Greg Bear: Hull Zero Three

My stomach has settled—no food helps.

The quality of the light ahead changes—it’s pinker, then bluer. There’s something ahead, an opening in the side of the tube. Getting to it takes me about fifty hops and pushes. Then I am there. The opening leads to a larger space, a chamber or void filled with drifting objects, large and small. Some are irregular, others geometric, smoothly curved, or angular, like pieces of structure or machinery. I recklessly kick into the space.

Something wide and black and massive wobbles out of nowhere and nearly squashes me against the outer wall. I scramble around and out from under large flopping limbs, plates and matted fur. Out of the fur seeps a glob of dark fluid that bobs against my face. With a slight suck the blob surrounds my head and I can neither see nor breathe. It’s heavy and thick like syrup and smells cloying, poison-sweet, stinging my face, and if it gets in my eyes—

Frantic swipes and wipes of my hands and arms get most of it off, but a film still clings. I fling my arms out to clear my fingers, and thick drops fly to the far walls or spatter against other masses, other shapes.

Blinking, I try to see through a blur. I’m half-blind. All I can hear—once I clear my ears—is faint sounds of bumping, knocking, sucking. One hand still clings to a hank of fur on one side of the dead creature that nearly smashed me.

More dark blobs extrude from some other nearby dead things. I can’t make out their shapes clearly. The blobs collide and merge. I dodge one about the size of my head. It wobbles and shimmers in the breezy current of my motion, then spatters against a long, hard chunk, part of a broken machine, I assume: edges irregular and hard. It’s big, three times my height. The blob wraps around one end and decides to travel up its length like paint on a stick.

In my head, I’ve been putting together some sort of diagram or map from both memory—such as it is—and logic. The hall/tube seems to run around the perimeter of something—Ship, presumably. I vaguely picture Ship spinning, pressing me down against the outer tube. When Ship spins, the hall or tube seems to curve up . Up would be inboard ; down, outboard .

I take note of the fact that this void, filled with broken or dead stuff, extends from the inner circumference of the hall’s curve—what used to be the top, before everything began to float and fly.

That means the void is inboard. I’m in a floating pile of junk. Useless as I am, maybe I belong here. What original use the junk may have had is not obvious. Some of it seems to have been alive—animals of a sort, leaking life blood—but nothing I see is familiar.

An odd feeling comes back to me, however. I’ve done this before . I know from weightless. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I’ve practiced this sort of maneuver before, often—in Dreamtime.

Large masses remain dangerous even when weightless—they can crush. They can also provide good points of vantage, good sport—kickoff, flight, stopping. Big masses will move only a little if I hit them, little masses I can use to propel myself if I fling them away.

After a little practice, I will move around in the void and take an inventory of its contents, may be useful later on. Maybe I’ll find something to eat. The leaked blobs, however, did not taste at all good.

“You’re a mess.”

The high, sweet voice, is practically in my ear. I can almost feel the breath on my neck. Frantic, I try to twist about, but I’m between two objects, kicking away from one and hoping to bound off another, to get back to the opening and the tube. I can turn only by pulling my arms in, and then I rotate around an axis that runs through my left shoulder through my right hip.

Only then can I catch sight of the little one, floating about three body lengths away. She’s drawn herself up in a graceful knot, legs crossed as if squatting in a lotus —another teacher word. Her arms are folded. She follows me with large gray eyes.

She looks disappointed.

“You’re not dead,” I say.

“No. But it is.” She unfolds an arm and points at the big thing that had nearly crushed me.

I manage to kick off from another jagged white mass, heavy as a boulder. The mass slowly moves in the opposite direction, knocking aside other chunks and shapes. One of those shapes, I see, is part of a human body. The head is half chewed away, the legs are missing, and one arm is gone below the elbow. My shock nearly causes me to go off course, but I correct by pushing at a blackish, rubbery shape half my size, then correct, rather skillfully, to drift slowly in front of the girl.

“He’s dead, too,” she says, indicating the mangled corpse. Her arm is wrapped in a piece of dirty gray fabric. Blood shows through.

“The big thing tried to eat both of you?” I ask.

“No,” she answers. “It doesn’t eat—it cleans things up. It’s a cleaner. Sorry about your clothes. This body has already been stripped. We can find another, with pants.”

“You rob the dead?”

“Or anyone else who isn’t paying attention.”

“This is a trash heap? We’re in a junkyard?”

She nods. “Cleaners bring stuff here. Even dead cleaners.” She looks at the square book in my left hand. I’ve managed to hold on to it for all this time, unwilling to lose my one possession, but too busy to actually open it up and look inside.

“That’s mine,” she says, her eyes bright and sad. “I earned it.”

“Is it?” I bring it close to my eyes, reluctant to give it up. Up close, I see that what I took to be seven grooves on the back cover were in fact seven groups of seven scratches.

“It is. I earned it.”

I slowly reach out and place it in her outstretched hand.

“Where do you come from?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says, clutching the book to her chest. She’s wearing a loose red tunic and shorts and looks like a dab of paint in a void otherwise filled with duns and blacks, grays and muddled whites.

“How long have you been here?” I manage to wipe my eyes clear enough to focus on the farthest wall.

“We need to get you to water. You should know better than to get that stuff in your eyes. Don’t rub.”

Water. I realize how thirsty I am and think back on the dripping condensation—how I should have caught it on my tongue, lapped it up.

“Is there water nearby?”

“There might be.”

“Where? Here?”

“No.” A sour expression. “This is just a good place to hide.”

“Why did you pull me out of the cold?”

“I get lonely,” she says with a sniff. Somehow, I doubt that’s the whole truth.

“What happened to the thing that grabbed you?”

“ They killed it when it tried to clean them.”

“Who killed it?”

“Others, not like you and me. Well, maybe a little. There’s a lot of variety, most of it bad.”

This expands my thinking to a painful degree. I’m drifting away from her again on air currents, bumping up against small stuff. So many questions, and this girl has reversed roles, making herself a teacher and me a student.

“How long have you been here?” I ask.

She shrugs. “I stopped counting after forty-nine.”

Seven groups of seven.

“Forty-nine what?”

“You’re ugly without clothes,” she says. “Let’s get out of here and find you some.” She uncrosses her legs and extends her arms, then unexpectedly uses my stomach to kick off. I whoof and drift back, and she shoots away toward the tube, though how she knows where it is in all this floating stuff is beyond comprehension.

But so is everything else.

I rebound and clumsily follow. The girl keeps her legs together, toes pointed, arms at her sides, spinning like a little bird or fish, and swiftly reaches out to push or kick, to echo or deflect.