Hull Zero Three Read online

  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.

  “Scarlet,” 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

  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 w
e’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, circumnavigating, 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 wit
h 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 much too large.

  It comes around again. I make out a sinuous rill along one side, where ice has apparently been dug out, perhaps mined. Rill. That’s good. Rill 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 blister 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.