Greg Bear - Hull Zero Three

My mouth is as dry as dust. “I remember,” I say.

“If something had gone wrong with your making, you wouldn’t remember anything about me. I’m so glad you do. I always remember you .”

“You’re Destination Guidance?” Nell asks.

“The very last,” the old woman says. “Now, please, you’ve brought me such lovely gifts, these odd creatures tell me. I didn’t design them, you know. That was Selchek. He’s gone by now, surely. There were three others. They’re gone, too, by now.”

“Yes,” Nell says.

The bodies.

“They brought themselves back one by one, to live out their lives and fight for the soul of the Ship. I presume that’s how it happened,” she says. “None of us was supposed to live forever, or even longer than a normal human being. So we had to cobble together an apparatus and carry it piecemeal from the hulls… along with these creatures !”

The monkeys do not seem offended by her appraisal. “She is the last,” they agree.

She grasps Kim’s huge arm in frail hands. “I’m sure there are better clothes somewhere. The monkeys care nothing for dress, you know. Please take me someplace warmer.”

Nell grimaces at me, but the sphere is merciful, and the monkeys have been busy cleaning, clearing, and preparing. I get the impression that in the monkeys, something remains of the others and that they are attendant on this meeting, listening. Perhaps they are pleased and finally willing to waste a few resources, for however short a time we will be here.

It has taken us so long to be created and gathered.

“Someplace warm,” the old woman repeats. Then, to the monkeys, the sphere, she calls out, in a surprisingly loud and firm voice, “Light the fires. Bring out the feast. It’s time!”

My heart thrills. We’ve never met, but knowing her is my validation.

Tsinoy, I think, fell in love with the old woman right away and cared for our infant successors with a quiet enthusiasm. She did not need to protect the rest of us.

We had already initiated the final cooling of the hulls. Essentially, this meant the destruction of most living things aboard Hull Zero Three, the other hulls being nearly dead already. Some might survive for a time—Mother is always resourceful, and the gene pool is a never-ending source of ingenuity.

But we have stopped transport of ice from the moon to the hulls. Soon, there will no longer be heat to chase. The liquid within the hulls’ central tubes will also freeze, for a time, and Ship will drift without power, except for the reserves within this sphere.

The old woman died a few days after our arrival. She did not tell us all we needed to know, but she gave us the keys to what was left of Ship’s original instructions, almost eroded away after centuries of fighting.

Nell has learned this much after careful study of the remnants of Ship’s memory and after careful questioning of the monkeys, who have grown a touch dotty over time:

It was the original choice of the first Destination Guidance team to set the course for a system that observation showed was already inhabited by intelligent beings. Honorably enough, they died, their work done—but done badly, as it turned out.

As Ship approached its intended destination, the first Mother was created, and the first consorts. They prepared Ship to destroy, replace.

But Ship was somehow pushed into a minute diversion, away from its intended destination and toward a dangerously unstable star. That star exploded in a supernova, washing Ship in deadly radiation and damaging the hulls and memory.

As Ship’s memory degraded, emergency procedures dictated that memory and function would be diverted to biological components able to carry out basic functions, including preserving and re-creating the gene pool. Ship then entered the dusty outer clouds of the resulting nebula.

With the original destination no longer in reach, another Destination Guidance team was born—into the worst imaginable conditions. Ship Control was intermittent, the hulls were filling with monsters, the birthing chambers were either being perverted to Mother’s demands or, failing that, being shut down.

The old woman and her colleagues—then little more than adolescents—somehow reached the decision that Ship must not continue in its present form. Destination Guidance infiltrated hull communications and assumed control of some birthing chambers, creating counter-crew and subverting some of Mother’s Killers by mixing components of biology and memory.

They fought Mother in all her many different incarnations.

Thus began the war.

AT THE END, the old woman met with me alone in a small room the monkeys had arranged for her. She took my hand, her fingers as light as bird wings, and said, “You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

I’m not willing to admit I’ve seen anything.

She then adds, “Our Ship is haunted. Not just by the dead of ancient wars, oh no—but by something not from Ship. Something I believe set us a great challenge. When I told Selchek and Grimmel what I saw, they did not believe me. They joked, calling it my avenging angel. Puroy called it the Judge. She, too, did not believe it was real. But it was—I know. It’s been with us for hundreds of years.”

She regards me with a gaze growing strong and steady—an assured but also frightened gaze. I can barely look at her my body is trembling so.

“In time, others saw it as well. Those of us who saw felt that we were indeed being judged. We believed it diverted Ship toward the supernova. In part, seeing it—fearing its judgment—we knew that if we didn’t clean up our act and prevent the destruction of other innocent worlds, Ship would be utterly destroyed.”

I have to ask, “Where does it come from?”

She smiles, pats my wrist. “I do not know. It never told me, nor anyone else. It does not want to interfere any more than it has to.” The old woman then whispers, “Reach into your memory… Tell me what you think it might be. Look into the mirror. Engage your imagination. I know you have one.”

Her last words to me.

MAYBE WHEN I look into this mirror, I draw out a story, awakening not memory, not history, but fable.

I can’t express this at all well.

Ship can never return home. The designers who originally equipped it knew that it was far too capable, far too dangerous: a true slaying seed.

Intelligent life in other systems, sensing the approach of such a danger, might mount defenses to protect their homes. But they would likely take no risks, expending the least amount of effort, and do all they could to simply destroy us.

Who else from outside would care for such a large, clumsy, deadly contraption as Ship? Who else would care enough to challenge it, rather than to just safely destroy it and be done with us all?

Those who followed us from Earth would have built faster ships—or traveled using no ships at all. They would have spread out into a broad galaxy, perhaps going through their own hells of destruction and learning. And then, finding our Ship and perhaps others, vast capsulated samples of an ancestral world, they might have marveled, studied—valued. They might have felt sympathy for their primitive ancestors and wanted us to succeed, as a pilot flying a jet might feel for a lost family in a Conestoga wagon.

But they had no desire to watch Ship wreak ancient havoc. And so they appointed a chaperone, a guardian who chastised and protected at once, but who also conveyed a subliminal warning, a chance at reflection—a chance to discover our only place in space and time.