by Greg Bear
But things that don’t always eat what they kill—the decayed corpse in the blister.
Only now do I wonder what became of that corpse while we slept. Did something come back and finally finish it off—consume what was left, after waiting a decent interval for it to “ripen”?
I see spots of blood and other tissues and fluids on the floor and on the walls. I stop and examine smears, handprints, and find the tips of a few broken spikes, sharp and orange. Another struggle. Maybe Picker and Satmonk injured whatever it was that killed Pushingar. Why would anything want to carry them this far? Where would it be taking them?
Someplace to eat them in private. Chasing heat, just like you.
The illumination in the corridor dims. Cold is coming. Ahead, I see something large, dark, and broken-looking sprawled across the walkway, draped over the railing. It’s another dead cleaner, like the one in the trash chamber. As I get close, I see that the body has been cut or pulled into several large pieces. The shell has been split. Dark fluid everywhere, leaving an oily sheen.
I see no other bodies, unless they’re stuck underneath the cleaner. I bend over and lift up a flat, limp “paw,” and there’s no sign of human remains. I squeeze past the broken shell and lifeless limbs, the somehow pitiful heads—three of them, as before—with their shiny, blind eyes.
Easy prey. Everyone kills cleaners—except the girl, who could not fight back.
I’ve been walking for some time now, and the wide corridor finally reaches its end. A wall with two hemispheric bumps forms the terminus of the twin grooves, and at the conclusion of the walkway is a circular indentation about two meters wide, carved or molded into the wall’s grayish surface.
I look back. The faintest breath of cold air washes over me. Soon the corridor will be unlivable. Likely the observation blister and the corpse of Blue-Black are already frozen. No going back without dying, and, apparently, no going forward.
I put down the bags. I haven’t touched the girl’s bottle or her piece of loaf. In gratitude for rescuing me, for not letting me die, for poking me along on a course to survival—up to this point—I hope to present her with these remnants if we meet again.
I lean against the wall at the end of the walkway. “Is there anybody else on this ship?” I wonder out loud.
“Whom are you addressing?” a voice asks. For a moment, it seems to be many voices, but then, I think, no, it’s just one.
I jump back from the wall and spin to face it. I can’t even begin to hope the voice is real. I don’t want to test it by speaking again, much less asking another question. Perhaps there are only a few possible answers remaining—or silence. Perhaps I’ve used up my last question, made my last request for information—my one and only wish.
The cold is getting intense.
“How do I get through? Is there a door?”
I’m surprised by my audacity. I can’t remember even formulating these questions.
“What is your origin, and what is your occupation?”
I think this over. “I’m a teacher. Others came this way, and I’d like to join them.”
“Are you part of Ship Control?”
I don’t think so. “No,” I say.
“Then I made you. You’re in the outer regions of Hull Zero One. It is not safe here. Move inboard, to the core.”
Before I can react, the indentation deepens and the circle spins outward, leaving an opening. Beyond the opening is more darkness and only a little warmth. I step halfway through, then pause, waiting to be grabbed after being lured into a trap.
“Has anyone else come this way?” I ask.
“This opening will close in five seconds.”
“Who are you?”
The circle starts to close. I jump through at the last second and roll on the other side, coming to rest against a sloping surface—a low, broad mound, smooth and, of course, gray. Little lights everywhere twinkle faintly in the gloom. Above me, the lights grow brighter.
I see I’m at the bottom of a wide, deep shaft. There’s a tiny circle at the top of the shaft. The walls of the shaft join the floor in a curve, the mound in the center about three meters wide and a meter high.
The surface behind me shows no sign of the circular door. Up the shaft—inboard—is the only way out.
My left hand reaches out and encounters another bag—almost empty. Inside I feel only one thing, small and square.
A book.
I undo the knot in the drawstring and remove the book. It has a silver cover and forty-nine fine notches in seven rows of seven. The girl was brought this way. Knob-Crest and Scarlet-Brown might still be with her. Perhaps they escaped during the struggle with the cleaner—they certainly weren’t strong enough to pull the cleaner to pieces. Cutting is more their style. The cleaner might have distracted the thing with the reddish spiky claw—that might explain the broken spikes on the floor.
They might have gotten away.
I can climb the rungs, or I can wait for spin-down and weightlessness. Examining the shaft, I see the best option—in the time remaining—is to climb.
I sling the bags over my shoulder, then adjust Blue-Black’s loose overalls, trying to cinch the waist tighter. No use. After a bite of my loaf and a gulp of water, I piss against a wall—Marking my trail, I think, and grimace.
I start climbing. My mind is racing, stumbling over ideas and rough schematics, based on what I saw from the blister, the observation chamber, and remembering my walk in the drowsing dream.
The spindle—Hull Zero One, as the voice called it—rotates like a long, tapering axle within some sort of wheel fixed on the end of a strut. There are probably three parallel hulls at the ends of three struts, spaced equilaterally around the big chunk of dirty ice. The struts connect each hull to rails attached to the ice ball’s wiry, confining cage. The hulls can move forward and aft along those rails.
I think I’m heading forward within Hull Zero One. I could also be in the rear half, moving aft. Orientation is difficult to judge with what little I know.
My best guess as to the size of this hull is that it’s about ten kilometers long and perhaps three kilometers wide at the widest. As to the size of the ice ball, it’s not really a ball. From what I saw, it’s more like a football, oblong and at least a hundred kilometers long. The ice chunk dwarfs the hulls.
Too big. Should be much smaller by now.
Something has to push the hulls and the lump of dirty ice through space. Where are the motors? The engines? It seems likely that the engines are pretty powerful and not pleasant to be around. I have to conclude that the two halves of each spindly hull serve very different purposes.
I’m almost certainly heading forward.
What about the sinuous rill, the serpent shape carved into the ice?
Now my head really hurts.
I keep climbing. The outward tug grows weaker. Moving inboard reduces my centrifugal acceleration. The farther I go, the less the spin-up affects me. The effect is gradual but for some reason makes me feel even woozier than the intervals of spin-up and spin-down.
At least the climb gets a little easier.
I can’t think of any reason for spin-up, spin-down. None of what we’ve experienced in the way of weight or lack of weight makes any sense, though I wonder if I might understand the theory behind cooling and heating. The hulls are huge and mostly hollow, with lots of spaces and volumes requiring lots of energy to maintain—assuming they’re uniformly and constantly maintained. If we’re not at the conclusion of whatever voyage we’re making, and the passengers haven’t been awakened…
“Then I made you.”
The voice at the door. This derails my thought process but makes no more sense than anything else, so I rejoin the track I’d been following:
If most of the passengers haven’t been awakened, then the spaces might be heated and allowed to cool at regular intervals, to keep the hull from warping. Or to save energy.
The passengers, the colonists, are all frozen, anyw
ay—perhaps stored near the core, away from the outer hull, where there might be more radiation on a long, long journey.
So who woke up the monsters?
Not enough facts, not enough experience, far too much trauma, yet still not enough to complete my integration.
Climbing toward the core. I look down—and that’s a mistake. My stomach almost spits back the loaf I’ve eaten. I concentrate on where I’m going. My feet are no longer necessary for the climb, so I just pull myself hand over hand.
“Where do these loaves come from? And the voice at the door?” The reverberation of my voice in the huge shaft is hollow but comforting. “Who or what is Ship Control?” The echo is too muddled to use as any sort of indicator as to how far I’ve come.
Spin-down catches me by surprise. My fingers are cramping. I’ve gotten used to reducing the strength of my grip on the rungs, so the gentle lurch and the resulting breeze in the shaft breaks one of my hands loose. I dangle for a moment, pulled more toward my left and the near wall of the shaft than down. I grab hold of the rungs with hands and toes and cling until the last little sensation of weight is gone.
Then, feet pointed toward the center of the shaft, perpendicular to the line of rungs, I continue on. It’s almost like walking on my hands.
It’s almost like being a spider.
Spider.
That word—and the image it conveys, of something traveling along a sticky strand, part of a web—sends a shiver through me. I don’t know what spiders are, how big they are, or where they’re from. A spider could have snatched my companions. But the more I search the shreds of my knowledge, the more I think spiders are too small—though still creepy.
Of course, it’s always possible that in this life I’m very small as well.
I hate the uncertainty. Whoever woke me up, woke us up, was doing none of us any favors. What use are we? Maybe our only purpose is to be swept up, smashed around, destroyed—swatted like flies.
Spiders eat flies.
Ugh.
But so far, I’ve outclimbed and survived the cold. This part of the shaft seems to maintain a more constant temperature. Perhaps the core is more stable. The little lights in the walls of the shaft are dimming. Then brightening again. The intervals seem to be random. So much for stability. Things don’t make sense here, either.
I’ve been focusing on my climb for so long that only when I reach down to scratch my hip and hitch up my pants do I look at a nearby patch of wall, a meter or so to my left. Some sort of scratch there. Then I see a lot of little abrasions—more scratches, lots of them, in an irregular circle all the way around the shaft, sweeping up and down—along with a few deep gouges.
Something strong, with strong claws, paused here and scrabbled against a spin-up. Something big enough to span the shaft—maybe five meters wide, limbs and all. Maybe it fell and was cleaned up.
Above the circle of scratch marks, there’s something smaller, different, a patch of irregular lines. I reverse and overhand to where I might be able to identify it.
It’s a drawing. A drawing in dark, dried paint—or something else. The smell has lingered faint in the air since I arrived in the shaft, but I’ve been trying very hard to ignore it—more human blood.
Use what you came with.
The sketch is crude, simple. Maybe it’s not just a sketch, but an identifying mark. My eyes hurt trying to focus—the lights are dimming again. Finally I dangle and stretch out with one foot looped under a rung. My calf and ankle muscles bring me right up to the wall.
The sketch shows a plump, almost round figure. It could be human, though the head is small and round and has no features except a kind of line where the eyes should be. The legs are squat and come together to form a point, with no discernible feet. I see a separate blotch, less than a centimeter broad—a fingerprint. I hold up my forefinger and compare. The lines were painted by a much smaller finger. A finger dipped in blood.
It seems likely the little girl drew this figure in the shaft—but why?
Below the rounded head, protruding like little sacs from the round body, are breasts—twelve of them. Twelve breasts, three rows of four. Only a few of the breasts have nipples. No time to dab them all in, I guess.
I swing slowly around. Fifty or sixty centimeters away, almost too faint to see—as if the supply of blood was running low—there’s a handprint, the signature of the artist, just about the size of the girl’s hand.
For a moment, whatever took her from the observation blister paused here, leaving scratches and gouges, while she made her own marks. In her own blood.
No time for wonder or fear or despair. I’m hungry and I’m thirsty. I move on. Try not to think. Try to keep breathing steadily. Then, before I know it, I’m at the top of the shaft, where I almost bump my head. There’s a kind of big lid. On one side it’s been raised enough to allow me through.
I’ve climbed perhaps two hundred meters inboard. If the hull is as thick as I think it might be, I’m not much nearer the core than when I began—but the shaft has reached an end, I’m tired, and I want to just drift for a moment.
Somewhere inboard I hear a deep, rhythmic sound, pervasive and faint—very distant. Like breathing. The entire ship, breathing. With the accompanying low thump of a calm, steady heartbeat.
I squeeze up through the gap between the lid and the shaft, then reach out and tap the lip with one hand, rotating to inspect the surroundings. I’m in a space that for the first time looks human scale, suited for habitation by my kind of human, with my kind of memory. A kind of room.
I catch my breath and hold out my hand to stop. The space at the top of the shaft is long, low, narrow. Lumpy shapes rise from the outboard “floor.” In the shadows, I wonder if they might be furniture. As elsewhere in this hull, the walls glow with tiny spots of light, but here the illumination flows from place to place like waves on a pond, a kind of shimmer of light that somehow conveys the Ship is alive, watching—
Not that I can remember ever visiting a pond. A lot of things in my memory have no hooks in my real life.
Like smells. I smell a faint hint of char. My eyes are already adjusted, but it takes a physical inspection, moving slowly from ceiling to floor, approaching the lumpy objects on the floor, to learn that this space is designed to have an up and a down—designed for a sense of weight. I reach out to feel the objects that might be furniture and realize they’re lumpy because they’ve melted, or perhaps never finished forming. Couches, chairs, tables… stunted like burned young bushes or trees. My fingers come away covered with oily soot. A blaze swept through the chamber some time ago. Floating close to the wall, squinting, I make out large, sweeping smudges from swirling flames. Many of the glim lights could have been burned, overheated. Getting closer, feeling around gently, as if dealing with singed flesh, I study the resulting tiny pits.
Dead glims.
I move freely away from the lid and the long shaft, through the acrid air and toward the far wall, and observe another circular indentation, this one partway open but heated and warped—burned or jammed in place.
Going through the opening could help lead me around this inner circumference, a ring of rooms within the Ship.
Right now, however, I don’t want to do anything but rest. Take a sip of water. Finish my loaf and consider whether I should drink the girl’s water, eat her loaf, or try to read her book.
I don’t actually know if I can read.
I hang in the air, bottle in hand, swishing the drink around my mouth. I’m near a charred wall. I hook my foot under what might have become a chair, next to an angled, agonized surface that might have tried to be a table.
I can kick away if something comes for me. I can sense a spin-up, when that happens.
My eyes begin to close.
I’m not really in charge anymore.
Oh, hello. Here you are.
It’s a silvery smooth, sculptured face, more female than male but almost without feature, hovering before my darkened field of visi
on. I think I’m dreaming. Then I realize my eyes are halfway open. I’m not yet fully asleep. It’s going to take some time to rouse up out of this exhausted torpor. The shock of seeing this face makes my muscles tingle, but it’s still going to be another few seconds….
A silvery-smooth hand reaches out. Cool fingers lightly caress my cheeks, my forehead, poke under my hair to make combing motions. The face angles and gets closer, nose to nose, as if in affectionate curiosity.
Its eyes are blue, empty, and infinitely deep.
With a strangled yell, I regain control of my body and thrash. The face and questing fingers back off into shadow. I think my fist briefly connects with a semisolid, rubbery object—a shoulder or arm. I scream and thrash some more. My foot is still hooked under the half-formed table, and the pain of wrenching my ankle brings me back to self-control.
The chamber is empty but for me.
I take a deep breath, look around with several jerking motions, and confirm I am alone… now.
The room’s illumination comes and goes in slow waves, as before.
I reach for the bottle of water and squeeze it into my mouth, draining it dry. Then I reach down for the bags. They’re both strung around my leg, as I left them before trying to sleep.
But what I assume was—is—the girl’s bag is now empty. No book. The remains of her loaf and bottle of water, still in my bag, have not been touched.
RULES AND DECORUM
I don’t know how long I actually slept, but my mind feels sharper, more able to observe and cope with what I might find. This chamber is a mess. Maybe the fire scarred it so badly it just died—a funny concept, that parts of this hull are active and alive but can be injured and even die.
If I look at something long enough, I begin to put it into place, arrange it in some loosely defined perspective. But I did not dream the silvery face, because the girl’s book is gone.
I’ve decided to drink her water and eat her loaf. With the book gone, I will have nothing to offer her should we find each other again. I don’t want to think about it.