Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

“Don’t drink it all at once, and don’t eat all of the cake,” the girl tells me.

“Thanks,” I say.

Picker agrees with a nod. His cheeks are packed.

“He looks like a squirrel ,” I say, laughing, spraying soggy crumbs.

“What is squirrel?” Picker honks. He can eat and talk at the same time. I tap my own full cheeks. Again, we’re laughing—laughing, eating, drinking. The cake tastes brown and dry and a little sweet. I can feel the food and water in my blood. Wonderful and strange, like I’m a husk filling out with both liquid and energy.

We strap ourselves into the couches within the dusty bubbles. I look through the hazy surface at the decayed body floating near the center of the big sphere.

“Somebody brought all this stuff here before they died,” the girl says. “We should take the clothes. Even her clothes. They’ll fit in one of these bags.”

“Where does this stuff come from?” I ask. “I mean, where do you go to find it and bring it back?”

“Don’t worry about that,” the girl says. “Nothing makes sense until you find your book. Let’s sleep.”

Satmonk is already asleep. Nobody seems inclined to stay awake and keep watch. I really don’t want to sleep. But I don’t have much choice. My eyelids are the only thing about me that has weight.

Too bad.

It turns out to be a big mistake.

Parts of my brain have time now to ask impossible questions. The body has time to assess its damage and register complaints to the incompetent management. Sleeping becomes a dark reservoir of itching, plus real pain—both sensations I can’t wake up from—and then, those questions.

Part of me thinks it should be easy to return to Dreamtime and gets peevish when that doesn’t happen—not the way I want it to happen. Dreamtime is the reality, obviously, and what I’ve just experienced is a nightmare, but struggle as hard as I can, there’s no way to invert the relationship.

I remember joy and joining. I remember a tremendous sense of accomplishment and of camaraderie. Everyone cooperates. Everyone is anxious to get on with some exciting, monumental task.

Everyone looks like me, more or less.

It would be so wonderful to go back and rejoin my real friends—familiar and filled with unbridled hope. What’s holding me back? Clearly, I’ve done something wrong. Maybe I’ve been winnowed out, or maybe I’ve been cleaned and put in the Ship’s trash bin with the other rejects.

Maybe I’m in hell.

Not hell. Sick Ship.

What could I have done to deserve such judgment?

I can feel my body writhing on the couch, my slack mouth making embarrassing, primal sounds, but I still can’t wake up. Instead, I drop into a different dream.

I’m trekking on the surface of that gigantic dirty snowball, naked again, lacking even tight, bloodstained shorts. As I stand on the crusty, frozen surface, not far from one of the sweeping, rising bands of that gigantic enveloping cage, I try to breathe—and realize I can’t.

There’s no air.

I’m in space. Isn’t that obvious?

But not being able to breathe doesn’t seem to matter. I’m compelled to learn by exploring, so I walk—and then try to look up . But no matter how hard I try, I can’t raise my head. My sight lines stay level with the horizon.

I know the Ship is above me, but I have no idea what it looks like. This dirty snowball I’ve seen from above—I’m familiar with it. I can fill in the details, or at least make them up, make them convincing and self-consistent. The snowball is huge. I could walk for hours and not go all the way around it. The snowball is—

Water.

Mostly water and rock.

I begin to see how to play the game. Somewhere inside me there’s knowledge, but it isn’t integrated. It can only be unleashed by a combination of experience, observation, and… guilt. Trauma. I will learn by screwing up. Following that reasoning, I might learn a lot by dying.

Somehow, I’ve walked partway around the snowball, and I think maybe now I can look up and see something …. But I can’t. I know something new, different, is above me. It’s another Ship at the end of another broad spar, attached to the snowball on the opposite side. Not quite opposite, actually.

I don’t know what that part looks like, either.

The Ships are big, but they are dwarfed by the snowball, of course—any schoolchild knows that. The snowball is like a gigantic yolk. It contains all the stuff necessary to get us to where we’re going….

But I dreamed we had already arrived. The Dreamtime told me

WE!

ARE!

HERE!

Obviously we are not. The size of the snowball proves that fact. It should be smaller, a lot smaller, almost used up.

I’m still walking. Now and then, I can look up and see that incredible spray of pinpoints, the universe. Stars. Wisps with ghostly thin color. The galaxy. Then I’m walking over a third spot on the snowball where I can’t look up—again, because I know what’s there but I don’t know what it looks like, either… yet.

A third Ship. A third part of Ship, actually. A trio strapped to a big snowball moon, under clouds and stars.

No. Between the stars. A serpent-marked moon lost and wandering between the stars.

I hate this hallucinogenic guesswork. The mind shouldn’t be a game. Knowledge is who we are—memory and knowledge should be organized and easily available. After all, I’m a teacher.

I have to pee, but I’m also very thirsty.

I open my eyes. Really. I’m waking up. Heavy sleep still murks my thoughts. Something important came to me in the sleep—three Ships. Three parts. Not where we should be. Nothing the way it should be.

My bag floats in front of my couch, attached by its drawstring to my wrist. I undo the couch straps and float free, wondering how one pees in weightless conditions, and rummage in the bag for the bottle of water.

Then I hear shouts and screams.

The shock makes me wet my shorts. Pee dribbles out and floats. I can’t see through the smaller bubble where I’ve been sleeping. I focus on the translucent surface. It had been fogged with dust. Now it’s spattered and smeared reddish brown. There’s a handprint at the end of one smear, and streaks from trailing fingers.

Shadows move outside, forming silhouettes on the spatters and dust. From the light, I can see the ice ball is below us, reflecting up through the large blister. The shadows move fast, and hollow thumps echo through the domiciles.

The honking and warbling is awful. Then the honking stops. I can’t hear screams now—the girl is silent. Maybe she got away—maybe she’s hiding.

I look at the bubble’s entrance. The opening is beyond the end of the couch.

Something big and red reaches through the hole and waves inside my bubble. I think it’s an arm—it’s covered with thick bristles or spikes and the end is like a spiky club. The club splits into a claw. I try to hide behind the couch, grabbing a strap and pulling myself down, then embracing the cushions and climbing under. I stop, wedged between the couch and the bubble, trying not to make a sound.

Trying not to scream.

The red spiky arm thumps against the couch, grabs it, tries to yank it out to get hold of me. It knows where I am. It wants me.

As if things aren’t complicated enough, I feel another push. The Ship is spinning up. Weight is returning. I’m shoved by invisible forces away from the couch, can’t grab hold soon enough or tightly enough, and hang from the strap, muscles straining as the outboard acceleration grows stronger.