by Greg Bear
I shook my head. There were more important problems. “I want to find something like a ship’s bridge, or at least a computer terminal. Did you see something before you found my cabin?”
Sonok nodded. “Other way in corridor. But there were…things there. Didn’t enjoy the looks, so came this way.”
“What were they?” I asked.
“One like trash can,” he said. “With breasts.”
“We’ll keep looking this way,” I said by way of agreement.
The next bulkhead was a dead end. A few round displays studded the wall, filled like bull’s eyes with concentric circles of varying thickness. A lot of information could be carried in such patterns, given a precise optical scanner to read them—which suggested a machine more than an organism, though not necessarily. The bear paced back and forth in front of the wall.
I reached out with one hand to touch the displays. Then I got down on my knees to feel the bulkhead, looking for a seam. “Can’t see it, but I feel something here—like a ridge in the material.”
The bulkhead, displays and all, peeled away like a heart’s triplet valve, and a rush of air shoved us into darkness. I instinctively rolled into a fetal curl. The bear bumped against me and grabbed my arm. Some throbbing force flung us this way and that, knocking us against squeaking wet things. I forced my eyes open and unfurled my arms and legs, trying to find a grip. One hand rapped against metal or hard plastic, and the other caught what felt like rope. With some fumbling, I gripped the rope and braced myself against the hard surface. Then I had time to sort out what I was seeing. The chamber seemed to be open to space, but we were breathing, so obviously a transparent membrane was keeping in the atmosphere. I could see the outer surface of the ship, and it appeared a hell of a lot larger than I’d allowed. Clinging to the membrane in a curve, as though queued on the inside of a bubble, were five or six round nebulosities that glowed dull orange like dying suns. I was hanging on to something resembling a ship’s mast, a metal pylon that reached from one side of the valve to the center of the bubble. Ropes were rigged from the pylon to stanchions that seemed suspended in midair, though they had to be secured against the membrane. The ropes and pylon supported clusters of head sized spheres covered with hairlike plastic tubing. They clucked like brood hens as they slid away from us. “Góspodi!” Sonok screeched.
The valve that had given us access was still open, pushing its flaps in and out. I kicked away from the pylon. The bear’s grip was fierce. The flaps loomed, slapped against us, and closed with a final sucking throb. We were on the other side, lying on the floor. The bulkhead again was impassively blank.
The bear rolled away from my arm and stood up. “Best to try the other way!” he suggested. “More easily faced, I cognize.”
I unshipped the six bolted hatch, and we crawled through. We doubled back and went past my cabin. The corridor, now that I thought of it, was strangely naked. In any similar region on my ship there would have been pipes, access panels, printed instructions and at least ten cabin doors.
The corridor curved a few yards past my cabin, and the scenery became more diverse. We found several small cubbyholes, all empty, and Sonok walked cautiously ahead. “Here,” he said. “Can was here.”
“Gone now,” I observed. We stepped through another six bolt hatch into a chamber that had the vague appearance of a command center. In large details it resembled the bridge of my own ship, and I rejoiced for that small sense of security.
“Can you talk to it?” Sonok asked.
“I can try. But where’s a terminal?”
The bear pointed to a curved bench in front of a square, flat surface, devoid of keyboard, speaker, or knobs. It didn’t look much like a terminal—though the flat surface resembled a visual display screen but I wasn’t ashamed to try speaking to it. Nor was I abashed when it didn’t answer. “No go. Something else.”
We looked around the chamber for several minutes but found nothing more promising. “It’s like a bridge,” I said, “but nothing matches specifically. Maybe we’re looking for the wrong thing.”
“Machines run themselves, perhaps,” Sonok suggested.
I sat on the bench, resting an elbow on the edge of the “screen.” Nonhuman technologies frequently use other senses for information exchange than we do. Where we generally limit machine human interactions to sight, sound, and sometimes touch, the Crocerians use odor, and the Aighors control their machines on occasion with microwave radiation from their nervous systems. I laid my hand across the screen. It was warm to the touch, but I couldn’t detect any variation in the warmth. Infrared was an inefficient carrier of information for creatures with visual orientation. Snakes use infrared to seek their prey
“Snakes,” I said. “The screen is warm. Is this part of the snake ship?”
Sonok shrugged. I looked around the cabin to find other smooth surfaces. They were few. Most were crisscrossed with raised grills. Some were warm to the touch. There were any number of possibilities—but I doubted if I would hit on the right one very quickly. The best I could hope for was the survival of some other portion of my ship.
“Sonok, is there another way out of this room?”
“Several. One is around the gray pillar,” he said. “Another hatch with six dogs.”
“What?”
“Six…” He made a grabbing motion with one hand. “Like the others.”
“Throw bolts,” I said.
“I thought my Anglo was improving,” he muttered sulkily.
“It is. But it’s bound to be different from mine, so we both have to adapt.” We opened the hatch and looked into the next chamber. The lights flickered feebly, and wrecked equipment gave off acrid smells. A haze of cloying smoke drifted out and immediately set ventilators to work. The bear held his nose and jumped over the seal for a quick walk through the room.
“Is something dead in here,” he said when he returned. “Not like human, but not far. It is shot in head.” He nodded for me to go with him, and I reluctantly followed. The body was pinned between two bolted seats. The head was a mess, and there was ample evidence that it used red blood. The body was covered by gray overalls and, though twisted into an awkward position, was obviously more canine than human. The bear was correct in one respect: it was closer to me than whiskered balls or rainbow snakes. The smoke was almost clear when I stepped back from the corpse.
“Sonok, any possibility this could be another mascot?”
The bear shook his head and walked away, nose wrinkled. I wondered if I’d insulted him.
“I see nothing like terminal here,” he said. “Looks like nothing work now, anyway. Go on?”
We returned to the bridgelike chamber, and Sonok picked out another corridor. By the changing floor curvature, I guessed that all my previous estimates as to ship size were appreciably off. There was no way of telling either the shape or the size of this collage of vessels. What I’d seen from the bubble had appeared endless, but that might have been optical distortion.
The corridor dead ended again, and we didn’t press our luck as to what lay beyond the blank bulkhead. As we turned back, I asked, “What were the things you saw? You said there were ten of them, all different.”
The bear held up his paws and counted. His fingers were otterlike and quite supple. “Snakes, number one,” he said. “Cans with breasts, two; back wall of your cabin, three; blank bulkhead with circular marks, four; and you, five. Other things not so different, I think now snakes and six dog hatches might go together, since snakes know how to use them. Other things you and your cabin fixtures, so on, all together. But you add dead thing in overalls, fuzzy balls, and who can say where it ends?”
“I hope it ends someplace. I can only face so many variations before I give up. Is there anything left of your ship?”
“Where I was after disruption,” the bear said. “On my stomach in bathroom.”
Ah, that blessed word! “Where?” I asked. “Is it working?” I’d considered impolitely messing the c
orridors if there was no alternative.
“Works still, I think. Back through side corridor.”
He showed me the way. A lot can be learned from a bathroom social attitudes, technological levels, even basic psychology, not to mention anatomy. This one was lovely and utilitarian, with fixtures for males and females of at least three sizes. I made do with the largest. The bear gave me privacy, which wasn’t strictly necessary—bathrooms on my ship being coed—but appreciated, nonetheless. Exposure to a Teddy bear takes getting used to.
When I was through, I joined Sonok in the hall and realized I’d gotten myself turned around. “Where are we?”
“Is changing,” Sonok said. “Where bulkhead was, is now hatch. I’m not sure I cognize how—it’s a different hatch.”
And it was, in an alarming way. It was battle armored, automatically controlled, and equipped with heavily shielded detection equipment. It was ugly and khaki colored and had no business being inside a ship, unless the occupants distrusted each other. “I was in anteroom, outside lavatory,” Sonok said, “with door closed. I hear loud sound and something like metal being cut, and I open door to see this.”
Vague sounds of machines were still audible, grinding and screaming. We stayed away from the hatch. Sonok motioned for me to follow him. “One more,” he said. “Almost forgot.” He pointed into a cubbyhole, about a meter deep and two meters square. “Look like fish tank, perhaps?”
It was a large rectangular tank filled with murky fluid. It reached from my knees to the top of my head and fit the cubbyhole perfectly. “Hasn’t been cleaned, in any case,” I said.
I touched the glass to feel how warm or cold it was. The tank lighted up, and I jumped back, knocking Sonok over. He rolled into a backward flip and came upright, wheezing.
The light in the tank flickered like a strobe, gradually speeding up until the glow was steady. For a few seconds it made me dizzy. The murk was gathering itself together. I bent over cautiously to get a close look. The murk wasn’t evenly distributed. It was composed of animals like brine shrimp no more than a centimeter long, with two black eyespots at one end, a pinkish “spine,” and a feathery fringe rippling between head and tail. They were forming a dense mass at the center of the tank.
Ordered dots of luminescence crossed the bottom of the tank, changing colors across a narrow spectrum: red, blue, amber.
“It’s doing something,” Sonok said. The mass was defining a shape. Shoulders and head appeared, then torso and arms, sculpted in ghost colored brine shrimp. When the living sculpture was finished, I recognized myself from the waist up. I held out my arm, and the mass slowly followed suit.
I had an inspiration. In my pants pocket I had a marker for labeling tapas cube blanks. It used soft plastic wrapped in a metal jacket. I took it out and wrote three letters across the transparent front of the tank: WHO. Part of the mass dissolved and re formed to mimic the letters, the rest filling in behind. WHO they spelled, then they added a question mark.
Sonok chirped, and I came closer to see better. “They understand?” he asked. I shook my head. I had no idea what I was playing with. WHAT ARE YOU? I wrote.
The animals started to break up and return to the general murk. I shook my head in frustration. So near! The closest thing to communication yet.
“Wait,” Sonok said. “They’re group again.”
TENZIONA, the shrimp coalesced. DYSFUNCTIO. GUARDATEO AB PEREGRINO PERAMBULA.
“I don’t understand. Sounds like Italian—do you know any Italian?”
The bear shook his head.
“‘Dysfunctio,’” I read aloud. “That seems plain enough. ‘Ab peregrino’? Something about a hawk?”
“Peregrine, it is foreigner,” Sonok said.
“Guard against foreigners…‘perambula,’ as in strolling? Watch for the foreigners who walk? Well, we don’t have the grammar, but it seems to tell us something we already know. Christ! I wish I could remember all the languages they filled me with ten years ago.”
The marks on the tank darkened and flaked off. The shrimp began to form something different. They grouped into branches and arranged themselves nose to tail, upright, to form a trunk, which rooted itself to the floor of the tank.
“Tree,” Sonok said.
Again they dissolved, returning in a few seconds to the simulacrum of my body. The clothing seemed different, however—more like a robe. Each shrimp changed its individual color now, making the shape startlingly lifelike. As I watched, the image began to age. The outlines of the face sagged, wrinkles formed in the skin, and the limbs shrank perceptibly. My arms felt cold, and I crossed them over my breasts; but the corridor was reasonably warm.
Of course the universe isn’t really held in a little girl’s mind. It’s one small thread in a vast skein, separated from every other universe by a limitation of constants and qualities, just as death is separated from life by the eternal nonreturn of the dead. Well, now we know the universes are less inviolable than death, for there are ways of crossing from thread to thread. So these other beings, from similar Earths, are not part of my undifferentiated infancy. That’s a weak fantasy for a rather unequipped young woman to indulge in. Still, the symbols of childhood lie all around—nightmares and Teddy bears and dreams held in a tank; dreams of old age and death. And a tree, gray and ghostly, without leaves. That’s me. Full of winter, wood cracking into splinters. How do they know?
A rustling came from the corridor ahead. We turned from the tank and saw the floor covered with rainbow snakes, motionless, all heads aimed at us. Sonok began to tremble.
“Stop it,” I said. “They haven’t done anything to us.”
“You are bigger,” he said. “Not meal sized.”
“They’d have a rough time putting you away, too. Let’s just sit it out calmly and see what this is all about.” I kept my eyes on the snakes and away from the tank. I didn’t want to see the shape age any more. For all the sanity of this place, it might have kept on going, through death and decay down to bones. Why did it choose me; why not Sonok?
“I cannot wait,” Sonok said. “I have not the patience of a snake.” He stepped forward. The snakes watched without a sound as the bear approached, one step every few seconds. “I want to know one solid thing,” he called back. “Even if it is whether they eat small furry mascots.”
The snakes suddenly bundled backward and started to crawl over each other. Small sucking noises smacked between their bodies. As they crossed, the red ovals met and held firm. They assembled and reared into a single mass, cobralike, but flat as a planarian worm. A fringe of snakes weaved across the belly like a caterpillar’s idea of Medusa.
Brave Sonok was undone. He swung around and ran past me. I was too shocked to do anything but face the snakes down, neck hairs crawling. I wanted to speak but couldn’t. Then, behind me, I heard: “Sinieux!”
As I turned, I saw two things, one in the corner of each eye: the snakes fell into a pile, and a man dressed in red and black vanished into a side corridor. The snakes regrouped into a hydra with six tentacles and grasped the hatch’s throw bolts, springing it open and slithering through. The hatch closed, and I was alone.
There was nothing for it but to scream a moment, then cry. I lay back against the wall, getting the fit out of me as loudly and quickly as possible. When I was able to stop, I wiped my eyes with my palms and kept them covered, feeling ashamed. When I looked out again, Sonok stood next to me.
“We’ve an Indian on board,” he said. “Big, with black hair in three ribbons”—he motioned from crown to neck between his ears—“and a snappy dresser.”
“Where is he?” I asked hoarsely.
“Back in place like bridge, I think. He controls snakes?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
“Go look?”
I got up and followed the bear. Sitting on a bench pulled from the wall, the man in red and black watched us as we entered the chamber. He was big—at least two meters tall and hefty, dressed in a black silk shi
rt with red cuffs. His cape was black with a red eagle embroidered across the shoulders. He certainly looked Indian ruddy skin, aristocratic nose, full lips held tight as if against pain.
“Quis la?” he queried.
“I don’t speak that,” I said. “Do you know English?”
The Indian didn’t break his stolid expression. He nodded and turned on the bench to put his hand against a grill. “I was taught in the British school at Nova London,” he said, his accent distinctly Oxfordian. “I was educated in Indonesia, and so I speak Dutch, High and Middle German, and some Asian tongues, specifically Nippon and Tagalog. But at English I am fluent.”
“Thank God,” I said. “Do you know this room?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I designed it. It’s for the Sinieux.”
“Do you know what’s happened to us?”
“We have fallen into hell,” he said. “My Jesuit professors warned me of it.”
“Not far wrong,” I said. “Do you know why?”
“I do not question my punishments.”
“We’re not being punished—at least, not by God or devils.”
He shrugged. It was a moot point.
“I’m from Earth, too,” I said. “From Terre.”
“I know the words for Earth,” the Indian said sharply.
“But I don’t think it’s the same Earth. What year are you from? Since he’d mentioned Jesuits, he almost had to use the standard Christian Era dating.
“Year of Our Lord 2345,” he said.
Sonok crossed himself elegantly. “For me 2290,” he added. The Indian examined the bear dubiously.
I was sixty years after the bear, five after the Indian. The limits of the grab bag were less hazy now. “What country?”
“Alliance of Tribal Columbia,” he answered, “District Quebec, East Shore.”
“I’m from the Moon,” I said. “But my parents were born on Earth in the United States of America.”
The Indian shook his head slowly; he wasn’t familiar with it.
“Was there—” But I held back the question. Where to begin? Where did the world lines part? “I think we’d better consider finding out how well this ship is put together. We’ll get into our comparative histories later. Obviously you have star drive.”