Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

I passed three forest balls and several junk balls. Processors were recycling broken parts—including factors. Lots of factors damaged recently. Are there wars in the hull? I believe I’ve found a

A brutal dark line.

The Ship is very badly off. I’ve come upon a crude membrane that separates much of the forward sections from (I assume) vacuum. Pressure bellies the membrane outward from surviving bulkheads and stanchions, and it’s translucent, I think, but I can’t make out anything except a grayish blur that might be the ice ball—our big/little moon. The moon with the snake carved into it. Serpent Moon.

Considering how near the core I think I am, that means a pretty big chunk of the Ship is missing on the ice ball side. Factors are still cleaning up; it’s dangerous to travel around here because they might mistake me for debris and haul me to a junk ball. Some chambers are so badly scarred I can’t imagine they’ll ever be recovered, but repair factors are still at work, moving sluggishly, relaying the active surfaces a few centimeters at a time, working only during spin-down. I’d describe these spaces but you’ll

Another dark line.

This has to be quick. I think I know a little about Destination Guidance. There was a work party revived a long time ago. All this is vague, because the concepts that support my suppositions are still buried somewhere in Dreamtime. I think the Ship (we are definitely on a Ship in space, between the stars—physically, really, not just a mock-up) came to a point in its journey where a decision had to be made between two or more candidates, planets or stars with planets. A team was created to make that decision. I don’t believe they ever lived in the hulls. They were probably created on a station or “bridge” down on the ice moon. Far away—down below, inboard, and maybe a little behind the leading points of the hulls.

Covering most of a page in the book is something fascinating—a quick sketch of part of Ship. It looks like this:

I suppose if someone draws a map for a baby, the baby has to spend years growing up enough to even begin to understand. But we are not exactly babies. This sketch means a lot of things to me. It graphically confirms what I thought I saw in the observation blister and in my dream. The scale is off—the moon/ice ball should be much bigger, the spindles longer and smaller in comparison to the moon—but the rough truth of it is evident.

This is Ship, then. Three hulls shaped like spindles, one big oblong ice moon, and something I think must be at the leading point of the moon, between the spindles… way down below.

It makes sense. It arouses things from Dreamtime that start me quivering until I worry I won’t be able to stop. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. The Ship is not just sick, it’s gone way wrong .

Wrong way.

I read on.

The little sphere down there, from what I’ve been told, is actually pretty big, but not nearly as big as the spindles. She’s visited, the tall, lean one, kitten-gray, kind of pretty. She may or may not be a sport. But she’s gone now. Little Killer got her.

And inside this sphere, Destination Guidance was born and was supposed to make decisions about which planet or star we would fly toward. There were five.

The tall one seemed to have her own set of patterning, her own knowledge. She knew a lot about Ship that I don’t. She said Destination Guidance is raised from true infants, originals, unblemished—unpatterned.

I’m not sure what she meant. I certainly remember being a child, even being a baby—some things, anyway.

But after they do their job, they are supposed to retire or maybe even just die. I don’t know how long they were supposed to work. From what I’ve seen, however, I think a mistake was made. A bad mistake. It nearly destroyed this hull. The other hulls might be all right—I don’t know, since I can’t see them directly, only in this walking dream I have. (That’s walking, not waking. I walk over the ice ball and look up sometimes. But you probably have the same dream.)

Destination Guidance. Something scared them badly, maybe started all this, made the Ship sick, I’m learning from

Damn, another brutal dark line.

I found my own body this time. It’s true, then. I was never a baby.

It’s dark at the core. The big store of liquid water keeps it from getting too cold. I can’t see them. Don’t come here. One is small, one is big. The small one is worse

That’s it. The book has maybe five more blank pages. It had to end badly, of course, but I wonder at the strength necessary to keep writing even after being “caught”—and losing the blood that stains the cover and page edges.

It’s human blood, all right.

I’m exhausted. There’s weight now. I was decoding and reading right through spin-up, but found a corner to ride it out and hardly noticed. I stick the book in my pocket, next to the flexible mirror, and then take out the mirror and look at myself again.

It scares me, but I know I’m not going to stick around and sponge off the boy. I’m almost reconciled to that. To being a tool in some greater process. It’s not faith, it’s certainly not comforting, but holding that identity and purpose in my pocket—and maybe in my dreams—is more important than anything that’s happened to me yet.

I need to sleep. I want to see if I dream something more about the Ship, the hulls—if the book has opened the spigots of memory I know are there.

The woman and the boy shout through the open door. I’ve been dozing for what feels like minutes. In that brief time, I’ve come up with a face: a female face, not the woman who lives with the boy. I try to recover her features, but it’s no use.

The voices are insistent.

The boy and the woman drag me out of the room and down the hall to the boy’s room. The boy makes a motion with his hands on the wall and the door closes.

“They’re coming,” he says. “We stay in here and they leave us alone.”

“Where’s the girl?” I ask. I don’t see her—there’s not enough furniture to hide even her small frame.

“The girls are frail,” the woman says. “They can’t spend too much time away from their mother.”

“Where’s their mother?” I ask.

They both shrug. We sit together, saying nothing, not even looking at each other. The atmosphere is sad, stifling, like caged animals in a zoo .

Then the woman looks up at me, biting her lip. There’s sweat on her bare arm. We’re sitting on a low couch with a straight, square back that is soft enough not to hurt, but not much softer. The boy either has only a loose sort of control over this room after all, or likes it Spartan.

I have no idea what that word means, but it implies serviceable but not comfortable.

The woman slides down a little, eyes still fixed on mine, until we’re almost touching. She puts her hand on my leg. This provokes an odd feeling. I don’t know what to do. Her touch certainly isn’t appropriate, given the danger outside—but then, maybe that’s why she does it, because she’s frightened and wants reassurance.

But I know sure as God made little green apples (there it goes again! Spartan apples, maybe) that I’m not the one from whom she’s going to get reassurance. Still, I pat her hand, then remove it gently, letting it rest limp and damp on the couch. This effort has cost her. The sadness inside me is almost unbearable.