all I can make out. I wonder if these rooms are where the colonists will stay when they all awaken and get ready for the landing.

The boy leads the way. The girl hangs back five or six paces. The woman is right behind me, too close. We walk perhaps forty meters, passing six chambers on both sides, and the air suddenly chills. It’s freezing again—but it feels like this place is
always
cold.

One of the doors is bigger, an opening into another corridor—a long one, bluish at the far end.
The woman pauses, straightens one arm, flicks her hand, then turns left again.
Wiseywiddershins
Maybe I don’t remember that part correctly, about widdershins being lucky.
“Anyone have a map?” I ask.
“We don’t need one,” the boy says. “We mostly stay here.”
I ask the woman, “Where do all these creatures come from? The one in the garden, the tooth-snout, the cleaners?”
“Some are factors,” the woman says. “That’s all I know.”
“She thinks she should remember that stuff,” the boy says. “But she just can’t cough it up.” He mimics throwing up, finger in his mouth, then applies the damp finger to his head and grimaces. “Messes her up.”
“It should be different,” I agree.
“I don’t remember anything from Dreamtime,” the boy says. “I’m happier without it, I guess. You say this is a ship—I’ve never seen it that way. It just goes on forever, with people stuck inside. That’s all.”
He guides me left into another hall. The hall expands into a wide tube. The floor goes on, but we’re walking through a long cylinder lined with rectangular glass cases. The cold here is different. It has purpose. The light has gradually shaded into deep
sapphire
, like the inside of a
glacie
. I don’t know what a glacier is, except that some existed once where we came from. Mountains of ice sliding like rivers…
I see in my thoughts a wall of blue ice and white snow and maybe somebody climbing—a poke of memory so muddled I don’t feel right sharing it. Glacier. The spill of sense and imagery that fans out from this word is fascinating enough that if I were alone, I’d stop and close my eyes and just savor the visual and even tactile memories about snow and ice and sliding around on long boards, about polar caps and cubes bobbing in frosted glasses of sweet tea and lemonade—another lifetime of things icy, nothing like this bitter frigidity.
“Don’t look until she says,” the boy says.
I can’t help it. I look. The cases are coated with rime. We walk by a dozen, two dozen—all the same.
“Stop,” the woman says.
The boy watches me with that awful grin.
Blue light everywhere. More cases covered with frost. My feet are freezing. The girl hasn’t kept up. I don’t see her. I start to say something, but the boy pushes me forward. The woman guides me.
“It’s like a meat locker in here,” I say. I remember the tastes of steak and lamb and pork, all
meats
you want to keep cold so they won’t spoil. But nobody eats meat anymore. There’s something else—that word again,
fis
. Frozen fish, stacked like
cordwood
, whatever
that
is.
“We’re all meat waiting to happen,” the woman says, pleased at my expression, pleased that once again our thoughts seem to be in sync.
“We don’t belong here,” I say. Cases on all sides, above and below…
“Not when we’re alive, we don’t,” the boy agrees.
“Okay,” the woman says. “This one. Look close.” She leans over and rubs away some frost. Behind the clear surface, the case is stuffed with the same sort of sleeping cocoons I saw earlier, drawn out full length and stacked three or more to a case.
Inside each cocoon is a body. Some are badly damaged—gaping wounds, limbs missing, heads gone. Not much in the way of color except for that glacial blue. “Are they all dead?” I ask.
The boy says, “Look
clos
.” He grabs my neck and shoves my head forward. I want to resist, to strike out and smash him… but I don’t. My nose almost touches the case. It’s so very cold. My skin would stick, just as it did before.
A few centimeters away, on the other side of the transparency, a head sticks out. It’s a man. The cocoons are too short to serve as shrouds. The face’s expression is hard, eyes blank, jaw frozen open. The cocoon is slack below the waist. The lower half of the body is missing.
It takes a moment to register what I’m looking at.
Who I’m looking at.
The features are the same, the shade of hair is probably the same. I bend and swipe my own hand, risking the cold. The body below shows another face in profile. I reach up and wipe frantically. The body above has no head. The body above that one has its back to me.
I shove the boy away and cross to the opposite side. There, I bob up and down in front of more stacks. Bodies above, beneath, all around. I run to the next row, the edge of my palm burning with cold, but it’s the same—and the next, using my other hand—
Dozens of cases, hundreds of frozen bodies, stretching off into a deep sapphire distance. I’ve inspected twenty or more of the cases on both sides. The faces I can see are all like mine. All the same. Just like mine.
“Get it?” the boy asks, fairly vibrating with excitement. The woman has crossed her arms and is trimming her fingernails with her teeth. She spits out a bit of nail.
The new memories and new words mean nothing. I don’t want to think, I don’t want to understand. I want to be empty.
“We shouldn’t be caught here when the weight goes,” the woman says. “Hard not to hurt yourself.”
She takes me by the arm, gently, and leads me up the long corridor and to the right, out of the blueness and toward the warmer rooms, where people are given food, where living people go and are welcome.
They push me through a door into cloying warmth. I stumble into the flowery sweetness of jungle air and the boy and the woman just stand there while I kneel and then fall over on a pad.
I’m weeping—weeping like a child.
The boy watches with satisfaction. The woman watches with wonder. “It’s not so bad,” she says soothingly. “You always come back.”
I’ve been here before. I can’t deny what I’ve seen. I’ve been here hundreds, maybe thousands of times, trying to do whatever it is I’m meant to do…. And every time I’ve failed.
Every time I’ve died.
PART TWO
THE DEVIL

You saw another one like me?” the little girl asks.
I come up out of a deep, hot stupor and turn over on the pad. I’m feverish. Someone’s slipped me into a cocoon, I’ve slept hard, I can feel it in my muscles, slept through a spin-down, and now there’s weight again.

With a groan, I push myself out of the cocoon and lie panting and sweating on the pad. The edges of my palms hurt like hell—frostbite.
The girl holds out a bottle of water. I sit up and drink.
“You saw another one like me?” she asks again, hopeful.
“Like you.” I drink more. The lights brighten.
“She had a book?”
“Yes.”
“Did you read it?”
“No time. I wanted to return it… when I saw her again. I saved her food and water for a while, too, but…”
The girl nods. “Where was she going?”
“She wanted to go forward.”
The woman comes through a round doorway between the linked domiciles and stands for a moment, biting another fingernail. She must put each finger through rationed rotation, ten little luxuries. “Now you’re really back,” she says.
I don’t know how to respond.
“What do you know?” the girl asks. “What have you learned from where you’ve been?”
This is a reasonable question, though why she waits until now to ask it… Maybe she thinks I’ve learned something essential and now I’m ready to talk sensibly. I think about what I know. It isn’t much.
“How many of me have you met?” I ask.
“Ten,” the woman says. “They went forward. The cleaners brought some of them back and put them in the freezers. When the girl came here, she was alone. She says there are others like her… but she won’t tell me more than that. Maybe you can persuade her.” They exchange a look. The girl’s face is rigid. She has a steel will.
“Tell us your story,” the girl says.
I tell them what I know. After a few minutes, the boy joins us and listens skeptically.
“We’re on a Ship,” I conclude. “A Ship in space, between the stars. I thought we were supposed to sleep, to be awakened when we near our planet. That’s what I remember from Dreamtime. A little girl just like you pulled me out of a room full of new bodies. She said we have to chase heat or die. Doors closed behind us….”
I go on. The highlights for the girl and the woman seem to be that there are three parts to the Ship—three hulls—and that we’re connected to a giant piece of dirty ice. I add something new: that the ice might provide fuel and reaction mass for the Ship.
I tell them again about the voice from the wall. The spin-up and spindown they’ve figured out. The boy doesn’t want to hear about the silvery figure. He doesn’t seem interested in most of my story, but this bit really upsets him.
They don’t know much about the cycling heat and cold. Here, places that are warm stay warm, and places that are cold stay cold.
“Tell us again about the voice,” the woman says.
“It asked me if I was part of Ship Control. It says it made me. I didn’t understand.”
“You weren’t asleep. You weren’t awakened. You were
grown
,” the girl says. “
She
pulled you out.
She
thought you were important. You keep trying to go forward.”
I think this through as carefully as I can, given my thudding heart and the urge to just sit and scream. My hand reaches into my overalls pocket and pulls out the square piece of plastic with the stripe on one side and the scrub marks on the other. I hold it up. “What’s this for?” I ask.
“For remembering stuff,” the girl says. “You get them and make them into books.” She reaches into her own pocket, feels something there, and makes a bitter face.
“Do I always tell you what I know before I go forward?” I ask.
The woman puts her hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl shrugs it off.
“Give it to him. By rights it’s his,” she says.
“He didn’t bring
min
,” the girl says. “He lost it. Maybe the next one will have it.”
I stare at the square of thin plastic.
“I don’t have one,” the woman says, turning away. “I’ve never had one. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have yours.”
“Give it to him,” the boy says. “There’ll be others.”
“But it’s been so long, and I need to find my mother,” the girl says, her voice cracking. “I need
Mother
.”
I look between the three of them.
“It’s pretty comfortable here,” the boy says. “I close the door when the cleaners come. We hide. I tell the rooms to make food. The rooms listen to me. I say, give him his book.”
The boy seems to want to be in charge. This might be his version of a threat. The girl puts on a stubborn face, then simply looks tired. She pulls a black-covered rectangle out of her pocket. “It doesn’t say anything about Mother. Most of it’s just stupid.”
I reach to take it from her quivering fingers. “Thank you,” I say.
Then she pulls out a short, thin stick with a blackened, sharpened tip, a kind of
penci
. “You can use this if you want.”
I hold it. My fingers are sweaty. My eyes lose focus. We are born in ignorance, we die in ignorance, but maybe sometimes we learn something important and pass it along to others before we die. Or we write it down in a little book.
“The hallways going forward are full of freezers,” the boy says. “As far as I care to go, which isn’t very far, they’re full of bodies. Must be thousands of them.”
“They’re waiting to be born again,” the girl says. “Mother will make them all better. I think then they turn into girls like me.”
The boy makes a face. “Let’s get some food,” he suggests.
THE MAN OF THE BOOK

The boy’s inner residence has the usual pad and accordion cocoon, as well as a weird nest of bars and springs that might be exercise equipment. Long cables hang from the walls and the ceiling—good for grabbing when the weight goes. Most important, a thick tube rises from the middle of the floor. It has a rounded top with a square hole. The hole produces loaves, and if you put a bottle in the hole, it fills with water from a spigot that folds up out of sight when it’s done.

If Ship recognizes you, you get all you really need, and not one thing more—like a
hamster.
After we eat, everyone is quiet, and I somehow get that they expect me to go into another room—there are several open doors down the corridor—and read my book in private. That’s the last thing I want. But it’s a ritual, apparently. It’s happened before.
Maybe I’m the only entertainment around here.
That thought almost makes me puke. I leave them to their imaginings. I’m thinking and feeling so hard that the spin-down catches me by surprise and I stumble and have to scramble back against the push, to get into my smaller, emptier room before all the weight is gone.
I float there—echoing slowly from wall to ceiling to floor, refusing to grab the cables—and pretend to lie back. Relax.
I can’t gather up the courage to open the damn thing. I am who I am. All those others… well, there’s every reason to deny them their place, their reality, because it leaves me with an insoluble problem. Identity.
What lies in my memory, waiting to be accessed, might just duplicate what’s already written in the book. Someone might have explored all of my knowledge, made all of my possible choices, run me completely out of fresh options. Someone might have lived my life all the way through.
I look closely at the book. Somehow, it feels like
my
book. It has little hallmarks of the character I might yet find inside my head. But I won’t believe that—not yet. I am who I am, and there’s no one else like me in the universe— right? That is a fact. It will remain a fact.
Until I open the book.
I’ve rolled it around in my hands for an hour. It’s made up of leaves of plastic, thinner than the one in my pocket. A thick brittle glue holds the leaves, the pages, between the black boards. The boards have a frayed, stained look, as if they were ripped or bent from a bigger sheet—something found in a garbage void. The stains might be blood. There are also dark marks on the page edges.
Not opening the book could be suicidal. How many times have I had access to a book like this and refused to open it—echoing through mistake after mistake, without the heavy assurance of past experience to guide me? But I
know
I’ve lived for years, decades, that I wasn’t just squirted into a sac and shaken into existence a couple of dozen spin-ups before. This conviction is necessary for my sanity. This conviction is going to kill me. Now of course it’s time to curse my maker, whoever that is—the hull or Ship Control or
God
…
The first time I’ve thought of
that
name, that concept. It should open so many new doors… but I don’t feel it. The word is curiously empty. I have a stronger connection to whatever Ship Control is, or even Destination Guidance.
I’m more miserable now than I’ve been during my short existence, including the physical pain and the blind, newborn fear. It’s the freshness of my fear that convinces me, finally. Pain is forgotten, but fear builds and leaves tracks, and I don’t feel those tracks—not in my thoughts, not in my flesh. All my fears are new and short. I don’t have enough of them to help me survive. Not enough experience.
I’m an idiot not to open the book.
I pull back the front cover. The glue makes a cracking sound. I hold it up and look at the spine—wouldn’t want to damage it, after all. The glue has little bubbles, might come from something organic. Maybe it’s dried factor blood. Maybe the stains on the cover aren’t human blood but something else. I pull the book away, focus, squint.
I will literally lose my self in its pages.
First page begins with a thick black line.