by Greg Bear
The boy says, “Look close.” He grabs my neck and shoves my head forward. I want to resist, to strike out and smash him… but I don’t. My nose almost touches the case. It’s so very cold. My skin would stick, just as it did before.
A few centimeters away, on the other side of the transparency, a head sticks out. It’s a man. The cocoons are too short to serve as shrouds. The face’s expression is hard, eyes blank, jaw frozen open. The cocoon is slack below the waist. The lower half of the body is missing.
It takes a moment to register what I’m looking at.
Who I’m looking at.
The features are the same, the shade of hair is probably the same. I bend and swipe my own hand, risking the cold. The body below shows another face in profile. I reach up and wipe frantically. The body above has no head. The body above that one has its back to me.
I shove the boy away and cross to the opposite side. There, I bob up and down in front of more stacks. Bodies above, beneath, all around. I run to the next row, the edge of my palm burning with cold, but it’s the same—and the next, using my other hand—
Dozens of cases, hundreds of frozen bodies, stretching off into a deep sapphire distance. I’ve inspected twenty or more of the cases on both sides. The faces I can see are all like mine. All the same. Just like mine.
“Get it?” the boy asks, fairly vibrating with excitement. The woman has crossed her arms and is trimming her fingernails with her teeth. She spits out a bit of nail.
The new memories and new words mean nothing. I don’t want to think, I don’t want to understand. I want to be empty.
“We shouldn’t be caught here when the weight goes,” the woman says. “Hard not to hurt yourself.”
She takes me by the arm, gently, and leads me up the long corridor and to the right, out of the blueness and toward the warmer rooms, where people are given food, where living people go and are welcome.
They push me through a door into cloying warmth. I stumble into the flowery sweetness of jungle air and the boy and the woman just stand there while I kneel and then fall over on a pad.
I’m weeping—weeping like a child.
The boy watches with satisfaction. The woman watches with wonder. “It’s not so bad,” she says soothingly. “You always come back.”
I’ve been here before. I can’t deny what I’ve seen. I’ve been here hundreds, maybe thousands of times, trying to do whatever it is I’m meant to do…. And every time I’ve failed.
Every time I’ve died.
PART TWO
THE DEVIL
You saw another one like me?” the little girl asks.
I come up out of a deep, hot stupor and turn over on the pad. I’m feverish. Someone’s slipped me into a cocoon, I’ve slept hard, I can feel it in my muscles, slept through a spin-down, and now there’s weight again.
With a groan, I push myself out of the cocoon and lie panting and sweating on the pad. The edges of my palms hurt like hell—frostbite.
The girl holds out a bottle of water. I sit up and drink.
“You saw another one like me?” she asks again, hopeful.
“Like you.” I drink more. The lights brighten.
“She had a book?”
“Yes.”
“Did you read it?”
“No time. I wanted to return it… when I saw her again. I saved her food and water for a while, too, but…”
The girl nods. “Where was she going?”
“She wanted to go forward.”
The woman comes through a round doorway between the linked domiciles and stands for a moment, biting another fingernail. She must put each finger through rationed rotation, ten little luxuries. “Now you’re really back,” she says.
I don’t know how to respond.
“What do you know?” the girl asks. “What have you learned from where you’ve been?”
This is a reasonable question, though why she waits until now to ask it… Maybe she thinks I’ve learned something essential and now I’m ready to talk sensibly. I think about what I know. It isn’t much.
“How many of me have you met?” I ask.
“Ten,” the woman says. “They went forward. The cleaners brought some of them back and put them in the freezers. When the girl came here, she was alone. She says there are others like her… but she won’t tell me more than that. Maybe you can persuade her.” They exchange a look. The girl’s face is rigid. She has a steel will.
“Tell us your story,” the girl says.
I tell them what I know. After a few minutes, the boy joins us and listens skeptically.
“We’re on a Ship,” I conclude. “A Ship in space, between the stars. I thought we were supposed to sleep, to be awakened when we near our planet. That’s what I remember from Dreamtime. A little girl just like you pulled me out of a room full of new bodies. She said we have to chase heat or die. Doors closed behind us….”
I go on. The highlights for the girl and the woman seem to be that there are three parts to the Ship—three hulls—and that we’re connected to a giant piece of dirty ice. I add something new: that the ice might provide fuel and reaction mass for the Ship.
I tell them again about the voice from the wall. The spin-up and spin-down they’ve figured out. The boy doesn’t want to hear about the silvery figure. He doesn’t seem interested in most of my story, but this bit really upsets him.
They don’t know much about the cycling heat and cold. Here, places that are warm stay warm, and places that are cold stay cold.
“Tell us again about the voice,” the woman says.
“It asked me if I was part of Ship Control. It says it made me. I didn’t understand.”
“You weren’t asleep. You weren’t awakened. You were grown,” the girl says. “She pulled you out. She thought you were important. You keep trying to go forward.”
I think this through as carefully as I can, given my thudding heart and the urge to just sit and scream. My hand reaches into my overalls pocket and pulls out the square piece of plastic with the stripe on one side and the scrub marks on the other. I hold it up. “What’s this for?” I ask.
“For remembering stuff,” the girl says. “You get them and make them into books.” She reaches into her own pocket, feels something there, and makes a bitter face.
“Do I always tell you what I know before I go forward?” I ask.
The woman puts her hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl shrugs it off.
“Give it to him. By rights it’s his,” she says.
“He didn’t bring mine,” the girl says. “He lost it. Maybe the next one will have it.”
I stare at the square of thin plastic.
“I don’t have one,” the woman says, turning away. “I’ve never had one. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have yours.”
“Give it to him,” the boy says. “There’ll be others.”
“But it’s been so long, and I need to find my mother,” the girl says, her voice cracking. “I need Mother.”
I look between the three of them.
“It’s pretty comfortable here,” the boy says. “I close the door when the cleaners come. We hide. I tell the rooms to make food. The rooms listen to me. I say, give him his book.”
The boy seems to want to be in charge. This might be his version of a threat. The girl puts on a stubborn face, then simply looks tired. She pulls a black-covered rectangle out of her pocket. “It doesn’t say anything about Mother. Most of it’s just stupid.”
I reach to take it from her quivering fingers. “Thank you,” I say.
Then she pulls out a short, thin stick with a blackened, sharpened tip, a kind of pencil. “You can use this if you want.”
I hold it. My fingers are sweaty. My eyes lose focus. We are born in ignorance, we die in ignorance, but maybe sometimes we learn something important and pass it along to others before we die. Or we write it down in a little book.
“The hallways going forward are full of freezers,” the boy says. �
��As far as I care to go, which isn’t very far, they’re full of bodies. Must be thousands of them.”
“They’re waiting to be born again,” the girl says. “Mother will make them all better. I think then they turn into girls like me.”
The boy makes a face. “Let’s get some food,” he suggests.
THE MAN OF THE BOOK
The boy’s inner residence has the usual pad and accordion cocoon, as well as a weird nest of bars and springs that might be exercise equipment. Long cables hang from the walls and the ceiling—good for grabbing when the weight goes. Most important, a thick tube rises from the middle of the floor. It has a rounded top with a square hole. The hole produces loaves, and if you put a bottle in the hole, it fills with water from a spigot that folds up out of sight when it’s done.
If Ship recognizes you, you get all you really need, and not one thing more—like a hamster.
After we eat, everyone is quiet, and I somehow get that they expect me to go into another room—there are several open doors down the corridor—and read my book in private. That’s the last thing I want. But it’s a ritual, apparently. It’s happened before.
Maybe I’m the only entertainment around here.
That thought almost makes me puke. I leave them to their imaginings. I’m thinking and feeling so hard that the spin-down catches me by surprise and I stumble and have to scramble back against the push, to get into my smaller, emptier room before all the weight is gone.
I float there—echoing slowly from wall to ceiling to floor, refusing to grab the cables—and pretend to lie back. Relax.
I can’t gather up the courage to open the damn thing. I am who I am. All those others… well, there’s every reason to deny them their place, their reality, because it leaves me with an insoluble problem. Identity.
What lies in my memory, waiting to be accessed, might just duplicate what’s already written in the book. Someone might have explored all of my knowledge, made all of my possible choices, run me completely out of fresh options. Someone might have lived my life all the way through.
I look closely at the book. Somehow, it feels like my book. It has little hallmarks of the character I might yet find inside my head. But I won’t believe that—not yet. I am who I am, and there’s no one else like me in the universe—right? That is a fact. It will remain a fact.
Until I open the book.
I’ve rolled it around in my hands for an hour. It’s made up of leaves of plastic, thinner than the one in my pocket. A thick brittle glue holds the leaves, the pages, between the black boards. The boards have a frayed, stained look, as if they were ripped or bent from a bigger sheet—something found in a garbage void. The stains might be blood. There are also dark marks on the page edges.
Not opening the book could be suicidal. How many times have I had access to a book like this and refused to open it—echoing through mistake after mistake, without the heavy assurance of past experience to guide me? But I know I’ve lived for years, decades, that I wasn’t just squirted into a sac and shaken into existence a couple of dozen spin-ups before. This conviction is necessary for my sanity. This conviction is going to kill me. Now of course it’s time to curse my maker, whoever that is—the hull or Ship Control or God…
The first time I’ve thought of that name, that concept. It should open so many new doors… but I don’t feel it. The word is curiously empty. I have a stronger connection to whatever Ship Control is, or even Destination Guidance.
I’m more miserable now than I’ve been during my short existence, including the physical pain and the blind, newborn fear. It’s the freshness of my fear that convinces me, finally. Pain is forgotten, but fear builds and leaves tracks, and I don’t feel those tracks—not in my thoughts, not in my flesh. All my fears are new and short. I don’t have enough of them to help me survive. Not enough experience.
I’m an idiot not to open the book.
I pull back the front cover. The glue makes a cracking sound. I hold it up and look at the spine—wouldn’t want to damage it, after all. The glue has little bubbles, might come from something organic. Maybe it’s dried factor blood. Maybe the stains on the cover aren’t human blood but something else. I pull the book away, focus, squint.
I will literally lose my self in its pages.
First page begins with a thick black line.
I’ve been alive one hundred cycles of spin-up and spin-down. Funny, the people I meet all use those words—they’re part of the patois of survivors in the hull. You’re a teacher. You know what patois is. The book I was given—from my previous incarnation—had that word in it, but not much else. Books get lost. I’ve pulled apart this book and combined it with pages from others, adding blank pages when I can to record what happens next.
The other pages come from earlier. I mark them clearly.
Good luck.
P.S. If you’re me, you’ll figure out how to read the rest. If you’re not me… Well, we do like to trade information, and I wouldn’t want to give the others an advantage.
Someone seems to really hate me.
Hate you.
The rest of the book is written in what reads at first like gibberish—random letters, scrawled slowly and carefully, or in real haste, but always gibberish. I close the book and grip it tight. I’m not even quite sure what patois is—some sort of meat paste? Or a way of speaking. I think it’s the latter.
Maybe I’m not me—or him. Maybe something’s been lost. Certainly I don’t have all of my memories, even all of my knowledge. But of course I don’t have any memories, really… if I was made just a short while back. Pulled out of a sac. Then anything I remember from before I was made, finished, whatever, is just imprinting.
Instinct.
TIME RUNS OUT QUICKLY HERE
After a while, I’m settled in, about one good kick away from the ceiling, drifting and dozing. Best not to get caught away from shoving distance of a surface, in case something comes by—something that wants to clean me up and put me in the freezer.
One hundred cycles, the first page says.
I’m just a youngster, then.
Youngsters play games with words. I sort of see sunlight on a bedcover, a notebook, and a game. I see a row of white pickets on a fence. Switch the pickets: fence rail code. The game has to do with letters in the alphabet, exchanging one letter for another. To make this simple code harder, I convert everything I write into pig Latin before transposing the letters. Then I show it to my kids in school to see if they can read it. (I can almost smell the schoolroom: chalk, pencil shavings, steam heat from old radiators, gym socks, ham sandwiches in paper bags waiting for lunch.)
Some of the kids can unravel the code. They become my friends. Most can’t. We call them…
Losers.
That’s it, then. I’m not a loser. I know how to play the game.
I come out of my doze and open the book. After a while, I’m reading pretty quickly. I might even be able to write in code quickly, with a little practice. I’m good at that sort of thing.
PAGE 2
I’m making my way forward. My cold-burns are healing. The girl is dead. She was killed by a tooth-worm. It tore her to pieces.
I wonder if the little girl always dies, too.
Some of the things here are alive but act like machines. There aren’t any robots—though I did see a silver woman or thin figure of some sort, but only for an instant.
Let me describe the things that are here and can be dangerous.
FACTORS: Cleaners most important. Cleaners try to keep everything spick-and-span. They have three heads/faces and six legs. Most of the factors do very well without weight. They also do OK when there’s weight. They take us away when we die—and sometimes even before we die, if you can’t avoid them. Other factors: fixers and processors. Cleaners or scouts call fixers if the Ship has been damaged. They’re pretty single-minded, but they’re only dangerous if you get between them and something that needs fixing. Processors look scary and can be very
dangerous, but they tend to stick around junk balls. The toothy eel is a processor. It converts dead organic material to simpler slush. Ugh.
Fixers and processors are getting rare, I hear. I’ve seen only two.
Scouts: smaller, thinner. Rare now as well.
Gardeners: They’re the only factors that have real color. The others are dark brown or dark gray or black.
Factors see heat and are generally inactive during cooldown.
And there are Killers. That’s what I call them. Knob-heads call them Xhh-Shaitan. Hard to pronounce, even if I hold my nose. It seems to mean “Maker of Pain.”
Killers.
Only a few of us have seen a Killer and survived. No one I’ve met can give a clear description. Killers destroy and leave the dead behind, but they also collect—alive. Where they take those they collect is unknown. The hull cooperates with Killers. They can go anywhere—fast. Makes me angry, like the deck is stacked against us. (Think about that and try to remember card games—their play and their rules make excellent metaphors around here.)
Sometimes, the hull helps us—why this contradiction, I don’t know.
Now—why the hull gets cool. There are three hulls. Based on Dreamtime, I think they are supposed to join at some point and become one, but that’s not clear yet. The Blue-Blacks say the hull gets cool because something wants us all to die. The little girl said it’s to save power, and she seemed to know a lot—but she wanted her mother badly, and was losing her own energy—fading rapidly.