Hull Zero Three (18 page)

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.
Wai.
The scented air is getting to me. I know that face.
Please,no.Notthat.
Wearehere!

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
makin
? 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
coifed
, 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.
Molusksmakepearls,ofcourse…oystersgrownonfarms.
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.
THE BRIEFING

I try 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?”

W hy,this
is
sl
e
p,noramIyetawake.
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…

G OLDEN 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.

“ ‘HesentthemwordIhadnotgone (Weknowittobetrue):
Ifsheshouldpushthematteron, Whatwouldbecomeofyou?’”

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:

“ ‘Igaveherone,theygavehimtwo, Yougaveusthreeormore;
Theyalreturnedfromhimtoyou, Thoughtheywereminebefore.’”
I pick up with the next few lines.

“ ‘fIorsheshouldchancetobe Involvedinthisaffai,
Hetruststoyoutosetthemfree Exactlyaswewere.’”

“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…

“ ‘Mynotionwasthatyouhadbeen (Beforeshehadthisfi)
Anobstaclethatcamebetween Him,andourselvesandit.

“ ‘Don’tlethimknow shelikedthembest, Forthismusteverbe
Asecretkeptfromaltherest,
Betweenyourselfandme.’” “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’salmyfancypaintedher— YeGods!Sheisdivine.
Butherheartitisanother’s— Itnevercanbemine’”

She makes a wry face. “
YeGods
,” 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.
At any cost.
Sitting beside me, weary after our hike, she looks young and vulnerable, with her short bobbed hair and square, frank eyes, deep blue, and her wide, slightly ironic smile. I have felt over and over the honor and the depth of her care, her attention to detail both scientific and emotional; her concern for my parents, saying good-bye forever to their only son. Her parents died years before, and this only makes her more eager to establish a chain of posterity.
All of Earth is her family.
It is here that she gives me a real book, small and beautiful—a paper diary bound in faux leather. The paper is creamy and beautiful. “Write it all down, Teacher,” she tells me. “When you figure out the poem, write it down, and let me know.”
Atanycost.
Her body I am also aware of, picturing it beneath the winter coat, remembering the sheen on her thighs and shoulders as we swim almost naked in the warm waves off an atoll’s coral beach in the South Pacific. I remember our lovemaking, our murmured talk beneath soughing palms and warm breezes under a densely starry sky; talk about having children. She wants daughters. She believes daughters understand their mothers. She laughs at this, admits it’s silly, sons are wonderful, but she wants daughters.
My head spins at the extraordinary power put into this woman’s hands. When we arrive, she will be not just the shepherd but also the mother of another Earth. And I will be there with her, protecting her against danger, helping her succeed….
Atanycost.
I am suddenly back in the hidden pages of the Catalog.
Othersmaybethere.Aboriginallie-forms.Wemaybeoutoffuel,withno otherplacetogo.Theymaynotwantus,whenwearrive.Theymaytrytokil us.Kilme.KilEarth’sseedandmemory.Andwhatwilwedothen,lover?

MY EYES BLINK open and I groan. All of those emotions lie beneath my love, hidden like the monsters we’ve seen, only to be activated if the situation arises. It has arisen.