by Greg Bear
We all like to live near the water.
The forward wall…
Whoever lived here (or would live here) wanted to keep a constant watch. Like the end of the water tank, this wall is transparent, but fogged by a layer of grime. Someone—perhaps the girl or Big Yellow—has wiped a big oval. Irregular shadows lurk beyond.
I bob and echo to the oval. I’m facing the bow. What I see is even more compelling than the décor behind me. At this point in the hull’s narrowing taper, the conical structure is visible almost in its entirety. The maximum width of the hull, outside where I stand, must be roughly a hundred meters. This room, and those that complete a circle of habitats forward of the water tank, fills about a third of that width and pokes forward toward the bow.
Ten big cylinders—each about fifty or sixty meters long—are ranked outboard to my right. Their skeletal frameworks barely conceal the graceful curves of the shipwrights and tenders and other machines that build and prepare for launch the seedships that will probe and examine the planet, returning with the information necessary to match us to the planet—and the planet to us.
This view awakens too many memories for me to process all at once. I know this place—I know it well. This is where my work always begins, where the relationships forged over long hours of training will blossom into magnificent results—love and adventure and hard, hard work.
But a few seconds are enough to show me that the machines in the nose of hull number three are in disrepair. They’ve suffered from much worse than simple neglect. Ship’s mad war has struck the tip of our spear—and severely blunted it. I see the damage mentioned in my book. The cylinders and the embryonic craft within are bent, pitted, burned, blasted. Inboard, training and education units—like the crystal and steel seedpods of giant trees—have been ruptured and left in glistening, weeping ruins. To my right, the processors that would have created all of our landing vessels have been dealt similar blows, as if smashed by angry children with hammers and torches.
“What happened here?” I ask, my voice breaking.
“You’re the teacher,” Big Yellow says. “You tell us.”
Movement behind me—the hatch opening and closing.
“You found one?”
I turn to see a gray figure so spidery-thin it takes me a moment to decide it’s human—and a woman. She’s more than two meters tall, with a long, narrow face and large dark eyes. A fine dark fur covers her cheeks and arms up to her bare shoulders. Her fingers curl and uncurl at the end of long, taut arms.
“He found his way here,” Big Yellow says.
“The girl helped—at the beginning,” I say.
The spidery woman moves along the rails and cables with the fluid poise of a ballerina. Somehow, her thinness doesn’t even come across as skinny. She’s just another unexplained type in our tortured menagerie. “So, she thinks you’re important,” she says, doubtful.
“He is!” the girl insists. “He’s Teacher.”
“I’ve brought Tsinoy,” the spidery woman says. She gives me a narrow look, like a warning. “It’s right behind me.”
“Watch out,” Big Yellow says with a chinless nod.
The hatch opens again, and this time, white upon ivory fills the shadow, as if painted by a wide brush. I push back and resist a strong urge to run and hide—if I could run, if there is anyplace to hide.
This one is almost too large for the hatch, and far from human. Shining ivory spines ripple and fold back like bristled fur. Slung low between canine shoulders, a long head shows small, pinkish-red eyes and a blunt, reptilian snout. When rime-white lips pull back, I see ice-colored teeth—teeth that I know are stronger than animal teeth, maybe stronger than steel.
I’ve seen this one before—in a part of the Dreamtime I’m not supposed to remember… don’t want to remember.
Its body, below ridges of pale bristle, is corded with glistening spiral bands of muscles connected to silvery-gray bones. The muscles find new connection points and the beast refashions its shape and increases its power as it braces ceiling to floor beside the spidery woman.
It isn’t part of any Klados I should ever have to deal with. It’s from the wrong part of the Catalog.
Catalog. Klados. Oh, God. Too much all at once. I’m backed up against the long window. My body is soaked in sweat. The girl grabs a cable with one hand, legs folded. She looks at me and then at the ivory beast, judging what, I don’t know. The beast shakes and shivers with a clatter.
Ivory and silver and ice.
“He doesn’t like me,” it says to the spidery woman. The voice is dreadful, deep, grating in an oddly musical way—terrifying.
“You scared the hell out of me, first time I met you,” Big Yellow says.
“Talk Teacher down,” the spidery woman tells the girl.
The beast says, “Shit,” but doesn’t press the issue.
More memory bobs to the surface—more nightmare information. The fact that I do recognize it causes a nauseating sensation of being two people in the same body. It’s one of Ship’s dark secrets—a Tracker. Trackers are biomech weapons of incredible versatility and power. They can live off almost any combination of gases or liquids found in organically fertile environments.
But Trackers are not supposed to be able to talk. Dropped into any situation, all a Tracker does is track, clear, and kill.
It shouldn’t be here.
It shudders with another clatter. I worry that I’ve angered it, expecting it to change shape again at any moment. Why hasn’t it killed them all, killed me?
“Do we trust him?” the Tracker asks.
“Do we have a choice?” Big Yellow asks.
The girl looks between us, eyes sharp. The spidery woman shrugs.
“How’d you all get here?” I croak.
“We were pushed,” the spidery woman says. She’s casual, unafraid of any of us—least of all the ivory beast. “Factors moved forward and burned out the birthing rooms, the living quarters aft. No more newbies. We’re the last.”
“They’ll find us if we stay here,” Big Yellow says.
The girl pulls herself along the cable and reaches to take my wrist. “I prayed for you,” she says. “So you came.”
“She always prays for you,” Big Yellow says.
The Tracker sees something in my expression and moves closer, paw-claws clenching, stretching. I definitely feel threatened.
“You see me, you know what I am. I’m not just a freak,” it says. “Tell me.”
Before my eyes, the spines drop and the pale, glistening muscles rearrange on the screw-shaped bones, reassigning lift and load and balance. It’s looking more and more like a four-legged tank—or something called an armadillo. An armadillo with the head of an awful, lizardlike wolf. Three animals I’ve never seen. “Do you have a name?” it asks me.
“No,” I say. “I don’t remember.”
“I’m the only one here with a name,” it says. “Why?”
“Beg pardon,” the spidery woman says. “Introductions. Teacher, this… is Tsinoy.”
“I’m not supposed to look like this,” the Tracker says. Its voice drops an octave—something out of a deep, deep cave. “I look awful.”
“I’m not supposed to look the way I do, either,” Big Yellow says.
“I am what Mother made me,” the girl says.
“Of course,” Big Yellow says with what I take to be a wry face, allowing for the waxy stiffness of his features.
“What about you?” I ask the spidery woman.
“No name,” she says. “But I know that I work best in low gravity.” She stretches her arms and adds, “I also know a lot about the hulls. Especially what Ship will look like when all three hulls join. The Triad.”
“Good for her,” Big Yellow says. “For me, it’s all a mystery.”
The spidery woman approaches the window. I drop back to give her a chance to look through the cleaned oval and survey the wreckage of our hopes. Her large eyes turn sad.
&nbs
p; The girl tugs me to a big curved brown blob that might be a chair. It seems to suck me down and relax me at the same time, holding me with a soft, polite grip. “Tell us,” she says. “You’re Teacher. Tell us what you remember.”
“If you know something, teach us, Teacher,” Big Yellow says. “We’re hungry for knowledge.”
I swallow. Again, I feel as if I’ve split into two people, two Dreamtimes twisted together. The Tracker has kept its focus on me, like a cat watching a bird.
“What do I do?” it asks. “What’s my purpose?”
I don’t want to ignore this question, but I also have no desire to disappoint—and what I’ve involuntarily and hazily recovered won’t make any of us happy. The spidery woman passes me a squeeze bulb of water. I drink. “You’re called a Tracker,” I say. “Sometimes we send Trackers down to a planet in the first seedships. Or others like Trackers.”
“Why would Ship do that?” the spidery woman asks.
“If there’s a major problem with our destination planet, crew improvises from the Catalog.”
“What catalog?” Big Yellow asks.
“How would they use me?” the Tracker overrides him.
I answer the Tracker first. Whatever it has in its soul, it still terrifies me. “You clear the ground,” I say, trying to reduce the impact of simply telling it, You kill everything you meet. “Help prep the planet for human occupation.”
“I’m a Killer?”
You’re a Killer. I don’t say this out loud. I do say, under my breath, “I don’t know. Just stop staring.”
“Shit.” The Tracker stands down, moves away, seems to shrink, elongate, reduce its offensive posture even more. It appears almost smooth, sleek.
“It’s my beast, so be nice to it,” the spidery woman says softly. She doesn’t like what I’ve told them any more than I do. “It protected me, came here with me. No need to get it upset. The question is, who’s in charge—Teacher or me?”
“You left me out,” Big Yellow says, mocking disappointment.
“Teacher,” the girl insists.
“But you’re not actually a leader,” Big Yellow says.
“I don’t think so,” I agree.
“Can you talk to Ship Control and ask for help?”
“The Ship talked to me, I think—once.”
“Maybe he’s lying,” the Tracker grumbles.
The spidery woman stretches herself again to full length—very impressive. She and the Tracker make a formidable pair.
“Teacher knows everything, if he gets poked right,” the girl insists.
Big Yellow asks, “Is it true, Teacher? What else is in that catalog? Me?”
“I don’t know. Leave me alone for a while.” I avoid their eyes. I need to think, to rest. More of my head fog is starting to lift. I don’t like any of what memory shows me now. I’m supposed to be born after we find a planet, after we arrive—that’s the grand scheme of my Dreamtime. Arrival—planetfall—is a complicated job at the end of a hundred million processes, a trillion decisions, big and little. Getting there is most of the fun.
Maybe Dreamtime is all wrong, a convincing fairy story. What’s dawning on me—what should have been obvious from the beginning—is that if the planet isn’t hospitable, if there’s difficulty, Ship would have to adapt. I’m not born and raised. I’m made—like them. If big problems arise, I can be customized. I come in more than one variety. And now two of me—or more—are mixed together.
“Who’s been here longest?” I ask.
“Tsinoy and me,” the spidery woman says. “We met Big Yellow and the girl in front of the water tank and showed them this place.”
“None of you have books?”
“None of us has a book,” the spidery woman says.
“I had a book,” the girl says. “You lost it.”
“Right.” I don’t want to get into that again. “But I found one of my own,” I say, and take it out, opening to the page with the sketch. They crowd around—all but the Tracker, who seems aware that even folded, its spines might jab us.
“Three hulls, like you remember. To know what it all means, we need to see more, I guess.”
“That’s right,” the girl agrees. “He needs to be poked.” Why she focuses on me, I don’t know.
“You are what you see,” Big Yellow says.
“That’s deep. You’re our philosopher,” the spidery woman says.
Big Yellow stretches out massive arms. “Philosophers don’t look like me.”
“Join the club,” says Tsinoy.
“You drew this?” the spidery woman asks me, pointing to the sketch.
“No. Another me did—I think.”
“How many of you are there?” she asks.
“I’ve seen hundreds of bodies like mine… collected and frozen in lockers, aft.”
“Awful,” Big Yellow says. “Thankfully, I seem to be unique.”
An awkward pause.
“I’m exhausted,” I say. “Is there a place I can sleep? Is there any food?”
“Very little,” the spidery woman says.
“Less and less,” Big Yellow says. “On my way here, I saw a lot of folks who looked as if they’d starved to death.”
I take another drink. “There is a room aft,” I say, “outboard of the water tank… A boy and a woman live there. They were comfortable. The boy had plenty of food and water. He seemed to be able to tell the hull what to do.”
They all look at me with somber eyes, as if they don’t believe me. Then I see that they’re simply paying silent respect to a man who’s escaped certain death.
“There was another girl,” I say defensively. “She left first.” I pause and swallow. “She wasn’t you,” I say to this girl.
Big Yellow looks aside.
“We’ve heard about such places,” the spidery woman says. “After a few spin-ups, if you like it and stay, you start to think you’ve been there for years. You forget who you are… and then the room seals shut and never opens again. Traps you. In some other part of the hull, another room opens up… same thing, different people.”
Silence.
“They let me go,” I say.
“It’s just a story,” the spidery woman says. “We’ve got enough food for a few days, but we don’t have that much time. We need to find a way forward—a way out.”
“Where?” I ask.
“I don’t remember,” she says, crestfallen. “Not yet.”
Big Yellow moves in. “Right. If we don’t rest, we’ll start acting crazy. Let’s clean up, eat a crumb or two, sleep in shifts. We’ll stand watch one by one for a couple of hours, until next spin-down. Best to travel while there’s as little weight as possible—right?” He looks at the spidery woman with what passes for stubbornness.
She faces him down, then shrugs again, wide shoulders elegant, and curls up. “Who’s first on watch?”
“I’ll go,” Big Yellow says. “I sleep with my eyes open. Then the girl. She’s the most sensitive to noise.”
We scrub each other with a scrap of damp cloth. After, we feel better in a number of ways—and more connected. In the gentle tug of spin-up, the spilled bath-water slowly falls to the floor and forms viscous pools. We wipe it up and squeeze the cloth into an empty bottle. That takes a while—the water behaves like syrup. We can’t afford to waste anything.
The Tracker, of course, does not join this group, but watches with what I assume is a hint of sadness in its armor-lidded, ruby-pink eyes.
After a brief meal—a couple of chunks of loaf divided among us—we seek separate places in the chamber. I settle into the grippy couch. The Tracker finds a corner and wedges itself in, a peculiar process of grabbing hold of the walls and ceiling with three limbs and shoving until it’s compressed to almost half its former bulk.
The spidery woman chooses to lie unencumbered on the floor, a loose curl of limbs. She closes her eyes and relaxes. The girl stays close to her, happy with any substitute for a mother. Her legs are crossed, elbows
out, hands together, as if praying—praying to the hull, perhaps, or Ship Control. She glances at me. Her eyes grow heavy, and she curls up, too.
I spend a few minutes penciling an update in the little book. My handwriting—hand-printing—is uniform throughout. It’s all me. I don’t write it all down. I concentrate on a few vivid scenes. Eventually, I’ll gather enough pieces of paper to make enough books to tell the whole story. Then I’ll…
I don’t know what I’ll do.
I write. When I get to a certain point—my rescue from the red-dot horror—I look up.
“Who has a laser?” I ask.
Big Yellow is near the hatch, standing his watch. “Nobody,” he says, and manages a look of surprise. His facial expressions are subtle but real, once you get used to them. “We thought you had one, but you don’t, do you?”
“No.”
The spidery woman rouses. “Great. We have an unknown protector.”
“Or somebody was trying to kill you and missed,” the Tracker suggests, poking its head from the corner.
STARSHIP
Spin-down rouses us too soon. We barely feel the difference—a nudge.
“I think I remember more now,” the spidery woman says with a yawn.
“Sleep can do that,” Big Yellow says. “That’s why I don’t sleep much.”
She scowls at him. “All the hulls start out the same. If my memory is accurate—and that’s a big if—there’s access to a control center in the bow, across the staging area. We should be able to get through that side hatch.” She points to an otherwise anonymous impression on the far wall, almost hidden by the ceiling.
“It’ll have to do,” Big Yellow says.
The Tracker comes out of its corner. It extends a paw-claw, a formidable appendage, and the little girl gives it her hand, dainty flesh almost lost in that multiply capable span of digits, gripping ridges, and horny extrusions. Her trust seems absolute.
The spidery woman’s memory is accurate, so far—there is forward access. We pass through into a corridor, railed and cabled, designed for people. At her touch, another hatch opens on the forward end, and we clamber and float out into the acrid air of the staging area.