by Greg Bear
I move through the half-melted door into the next chamber. It’s cooler here, but not dangerously so—not below freezing. As I enter, the walls brighten, and for the first time I see everything all at once, clearly, almost too bright to bear. My eyes take a while to adjust, and I feel exposed, but the moment passes, and I see what these rooms must be like when they’re healthy—when they’re not burned.
The chamber is about thirty meters long, twenty wide, and five high—larger. Rectangular cubbies line the aft wall. The floor has many soft, square pads, arranged in parallel rows. I dimple one with my foot. Rods at the end of each pad support cocoons made of some sort of netlike fabric, bunched up and tied. They can be pulled out and crawled into so that one can sleep during spin-down. When there’s weight, there are the pads. No blankets, except maybe the gray bags. Many gray bags hang from the forward wall, their drawstrings slung on loops.
I think, People live here. Maybe they use this as a base camp while they go exploring. People retrieve bags and supplies and drop them off here. Someone should be watching over them.
But this room is as deserted as the first. One thing seems obvious—the thing that grabbed the girl and the two others, the thing that jammed Blue-Black into the hole in the domicile bubble, couldn’t fit through the gap in the jammed and half-melted door. I barely made it through myself.
Here comes the familiar push and outward tug. I grab hold of a cocoon and its rod and hang on while the spin-up brings back weight—less than I experienced in the outer reaches of the hull, but enough to allow me to walk without difficulty.
The temperature remains cool but gets no colder.
I let go of the rod and lick my lips at the thought of what might be in those bags. I’m distracted by a humming sound. The half-melted door has managed to open some more—a lot more. It’s jammed at about two-thirds of its full width, a lunate remnant stuck in place. It’s now about three meters wide, almost floor to ceiling.
My hope that it might block monsters is crushed.
Another door—undamaged—has opened as well, this one on the far side wall. My path is clear. Too clear, I think.
I walk to the wall of hanging bags and feel them. Most are empty, no loaves, no water bottles, no books. One contains soft goods. I pull it from its loop and pour its contents on the floor. Clothing. Blue and red, bright colors—as in the Dreamtime. Clean, no blood. I lift the overalls and hold them up to my body, then the jacket. They fit better than Blue-Black’s outfit, so I strip down and put them on. They’re more than a close fit—they might have been tailored for me. I reach into the overall pockets and find something in the right one—a thin, crinkly leaf. I pull it out. It’s a flat square made of plastic, like a thick sheet of paper. It’s been roughly erased on one side; there are still grayish marks that might once have been words. On the other side there’s a red stripe.
I replace it in the pocket. My pocket. There’s something in the other pocket as well—also small, flat, square, and flexible. I take that out. It’s a reflective foil. It lies flat in my hand. I see my face in it. The image confirms what I was sure I knew already.
Mostly.
I have a nose, two eyes, a fuzz of black hair on my crown. There are raw patches on my cheeks where I fell to the freezing floor after being rescued from the storage sac—it seems months ago.
But there’s something else as well. I have a ridge of low bony knobs under my skin, across the upper forehead. I feel it—it’s real, solid beneath the hair and scalp. My nose is unchanged, my skin is the right color, but the bumps shake me.
It is one thing to wake up with a weird, half-functioning memory—quite another to wake up looking different.
I make a face, stick out my tongue, then put the mirror back in my pocket and examine the other gray bags. There are forty-three of them. Most are empty. A few contain clothing—too large, too small—but three carry bottles and loaves. Six bottles, six loaves—two of each per bag, like a ration.
The water in the bottles is not fresh but it’s drinkable. I half drain one, then squat on a pad to eat one of the loaves. I finish it in a few minutes. Not luxury, certainly not the promised joy of Dreamtime (I still can’t catch more than colored glimpses), but better than anything I’ve experienced until now.
I have strength. A stirring of curiosity.
I feel almost human.
I walk between the pads to the next door.
AN UNEXPECTED PLEASURE
The little girl is waiting beyond. The room is dark. She’s half in shadow. She quirks her face, turns, walks away.
I pinch my arm to make sure I’m awake.
The room beyond lights up and shows her silhouette a third of the way across. She’s wearing green overalls. She looks back at me through those piercing gray eyes.
“Go away,” she says. “You’re useless. You always die.”
I can’t think of any response except, “Where are the others?”
Two different people step into view—not our previous companions. They stand beside the girl. One’s an adult female, the other a half-grown boy. The adult female is haggard. The half-grown boy has a face that seems ready to smile. They might be related—same color hair, brown, same shape and color of eyes, brown. Their skin is pale, and they have long noses and long fingers. Otherwise, they’re like me.
I try to smile, act friendly. I lift my bag. “I’ve got food and water,” I say. The woman and the boy stare.
I point at the girl. “I thought you were dead.”
Finally, the woman deepens her look of resignation and says, “It’s starting over.”
“You didn’t survive,” the boy says to me.
“This one isn’t him, idiot,” the woman says.
The little girl just stands with her back to me, but her shoulders slump.
“Where’d you come from?” the boy asks.
I gesture behind.
“There are lots of doors and they open different ways,” the woman says. “Did something let you in here?”
“There was a hatch, and a voice in the wall,” I say. “It asked me if I was from Ship Control.”
“Are you?” the woman asked.
A twinge of caution. “I don’t remember.”
“He’s Teacher,” the girl says. “He’ll die, too.”
“Show him,” the boy says. That hint of a smile is starting to bother me.
“Not yet,” the woman says. “It’s nice to be innocent—for a while.”
I address the girl’s back. “Something snatched you. Maybe the others. There was a fight, back near the transit tube… with the grooves. Something brought you here….”
I have the strangest feeling none of them knows what I’m talking about. “There was a fellow with a knobby crest and a fellow with brown skin and scarlet markings. You called them Picker and Satmonk. A Blue-Black man—you called him Pushingar—was killed and stuffed in a hole… which is how I survived, I think.”
The boy snorts. “Not too bright.”
“There are doors, lots of doors,” the woman tells me again. “Destination Guidance wants us all dead—wants us cleaned out.”
This is the first I’ve heard of Destination Guidance.
“But something else wants us alive,” the woman continues. “That’s all I know. My head is full of useless crap.”
“You don’t know me?” I ask the girl softly.
“No,” the girl says without looking back.
“Did you make that drawing in the shaft?” I ask, lifting a finger and sketching in the air.
“No.”
“Let’s show him!” the boy cries with an anxiousness not entirely for my benefit. He sounds as if he’s been bored for a long time. Showing me would be exciting.
I don’t like that at all. But I ask, “Show me what?”
“There’s lots of food,” the woman says, “and water this far in toward the core, so you’re not going to be a problem—or much of a help, unless you know something you haven’t told us. Where’s
your book?”
I shake my head. “I used to have your book,” I tell the girl. “Someone came while I was asleep and took it.”
The girl turns. “You lost it?” she asks with a flash of anger.
“Yes. Something silvery—”
“There isn’t anything silvery,” the boy says, his smile gone. “No robots. No metal men. Teacher said that—but he’s gone and you’re not him.”
“How many marks on that book?” the girl asks.
“Seven big ones, seven scratches each—forty-nine,” I say, suddenly lonely and knowing that if they don’t accept me, I might as well just die.
“She was worth more than all of you,” the little girl says. “But you lost her, too.”
“We sleep too much, that’s our problem,” the woman says, then smiles in a half-friendly way, as if she’s warming to me—or at least to the concept of having another join this odd little group.
“There are other books,” the boy says to the girl. “Show him.”
The woman waves me forward, and I step through the door. As soon as I’m in the next room, the door closes behind me. The room is empty—no cots, no bags, just brightness. The room is so evenly illuminated that I have a hard time deciding how big it really is.
“I guess this place thinks you might be useful,” the woman says. “Let’s go. There’s another place not far from here. You’ll need to see it eventually.”
“You won’t like it,” the boy says, smiling yet again. It’s not a nice smile. I decide I don’t like him.
“I didn’t make any drawing,” the girl says.
“All right.”
Nobody offers to shake hands or touch, and nobody exchanges names. Funny I should wonder about that—I still don’t know my own name. I suppose that’s a common condition here. Maybe this girl will name me like she did the others.
But then, the ones she named all died.
“You remember the Dreamtime?” the woman asks as she turns and heads to her left. The others follow, so I keep step.
“Not very clearly,” I say.
“You know where we are?”
“A Ship,” I say. “We’re in space somewhere.”
“Do you know that for sure?” the boy asks.
“I was near the outside. The outer hull. I saw stars.”
“We’ve never been there,” the woman says.
They do not seem curious to hear any more about the stars. A door slides open on the wall in front of us, and we step through—and the next space is amazing. It’s like a jungle, only the plants are hanging in the air. Wires crisscross everywhere, shaping a three-dimensional grid. A bridge like the last bridge—with a grating and a ladder over one rail—passes through. I suppose it connects to the other side, but I can’t see that far; it’s obscured by plants hanging, clinging, blooming. The space is at least as big as the junk-collection void. The foliage is so thick we have a hard time crossing, and I’m almost giddy with the smell and the colors—green leaves, blue stems and trunks, red flowers, pink pods.
“You can’t eat those,” the boy says. “Don’t even try.”
“He tried a long time ago and got sick,” the woman says. “Came out of a sac dumb, like all of us. The girl finds some like you and takes them elsewhere, but she won’t tell us where.”
“She’s lost,” the boy says.
“Am not lost,” the girl insists. “Just waiting.”
Now I know for sure this isn’t the same girl. Same size, same face, same eyes, same hair, the same personality—just a different girl, less energetic, fading like a bee away too long from the hive. I don’t know what makes me think of that, except we’re surrounded by flowers.
The woman pushes aside branches and red petals break away and twist down. Above us, I see something moving slowly, hanging from the wires. From what I can make out through the growth, it’s orange and blue and round, four or five meters wide, plenty big enough to be scary. I think again of spiders and flies.
“Don’t worry about that one,” the woman says. “It stays in this space. Doesn’t bother us. It cleans up the garden.”
We make it halfway across the bridge. Another bridge intersects, forming an X. We go left again. “There are rooms that make food,” the woman continues. “They give us water and a place to live and sleep. We usually stick close to them, but there’s something you have to see.”
The orange and blue doughnut clambers by, passing over the bridge. Lots of thin legs with tiny sharp hooks and snipping claws. It pauses, looks us over through a fringe of shining kitten-blue eyes, then drops along the wires, swinging and hooking around the plants. It’s not really like a spider, because the body is shaped like a circle, a torus, a doughnut.
A taste comes into my mouth, sweet and crumbly, and there’s something hot and bitter along with it—coffee.
“Makes you think of coffee, doesn’t it?” the woman asks. “I don’t know what coffee is. Do you?”
“Not yet.” I’m mostly glad to be with them, glad to be traveling in company again, but I’m also scared. I don’t think I’m going to like what they’re about to show me, because the woman is looking more downhearted and the boy more excited, with a nervous, trick-or-treat aspect.
“How long you been awake?” the boy asks.
“Days. Not long.”
We reach the other side. A door is open.
“This one never closes. That lets the smells from the garden into our rooms,” the boy says.
“It’s sweet,” the woman says, “but I’m getting tired of it. I think I’ll move on.” She puts her arm around the girl. The girl doesn’t like her touch but is too tired to shrug it off.
“You do that,” the boy says. It sounds like an old dispute.
The woman goes first and crooks her finger, urging me to follow.
TEACHER LEARNS TOO MUCH
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. Wisely widdershins. 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 w
ith rectangular glass cases. The cold here is different. It has purpose. The light has gradually shaded into deep sapphire, like the inside of a glacier. 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, fish. 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.