Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

Ten little girls, all wearing blue overalls, all moving in a line, hand in hand. A continuous loop of cable grows from the wall of the chamber, and they grip it like the safety bar in a roller-coaster car to keep in line and travel to where Kim and I have been left to gawk. They do not speak. They do not seem to have much interest in us, and certainly not in our protests as we are corralled and gently but insistently pushed aft.

“What’s my name again?” I ask Kim.

“Shit, I don’t remember,” Kim says. “You’re Teacher. Sanjay, I think.”

The warmth becomes tropical. We are guided over several curving ridges in the chamber wall, through pillars that rise to support what looks like intertwined stretches of golden tubing, smooth and translucent, varying in diameter from a few centimeters to ten or more meters. The whole structure softly hisses and whishes. It sounds like…

Waves on a seashore.

Ocean. Salt air, spray, seagulls, patches of decaying seaweed. Wet sand squeezing between my bare toes. Earth’s primordial gene pool. Swimming in a lagoon under a hot blue sky… with my partner.

I always liked that sound.

I suppose I never actually swam in an ocean or walked on a real beach but I like the sound, anyway.

The flowering of the tubes and pipes slips behind us, and there is only a warm glow of glim lights spaced along the inboard surfaces and the near wall, shifting and coalescing into polka-dot patterns, lighting our progress like the glowing skin of a deep-sea creature.

Ahead lies a thick, rough tangle of leafy limbs coated with sprays of tiny flowers, like living stars, with a light and a life of their own. All the little glowing things watching, interested, unafraid…

A naked forest ball.

We’re entering a protected zone, to be sure, but this is more of a welcoming committee—children, the flowering forest. We are not threats. We are expected. A path opens through spreading limbs. Only now do we see that the forest’s branches bear millions of tiny thorns, exuding from their tips tiny greenish drops—likely fatal doses of toxins for the unwary, the unwelcome, the unescorted.

What lies within the forest ball is very important to somebody—if only to herself. But then, the mother at the navel of our world deserves protection, doesn’t she?

“Don’t touch anything ,” I tell Kim. “We’re surrounded by cobras.”

“What’s a cobra?”

“Snake,” I say.

“Oh. Long, with teeth, right?”

This inane exchange is in part to compensate for the embarrassment of being gripped all around by the phalanx of girls, who care nothing for the thorns and who push against the leafy enclosure in such a way that they must be taking many pricks without obvious pain or harm.

The flowers, however, exude a glorious, peach-colored mist of scented light, not at all poisonous—sweet-tasting and sweet-smelling, actually. We are urged into the peach glow. Our reluctance is fading. Mother’s seduction is intense.

A thatch of deep green twigs surrounds a hollow within the forest ball, and at the center of the hollow—resting on a cushioned platform, facing away from her new visitors—is a long, fleshy, shockingly lovely creature . Even from behind, it’s obvious she’s female, no doubt at all—but at first I wonder if she’s remotely human. There is something of the serpent about her, but no serpent is equipped with so many breasts, arrayed in fruiting prominences on the fleshy rings of her torso, suckling so many smaller, younger versions of our girls.

Somehow the perfumed, lactating layers of her flesh are in perfect proportion to her function. She can move as far as she needs to move, and if more motion is required, the girls are there for assistance. Her brood. Her children, grown anew constantly to replace those lost in performing her work. I wonder if she misses them. Mother’s work is never done.

She turns her head, which is small in proportion to her enormous, slowly undulant body, and beams upon all a beatific smile that lights up her face.

Wait.

The scented air is getting to me. I know that face.

Please, no. Not that.

We are here!

The face is that of the woman in my Dreamtime—my partner, whom I’m destined to embrace as we fly to the new planet’s surface. All of it, the entire dream, returns in a warmly humid rush. I feel a flush of ecstatic nausea that makes me curl and writhe. The girls try to hold on, but I resist, kick out, push them away with hands and feet.

Again I’m like a newborn pulled cold and unhappy from an ignorant womb into an even more shocking reality. I want back into my previous ignorance, my dumb-show misery. This is wrong. It can’t be her . It’s an outrage—not even they would do this to her, to us!

We are so poorly prepared for life on this sick Ship, this skewed, tortured thing that makes us and kills us and protects us, lies between us and vacuum and radiation and the abrasive dust, like a shell around so many stupid mollusks.

The girls prove to be surprisingly strong. Kim is making a show of passive acceptance, hands up, palms out, shocked by my flailing reaction. For the moment, the little ones ignore him and flock around me, and finally bring me under sweating, aching control.

“Best to maintain, Teacher,” Kim suggests in a low grumble. “Like you said, cobras …”

At a single word, a soft murmur from those lips in that face, the girls reluctantly bring me forward, toward the one whose symbol I first saw sketched in blood in the faraway shaft in Hull Zero One, the one who inspires absolute loyalty in those who oversaw my birth.

And my making ? Is this both my partner and my own Mother?

My neck arches and I bare my teeth. Our noses nearly touch. I do not want this. I fear we will explode—this is wrong . But it does not happen—neither a kiss nor the half-desired love-death.

Her eyes close. She lightly sniffs. “Yes,” she says. “I know you.”

She raises a human-scale arm that had formerly lain relaxed down one side, across breasted rolls of torso. She offers her hand, fingers all too human, even shapely, nails trimmed and polished no doubt by her children. I see her short hair has been coiffed , and her flesh is scrupulously clean and dusted with a faint greenish powder that might be crushed from the leaves and flowers in her bower.

“Kiss,” whispers a little girl. I no longer feel fear—that perfume…. Unless I fight it, I will become drunk with her, totally intoxicated.

“You are Teacher,” Mother says.

“Another life,” I whisper. In that other life, my partner was destined to be Ship’s master of biology. Here, she is all she could ever have been, and much more. Kim might have been her assistant, in charge of the laboratory and the gene pool.

“We were together,” she tells me. “We made daughters. You were taken from me. I prayed for Ship to make more of you.”

My horror is mixed with admiration and awe. “I don’t remember,” I insist.

“Our daughters search you out again and again. I always lose you. You are always taken from me.”

Absorbing this causes an internal pain I can’t categorize or come to grips with.

“I birth my daughters. And they pray to Ship and bring you back to me,” Mother says. “What you see as you travel ripens you like a fruit. I am happy you are here.”

“Kiss,” the girl insists hopefully.

Mother shyly raises her hand again. The back is smooth against my lips, the fingers slightly plumper versions of fingers I’ve seen in so many Dreamtime moments, stretching back through freshly renewed memory like gaudy pearls on a string.