Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

“You win,” I say.

“You started from the girdle—near the midsection of the hull?” he asks.

“I think so.”

“Me too. Behind that, it’s probably all engine. Each hull has a big engine in the rear.”

“Guess, or fact?”

“A little of both. The big water tank—that’s reaction mass mined from the ice moonlet. It’s piped up through the fairings. The struts. I’ve seen some of the robots or factors or whatever they are down there. Maybe we can spot them, if our elegant pilot can spin this thing around a little, give us a tour?” He glances over his shoulder at the spidery woman.

She smiles and rolls her hands on the blue hemisphere. “The girl seems to have set it on autopilot. I can’t change our course. But I can adjust our orientation.”

The view outside the port changes accordingly, and we guide her with competing instructions until we look directly down upon the forward tip of the moonlet… and a tiny, pale green sphere that seems to have been glued to the ice.

“Destination Guidance,” my other says. “That’s their work station and living quarters.”

“Ship Control seems worried about Destination Guidance,” I say, trying to contribute.

“You’ve talked to Ship Control?”

“Maybe. Once. Destination Guidance should all be dead by now.”

“Who are they?” the spidery woman asks.

“They choose between the best destinations at midpoint, based upon all the data gathered by Ship.” My twin is quite the professor—a better, more learned Teacher by far, it seems.

He’s right. I’m remembering a lot more. Confirmation, affirmation, plus a kind of competitive challenge. It becomes more and more obvious, more and more logical. Even the distance we had hoped to travel starts to emerge in memory—five hundred light-years.

Thirty at twenty. A journey of more than thirty centuries at twenty percent of the speed of light. An enormous velocity, but not nearly enough to noticeably shrink our subjective time. I look up from my reverie, tell him what I just thought or just remembered. “Does it match?”

My other nods. “It’s in the book. We’ve had these memories before. But… can we trust them?”

I look at his book and feel a kind of hunger. It belongs to me, too, after all. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Because we’re not born—we’re made to order,” he says.

“I know,” I say weakly.

“Ship—the hull, at least—keeps making us for some reason.”

“The little girls pray for us,” I say.

He lifts an eyebrow, crusted with blood from a cut. “Most of us die. We don’t get our memories from education or from experience, from anything we would call learning. We’re imprinted. If we come into the right situation, the imprinting emerges, and we’re complete, ready to roll. If we don’t, we flounder.”

“That’s in your book?”

“Mostly speculation, but it sounds right.”

“I’d rather be born of woman and raised by my community,” I say. “That’s what I want to remember.”

The spidery woman nods agreement.

“And maybe that’s what we will remember, if we get to where we belong,” my other says. “Illusion is everything, after all.”

That’s a little cynical, I think, but it doesn’t feel right to criticize my other self—not yet.

The girls rouse long enough to look fondly at us, at each other—all’s right with the world—there are two Teachers—then, fall back asleep. Big Yellow—who cradles the Knob-Crest in his huge arms, where he looks childish by comparison—listens with heavy-lidded eyes. Only the spidery woman is actually wide awake, energized by what little control she has over our small craft.

I look down at her—aft, rather. Ship is accelerating, creating a bit of pull. “Where are we headed?”

“To another hull, I hope,” she says. “We came from Hull Zero One. We’ve just made a lengthwise run along the flank of what I think is Hull Zero Two. It’s pretty much a wreck forward of the engine. Lots of holes, like something big blew it out. There’s Hull Zero Three, of course—on the other side—a few dozen kilometers from here. If it’s wrecked, I don’t know where we’ll go. Maybe back to where we came from.”

That draws a protest from Big Yellow. “Let me out first,” he says. “I’ll take my chances on that moon down there.”

My other smiles. “Quite a team,” he says.

“Do we all have dupes?” I ask.

“Probably. But… they look alike to me, and nobody has a name.”

“It does,” I say, pointing at the Tracker. It lifts its snout, and its pink eyes track us wearily, then close again. “Its name is Tsinoy.”

“That might not mean much,” my other says. “I think that just means ‘Chinese.’”

“Funny,” Big Yellow says, “he doesn’t look Chinese.”

None of us knows why this might be humorous, but my dupe and I and the spidery woman laugh. Maybe it isn’t funny. Maybe it’s rude. But Tsinoy doesn’t seem to mind, just rearranges in its huddle and pulls the netting tighter.

“Third try’s the charm,” the spidery woman says. “Come up here if you want to see what we’re up against.”

My twin floats toward the port, near the blue hemisphere. “There’s room for you, too,” she says to me, her voice silky. She enjoys being in control, in her element—who wouldn’t? She might even enjoy the company of me and my dupe. But I’m pretty sure she doesn’t understand the vast scheme of things any better than we do. She just knows her way around the hulls, and that’s the kind of knowledge we need right now. She’s more important than any number of Teachers.

I lay my hand next to hers on the blue sphere. Instantly, without benefit of the port, I’m out in deep space, no egg-craft, just flying in the emptiness, thick stars ahead and that awesome nebula to one side.

Something is glowing at the nebula’s core—several things, actually, almost unbearably bright.

I feel her fingers move mine, instructionally, and my point of view spins around. I seem to face the hulls, the moonlet, all in a broad sweep.

“Isn’t it grand?” she asks.

It is impressive. The glimpse through the observation blister in the first hull did not begin to do it justice—nor did my dream-vision. The totality of Ship is huge. Hundreds of thousands could live in the forward space of each spindle-shaped hull—but that isn’t what the hulls are for. They’re not meant to be big apartment buildings. They could be huge testing areas for the Klados, preparing for planetfall.

Klados. It’s a Greek word. Cladistics is derived from it—whatever that is. The Klados describes us, links us to everything that comes from the Catalogs. Where are the Catalogs kept? How are they accessed? Who controls the birthing chambers?

The egg-craft moves in toward the last uninspected hull. There’s its number, a big 03, painted on the outboard side. The paint—along with the hull’s entire surface—looks scarred and pitted and gray as we pass around the blunt nose, searching for another docking port.

I’ve learned enough about the sphere that I move my fingers and twirl around, facing forward. I’m not looking for the nebula or the stars, but for that other glow that spreads like an umbrella ahead of Ship.

I move to Ship’s outboard side, near the origin of a pale grayish beam emanating from the third hull. The beam shoots forward, then fans out into space. Similar beams radiate from the other two hulls, but the beam from Hull Zero Two flickers weakly. It’s not up to full strength.

The beams merge somewhere ahead and form a barely discernible gray shield that must be hundreds of kilometers wide. Every so often, the shield sparks —infinitely small glints spread across its surface, then travel down the gray beams. Spinning around slowly to follow the progress of a parade of these sparks, I notice that there are runnels or small channels carved aft along each hull—lots of them.