Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

“What do you know?” the girl asks. “What have you learned from where you’ve been?”

This is a reasonable question, though why she waits until now to ask it… Maybe she thinks I’ve learned something essential and now I’m ready to talk sensibly. I think about what I know. It isn’t much.

“How many of me have you met?” I ask.

“Ten,” the woman says. “They went forward. The cleaners brought some of them back and put them in the freezers. When the girl came here, she was alone. She says there are others like her… but she won’t tell me more than that. Maybe you can persuade her.” They exchange a look. The girl’s face is rigid. She has a steel will.

“Tell us your story,” the girl says.

I tell them what I know. After a few minutes, the boy joins us and listens skeptically.

“We’re on a Ship,” I conclude. “A Ship in space, between the stars. I thought we were supposed to sleep, to be awakened when we near our planet. That’s what I remember from Dreamtime. A little girl just like you pulled me out of a room full of new bodies. She said we have to chase heat or die. Doors closed behind us….”

I go on. The highlights for the girl and the woman seem to be that there are three parts to the Ship—three hulls—and that we’re connected to a giant piece of dirty ice. I add something new: that the ice might provide fuel and reaction mass for the Ship.

I tell them again about the voice from the wall. The spin-up and spin-down they’ve figured out. The boy doesn’t want to hear about the silvery figure. He doesn’t seem interested in most of my story, but this bit really upsets him.

They don’t know much about the cycling heat and cold. Here, places that are warm stay warm, and places that are cold stay cold.

“Tell us again about the voice,” the woman says.

“It asked me if I was part of Ship Control. It says it made me. I didn’t understand.”

“You weren’t asleep. You weren’t awakened. You were grown ,” the girl says. “ She pulled you out. She thought you were important. You keep trying to go forward.”

I think this through as carefully as I can, given my thudding heart and the urge to just sit and scream. My hand reaches into my overalls pocket and pulls out the square piece of plastic with the stripe on one side and the scrub marks on the other. I hold it up. “What’s this for?” I ask.

“For remembering stuff,” the girl says. “You get them and make them into books.” She reaches into her own pocket, feels something there, and makes a bitter face.

“Do I always tell you what I know before I go forward?” I ask.

The woman puts her hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl shrugs it off.

“Give it to him. By rights it’s his,” she says.

“He didn’t bring mine ,” the girl says. “He lost it. Maybe the next one will have it.”

I stare at the square of thin plastic.

“I don’t have one,” the woman says, turning away. “I’ve never had one. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have yours.”

“Give it to him,” the boy says. “There’ll be others.”

“But it’s been so long, and I need to find my mother,” the girl says, her voice cracking. “I need Mother .”

I look between the three of them.

“It’s pretty comfortable here,” the boy says. “I close the door when the cleaners come. We hide. I tell the rooms to make food. The rooms listen to me. I say, give him his book.”

The boy seems to want to be in charge. This might be his version of a threat. The girl puts on a stubborn face, then simply looks tired. She pulls a black-covered rectangle out of her pocket. “It doesn’t say anything about Mother. Most of it’s just stupid.”

I reach to take it from her quivering fingers. “Thank you,” I say.

Then she pulls out a short, thin stick with a blackened, sharpened tip, a kind of pencil . “You can use this if you want.”

I hold it. My fingers are sweaty. My eyes lose focus. We are born in ignorance, we die in ignorance, but maybe sometimes we learn something important and pass it along to others before we die. Or we write it down in a little book.

“The hallways going forward are full of freezers,” the boy says. “As far as I care to go, which isn’t very far, they’re full of bodies. Must be thousands of them.”

“They’re waiting to be born again,” the girl says. “Mother will make them all better. I think then they turn into girls like me.”

The boy makes a face. “Let’s get some food,” he suggests.

The boy’s inner residence has the usual pad and accordion cocoon, as well as a weird nest of bars and springs that might be exercise equipment. Long cables hang from the walls and the ceiling—good for grabbing when the weight goes. Most important, a thick tube rises from the middle of the floor. It has a rounded top with a square hole. The hole produces loaves, and if you put a bottle in the hole, it fills with water from a spigot that folds up out of sight when it’s done.

If Ship recognizes you, you get all you really need, and not one thing more—like a hamster.

After we eat, everyone is quiet, and I somehow get that they expect me to go into another room—there are several open doors down the corridor—and read my book in private. That’s the last thing I want. But it’s a ritual, apparently. It’s happened before.

Maybe I’m the only entertainment around here.

That thought almost makes me puke. I leave them to their imaginings. I’m thinking and feeling so hard that the spin-down catches me by surprise and I stumble and have to scramble back against the push, to get into my smaller, emptier room before all the weight is gone.

I float there—echoing slowly from wall to ceiling to floor, refusing to grab the cables—and pretend to lie back. Relax.

I can’t gather up the courage to open the damn thing. I am who I am. All those others… well, there’s every reason to deny them their place, their reality, because it leaves me with an insoluble problem. Identity.

What lies in my memory, waiting to be accessed, might just duplicate what’s already written in the book. Someone might have explored all of my knowledge, made all of my possible choices, run me completely out of fresh options. Someone might have lived my life all the way through.

I look closely at the book. Somehow, it feels like my book. It has little hallmarks of the character I might yet find inside my head. But I won’t believe that—not yet. I am who I am, and there’s no one else like me in the universe—right? That is a fact. It will remain a fact.

Until I open the book.

I’ve rolled it around in my hands for an hour. It’s made up of leaves of plastic, thinner than the one in my pocket. A thick brittle glue holds the leaves, the pages, between the black boards. The boards have a frayed, stained look, as if they were ripped or bent from a bigger sheet—something found in a garbage void. The stains might be blood. There are also dark marks on the page edges.

Not opening the book could be suicidal. How many times have I had access to a book like this and refused to open it—echoing through mistake after mistake, without the heavy assurance of past experience to guide me? But I know I’ve lived for years, decades, that I wasn’t just squirted into a sac and shaken into existence a couple of dozen spin-ups before. This conviction is necessary for my sanity. This conviction is going to kill me. Now of course it’s time to curse my maker, whoever that is—the hull or Ship Control or God …

The first time I’ve thought of that name, that concept. It should open so many new doors… but I don’t feel it. The word is curiously empty. I have a stronger connection to whatever Ship Control is, or even Destination Guidance.