Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

“Not yet,” the woman says. “It’s nice to be innocent—for a while.”

I address the girl’s back. “Something snatched you. Maybe the others. There was a fight, back near the transit tube… with the grooves. Something brought you here….”

I have the strangest feeling none of them knows what I’m talking about. “There was a fellow with a knobby crest and a fellow with brown skin and scarlet markings. You called them Picker and Satmonk. A Blue-Black man—you called him Pushingar—was killed and stuffed in a hole… which is how I survived, I think.”

The boy snorts. “Not too bright.”

“There are doors, lots of doors,” the woman tells me again. “Destination Guidance wants us all dead—wants us cleaned out.”

This is the first I’ve heard of Destination Guidance .

“But something else wants us alive,” the woman continues. “That’s all I know. My head is full of useless crap.”

“You don’t know me?” I ask the girl softly.

“No,” the girl says without looking back.

“Did you make that drawing in the shaft?” I ask, lifting a finger and sketching in the air.

“No.”

“Let’s show him!” the boy cries with an anxiousness not entirely for my benefit. He sounds as if he’s been bored for a long time. Showing me would be exciting.

I don’t like that at all. But I ask, “Show me what?”

“There’s lots of food,” the woman says, “and water this far in toward the core, so you’re not going to be a problem—or much of a help, unless you know something you haven’t told us. Where’s your book?”

I shake my head. “I used to have your book,” I tell the girl. “Someone came while I was asleep and took it.”

The girl turns. “You lost it?” she asks with a flash of anger.

“Yes. Something silvery—”

“There isn’t anything silvery,” the boy says, his smile gone. “No robots. No metal men. Teacher said that—but he’s gone and you’re not him.”

“How many marks on that book?” the girl asks.

“Seven big ones, seven scratches each—forty-nine,” I say, suddenly lonely and knowing that if they don’t accept me, I might as well just die.

“She was worth more than all of you,” the little girl says. “But you lost her, too.”

“We sleep too much, that’s our problem,” the woman says, then smiles in a half-friendly way, as if she’s warming to me—or at least to the concept of having another join this odd little group.

“There are other books,” the boy says to the girl. “Show him.”

The woman waves me forward, and I step through the door. As soon as I’m in the next room, the door closes behind me. The room is empty—no cots, no bags, just brightness. The room is so evenly illuminated that I have a hard time deciding how big it really is.

“I guess this place thinks you might be useful,” the woman says. “Let’s go. There’s another place not far from here. You’ll need to see it eventually.”

“You won’t like it,” the boy says, smiling yet again. It’s not a nice smile. I decide I don’t like him.

“I didn’t make any drawing,” the girl says.

“All right.”

Nobody offers to shake hands or touch, and nobody exchanges names. Funny I should wonder about that—I still don’t know my own name. I suppose that’s a common condition here. Maybe this girl will name me like she did the others.

But then, the ones she named all died.

“You remember the Dreamtime?” the woman asks as she turns and heads to her left. The others follow, so I keep step.

“Not very clearly,” I say.

“You know where we are?”

“A Ship,” I say. “We’re in space somewhere.”

“Do you know that for sure?” the boy asks.

“I was near the outside. The outer hull. I saw stars.”

“We’ve never been there,” the woman says.

They do not seem curious to hear any more about the stars. A door slides open on the wall in front of us, and we step through—and the next space is amazing. It’s like a jungle, only the plants are hanging in the air. Wires crisscross everywhere, shaping a three-dimensional grid. A bridge like the last bridge—with a grating and a ladder over one rail—passes through. I suppose it connects to the other side, but I can’t see that far; it’s obscured by plants hanging, clinging, blooming. The space is at least as big as the junk-collection void. The foliage is so thick we have a hard time crossing, and I’m almost giddy with the smell and the colors—green leaves, blue stems and trunks, red flowers, pink pods.

“You can’t eat those,” the boy says. “Don’t even try.”

“He tried a long time ago and got sick,” the woman says. “Came out of a sac dumb, like all of us. The girl finds some like you and takes them elsewhere, but she won’t tell us where.”

“She’s lost,” the boy says.

“Am not lost,” the girl insists. “Just waiting.”

Now I know for sure this isn’t the same girl. Same size, same face, same eyes, same hair, the same personality—just a different girl, less energetic, fading like a bee away too long from the hive. I don’t know what makes me think of that, except we’re surrounded by flowers.

The woman pushes aside branches and red petals break away and twist down. Above us, I see something moving slowly, hanging from the wires. From what I can make out through the growth, it’s orange and blue and round, four or five meters wide, plenty big enough to be scary. I think again of spiders and flies.

“Don’t worry about that one,” the woman says. “It stays in this space. Doesn’t bother us. It cleans up the garden.”

We make it halfway across the bridge. Another bridge intersects, forming an X. We go left again. “There are rooms that make food,” the woman continues. “They give us water and a place to live and sleep. We usually stick close to them, but there’s something you have to see.”

The orange and blue doughnut clambers by, passing over the bridge. Lots of thin legs with tiny sharp hooks and snipping claws. It pauses, looks us over through a fringe of shining kitten-blue eyes, then drops along the wires, swinging and hooking around the plants. It’s not really like a spider, because the body is shaped like a circle, a torus, a doughnut .

A taste comes into my mouth, sweet and crumbly, and there’s something hot and bitter along with it— coffee.

“Makes you think of coffee, doesn’t it?” the woman asks. “I don’t know what coffee is. Do you?”

“Not yet.” I’m mostly glad to be with them, glad to be traveling in company again, but I’m also scared. I don’t think I’m going to like what they’re about to show me, because the woman is looking more downhearted and the boy more excited, with a nervous, trick-or-treat aspect.

“How long you been awake?” the boy asks.

“Days. Not long.”

We reach the other side. A door is open.

“This one never closes. That lets the smells from the garden into our rooms,” the boy says.

“It’s sweet,” the woman says, “but I’m getting tired of it. I think I’ll move on.” She puts her arm around the girl. The girl doesn’t like her touch but is too tired to shrug it off.

“You do that,” the boy says. It sounds like an old dispute.

The woman goes first and crooks her finger, urging me to follow.

We’ve crossed the garden, gone through the open door, and walk down a short corridor that intersects another corridor, where the boy sweeps his arms in welcome. “This is home,” he says.

The glim lights are bright enough to see clearly but are dim compared to the garden. A long line of doors stretches hundreds of meters to either side. The curve here is more distinct. Chambers open on both sides. The ceiling or inboard wall may be transparent, but looking up doesn’t solve any mysteries, because the inner spaces of the hull are dark. A few small fogged lights, vague shapes, are all I can make out. I wonder if these rooms are where the colonists will stay when they all awaken and get ready for the landing.