Hull Zero Three Page 15

  Good information to have—maybe we’re alone, or maybe everyone important has been concentrated along the hull’s center axis.

  “Or the hull’s trying to shed attackers,” I say.

  “Wow. That’s a possibility, too.”

  The girls walk around our circle, on the inside, and christen each of us in turn. “You are Kim,” one girl announces, tapping Big Yellow’s knee. Her twin, on the opposite side of the circle, brushes the spidery woman’s hand. “And you are Nell,” she says. The other girl taps the Knob-Crest and says, in a strangely comprehensible hoot, “Tomchin.”

  To me, “You are Sanjay.”

  And to my twin, “You are Sanjim. But we call you both Teacher. And you are Tsinoy, of course,” they conclude with the Tracker. “Now you all have names.”

  “What about your names?” Nell asks.

  “Mother knows. You do not need to know.”

  “That’s not fair, is it?” Kim asks.

  One girl pats his hand, and when he opens it, she folds herself into his fingers, then jerks her arms and head—up! He lifts her and holds her out high. This stirs something in my deep memory—something cultural, but I can’t quite place it. A monster and a girl. Anyway, he’s the wrong color, and so is she.

  “We love all,” she says, high over our circle. “We have prayed you here. That is enough. Others will come later, if necessary.”

  “Then who’s in charge?” Nell asks.

  “Mother,” my twin suggests. “Maybe Mother and Ship Control are one and the same.”

  “So far, no objections,” Kim says. “I’m going aft in case our host laid out a big spread and made up some beds, but forgot to tell us.” I follow Kim—such a little name for such a large fellow—and the girls seem to agree that exploration is in order.

  Where the staging area had been in Hull Zero One, there’s a similar space, but—as we saw during our first reconnoiter—the interior architecture is nascent, rudimentary. Still, cables and rails are in place, and even ladders and crawling tubes with rungs. We can get around—we are being accommodated. We move aft and inboard, up, climbing through a tube to a hatch. The hatch opens as my hand grips the topmost rung. More warmth spills out. The smaller spaces are warming quickly. Then I smell something marvelous.

  Food. Kim was right.

  We enter a broad chamber, a giant pie section of the central bulge that pokes into the staging area. The chamber’s design is different from the broad, flat room in the other hull, but who cares? As we watch, teardrop extrusions rise from the floor and push out in rows from the walls. Little silver covers open in the rounded tops of each teardrop as we walk from one to the next.

  Kim shakes his head and murmurs, “We can’t eat—not until we’re all here.”

  “Right.” But my hands are twitching.

  We go back and call the others. When all have assembled, we show them how the covers open and how food fills each dish. The food is in small cubes, beige and green and white, and smells delicious, but we are far from choosy. Each meal is enclosed in a flexible sphere. The sphere is transparent and allows our hands in and out, along with small bits—not burning hot. Something doesn’t want us to eat too fast or too much. Water and a sweet, reddish liquid are available from taps around the room, squeezing out little bulbs we can sip from.

  The hull has laid out a feast.

  Tsinoy eats what we eat and seems content.

  Before we’ve had anywhere near our fill, the teardrops withdraw, but the spigots remain, dispensing smaller bulbs. We’re being rationed. We’ve been nearly starved ever since we were made—no sense overdoing it.

  “Who do we thank?” Nell asks, licking her long fingers.

  “Whom,” my twin corrects.

  “Right. Whom do we thank?” she repeats archly.

  The girls yell, “Teacher!” and laugh, musical tones that delight almost as much as the food—or the red drink. We all smile, even the Knob-Crest, Tomchin.

  Now, soft, circular beds rise from the floor. On one side of the room, the teardrops and spigots are replaced by cylinders filled with running water. Steam puffs out from cuts in the pliable surround, slits that allow entry. Nearby, drawers open, with clothing folded inside. Small lights play across our faces, matching the color of our assigned shower stalls—and our drawers filled with changes of clothes.

  We’ve each been measured and fitted.

  “Mother provides,” the girls say. “All is well.”

  One stall is even big enough for Kim, and a burning question is answered when another, bigger cylinder shapes itself, and Tsinoy climbs in to be sprayed down with water, like a great, horrible wolf.

  The Tracker likes to keep clean.

  “It’s not a big warm tub,” Nell says as she emerges, naked, furry gray patches slicked and glistening. “But it’s the best thing I’ve ever felt.” Then she adds, looking between me and my twin, “In my young life, of course.”

  STORYTIME

  We lounge on the pads like campers under a giant tent—the pie-slice room even looks like a huge tent. We’re no longer hungry, we’ve had enough to drink, we’re clean, and still there’s electricity in our thoughts. We aren’t going to be sleeping for a while.

  The time has come for stories. The girls, of course, choose the Teachers. I go first and tell what happened to me. I condense it into a few minutes.

  My twin, oddly, departs from our campground script and shakes his head. “Later,” he says. “I’m not ready yet.”

  Kim goes next.

  “I don’t remember too much about being born. No girls, nobody—just me, alone. I’m in this long tube when I start to remember, like waking up, but I know I’ve got something I have to do—I have to go forward. I don’t even know where forward is, or what it is, but that’s where I have to go.” He looks at the rest of us. “Why don’t we come with instructions?”

  Nobody knows the answer. We’d all like to be real people, after all—probably even Tsinoy.

  Kim lifts his hands, examining them with a kind of wonder, and continues. “Being big turns out to be a good thing. Pretty soon, something even bigger and dark tries to stop me, so I break it or kill it. It happens so fast.” He flexes his fingers. “I guess it was a factor, maybe a cleaner—maybe it didn’t even want to hurt me. I don’t know, but I hate being interfered with.”

  “Amen,” Nell says.

  “Along the way, all I see are bodies or parts of bodies, and I think, this place is dying—or maybe it’s dead already. There are lots of burned areas. Once, I was moving through a place that smelled bad and had no lights at all, and something tried to take me from behind. I didn’t see it, but it left these marks.” He turns to show a circular collection of greenish welts, some still oozing reddish pus. Under his ragged clothing and the layers of grime, we hadn’t noticed them before. The circle is about three hands wide—his hands. His back is huge. “I don’t know how I got away, but I did, though I don’t think I hurt it much—I couldn’t even get a grip, really.”

  “A big Killer,” one of the girls says.

  “I don’t know how many times I went around the circumference, or doubled back, or reversed course and went aft again. It was all so confusing. I was still waking up. I knew I had to have a name, but I couldn’t remember it. I like Kim, mind you, but I don’t think it’s the name I should have….” He shakes his head with sad humor. “Sorry, girls. I must have spent dozens of spin-ups getting to the rotating sluices. That’s where the water gets channeled from the big central tank—I guess.”

  “It is,” Nell says. They’ve heard this before, repeating their stories for our benefit, but also with a kind of hypnotic focus, like chanting old, comforting songs. The stories are all they have, really.

  Kim and Nell don’t even have the emerging shadows of a personal Dreamtime. As for Tsinoy…

  “Once, I caught a cleaner carrying a body and seven gray bags.” Kim looks at me, squinting with his emerald-green eyes. “I think it might have been you, actually�
��one of you, I mean. The body was cut in half—no legs—but there were still bags around its neck. I broke the cleaner—didn’t kill it, but it was pretty lame after. Then I stole the bags and ate my fill, drank four bottles of water. I was sick for a few spin-ups. I just floated and bumped in a long tube and made messes. Must have eaten too fast. The loaves haven’t affected me that way since.”

  “Maybe they were poisoned,” Nell says.

  “Maybe. Finally, I’m climbing up this shaft when I see a big glowing ball coming down at me, with a window or port in the front.”

  “Did you see anything through the window?” my other asks.

  “Yeah. Maybe. A kind of face—shiny, white.”

  “Silvery,” I say.

  “There are no—” Kim begins, as if in reflex, and that makes us laugh—all but the girls, who are definitely not amused.

  Kim waits for a decent interval while we think this over, then continues his story up to the point where he’s made his way forward and meets the first little girl, then Nell and Tsinoy. We know the rest.

  Nell goes next. The girls sit on either side of her. Each takes a long-fingered hand. The scene is at once touching and incongruous.

  “The first thing I remember,” she begins, “is Tsinoy carrying me in a sac through a forest. The sac is slowly ripping, and I’m about to fall out. We get to a platform—I guess this is during spin-up. The platform is covered with dried stuff—blood, I think.”

  “It was blood,” Tsinoy agrees.

  “Where did you find her?” my twin asks.

  “In a pile of bodies in a birthing chamber—most of them still in sacs. They were dead, freezing, but one sac squirmed, so I pulled it out and took it with me.”

  “Why?” Kim asks.

  “I did not want to be alone. I had questions, and for too long, nothing and nobody to talk to.”

  “How did you know she would talk to you?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Her story first,” one of the girls insists.

  Nell resumes. “We were in a factor tunnel, somewhere outboard, maybe near the middle of the hull, near the cinch, when I fell out. Got born, I suppose. Tsinoy waited while I tried out my legs and arms. I managed to stand, and then I screamed. I’m embarrassed to say that.”

  “Don’t be,” Tsinoy says in a soft grumble.

  “But we were alone, it wasn’t attacking me. And then it spoke. I didn’t understand it at first. I had to integrate, bring language to the surface. I have other languages, potentially—maybe we all do. Maybe if we try hard enough, we can speak to others…” She casts a quick look at Tomchin. “Just as the girls do.”

  The girls look somberly around the circle.

  “Tsinoy was the first name I’ve ever heard. It knew who it was even then.”

  “Not what, though,” Tsinoy adds. “No mirrors, but limbs look all wrong.”

  “After a time,” Nell resumes, “Tsinoy guides me to a huge chamber—the biggest chamber we’ve seen. It’s full of a quiet, hissing rumble and big, long blue tubes… bigger than the water tank, I think. The tubes are lined up in a cylindrical shape, filled with whirling shadows, surrounded by sparkles, all flowing aft. The chamber might have been a kilometer wide. It was only a couple of minutes before we found more bodies, in terrible condition—not just desiccated, not injured, just crispy, burned. And we decided it wasn’t a good idea to stay there. They were like… like…”

  She can’t quite put her thoughts into words.

  “Like insects in a trap,” my twin finishes for her.

  She agrees.

  “What’s an insect?” Kim asks.

  “Little living thing, hard shell,” my twin explains. I see the same image: little dead things with glassy wings in a kind of trap or bottle. The things that spiders eat—flies. “Radiation,” I say. “Bad place to be.”

  “I think now it was part of the hull’s drive engine,” Nell says. “I started remembering some things. I know about engines, a little at first—engines and hulls and joining everything together. I know a little more now, but it still hasn’t all come to the surface. We left that part of Ship, found our way forward, through the cinch—felt sick for a few spin-ups but seemed to recover quickly… Maybe we’re tough that way. We blundered along, still moving forward, I think, until we met up with a Killer. A pack of them. I haven’t seen their like since. They were slender, barbed, maybe three times longer than I am tall, and about as thick through the middle, with four eyes at the end of a long stalk or arm, lots of bendy joints. The joints all have suckers on the outside.” She lifts a thumb knuckle and taps it. “They grip the walls and use leverage. Moved almost too fast for me to see—very strong. Made to clear the tubes, I think. They tried to get around Tsinoy—seemed to think it might be one of the team. I think they were surprised when it attacked them—before they could touch me. Tsinoy was very effective.”

  “They hurt me,” Tsinoy said, showing a black, burned-looking area under its ivory spines, behind a temporary shoulder joint. “They use poison.”

  “Why does everything want to kill us?” Nell asks suddenly. “Why are we even here, if Ship doesn’t want us to be here?”

  I’ve been thinking about this but have no solid answers. I exchange a look with my twin, San-whatever. He takes this as a kind of encouragement. “Something went wrong with Destination Guidance,” he says. “That place we don’t want to think about… The occupants took control of almost everything. They did something wrong—bad for Ship.”

  “Fair enough,” Nell says. “I can see that as a possibility. But where do the monsters come from? Why can’t we remember anything about them?”

  “Present company excluded,” Tsinoy says, and looks at me—then at my twin. “Something made me different. Why? What am I made to do?”

  “Originally, you’re designed to help clear a planet,” my twin says. “But you’re not supposed to have a human personality. You’re just a tool. You’re…” He hesitates.

  “Expendable,” Tsinoy finishes. “But what about you two—how is it you both know about me?”

  We’ve been through this before. I thought we’d explained ourselves, as much as we could, but now I’m not so sure. All this thickens our mood, helps spread a new gloom that overcomes even full bellies and clean bodies. And it’s interrupted our story telling. Nobody wants to pursue these questions—not now, not yet.

  Nell lounges back. “We need to talk this through. But we also need to rest. Ladies?” She looks at the girls. “You’re in charge here, right? Along with the Teachers?”

  “Sleep,” the girls say. “More later.”

  “Dim the lights,” my twin says. “Sleep mode, whatever.”

  The hull complies. The lights under the tent-shaped chamber dim until we’re bathed in a shadowy golden glow.

  “Which one am I, again?” I ask my twin as we lie down next to each other. We don’t touch. I’m not even sure I like him, actually.

  “Sanjay,” he says.

  “And you are… Sanjim.”

  “Right.”

  I close my eyes. I don’t realize how truly tired I am, but it seems just a blink before Nell pokes me.

  Sanjim and I rise up.

  “Noises,” she says. “Grinding noises aft.”

  We can hear them, too—we all can. The sounds are deep, harsh, big. They set my teeth on edge. The deck vibrates and now we feel a jerky sort of spin-down. We start to slide as the hull slows its rotation. We’re away from the cables and rails, so we flatten and press our hands on the smooth deck, or grab hold of a cot frame, or slip up against a bulkhead, as Tsinoy does, all bristled.

  The girls are nowhere to be seen.

  Kim and Tomchin crawl back toward us. The hull is jerking, spinning up again—then down. More grinding. The whole frame around us shudders.

  “We should look at the control center and see what we can learn—then, what we can do,” Kim says. “It’s coming quicker than we thought.”

  “What?” I ask, sti
ll dopey.

  “More bad.”

  THE BIG VIEW

  For a moment, it seems that the entire hull is about to shiver itself to pieces and blow us all out into space. Maybe this is intentional. Maybe this is the last part of Ship they can’t control, so they’re going to destroy it completely—but then, where will that leave them, whatever they are?

  Surely they wouldn’t destroy the entire Ship just to purge us. Would they?

  But we do have Tsinoy, who understands something about what lies all around us. And Kim, who has more than a normal sense of finding his way around. And Nell, who seems to know something about engineering and hull operations—and who desperately needs to recover all she knows.

  The grinding and vibration settle long enough for us to make our way through the hatch, across the staging area, and along the bars and cables, back to the forward chamber. Here, we’re almost floating, the spin has been so reduced. We’re used to that. We’re used to having things go wrong. We seem hardly rattled at all, and the way we move, the way we help each other—I even grab Tsinoy’s paw to pull it through a tight hatch—means we’re finally acting as a team.

  Tomchin is right beside us as we tug and haul ourselves up to the bow chamber, where nascent outlines—squares and rectangles and ovals—still glow gently. Where pylons and controls will pop up, we hope, if only we ask.

  “Tell it!” Nell shouts at the two of us, looping her foot around a cable and stretching to her full, impressive two and a half meters.

  “Show us the stars, build us controls—” my twin says.

  Before he can finish, the hull is already fulfilling our request. More teardrops rise, then shape into horizontal control boards, thickening, spreading wide, and all the while, the panels covering the bow viewports slide up and away. Once more, we stare out at the universe—at wisps and the endless diamond-dust glow of uncounted millions of stars.