Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

“We’ll slow down?” Kim asks.

Nell says, “Ship might be responding to prior programming, not to our threats.”

“A destination has been chosen?” I ask. “Why didn’t Ship Control tell us?”

“Maybe it doesn’t want us to know. Maybe we’re being manipulated. I don’t know the answers.”

I’m still tingling with the shock of this potential revelation. A turning maneuver, rearranging the shields—that’s actually a viable alternate theory. “ They weren’t trying to kill us—and we didn’t force them to back down?”

“No,” Tsinoy says.

“Then what the hell good are we, sitting up here, thinking we’re in charge?” I ask.

“Clearly,” Nell says, “we’ve got more research to do.” She looks at me and crooks a long finger. “Will you join me in Ship for a moment? Before you go, I need Kim to see something as well.”

“What about me?” my twin asks.

“One at a time,” Nell says.

I approach the hemisphere and lay my hands beside Nell’s. She gives me a long, puzzled look. “Someone in here knows you,” she says softly. “Both of you.”

We go in.

A few minutes later, we emerge. Kim goes next. My twin watches with apparent calm. Does he suspect? Then, Nell invites him into Ship. What she tells him or shows him there, I don’t know.

The journey is not dangerous, the girl says, but it is devious and may take a while. To that end, we pack a lunch and some extra clothes and water. Ship is adapting. There is hope that we can change things—if we are kept informed.

And that is our mission. To find the girl’s mother and learn as much as we can. There are no farewells. We simply take our supplies in gray bags and move aft from the tent-shaped chamber. Kim and I are not complacent—we do not believe there is safety anywhere, but I also do not believe the girl is leading us into a trap. We may have the same approach to differing agendas, but for now, agreement should be possible.

We climb into the hull’s cap chamber, which is immense beyond our previous experience. In Hull Zero One, behind the cap chamber, a single water tank had filled the center of the hull, but here, Kim and I are surprised to find six tanks, each as large or larger. Their huge “eyes” are filled with the hypnotic beauty of trillions of gallons of water, interrupted by narrow turquoise voids, smaller bubbles rejoining great ones. Placid. Dormant.

“Why six?” Kim asks. I have no answer—the girl has no answer. Our curiosity is not her concern. She guides us out to the perimeter of the cap chamber. Looking up, I notice a bump in the center of the vast bulkhead supporting the six tanks, what might be a round hatch or access point. I think this could be the entrance to a more efficient route down the center line of the hull, between the tanks, but one we are not taking.

The girl leads us to a corridor that circles around the tank cap. We echo along the corridor until we reach a control pylon, positioned at a junction with another corridor leading aft. The pylon supports a simple flat visual display. This is new to us—but not to the girl. This is her domain. With deft fingers, she calls up our present location, then a map of the spaces we will encounter moving down the length of the water tanks. We are still hundreds of meters below the skin of the hull. The hull, so far, has shown no signs of resuming its high rate of spin, for which I’m grateful. I feel no need of extra challenges.

The display reveals thousands of spherical chambers arranged in rows and clusters around the tanks, none smaller than a hundred meters across. “Forest balls?” I ask.

“Like that, but no,” the girl says.

“What, then?”

“I don’t have the words.”

Kim and I quirk our lips. It’s obvious this hull is different from the one we were birthed in—but why? The girl doesn’t have the words.

As in Hull Zero One, the corridors are lined with bands and radiances. Again, it seems these must be guides for factors—indicating the corridors were not meant primarily for human travel. Kim takes an interest in an oval radiance of black and green lines, about as wide as two of my hands—less than one of his. I wait for him as he runs his fingers over it. The girl, as always, moves ahead by ten or twelve meters, then pauses to allow us to catch up.

Kim shakes his head and we move on. “No factors,” he says. Brief but sufficient—we’ve gone some ways and have yet to encounter cleaners, retrievers, or any of the other peculiarities we met in Hull Zero One.

The girl has assumed her characteristic lotus.

“Why no factors?” Kim asks.

She unfolds and stretches. “It isn’t dirty here, and nobody’s dying.”

“Why not birth us here , then, where it’s clean and things won’t chase us?” Kim asks. His tone has an accusing edge. Big Yellow has always seemed remarkably together and calm, perhaps because of his obvious strength, or perhaps because those are simply innate qualities marked somewhere on his page in the Catalog.

The girl moves on. “I don’t know,” she calls back.

I think about asking if she’s the one who rescued me after my chilly birth, but if it doesn’t matter to her, then it doesn’t matter to me. Sentiment and memory are severely mismatched in our unbalanced and wretched world.

Odd how food and water and a clean body—and a few moments of rest—lead me into philosophy.

Kim touches another oval. “If we could read them, these would tell us where we are and where to go,” he says.

“Right,” I say. “Anything bubbling up from memory?”

“Not yet,” he says. “You?”

We’re making conversation, putting off the inevitable. We’re both reluctant to talk here about what Nell showed us. The girl’s hearing is remarkably acute.

“Well, I’d like to say these are orientation signs used by factors, but there are no factors.”

He snorts his humor. “What in the hell are we doing here?”

“Following,” I say.

“Away from food and water…” He pauses to frown intensely at another oval. “More of these, just around here. That could mean another intersection is coming up. I wonder if she can read them.”

I look for the girl but she’s way ahead, out of sight beyond a curve in the corridor. Suddenly, Kim pulls me close. “Nell tells me I have to watch you.”

I swallow. “I don’t blame her.”

“She thinks you’re the real deal… whatever that means.”

“Thanks,” I whisper.

“Did she tell you about the book in the netting?”

I nod and point to his big hands on my arms. “Looser, please.”

“She says you have little bumps on your head, but the other one doesn’t. You’re not identical.”

“I didn’t check him,” I say.

“Why would he hide his book in the egg? Why not just show it to us? You did, after all.”

“It’s probably in code,” I suggest, as if making an excuse.

“She figured it out.”

I hadn’t realized Nell was that quick. I feel like a little boy caught trying to hide a dirty secret—even though it isn’t me, and it isn’t my secret. “Oops,” is all I can say.

“She didn’t tell me if she read it all,” Kim says. “Just the part about looking for Mother, and making sure we agree to crunch Destination Guidance. We all wanted that, didn’t we, at first? All but Tsinoy.”

“Yeah. But he wrote it down like an instruction. Like he was following orders. So… where did he get his orders?”

Kim relaxes his grip. “What else did Nell show you?”

The biggest discovery of all. I’m still not sure I believe it. “We carry a lot of Ship’s memory and programming inside us. Maybe more. We’re like safety storage—a biological backup. Ship is recovering memory from us each time we enter. Some of the parts that looked burned are growing back. We’re helping fill them in. Especially Nell and Tsinoy.”