Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

Nell backs down from her control board. “Why not?” she asks, teeth gritted.

“Because I can’t find most of the navigational data or any way to control Ship’s engines,” Tsinoy says. “I think we’ve been sidetracked into bad space—a really dangerous region—and as far as I can tell, we’re less than halfway to where we want to be. We can’t destroy Destination Guidance. Whoever they are, we need their help.”

“But they want us dead ,” Nell says.

None of us, it seems, has noticed that the girls have returned—and are listening to us all with worried faces.

“How do we know that?” Tsinoy asks.

“Ship Control,” I say.

“How reliable is that?” Tsinoy asks, her spikes at full defensive posture, an awesome display that expands her to three times her former dimensions.

We all back away.

The girl nearest me pushes out her lower lip. “We tell you. Mother tells us.”

“Oh, it’s that , is it?” Tsinoy says. “We’ve never met Mother. We have no way to question her. We can’t make this decision without more evidence, because if we do, there’s a very real chance we’ll never find our way to a good star. Ship will die out here.”

“We’re dying now,” my twin says. “Can’t you hear it? We’re being sandblasted to oblivion. You said so yourself.”

Nell listens to all this with a frightened grimace. She’s trying to form the right words to bring us back on some sort of constructive track. But the problem is being stated very clearly by our formidable astrogation expert.

Tsinoy pulls in her spines. “There’s a maneuver that might explain turning off the shield, temporarily,” she says. “It’s part of Ship’s standard procedure. But it doesn’t make sense—not now, not yet.”

If you’re like me, you’ve been trying to form a picture of Destination Guidance. Chances are you’ve been at least as successful. We’re not supposed to know about them. Our brains refuse to seriously consider their little spherical refuge down there on the leading point of the moonlet—and we have no idea what they look like or what they want. If they were ever a planned part of this mission—and that makes sense, at least as far as our ignorance allows us to judge—then they’ve failed. From what we’ve been able to piece together, they’ve stayed past their time, and they are very likely responsible for most, if not all, of our problems.

But to fight something, you really have to try to understand its motivations—particularly when the something you’re fighting holds most of the cards, the deck is stacked against you, and the whole gambling hall is on fire and filled with thugs.

The shivering and grinding gets louder. Unbearably loud. We shouldn’t be here when this happens.

“Our brains are packed with crap ,” my twin shouts to me as we move aside. Then we put our heads together. We’re both thinking as fast as we can to arrange what few facts we have into some usable order. “Fake history, fake lives—storybook crap . How can we replace all that crap with useful information? We have to force our way into data that doesn’t want to be known.”

“We just tried ,” I say, working to keep my voice low but still be heard over the cacophony. “Why does Ship even tempt us?”

“We should be getting the hell out of here!” Kim cries out, covering his ears. The big fellow is on the edge of panic, and if he loses it, where does that leave us?

“Because there’s a contradiction in Ship’s systems, all of them,” my twin says. “Right?”

That much is obvious.

“So talk to me,” he says, staring into my eyes. “Double-team with me. Tell me what I should be thinking.”

I go back through a quick selection of my inner mumblings and fragmented theories. We’re both so far into this little game that we don’t see until we’re almost finished that everyone else is watching us, quiet, waiting.

All but Nell. She has once more applied herself to the blue hemisphere controls, her eyes turned up in her head. We silently wish her luck.

“We’ve got false memories,” I say, “so that when we arrive at a destination, we’re fully rounded individuals. We might be teachers, of a sort—but we need to have something to teach . Cultural history, rules and regulations, courtesy, patterns of behavior… How to get things done as a group.”

“Good,” my twin says. “My thoughts almost exactly.”

“We’re more effective if we believe in what we’re teaching—if we’ve lived it and experienced some of the consequences of screwing up. We have to have a history. So we’re given one. But we also have to be filled in on the real-world situation.”

My twin carries on from this, nodding his head frantically and holding up one hand as if he wants to control an orchestra. “That’s right. And there is no real-world situation. Something has asked us to be made and trotted out before the stage has been set, our stage, our play—before there are colonists to teach or any situation someone could possibly expect us to face.”

I’m getting the rhythm. Two heads are better than one. And it might be possible that we’ve been fed different parts of the puzzle.

“We saw part of the Catalog,” I say. “Centuries of effort and money and programming, all poured into the gene pool .” I look over my shoulder at Tomchin and Kim. “Not all the suitable planets are going to be exactly like Earth. So colonists come in a variety of styles, suited to particular environments. If you don’t have to carry around fully formed people, if all you’ve got is embryos—or even more simple than that, instruction sets fed into bio-generators …”

I am surprised by that word.

“You just made that up?” my twin asks.

“Maybe. Bio-generators hooked up to a database of all possible life-forms, Earth life modified to occupy the far-flung reaches of all practical evolution….” I’m shivering again. The others, including Nell, are like a crowd in a jazz club, moving in around a hot jam session.

Nell says, “Whoever put together Ship wanted us ignorant of our true nature and origins? That’s what you’re saying, right?”

My twin says, “We wouldn’t need to know about our origins. In fact, it might distract us.” Even Tomchin is following our dialogue with signs of comprehension. Tsinoy is so close I feel her ivory spikes digging into my calf. I withdraw that leg and look at her resentfully.

“Go on,” she grumbles. “Whoever made me screwed me over and told me nothing about why.”

“Well, you are the real puzzle here,” my twin says. “Trackers shouldn’t have fully formed human intellects and probably would never be employed as navigators.”

“Astrogators,” Tsinoy corrects. “But why would you have any memory of something that shouldn’t be in the first place?”

This pushes us into the embarrassing zone of our speculations. I am no braver than my twin but am less experienced, so I go first. “I think part of our programming, our historical indoctrination, might contain contingency plans—dark ones. Secrets we’d never acknowledge, never need to acknowledge—unless things go badly wrong.”

“Cleaning up planets,” Tsinoy says. “I’m a Killer.”

“ Oh ,” Nell says, a sound of dread.

“If we get where we’re going and there’s competition…”

“We can’t go anywhere else,” my twin says. “We’ll be out of fuel. It’s either get along—which may or may not happen—or kill and strip the system to survive. To accomplish our mission.”