Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

The boy leads the way. The girl hangs back five or six paces. The woman is right behind me, too close. We walk perhaps forty meters, passing six chambers on both sides, and the air suddenly chills. It’s freezing again—but it feels like this place is always cold.

One of the doors is bigger, an opening into another corridor—a long one, bluish at the far end.

The woman pauses, straightens one arm, flicks her hand, then turns left again. Wisely widdershins. Maybe I don’t remember that part correctly, about widdershins being lucky.

“Anyone have a map?” I ask.

“We don’t need one,” the boy says. “We mostly stay here.”

I ask the woman, “Where do all these creatures come from? The one in the garden, the tooth-snout, the cleaners?”

“Some are factors,” the woman says. “That’s all I know.”

“She thinks she should remember that stuff,” the boy says. “But she just can’t cough it up.” He mimics throwing up, finger in his mouth, then applies the damp finger to his head and grimaces. “Messes her up.”

“It should be different,” I agree.

“I don’t remember anything from Dreamtime,” the boy says. “I’m happier without it, I guess. You say this is a ship—I’ve never seen it that way. It just goes on forever, with people stuck inside. That’s all.”

He guides me left into another hall. The hall expands into a wide tube. The floor goes on, but we’re walking through a long cylinder lined with rectangular glass cases. The cold here is different. It has purpose. The light has gradually shaded into deep sapphire , like the inside of a glacier . I don’t know what a glacier is, except that some existed once where we came from. Mountains of ice sliding like rivers…

I see in my thoughts a wall of blue ice and white snow and maybe somebody climbing—a poke of memory so muddled I don’t feel right sharing it. Glacier. The spill of sense and imagery that fans out from this word is fascinating enough that if I were alone, I’d stop and close my eyes and just savor the visual and even tactile memories about snow and ice and sliding around on long boards, about polar caps and cubes bobbing in frosted glasses of sweet tea and lemonade—another lifetime of things icy, nothing like this bitter frigidity.

“Don’t look until she says,” the boy says.

I can’t help it. I look. The cases are coated with rime. We walk by a dozen, two dozen—all the same.

“Stop,” the woman says.

The boy watches me with that awful grin.

Blue light everywhere. More cases covered with frost. My feet are freezing. The girl hasn’t kept up. I don’t see her. I start to say something, but the boy pushes me forward. The woman guides me.

“It’s like a meat locker in here,” I say. I remember the tastes of steak and lamb and pork, all meats you want to keep cold so they won’t spoil. But nobody eats meat anymore. There’s something else—that word again, fish . Frozen fish, stacked like cordwood , whatever that is.

“We’re all meat waiting to happen,” the woman says, pleased at my expression, pleased that once again our thoughts seem to be in sync.

“We don’t belong here,” I say. Cases on all sides, above and below…

“Not when we’re alive, we don’t,” the boy agrees.

“Okay,” the woman says. “This one. Look close.” She leans over and rubs away some frost. Behind the clear surface, the case is stuffed with the same sort of sleeping cocoons I saw earlier, drawn out full length and stacked three or more to a case.

Inside each cocoon is a body. Some are badly damaged—gaping wounds, limbs missing, heads gone. Not much in the way of color except for that glacial blue. “Are they all dead?” I ask.

The boy says, “Look close .” He grabs my neck and shoves my head forward. I want to resist, to strike out and smash him… but I don’t. My nose almost touches the case. It’s so very cold. My skin would stick, just as it did before.

A few centimeters away, on the other side of the transparency, a head sticks out. It’s a man. The cocoons are too short to serve as shrouds. The face’s expression is hard, eyes blank, jaw frozen open. The cocoon is slack below the waist. The lower half of the body is missing.

It takes a moment to register what I’m looking at.

Who I’m looking at.

The features are the same, the shade of hair is probably the same. I bend and swipe my own hand, risking the cold. The body below shows another face in profile. I reach up and wipe frantically. The body above has no head. The body above that one has its back to me.

I shove the boy away and cross to the opposite side. There, I bob up and down in front of more stacks. Bodies above, beneath, all around. I run to the next row, the edge of my palm burning with cold, but it’s the same—and the next, using my other hand—

Dozens of cases, hundreds of frozen bodies, stretching off into a deep sapphire distance. I’ve inspected twenty or more of the cases on both sides. The faces I can see are all like mine. All the same. Just like mine.

“Get it?” the boy asks, fairly vibrating with excitement. The woman has crossed her arms and is trimming her fingernails with her teeth. She spits out a bit of nail.

The new memories and new words mean nothing. I don’t want to think, I don’t want to understand. I want to be empty.

“We shouldn’t be caught here when the weight goes,” the woman says. “Hard not to hurt yourself.”

She takes me by the arm, gently, and leads me up the long corridor and to the right, out of the blueness and toward the warmer rooms, where people are given food, where living people go and are welcome.

They push me through a door into cloying warmth. I stumble into the flowery sweetness of jungle air and the boy and the woman just stand there while I kneel and then fall over on a pad.

I’m weeping—weeping like a child.

The boy watches with satisfaction. The woman watches with wonder. “It’s not so bad,” she says soothingly. “You always come back.”

I’ve been here before. I can’t deny what I’ve seen. I’ve been here hundreds, maybe thousands of times, trying to do whatever it is I’m meant to do…. And every time I’ve failed.

Every time I’ve died.

“You saw another one like me?” the little girl asks.

I come up out of a deep, hot stupor and turn over on the pad. I’m feverish. Someone’s slipped me into a cocoon, I’ve slept hard, I can feel it in my muscles, slept through a spin-down, and now there’s weight again.

With a groan, I push myself out of the cocoon and lie panting and sweating on the pad. The edges of my palms hurt like hell—frostbite.

The girl holds out a bottle of water. I sit up and drink.

“You saw another one like me?” she asks again, hopeful.

“Like you.” I drink more. The lights brighten.

“She had a book?”

“Yes.”

“Did you read it?”

“No time. I wanted to return it… when I saw her again. I saved her food and water for a while, too, but…”

The girl nods. “Where was she going?”

“She wanted to go forward.”

The woman comes through a round doorway between the linked domiciles and stands for a moment, biting another fingernail. She must put each finger through rationed rotation, ten little luxuries. “Now you’re really back,” she says.

I don’t know how to respond.