Hull Zero Three Page 21

  Maybe somewhere in those books lies the secret of what Mother’s society would have been like had she and her daughters survived to planetfall and spread their kind across the surface of a world.

  The girls finger the coded ovals, concentrating, remembering other corridors, other signs and codes. Marvelous. Adaptable, beautiful, deadly. How could the rest of us, motley and ignorant, ever win against such as these?

  We move on.

  A hundred meters back, we find a tunnel branch that must be new, as we did not pass it before. “This goes outboard,” one girl says, counting stripes and touching another radiance. “We are five hundred meters from the outer shell of the hull.” She looks uncertain. “If I read correctly.”

  “Lead on, Macduff,” I say. Macduff. It sounds like a name. A Scottish name. Perhaps it comes from an English writer named Shakespeare. Macbeth, Lady Macbeth. Nasty customers. Hamlet.

  To thine own self be true. Supposedly a weak, gullible man said that—

  “Shut up!” I shout. My voice echoes into obscurity.

  “We said nothing,” a daughter says.

  I wave my hand. We move outboard. This is my life.

  As we proceed, I feel a judder. Actually, drifting along, at first I see it more than I feel it. I wonder if it is my eyes or the walls that are vibrating. My long, echoing “stride” brings my foot in contact, and then I feel an unfamiliar subsonic quiver.

  There is definitely change coming. Whether it is caused by impacting stardust, or by Mother, or by our people in the bow is impossible to know. If we’re returning to the earlier phase of swift rotation, then things might go badly out here, our kilos converted to crushing weight.

  We continue without pause. That is, the girls continue and I follow. Whatever happens is out of my control, but I am content to see that where we are is not where they wish to be. I assume we are moving outboard to find a forward-pointing corridor. But it soon becomes obvious that the hull’s rearrangement is more radical than they had hoped. We reach a fork, the corridor continuing outboard, but for a short distance, a pipe leads aft again—I think—about ten meters, ending in one of those rounded caps.

  Taking advantage of the stop, I reach out to an oval, let out an exclamation, and draw back my hand. The pattern changes as I watch. The forking pipe grows shorter until it merges with the walls around us, then vanishes.

  The daughters clutch my arms. We dangle, moving gently from wall to wall, and then one girl sighs. Both regard me with blank faces, let go, and push along the outboard-leading corridor. They’re probably thinking what I’m thinking. Where we are could close off at any moment, imprisoning us in hull metal, kicking and screaming until the glim lights go out and we run out of air.

  I don’t need to think such thoughts. I want to be back in the bow, where I can eat and bathe and look out at the stars, as we were all meant to do.

  I’d rather be in Dreamtime.

  Or maybe not. After such knowledge.

  My legs and arms hurt from the echoing gait of hands and feet, elbows and knees, butt or thigh or shoulder. I think on the design of the factors—Tsinoy, more efficient in weightlessness than the rest of us. Each in its place. The great chain of being, leading from the incomprehensibility of biological phase space, winnowed down to the virtual pages of the Catalog, through the chemical limits of the gene pool, and out through the material limits of birthing surfaces…

  From stuff we are made… people stuff.

  There must be methods of transporting that stuff around Ship. Do factors deliver barrels of it? Is it piped through small conduits in the hull metal like capillaries? Ship itself has many qualities of a living organism and yet maintains much of a mechanical nature.

  In either case, plumbing is crucial.

  “What if something is trying to cut off your mother’s supply chains?” I ask. The girls, ten meters ahead, as usual, do not seem to hear me. But what if Mother loses her ability to direct Ship? What if she dies? Does one of the daughters assume her role? Rounded collops of breasted tissue forming along a lamia length, hormones adapting their girlish minds to great Mothering thoughts, seeking a consort, birthing, nurturing, loving multitudes of daughters…

  Sending them off to die?

  The glim lights brighten. Again, I feel the corridor shiver, but we are nearing the end of our outboard leg. The corridor is getting wider. There is a hatch half open ahead, and through that opening comes a dense, hot, moist waft of indescribable spice. Not savory or herbal, not so much flowery, but sharp and compelling and yet frightening—something ever so much richer, stronger, more confident than mere humans.

  We move toward the cap, the girls first, as usual, and before I can react, long ivory paws reach down and snatch them. The pair squirm and slap, but they make no other sound, simply rising in helpless fury through the cap, out of sight.

  Silence.

  I waver in the corridor. The girls were snatched by a Tracker. The only Tracker I know is Tsinoy—who I am convinced would not harm them. For some reason, I am not afraid—and I recognize the spicy scent now. I’ve smelled something like it before—when Tsinoy was lost in contemplation of the stars, or upset by other circumstances. But those effusions were mild compared to this overwhelmingly rich, acrid floweriness.

  Something has really aroused her.

  “Come on out,” Tsinoy says. “I’ve got them.”

  “Why?” I yell.

  “They were taking you to your death. Nell talks to Ship now.”

  I’m still a little numbed by the perfume of the bower. “Why?” I ask again, like a dull child.

  “Come up. We’re going where their mother doesn’t want us to go—through the oceans and back to the stars.”

  The hull seems to sigh.

  We travel aft for a time, the girls gripped firmly on the Tracker’s back in a tangle of rearranged muscle.

  Then we head inboard along an unfamiliar conduit, perhaps newly created, back toward the center of the hull.

  Tsinoy releases the girls at a fork that I suspect will lead them back toward the gene pool. They kick away, strong and silent.

  We never see them again.

  The Tracker examines our position, then tells me to follow. She seems to know where we are and where we need to go from here. “I have a new map,” she says.

  “Where did you get it—from Ship Control?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “Nell spoke with Destination Guidance. They heard our prayer. They know us now.” This is like being told she spoke with some great outer deity—or the devil.

  The prayer.

  I had recited the prayer aloud while Nell was compacting the hulls. The others joined in—my twin did not. If we all know the prayer, then we must be marked by Destination Guidance.

  “They’re real? They’re alive, not frozen?”

  Glim lights brighten ahead. “That’s Nell,” Tsinoy says. “It means she knows where we are. Maybe she can help protect us.”

  Before I can ask more questions, Tsinoy kicks off down the long cylinder. In my head, I vaguely sense we are outboard of the aft end of the water tanks, dropping toward the hull’s center. My mind becomes a blank again. I’m coasting behind a life-destroying monster who loves the stars. My head was once full of memories with little relevance to my actual world. I’ve met the woman of my dreams—and learned that not only is she nothing like I imagined her, but that she’s caused a significant portion of our hardship.

  And the hidden deity we tried to kill might be our new ally.

  I can’t encompass any of it, so I’ve stopped thinking.

  No time at all passes before we reach the end of the inboard-pointing tube, and kick off into the aft tank cap, far from the path I took when I was in the charge of the daughters.

  Tsinoy takes my hand. The reticulated surface of her paw-claw-hand is hot. But I have known frost to whiten that same cuticle. Perhaps she is made to survive under all conditions. What else can she do? Can she live without breathing?

 
The great blue eyes of the six tanks wheel and spin in slow majesty—but it’s me, in Tsinoy’s grip, who is wheeling and spinning like a paper toy in a huge wine cellar.

  I see a cable and grab it, as does Tsinoy, and we conclude this part of our journey, a few meters from the edge of a tank, voids, sheets, and bubbles writing cursive on the other side.

  HERITAGE

  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 plop, 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 s
ibilant 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 marine. 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.