by Greg Bear
Killers or cold or making other mistakes eventually remove us all from the scene.
And of course there are lots of versions of me, all dead. That means there’s a template. Maybe a lot of templates. For some reason, a word sticks up now—Klados. I don’t know what that means.
But hull is sick. Ship is sick. Something broke or went wrong—or something deliberately changed the rules. That’s why I’m heading forward—to answer those questions.
I rested for a while with the sluggards. The sluggards have a comfortable place and they just stay there. The boy in particular has made a cozy den. The room obeys his instructions but doesn’t cooperate with the rest of us. I wonder why. The woman is discouraged, maybe because she has to rely on the boy—and he can be irritating.
They aren’t going to go with me or help me find answers.
If they give you this, then you know about the freezers and the bodies. You know I’m dead. Take a deep breath. When you go forward—and you will—it gets worse.
Something doesn’t want us going forward. That might be Destination Guidance. I have no idea what that is—or who.
I’ve gone forward and down to the core. Here’s a little map.
Follows a sketch showing the tip of the spindle, an X marking the beginning of my (his) trip, and a dotted line zigging rather mysteriously toward the middle of the spindle and then jogging forward the merest fraction—a dot and a half, almost.
I passed three forest balls and several junk balls. Processors were recycling broken parts—including factors. Lots of factors damaged recently. Are there wars in the hull? I believe I’ve found a
A brutal dark line.
The Ship is very badly off. I’ve come upon a crude membrane that separates much of the forward sections from (I assume) vacuum. Pressure bellies the membrane outward from surviving bulkheads and stanchions, and it’s translucent, I think, but I can’t make out anything except a grayish blur that might be the ice ball—our big/little moon. The moon with the snake carved into it. Serpent Moon.
Considering how near the core I think I am, that means a pretty big chunk of the Ship is missing on the ice ball side. Factors are still cleaning up; it’s dangerous to travel around here because they might mistake me for debris and haul me to a junk ball. Some chambers are so badly scarred I can’t imagine they’ll ever be recovered, but repair factors are still at work, moving sluggishly, relaying the active surfaces a few centimeters at a time, working only during spin-down. I’d describe these spaces but you’ll
Another dark line.
This has to be quick. I think I know a little about Destination Guidance. There was a work party revived a long time ago. All this is vague, because the concepts that support my suppositions are still buried somewhere in Dreamtime. I think the Ship (we are definitely on a Ship in space, between the stars—physically, really, not just a mock-up) came to a point in its journey where a decision had to be made between two or more candidates, planets or stars with planets. A team was created to make that decision. I don’t believe they ever lived in the hulls. They were probably created on a station or “bridge” down on the ice moon. Far away—down below, inboard, and maybe a little behind the leading points of the hulls.
Covering most of a page in the book is something fascinating—a quick sketch of part of Ship. It looks like this:
I suppose if someone draws a map for a baby, the baby has to spend years growing up enough to even begin to understand. But we are not exactly babies. This sketch means a lot of things to me. It graphically confirms what I thought I saw in the observation blister and in my dream. The scale is off—the moon/ice ball should be much bigger, the spindles longer and smaller in comparison to the moon—but the rough truth of it is evident.
This is Ship, then. Three hulls shaped like spindles, one big oblong ice moon, and something I think must be at the leading point of the moon, between the spindles… way down below.
It makes sense. It arouses things from Dreamtime that start me quivering until I worry I won’t be able to stop. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. The Ship is not just sick, it’s gone way wrong.
Wrong way.
I read on.
The little sphere down there, from what I’ve been told, is actually pretty big, but not nearly as big as the spindles. She’s visited, the tall, lean one, kitten-gray, kind of pretty. She may or may not be a sport. But she’s gone now. Little Killer got her.
And inside this sphere, Destination Guidance was born and was supposed to make decisions about which planet or star we would fly toward. There were five.
The tall one seemed to have her own set of patterning, her own knowledge. She knew a lot about Ship that I don’t. She said Destination Guidance is raised from true infants, originals, unblemished—unpatterned.
I’m not sure what she meant. I certainly remember being a child, even being a baby—some things, anyway.
But after they do their job, they are supposed to retire or maybe even just die. I don’t know how long they were supposed to work. From what I’ve seen, however, I think a mistake was made. A bad mistake. It nearly destroyed this hull. The other hulls might be all right—I don’t know, since I can’t see them directly, only in this walking dream I have. (That’s walking, not waking. I walk over the ice ball and look up sometimes. But you probably have the same dream.)
Destination Guidance. Something scared them badly, maybe started all this, made the Ship sick, I’m learning from
Damn, another brutal dark line.
I found my own body this time. It’s true, then. I was never a baby.
It’s dark at the core. The big store of liquid water keeps it from getting too cold. I can’t see them. Don’t come here. One is small, one is big. The small one is worse
That’s it. The book has maybe five more blank pages. It had to end badly, of course, but I wonder at the strength necessary to keep writing even after being “caught”—and losing the blood that stains the cover and page edges.
It’s human blood, all right.
I’m exhausted. There’s weight now. I was decoding and reading right through spin-up, but found a corner to ride it out and hardly noticed. I stick the book in my pocket, next to the flexible mirror, and then take out the mirror and look at myself again.
It scares me, but I know I’m not going to stick around and sponge off the boy. I’m almost reconciled to that. To being a tool in some greater process. It’s not faith, it’s certainly not comforting, but holding that identity and purpose in my pocket—and maybe in my dreams—is more important than anything that’s happened to me yet.
I need to sleep. I want to see if I dream something more about the Ship, the hulls—if the book has opened the spigots of memory I know are there.
The woman and the boy shout through the open door. I’ve been dozing for what feels like minutes. In that brief time, I’ve come up with a face: a female face, not the woman who lives with the boy. I try to recover her features, but it’s no use.
The voices are insistent.
The boy and the woman drag me out of the room and down the hall to the boy’s room. The boy makes a motion with his hands on the wall and the door closes.
“They’re coming,” he says. “We stay in here and they leave us alone.”
“Where’s the girl?” I ask. I don’t see her—there’s not enough furniture to hide even her small frame.
“The girls are frail,” the woman says. “They can’t spend too much time away from their mother.”
“Where’s their mother?” I ask.
They both shrug. We sit together, saying nothing, not even looking at each other. The atmosphere is sad, stifling, like caged animals in a zoo.
Then the woman looks up at me, biting her lip. There’s sweat on her bare arm. We’re sitting on a low couch with a straight, square back that is soft enough not to hurt, but not much softer. The boy either has only a loose sort of control over this room after all, or likes it Spartan.
I have no ide
a what that word means, but it implies serviceable but not comfortable.
The woman slides down a little, eyes still fixed on mine, until we’re almost touching. She puts her hand on my leg. This provokes an odd feeling. I don’t know what to do. Her touch certainly isn’t appropriate, given the danger outside—but then, maybe that’s why she does it, because she’s frightened and wants reassurance.
But I know sure as God made little green apples (there it goes again! Spartan apples, maybe) that I’m not the one from whom she’s going to get reassurance. Still, I pat her hand, then remove it gently, letting it rest limp and damp on the couch. This effort has cost her. The sadness inside me is almost unbearable.
“He’s not the one for you,” the boy says to her, having watched with a detached expression. “The hull made him that way. It will never be you.”
“Shut up,” the woman says.
“You shut up,” the boy says.
The woman clears her throat. The boy gets up and places his ear against the space where the door was. He moves his hands again. Turns and smiles. The door opens. The hall beyond is quiet and empty. “They’ve gone,” the boy says.
“What were they?” I ask.
“Factors,” the boy says. “I get a feeling when they’re coming. I close the door and they pass us by.”
The woman stares into a corner. “You’ll leave now,” she says. “It’s what you always do. You read your book and then you leave. And they bring you back.” She shudders in something like resignation, maybe more like despair. “Don’t go out there. Out there is nothing but death and misery. You could stay here. There’s food and water, and we could pass the time. Talk is what I miss the most.”
But it’s clear I’ve made up my mind.
“Next time, if there’s a book, don’t give it to him,” the boy suggests.
The woman gets up. “Well, at least let me put together a bag of food and water.” She looks at the boy, who nods permission. Here, he is the master. The woman is just another piece of furniture.
It really is time for me to leave.
CENTERING
The boy seems glad that I’m moving on. He’s happy to give instruction. Make a run down the hall that passes the freezers while there’s still weight, he says—it should get warmer on the other side.
I do. I barely make it.
Spin-down finds me having to choose between a shaft that points inboard—with a ladder on one side—or a split in the corridor a few meters forward that stretches left and right, concentric with the outer hull, I presume—and there’s no way of knowing whether the corridor circles around, bringing me back here, or branches off somewhere—in other words, whether left and right are ultimately the same or lead to places very different.
With what leisure I have, I pause to analyze some of the faint markings at this juncture: more circular radiances and stripy patterns. No idea what they mean. They’re probably not for me. More likely, they’re ways to guide factors.
What’s obvious to me now is that very little of the hull is prepared for human habitation. All that I’ve seen so far has a sort of useful logic if you’re a factor, intent on specific duties and with little or no curiosity. But more senseless monotony will certainly push me into eccentricity.
I might just return to the Land of the Loaf-Eaters.
For some reason, that brings a smile. I’ve twisted words and made a joke, but I don’t know the original behind what I’ve twisted.
I take out the book and the pencil and think about writing down my joke, to add some levity to a very serious tome. I leaf through the pages, finger the black lines—and only now does the obvious occur to me: what the broad slashes mean. They’re transitions. A new hand writes after each slash.
This makes my joke more than trivial. I close the book and put away the pencil. This book has been carried by at least four of me. If it gets lost, then those who came before might as well have never lived.
How many bodies were brought back to the freezers without a record of their achievements? The others like me, who wrote in this book, saw things of interest. I hope at least to go as far as they did. I’ll eventually take the opportunity to add notes as I proceed, but there’s no point if I just duplicate what’s already recorded, so…
I haven’t earned the right to add anything yet.
No going back.
I make my choice and descend. I decide to be perverse and use my words counter to the periodic and unreliable up and down. I decide that descent means going inboard toward the core and ascent means moving outboard, toward the skin of the hull.
The “descent” is as before, but I’m getting better at it. I don’t know how far forward along the hull I’ve traveled, but not far enough toward the narrowing bow to make a substantial reduction in the circumference. That might require another kilometer or two. I think it over as I move down the shaft, keeping a lookout for more sketches, more signs of the girl or anybody or anything having made it this far… other than me, of course.
A visit from my own ghost would be strange. I vaguely recall stories of the oracular dead: spirits, hauntings. What if all of me decided to return at once, babbling incoherently? Spooky fables. Useless crap rising up at odd moments. Part of some sort of artificial cultural heritage. Why can’t I retrieve the knowledge I need? The reason and shape behind the Ship—a good schematic. Why three hulls? Why the moon of dirty ice? What, if anything, lives in the other hulls? Is there still someone alive from the Destination Guidance team?
How long has it been? How long since the Ship departed… and where did it depart from? I can think of reasonable answers to some of these questions, but they don’t yet feel convincing.
This much is clear. Ship makes people and stuff as it goes along.
I’m just a youngster.
The shaft behind me is like the shaft below me, a vanishing obscurity. Down, down, downward… hundreds of meters. I pause to drink, but I’m not hungry yet. I had my fill back in the boy’s room. I almost feel guilty partaking of that food, and I feel sorry for the woman in the boy’s thrall.
What did the boy do or give up to find favor with Ship?
There’s a nightmare thought I don’t need to deal with as I hand-over-hand along the rungs.
Spin-up comes, but I’m instinctively prepared. I lock feet and hands on the rungs and wait until things are stable. When I resume, a bottle of water falls out of the bag before I draw the cinch, and I can’t help but watch its twisting, bouncing, accelerating progress into vanishing twilight.
Now it’s a climb in earnest. If I let go and don’t catch myself, I’ll fall down the shaft like the bottle. I’ll bounce and gather speed and… splat.
Another body for the freezer.
Another book for someone to retrieve, with nothing new added.
Is that what the little girls do? Retrieve everyone’s books—Blue-Blacks, Scarlet-Browns, visitors from Destination Guidance?
Descending inboard, always inboard.
After two hours, my fingers and hands have blisters, worse where I touched the frosted cases or laid palms on the freezing deck after I was made. I’m leaving a little blood trail, of which I see no evidence as I climb.
There’s a shadow above—a big one. I pause and lean out to get details, hanging by hands and feet. It’s just a rough black plug higher in the shaft. I climb another dozen meters. The shadow assumes a trilateral outline: a cleaner, about forty yards inboard. It doesn’t move and appears to be stuck. Dead or broken—or patiently waiting. It blocks the rungs at an angle.
I stop and hang for several minutes. I know it’s waiting. It’s a sentinel left in the shaft—not a cleaner, some sort of Killer. A big one, at least, not the little one, which is worse…
I have no idea what any of that means.
Drops of my sweat drip and fall outboard.
Then the black shadow shifts—makes a scraping jerk along one side. The movement so unnerves me I let go of my slippery grip. I fall a few rungs, manage to grab h
old again, but wrench my foot.
I see that now the shadow has wedged three broad appendages against the wall of the shaft. Whatever sort of grip a factor might have—suction, friction, like lizard’s feet, it’s coming unstuck. Dead or alive, it’s about to slip loose and drop. All I can do is lay myself tight against the rungs, swing sideways and hang with one hand and one foot flat against the wall.
I don’t dare look up. I can hear it scraping, sliding, jamming again, scraping some more—and that’s all I hear. No scrabbling, no attempt to hang on, no sounds of apprehension or fear.
The glow around and above me dims in a rush. I feel air. Then the big black shape whooshes past, edgewise but brushing my shirt, and I look just in time to see two other bodies, parts of bodies, falling in its wake. One is a Scarlet-Brown—just a head and shoulders terminating in old meat and clotted gore. The other is more like me, probably male. I can’t see the face, but he’s bigger and bulkier, dressed in reddish overalls and seemingly intact, with skin about the same color. Could be a Knob-Crest.
I watch the whole tangle fall with softer, dead, diminishing sounds… Into the shadows. Only in the backdraft do I smell the char of singed meat.
For some reason, survival makes me laugh. I’ve come this far, I become multitudes—I’m more than eccentric, I’m plain silly—my life makes me laugh in mad earnest. I stop laughing, suck as much air as I can stand, try not to retch, and continue my climb, hand over hand. Following instinct.