Greg Bear: Hull Zero Three

“What is that?” the girl asks, her voice a tiny squeak. She hasn’t seen any of this before. Her face expresses resistance to revealing either ignorance or curiosity. She doesn’t like new, large things or ideas—or perceptions.

“It’s sky ,” I say. “It’s the universe. Those are stars.”

“This is Ship,” Picker says. “Big, sick Ship.”

“Where are we?” the girl asks, her voice tremulous.

“A viewing chamber,” I say. “I remember them from Dreamtime.”

And I do, vaguely. All of us would gather in a place like this to look down on a new world. Except I don’t see anything like a new world. But there’s something ahead and below, mostly obscured by the curve in the bridge and the rails. As we walk farther, the object comes into view. We’re moving—it’s moving, and rather rapidly. Soon it will pass right underneath us. I’m confused for a moment, so I stop walking and grip the railing.

“Is that our world?” the girl asks. She seems to remember something out of Dreamtime as well.

The object is passing right underneath—outboard, far down. It’s big, all right—big and mottled white, cracked, cratered, covered with thin, confining bands and stripes. It’s like a huge caged snowball. A very dirty snowball. The cage wraps around the snowball and reaches up in a gigantic strut—curved, graceful, big.

And that strut or support or brace climbs all the way up from the dirty snowball to where we are.

It connects the big snowball to Ship.

The snowball and the strut move clockwise to the other side and pass out of sight. Compared to the size of that lump of dirty ice, Ship is tiny. Ship rotates in some sort of cradle suspended above the snowball—or the snowball flies around us. But that doesn’t make as much sense.

We’re inside a spinning something, probably a cylinder. The spin causes the acceleration and the feeling of weight.

Ship is spinning.

“It’s not our world,” I say.

Satmonk seems to agree, shaking his head, holding out flat hands as if to reject all of it. I might know what the dirty snowball is, but I don’t want to make that particular guess. Because if my guess is correct, then Ship is very sick indeed.

The snowball is much too large .

It comes around again. I make out a sinuous rill along one side, where ice has apparently been dug out, perhaps mined. Rill. That’s good. Rill actually means a small river, but this is all ice. It reminds me of a snake , a serpent .

For the time being, what we’re seeing is impressive, it’s frightening, and it’s informative in a stunning, useless sort of way—but it isn’t food.

The bridge isn’t a comfortable place to rest and try to remember, so we continue across until we reach the middle. There, the bridge reaches and then apparently passes through a glassy sphere about forty meters in diameter. The sphere lies suspended on the bridge, over the blister that reveals the stars and the serpent-marked ice ball. This is a place where people are meant to stop, look, and marvel. A resting place.

The dirty snowball again rotates into view and passes beneath, but more slowly. We all feel the now-familiar sensation of Ship reducing its spin—the push forward, making us grip the rungs of the ladder, the bars, each other. As the forward shove lessens, so does our downward tug.

We’re weightless again.

A wind sighs through the larger bubble, swirling around the bridge rails and decking. Without thinking, I realize that I had put on the shorts before crossing the bridge. I didn’t want to die naked and exposed.

The girl lets go of the ladder and floats in front of me. The last of the wind shoves her forward toward the glassy sphere. I let go of the ladder and follow.

The three other humans—Picker, Pushingar, Satmonk—not exactly like me or the girl but capable of laughter and kindness and solidarity, the best human traits of all, follow close behind.

The first thing I see in the sphere is a floating body—fully clothed, slowly rotating on an axis through its shoulders. It’s an adult female, I think, but badly decayed or eaten away. There’s no way of knowing what type of human she once was.

“The cleaners aren’t very active here,” the girl says, her lips prim in disapproval. She shoves away from the end of the bridge and intersects the body, then, as the others move toward the opposite side of the sphere, clambers around it and shows us that it’s wearing a kind of backpack. Thrusting her hand into the pack, she pulls part of it inside out—it’s empty.

“No book,” she says with a chuff. She kicks violently away from the body, and both go in opposite directions, just as Newton intended—

Newton.

The first name I’ve recovered—a name apparently more important than my own.

That big outboard mass of gray and brown and white very slowly comes back into view, then stops, parking itself “below” us at about two o’clock as I look outboard and forward. Clockwise. Clock hands. Rotation. Degrees and radians. That starts to make visual and other kinds of sense.

I shake my head in mixed wonder and sorrow, and precess until my hand clenches the end of the railing and stops me. I’m looking inboard now, away from the spectacular view, “up” toward a dark, shadowy section of the sphere. There’s stuff way up there—smaller clumped spheres, like magnified foam, each filled with one or more couches, chairs—and dark boxes. Places to rest. Places to explore.

The girl grabs hold of my shoulder. We wobble together until my wrist tightens and damps our motion.

“That woman was coming here for a reason,” she says. “Something didn’t want her here.”

“What?” I ask.

“Not a friend.”

Already Picker and Satmonk have kicked away from the end of the bridge to ascend toward the glimmering cluster. The girl joins them. With my usual finesse, I follow and arrive after a couple of clumsy rebounds.

The cluster’s curved, pushed-together surfaces are fogged by a layer of staticky dust. The cluster looks more and more like a bunch of soap bubbles pushed together—but with an access hole cut between each bubble. More scraps of clothing float in their quiet confines.

The girl is working on opening one of the boxes. She succeeds, but it’s empty. Satmonk is in another bubble, his leg wrapped around a couch as he breaks a box loose of some sort of stringy glue. The lid comes open, and he gives a bird warble and shows it to the rest. I’m at a bad angle, but the others instantly move into his sphere of influence and generosity.

Once again, I’m the last to join them. The girl has managed to save me a large gray bag. Other bags, liberated from the box, have been apportioned, first come, first served.

“Just say thanks,” she tells me, and pulls her own bag close.

The bags are all tied shut with a drawstring. I watch the others, then pull the bow knot—

And out comes a loaf of heavy brownish cake ten or so centimeters long and half as wide and deep—a really big chunk of something that smells fruity and fishy. Fruit I get. The clusters around us are like grapes, in a weird way. I can taste a grape in memory. We eat fruit in Dreamtime.

Fishy is more difficult. I’m not sure what that really means, though I see oceans and silvery creatures in the water. But this is just a distraction. I’m eating the loaf before I give a damn what it smells like.

Also in the bag is a head-sized, squishy oval ball filled with—I hope—water. The cake is dry, and my mouth starts to fill with crumbs I can’t swallow without gagging. The girl shows me how to hold the ball up to my mouth and squeeze. Wherever my mouth is, liquid shoots out. It’s water, all right—about two liters of it, almost without taste.