Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

Easy prey. Everyone kills cleaners—except the girl, who could not fight back.

I’ve been walking for some time now, and the wide corridor finally reaches its end. A wall with two hemispheric bumps forms the terminus of the twin grooves, and at the conclusion of the walkway is a circular indentation about two meters wide, carved or molded into the wall’s grayish surface.

I look back. The faintest breath of cold air washes over me. Soon the corridor will be unlivable. Likely the observation blister and the corpse of Blue-Black are already frozen. No going back without dying, and, apparently, no going forward.

I put down the bags. I haven’t touched the girl’s bottle or her piece of loaf. In gratitude for rescuing me, for not letting me die, for poking me along on a course to survival—up to this point—I hope to present her with these remnants if we meet again.

I lean against the wall at the end of the walkway. “Is there anybody else on this ship?” I wonder out loud.

“Whom are you addressing?” a voice asks. For a moment, it seems to be many voices, but then, I think, no, it’s just one.

I jump back from the wall and spin to face it. I can’t even begin to hope the voice is real. I don’t want to test it by speaking again, much less asking another question. Perhaps there are only a few possible answers remaining—or silence. Perhaps I’ve used up my last question, made my last request for information—my one and only wish.

The cold is getting intense.

“How do I get through? Is there a door?”

I’m surprised by my audacity. I can’t remember even formulating these questions.

“What is your origin, and what is your occupation?”

I think this over. “I’m a teacher. Others came this way, and I’d like to join them.”

“Are you part of Ship Control?”

I don’t think so. “No,” I say.

“Then I made you. You’re in the outer regions of Hull Zero One. It is not safe here. Move inboard, to the core.”

Before I can react, the indentation deepens and the circle spins outward, leaving an opening. Beyond the opening is more darkness and only a little warmth. I step halfway through, then pause, waiting to be grabbed after being lured into a trap.

“Has anyone else come this way?” I ask.

“This opening will close in five seconds.”

“Who are you?”

The circle starts to close. I jump through at the last second and roll on the other side, coming to rest against a sloping surface—a low, broad mound, smooth and, of course, gray. Little lights everywhere twinkle faintly in the gloom. Above me, the lights grow brighter.

I see I’m at the bottom of a wide, deep shaft. There’s a tiny circle at the top of the shaft. The walls of the shaft join the floor in a curve, the mound in the center about three meters wide and a meter high.

The surface behind me shows no sign of the circular door. Up the shaft—inboard—is the only way out.

My left hand reaches out and encounters another bag—almost empty. Inside I feel only one thing, small and square.

A book.

I undo the knot in the drawstring and remove the book. It has a silver cover and forty-nine fine notches in seven rows of seven. The girl was brought this way. Knob-Crest and Scarlet-Brown might still be with her. Perhaps they escaped during the struggle with the cleaner—they certainly weren’t strong enough to pull the cleaner to pieces. Cutting is more their style. The cleaner might have distracted the thing with the reddish spiky claw—that might explain the broken spikes on the floor.

They might have gotten away.

I can climb the rungs, or I can wait for spin-down and weightlessness. Examining the shaft, I see the best option—in the time remaining—is to climb.

I sling the bags over my shoulder, then adjust Blue-Black’s loose overalls, trying to cinch the waist tighter. No use. After a bite of my loaf and a gulp of water, I piss against a wall— Marking my trail , I think, and grimace.

I start climbing. My mind is racing, stumbling over ideas and rough schematics, based on what I saw from the blister, the observation chamber, and remembering my walk in the drowsing dream.

The spindle—Hull Zero One, as the voice called it—rotates like a long, tapering axle within some sort of wheel fixed on the end of a strut. There are probably three parallel hulls at the ends of three struts, spaced equilaterally around the big chunk of dirty ice. The struts connect each hull to rails attached to the ice ball’s wiry, confining cage. The hulls can move forward and aft along those rails.

I think I’m heading forward within Hull Zero One. I could also be in the rear half, moving aft. Orientation is difficult to judge with what little I know.

My best guess as to the size of this hull is that it’s about ten kilometers long and perhaps three kilometers wide at the widest. As to the size of the ice ball, it’s not really a ball. From what I saw, it’s more like a football , oblong and at least a hundred kilometers long. The ice chunk dwarfs the hulls.

Too big. Should be much smaller by now.

Something has to push the hulls and the lump of dirty ice through space. Where are the motors? The engines? It seems likely that the engines are pretty powerful and not pleasant to be around. I have to conclude that the two halves of each spindly hull serve very different purposes.

I’m almost certainly heading forward.

What about the sinuous rill, the serpent shape carved into the ice?

Now my head really hurts.

I keep climbing. The outward tug grows weaker. Moving inboard reduces my centrifugal acceleration. The farther I go, the less the spin-up affects me. The effect is gradual but for some reason makes me feel even woozier than the intervals of spin-up and spin-down.

At least the climb gets a little easier.

I can’t think of any reason for spin-up, spin-down. None of what we’ve experienced in the way of weight or lack of weight makes any sense, though I wonder if I might understand the theory behind cooling and heating. The hulls are huge and mostly hollow, with lots of spaces and volumes requiring lots of energy to maintain—assuming they’re uniformly and constantly maintained. If we’re not at the conclusion of whatever voyage we’re making, and the passengers haven’t been awakened…

“Then I made you.”

The voice at the door. This derails my thought process but makes no more sense than anything else, so I rejoin the track I’d been following:

If most of the passengers haven’t been awakened, then the spaces might be heated and allowed to cool at regular intervals, to keep the hull from warping. Or to save energy.

The passengers, the colonists, are all frozen, anyway—perhaps stored near the core, away from the outer hull, where there might be more radiation on a long, long journey.

So who woke up the monsters?

Not enough facts, not enough experience, far too much trauma, yet still not enough to complete my integration.

Climbing toward the core. I look down—and that’s a mistake. My stomach almost spits back the loaf I’ve eaten. I concentrate on where I’m going. My feet are no longer necessary for the climb, so I just pull myself hand over hand.

“Where do these loaves come from? And the voice at the door?” The reverberation of my voice in the huge shaft is hollow but comforting. “Who or what is Ship Control?” The echo is too muddled to use as any sort of indicator as to how far I’ve come.

Spin-down catches me by surprise. My fingers are cramping. I’ve gotten used to reducing the strength of my grip on the rungs, so the gentle lurch and the resulting breeze in the shaft breaks one of my hands loose. I dangle for a moment, pulled more toward my left and the near wall of the shaft than down. I grab hold of the rungs with hands and toes and cling until the last little sensation of weight is gone.