Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

Mollusks make pearls, of course… oysters grown on farms.

I kiss her hand. All around me relax. One little girl claps gently, delighted, and comes around between us, asserting her privilege in front of Mother, staring deep into my stunned eyes. “We were so worried. But you are here.”

Mother gently pushes the girl aside, and she laughs and flits off to join her sisters, leaving Kim and me to float unassisted. Kim, the brief glimpse I have of him—eyes almost closed, arms crossed—looks like a big, sleepy, lemon-colored genie.

“There will be food,” Mother says. “But let’s begin.” The woman who was to be my mate, my partner for all new worlds circling new suns, stretches in languor upon her platform. “Teach me. Tell me what you’ve seen.”

Branches grow into personal bowers. She is mistress of her space. The perfume has performed its task. It is good to be in her grace.

I begin.

Itry to recall all that I’ve seen and learned, spooling it off like a recording machine, but it’s all remarkably ephemeral. I keep seeing my partner’s face on another body, in another existence.

My words trail off. Hours have passed. The bower’s golden light has become shadowy. Mother rests, eyes closed but not asleep. Perhaps she never sleeps. Many of the girls are asleep, however. Kim also drowses, surrounded by a leafy nest.

I am watchful. How am I different from the others who were taken from her, who died? From the true consorts, like my twin, back in the bow… who was born knowing how to follow her orders.

Has she judged? She may not know yet, not for certain.

Mother opens her eyes. “I do not understand where it went wrong.” Her voice is sweet and small. “I see Ship, I see struggle—I know those who frustrate me and kill my children. They’ve taken you from me so many times…” She looks to me for guidance. “Why do they fight us?” she asks, and then, with an eyebrow flick of inner awareness, “Why do we look like this, so different?”

Why, this is sleep, nor am I yet awake.

Her eyes are pale blue. They are no larger than I remember them. I do not stray from her face, but the impression of the rest of her body is unavoidable. Beauty lies both in her form and in her function. So many daughters—so much adoration. Will they all grow up to be like her?

“My daughters tell me there is another Teacher. Yet he stayed behind. Why?”

“We wanted to make sure the journey was safe,” I tell her, and hope she believes me.

Mother turns her face away. “My daughters did not pray for this yellow one, or for the others. Only for you.”

“We traveled and fought together,” I say. “The girls brought all of us to this hull.”

“Not all,” she reminds me. “Many died. You accessed the records of the Klados, as I hoped, but you are upset. What did you see that upset you?”

“I don’t like the memories they reveal in me. That is not Ship as I know it. Not me.”

“Oh, but it is .” Mother regards me with half-closed eyes, shrewd, rich, suffused with immense, private hormonal flows that do not dull but forcefully direct. She brushes my face. The scent intensifies. The bower has brought us closer. “We only protect Earth. You know Earth.”

“Yes.” I am drunk with her. I am drunk with Earth. For the moment, I forget that I never lived those memories, that they are false.

Mother is my mirror. Looking at her, I remember…

GOLDEN LIGHT OVER a small clearing. I’m taking my rest after a long hike, sitting on a fallen log surrounded by green-black trees. The air is hushed by falling flakes of snow, each painted pale yellow by a diffuse wintry sunset. A lithe brown animal with a long neck watches from the edge of the clearing. A deer. It bolts and vanishes. I know there are other animals in the black woods. Bears, squirrels, and nearby, rainbow-gleaming fish swim in a rushing, ice-cold river.

I’ve been walking with my partner as she finishes a survey. It’s more of a ritual than a scientific necessity. All of this will be coming with us. It will be her job to protect the records of life on Earth and to carry them to the stars. My job is to keep her happy and to provide the colonists with cultural structure, social instruction. We are in a sense opposites—she will transport Earth’s life; I will transport humanity’s history and thought.

My partner emerges from the shadows and sits on the log with me. I kiss the back of her hand.

“You’re back,” I say.

“‘He sent them word I had not gone,’” she quotes a poem from one of our favorite stories. I taught it to her back at the training center, where our love began. “Will we ever know what that means?”

“It’s nonsense,” I say. “Always will be.”

“And you call yourself a teacher .” She lifts her hand and marks the air with the words of the poem.

On the log, in the quiet and the peace, I am the happiest I’ve ever been, the most contented, the most fulfilled. I am lost in admiration as well as love. We often play with poems and words, but I can’t play with what she does: life itself. As chief biologist, my partner will ensure that Earth lives on in Ship. I am proud of her. My job—our job—is part of the greatest endeavor in human history. We have visited cities and towns, forests and jungles and deserts. We have met with schoolchildren and farmers, scientists and celebrities. We are the chosen. We are famous.

“It still doesn’t make sense to you?” she chides.

“Sorry.”

She continues:

I pick up with the next few lines.

“Good,” she says, wrapping her arm around me and hugging me close in the evening chill. “If we get lost out there, this is how we’ll know each other. Like a secret song.”

“We’re not going to get lost,” I say.

“No,” she says. “But still…

“You forgot the first stanza,” I say.

“It’s not important,” she says. “These are all you need to know to find me.”

For some reason, I quote part of the original song from which Lewis Carroll’s enigmatic parody was drawn.

She makes a wry face. “ Ye Gods ,” she says. “You are so didactic.”

Ours has been called a great romance, perhaps the greatest romance ever—love that will fly out between the stars, love that will survive chill centuries to be warmed anew. Fulfillment and destiny and preparedness: The emotions are utterly warm and embracing and richly detailed.

I can’t pull up from the vision. I do not want to. We are ready to go. We are simply saying farewell to our world.

The forest watches. I can’t see the eyes of the animals who know we are here, but they are the eyes of the Earth, and soon we will move far away and will not be seen again, until we make this place anew, around another star, very far away.