by Greg Bear
We’re perched on the edge of a big sphere, much bigger than the forest balls or the trash voids of Hull Zero One, large enough that it seems possible it might reach all the way out through the skin of the hull. It might even bump out on Ship’s surface, with, I hope, its own observation blister. I’d like to see what’s happening outside, down on the moon.
The big bright space is not empty. Far from it. Beginning just four or five meters from the wall, hundreds of milky globes hang in suspension, surrounded by puffs of shining, translucent branches. The tips of the branches fuzz out in smaller tubes until the globes seem surrounded by feathery down, like huge dandelion seeds. There must be millions of them. It’s their refraction of a distant light source that almost blinded us. We can reach out to the nearest, but Kim warns, “Don’t touch.”
It looks beautiful—and wicked sharp.
“What’s this?” I ask the girl.
“Mother’s library,” the girl says.
Above, the branches rustle in a rapid, disconcerting dance. Little rods move along the outer tips on wirelike legs, rotating, pushing aside branches, then jabbing their tips into each puffy “seed.” The rods withdraw, move along to the next globe, maneuver through the branches, and reinsert, churning the contents of the globes.
“I know what this is,” Kim says. “It’s like the root of the Klados—the library the Catalogs draw from. The gene pool. But it’s too big. Something’s different. I know this,” he repeats in wonder.
“Sounds like you’ve found your résumé,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m a cook. Assistant chef. This is like a diagram of my kitchen.”
The girl smiles. “Mother will be happy,” she says.
“The question is, why is it so big?” Kim asks. “The places I’m supposed to work in are much smaller. I mean, genes are small, so why all this?”
I think I know, but now is not the time—nor do I like the answer. It’s tough to discover a conflict in one’s essential being, but I have a big one—a great big conflict that could rip me apart or turn me into something as bad as what we’d likely find in the hidden pages of the Catalog….
Or in the pages of my twin’s book. Everything hinges on what I do when we meet Mother.
I push that small voice back into the mental gloom from which it emerged and we follow the girl along a beam and series of cables, to where this huge sphere joins with another, smaller sphere—less than forty meters wide and empty, dark.
A single tube about half a meter in diameter thrusts from the center of the puffball chamber and through the darkness. The tube’s surface is visibly frosting. It’s like a delivery chute. A dumbwaiter leading from the big, big kitchen to the dining room.
“We cross fast,” the girl explains. “No cables, no touch. Just kick off and fly.”
Kim doesn’t like this. “I’ve never been that graceful,” he grumbles.
“It is cold,” the girl emphasizes. “Do not take a breath out there, until after you cross.”
“Great,” Kim says.
The girl launches from the rim where the two spheres meet. We suck in air, then hold it. Kim goes next. He’s more graceful than he gives himself credit for. He vanishes into the darkness, toward a dim beam of light from the far side. My eyes hurt, staring into the cold. His shadow crosses the light, and a moment later, I hear him draw a whooping breath.
“Okay!” he shouts.
My turn.
It’s colder at midpoint than anything we experienced back in Hull Zero One—cold enough to freeze me solid in minutes if not seconds, and the air seems gelid, denser. Tingling snaps crawl along my skin as well, and I see blue lights that aren’t there.
Then, Kim’s long arm grabs me again and pulls me back on target.
“Good,” the girl says.
Skin tingling, eyes defrosting, all those little blue lights flitting away—I wonder if I’ve awakened from this long, bad dream and fallen into another, better one. Not the first time, of course. Hope springs eternal. The air is filled with sweet scents, funky scents—flower smells and human smells coming and going in warm waves, more intense than anything I’ve experienced.
What I’m seeing, or think I’m seeing, is improbably wonderful. It’s a weightless town—more of a village, actually, made of hundreds of little round domiciles both clear and opaque, colored and white, arranged like clusters of soap bubbles in another curved space. Children work and wander and play throughout, naked or wearing blue overalls, clutching little jars and long sticks, pushing food and bottles and other objects through the warm, weightless air like hundreds of busy little angels. Children everywhere, all female.
Beautiful, identical, happy.
“Welcome,” our girl says, and something goes out of her—a stiff, stubborn posture. Compared to the others, she’s grubby, travel-worn, tired. It makes her look older. “I’m going to go be with Mother now. After I touch her, she will remember all that’s happened. Then she will meet with you.”
Kim and I clutch a cable on the forward wall of the chamber. The currents of chill air behind us are blocked. Only the tube from the gene pool passes through to arrive at a glorious conclusion—a flower of golden rods, each rod in turn blossoming again.
The girls move around this flower like little bees, taking and carrying away samples.
What I’ve seen is humbling and beautiful. We are on the outskirts of Ship’s glorious belly button. Well, of course, neither Kim nor I has a navel. But the girls do, cute little innies—and Ship does as well, a truly whopping Omphalos.
This is the beating, vibrant gonad of Hull Zero Three, the very reason for Ship’s existence and journey. This is where the Klados begins—where all living things are designed and judged. Mother has occupied the gene pool, making herself mistress of life itself.
But I still don’t remember Mama.
With all this stimulating visual information inspiring us to pull up submerged memory and knowledge, why don’t we remember Mother?
Who designed and made her?
“Heads up,” Kim says. I look where his thick, lemon-colored finger points. “Reception committee.”
Ten little girls, all wearing blue overalls, all moving in a line, hand in hand. A continuous loop of cable grows from the wall of the chamber, and they grip it like the safety bar in a roller-coaster car to keep in line and travel to where Kim and I have been left to gawk. They do not speak. They do not seem to have much interest in us, and certainly not in our protests as we are corralled and gently but insistently pushed aft.
“What’s my name again?” I ask Kim.
“Shit, I don’t remember,” Kim says. “You’re Teacher. Sanjay, I think.”
The warmth becomes tropical. We are guided over several curving ridges in the chamber wall, through pillars that rise to support what looks like intertwined stretches of golden tubing, smooth and translucent, varying in diameter from a few centimeters to ten or more meters. The whole structure softly hisses and whishes. It sounds like…
Waves on a seashore.
Ocean. Salt air, spray, seagulls, patches of decaying seaweed. Wet sand squeezing between my bare toes. Earth’s primordial gene pool. Swimming in a lagoon under a hot blue sky… with my partner.
I always liked that sound.
I suppose I never actually swam in an ocean or walked on a real beach but I like the sound, anyway.
The flowering of the tubes and pipes slips behind us, and there is only a warm glow of glim lights spaced along the inboard surfaces and the near wall, shifting and coalescing into polka-dot patterns, lighting our progress like the glowing skin of a deep-sea creature.
Ahead lies a thick, rough tangle of leafy limbs coated with sprays of tiny flowers, like living stars, with a light and a life of their own. All the little glowing things watching, interested, unafraid…
A naked forest ball.
We’re entering a protected zone, to be sure, but this is more of a welcoming committee—children, the flowering forest. We are not threats.
We are expected. A path opens through spreading limbs. Only now do we see that the forest’s branches bear millions of tiny thorns, exuding from their tips tiny greenish drops—likely fatal doses of toxins for the unwary, the unwelcome, the unescorted.
What lies within the forest ball is very important to somebody—if only to herself. But then, the mother at the navel of our world deserves protection, doesn’t she?
“Don’t touch anything,” I tell Kim. “We’re surrounded by cobras.”
“What’s a cobra?”
“Snake,” I say.
“Oh. Long, with teeth, right?”
This inane exchange is in part to compensate for the embarrassment of being gripped all around by the phalanx of girls, who care nothing for the thorns and who push against the leafy enclosure in such a way that they must be taking many pricks without obvious pain or harm.
The flowers, however, exude a glorious, peach-colored mist of scented light, not at all poisonous—sweet-tasting and sweet-smelling, actually. We are urged into the peach glow. Our reluctance is fading. Mother’s seduction is intense.
A thatch of deep green twigs surrounds a hollow within the forest ball, and at the center of the hollow—resting on a cushioned platform, facing away from her new visitors—is a long, fleshy, shockingly lovely creature. Even from behind, it’s obvious she’s female, no doubt at all—but at first I wonder if she’s remotely human. There is something of the serpent about her, but no serpent is equipped with so many breasts, arrayed in fruiting prominences on the fleshy rings of her torso, suckling so many smaller, younger versions of our girls.
Somehow the perfumed, lactating layers of her flesh are in perfect proportion to her function. She can move as far as she needs to move, and if more motion is required, the girls are there for assistance. Her brood. Her children, grown anew constantly to replace those lost in performing her work. I wonder if she misses them. Mother’s work is never done.
She turns her head, which is small in proportion to her enormous, slowly undulant body, and beams upon all a beatific smile that lights up her face.
Wait.
The scented air is getting to me. I know that face.
Please, no. Not that.
We are here!
The face is that of the woman in my Dreamtime—my partner, whom I’m destined to embrace as we fly to the new planet’s surface. All of it, the entire dream, returns in a warmly humid rush. I feel a flush of ecstatic nausea that makes me curl and writhe. The girls try to hold on, but I resist, kick out, push them away with hands and feet.
Again I’m like a newborn pulled cold and unhappy from an ignorant womb into an even more shocking reality. I want back into my previous ignorance, my dumb-show misery. This is wrong. It can’t be her. It’s an outrage—not even they would do this to her, to us!
We are so poorly prepared for life on this sick Ship, this skewed, tortured thing that makes us and kills us and protects us, lies between us and vacuum and radiation and the abrasive dust, like a shell around so many stupid mollusks.
The girls prove to be surprisingly strong. Kim is making a show of passive acceptance, hands up, palms out, shocked by my flailing reaction. For the moment, the little ones ignore him and flock around me, and finally bring me under sweating, aching control.
“Best to maintain, Teacher,” Kim suggests in a low grumble. “Like you said, cobras…”
At a single word, a soft murmur from those lips in that face, the girls reluctantly bring me forward, toward the one whose symbol I first saw sketched in blood in the faraway shaft in Hull Zero One, the one who inspires absolute loyalty in those who oversaw my birth.
And my making? Is this both my partner and my own Mother?
My neck arches and I bare my teeth. Our noses nearly touch. I do not want this. I fear we will explode—this is wrong. But it does not happen—neither a kiss nor the half-desired love-death.
Her eyes close. She lightly sniffs. “Yes,” she says. “I know you.”
She raises a human-scale arm that had formerly lain relaxed down one side, across breasted rolls of torso. She offers her hand, fingers all too human, even shapely, nails trimmed and polished no doubt by her children. I see her short hair has been coiffed, and her flesh is scrupulously clean and dusted with a faint greenish powder that might be crushed from the leaves and flowers in her bower.
“Kiss,” whispers a little girl. I no longer feel fear—that perfume…. Unless I fight it, I will become drunk with her, totally intoxicated.
“You are Teacher,” Mother says.
“Another life,” I whisper. In that other life, my partner was destined to be Ship’s master of biology. Here, she is all she could ever have been, and much more. Kim might have been her assistant, in charge of the laboratory and the gene pool.
“We were together,” she tells me. “We made daughters. You were taken from me. I prayed for Ship to make more of you.”
My horror is mixed with admiration and awe. “I don’t remember,” I insist.
“Our daughters search you out again and again. I always lose you. You are always taken from me.”
Absorbing this causes an internal pain I can’t categorize or come to grips with.
“I birth my daughters. And they pray to Ship and bring you back to me,” Mother says. “What you see as you travel ripens you like a fruit. I am happy you are here.”
“Kiss,” the girl insists hopefully.
Mother shyly raises her hand again. The back is smooth against my lips, the fingers slightly plumper versions of fingers I’ve seen in so many Dreamtime moments, stretching back through freshly renewed memory like gaudy pearls on a string.
Mollusks make pearls, of course… oysters grown on farms.
I kiss her hand. All around me relax. One little girl claps gently, delighted, and comes around between us, asserting her privilege in front of Mother, staring deep into my stunned eyes. “We were so worried. But you are here.”
Mother gently pushes the girl aside, and she laughs and flits off to join her sisters, leaving Kim and me to float unassisted. Kim, the brief glimpse I have of him—eyes almost closed, arms crossed—looks like a big, sleepy, lemon-colored genie.
“There will be food,” Mother says. “But let’s begin.” The woman who was to be my mate, my partner for all new worlds circling new suns, stretches in languor upon her platform. “Teach me. Tell me what you’ve seen.”
Branches grow into personal bowers. She is mistress of her space. The perfume has performed its task. It is good to be in her grace.
I begin.
THE BRIEFING
I try to recall all that I’ve seen and learned, spooling it off like a recording machine, but it’s all remarkably ephemeral. I keep seeing my partner’s face on another body, in another existence.
My words trail off. Hours have passed. The bower’s golden light has become shadowy. Mother rests, eyes closed but not asleep. Perhaps she never sleeps. Many of the girls are asleep, however. Kim also drowses, surrounded by a leafy nest.
I am watchful. How am I different from the others who were taken from her, who died? From the true consorts, like my twin, back in the bow… who was born knowing how to follow her orders.
Has she judged? She may not know yet, not for certain.
Mother opens her eyes. “I do not understand where it went wrong.” Her voice is sweet and small. “I see Ship, I see struggle—I know those who frustrate me and kill my children. They’ve taken you from me so many times…” She looks to me for guidance. “Why do they fight us?” she asks, and then, with an eyebrow flick of inner awareness, “Why do we look like this, so different?”
Why, this is sleep, nor am I yet awake.
Her eyes are pale blue. They are no larger than I remember them. I do not stray from her face, but the impression of the rest of her body is unavoidable. Beauty lies both in her form and in her function. So many daughters—so much adoration. Will they all grow up to be like her?
“My daughters tell me there i
s another Teacher. Yet he stayed behind. Why?”
“We wanted to make sure the journey was safe,” I tell her, and hope she believes me.
Mother turns her face away. “My daughters did not pray for this yellow one, or for the others. Only for you.”
“We traveled and fought together,” I say. “The girls brought all of us to this hull.”
“Not all,” she reminds me. “Many died. You accessed the records of the Klados, as I hoped, but you are upset. What did you see that upset you?”
“I don’t like the memories they reveal in me. That is not Ship as I know it. Not me.”
“Oh, but it is.” Mother regards me with half-closed eyes, shrewd, rich, suffused with immense, private hormonal flows that do not dull but forcefully direct. She brushes my face. The scent intensifies. The bower has brought us closer. “We only protect Earth. You know Earth.”
“Yes.” I am drunk with her. I am drunk with Earth. For the moment, I forget that I never lived those memories, that they are false.
Mother is my mirror. Looking at her, I remember…
GOLDEN LIGHT OVER a small clearing. I’m taking my rest after a long hike, sitting on a fallen log surrounded by green-black trees. The air is hushed by falling flakes of snow, each painted pale yellow by a diffuse wintry sunset. A lithe brown animal with a long neck watches from the edge of the clearing. A deer. It bolts and vanishes. I know there are other animals in the black woods. Bears, squirrels, and nearby, rainbow-gleaming fish swim in a rushing, ice-cold river.
I’ve been walking with my partner as she finishes a survey. It’s more of a ritual than a scientific necessity. All of this will be coming with us. It will be her job to protect the records of life on Earth and to carry them to the stars. My job is to keep her happy and to provide the colonists with cultural structure, social instruction. We are in a sense opposites—she will transport Earth’s life; I will transport humanity’s history and thought.
My partner emerges from the shadows and sits on the log with me. I kiss the back of her hand.
“You’re back,” I say.