Hull Zero Three (5 page)

Parts of my brain have time now to ask impossible questions. The body has time to assess its damage and register complaints to the incompetent management. Sleeping becomes a dark reservoir of itching, plus real pain—both sensations I can’t wake up from—and then, those questions.

Part of me thinks it should be easy to return to Dreamtime and gets peevish when that doesn’t happen—not the way I want it to happen. Dreamtime is the reality, obviously, and what I’ve just experienced is a nightmare, but struggle as hard as I can, there’s no way to invert the relationship.

I remember joy and joining. I remember a tremendous sense of accomplishment and of camaraderie. Everyone cooperates. Everyone is anxious to get on with some exciting, monumental task.

Everyone looks like me, more or less.
It would be so wonderful to go back and rejoin my real friends—familiar and filled with unbridled hope. What’s holding me back? Clearly, I’ve done something wrong. Maybe I’ve been winnowed out, or maybe I’ve been
cleaned
and put in the Ship’s trash bin with the other rejects.
Maybe I’m in hell.
Nothel.SickShip.
What could I have done to deserve such judgment?
I can feel my body writhing on the couch, my slack mouth making embarrassing, primal sounds, but I still can’t wake up. Instead, I drop into a different dream.
I’m trekking on the surface of that gigantic dirty snowball, naked again, lacking even tight, bloodstained shorts. As I stand on the crusty, frozen surface, not far from one of the sweeping, rising bands of that gigantic enveloping cage, I try to breathe—and realize I can’t.
There’s no air.
I’minspace.Isn’tthatobvious?
But not being able to breathe doesn’t seem to matter. I’m compelled to learn by exploring, so I walk—and then try to
lookup
. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t raise my head. My sight lines stay level with the horizon.
I know the Ship is above me, but I have no idea what it looks like. This dirty snowball I’ve seen from above—I’m familiar with it. I can fill in the details, or at least make them up, make them convincing and self-consistent. The snowball is huge. I could walk for hours and not go all the way around it. The snowball is—
Water.
Mostly water and rock.
I begin to see how to play the game. Somewhere inside me there’s knowledge, but it isn’t integrated. It can only be unleashed by a combination of experience, observation, and… guilt. Trauma. I will learn by screwing up. Following that reasoning, I might learn a lot by dying.
Somehow, I’ve walked partway around the snowball, and I think maybe now I can look up and see
somethin
…. But I can’t. I know something new, different, is above me. It’s another
Ship
at the end of another broad spar, attached to the snowball on the opposite side. Not quite opposite, actually.
I don’t know what that part looks like, either.
The Ships are big, but they are dwarfed by the snowball, of course—any schoolchild knows that. The snowball is like a gigantic yolk. It contains all the stuff necessary to get us to where we’re going….
But I dreamed we had already arrived. The Dreamtime told me
WE!
ARE!
HERE!
Obviously we are not. The size of the snowball proves that fact. It should be smaller, a lot smaller, almost used up.
I’m still walking. Now and then, I
can
look up and see that incredible spray of pinpoints, the universe. Stars. Wisps with ghostly thin color. The galaxy. Then I’m walking over a third spot on the snowball where I can’t look up—again, because I know what’s there but I don’t know what it looks like, either… yet.
A third Ship. A third part of Ship, actually. A trio strapped to a big snowball moon, under clouds and stars.
No.
Between
the stars. A serpent-marked moon lost and wandering between the stars.
I hate this hallucinogenic guesswork. The mind shouldn’t be a game. Knowledge is who we are—memory and knowledge should be organized and easily available. After all, I’m a teacher.
I have to pee, but I’m also very thirsty.
I open my eyes. Really. I’m waking up. Heavy sleep still murks my thoughts. Something important came to me in the sleep—three Ships. Three parts. Not where we should be. Nothing the way it should be.
My bag floats in front of my couch, attached by its drawstring to my wrist. I undo the couch straps and float free, wondering how one pees in weightless conditions, and rummage in the bag for the bottle of water.
Then I hear shouts and screams.
The shock makes me wet my shorts. Pee dribbles out and floats. I can’t see through the smaller bubble where I’ve been sleeping. I focus on the translucent surface. It had been fogged with dust. Now it’s spattered and smeared reddish brown. There’s a handprint at the end of one smear, and streaks from trailing fingers.
Shadows move outside, forming silhouettes on the spatters and dust. From the light, I can see the ice ball is below us, reflecting up through the large blister. The shadows move fast, and hollow thumps echo through the domiciles.
The honking and warbling is awful. Then the honking stops. I can’t hear screams now—the girl is silent. Maybe she got away—maybe she’s hiding.
I look at the bubble’s entrance. The opening is beyond the end of the couch.
Something big and red reaches through the hole and waves inside my bubble. I think it’s an arm—it’s covered with thick bristles or spikes and the end is like a spiky club. The club splits into a claw. I try to hide behind the couch, grabbing a strap and pulling myself down, then embracing the cushions and climbing under. I stop, wedged between the couch and the bubble, trying not to make a sound.
Trying not to scream.
The red spiky arm thumps against the couch, grabs it, tries to yank it out to get hold of me. It knows where I am. It wants me.
As if things aren’t complicated enough, I feel another push. The Ship is spinning up. Weight is returning. I’m shoved by invisible forces away from the couch, can’t grab hold soon enough or tightly enough, and hang from the strap, muscles straining as the outboard acceleration grows stronger.
The spiky arm pulls back—I can see it swinging outside in wide, nasty arcs. More blood flicks against the bubble. I smell blood in the air—human blood—nasty, sweet. I still the whimpers that rise from inside my chest. If I let them out, they’ll turn into screams, and the red jointed arm will come back for me—I just know that whatever is at the other end of the arm loves for living things to
scream
Then I hear a whimper. It’s not the girl, not Knob-Crest—not Picker. Picker was the one hooting and honking earlier, and it might be
his
blood I see on my bubble.
There’s a fight going on. The brownish red arm swings back with someone dark gripped in the spikes and slams him into the bubble, making the cluster vibrate and wobble.
I slip from behind the couch, grab the strap again, and drop-angle away from the center. The entrance to the bubble is near my head. I look down—the weight puts it below me, facing outboard—and consider just reaching out and pulling myself through, dropping away, hoping the spiky arm will be too busy to grab me, hoping there’s not another of them, a whole nest of them….
Before I can make another move, shadows completely cover and obscure the light from outside. With a crunch, something dark is wedged into the hole— doubled up, feet toward me, arm toward me, hand curled into a fist—so close it almost touches my nose.
I shove myself sideways, feet bracing against the couch, and for a terrible moment, I’m face-to-face with Blue-Black, Pushingar, jammed in like a cork. He looks right at me, but in his agony he can’t see me or doesn’t care. His eyes shiver, then close. His mouth hangs open.
The arm drops back. The shadows outside pull or fall away. The weight is acting on all of us, pulling us counterclockwise and outboard. I’m stuck in the bubble. For the moment, this seems a good place to be—with Pushingar blocking the entrance. I look inboard and to my left—the smaller hole into the other bubbles is clear, just wide enough for someone my size or the girl, too small, I hope, for the creature with the spiky arm.
Spin-up gets more aggressive.
The body starts to tug free. The arm swings loose, and suddenly the whole corpse falls out. Through the spatters and smears, I see Pushingar drop away. His belly has been ripped open. Entrails precede him.
He lands with a ringing
thump
on the bridge.
I’m far from fear. Death doesn’t matter—it’s been certain from the beginning. I’m just a pair of eyes on the end of a stalk of neck with a brain and some hands and legs attached.
Before the acceleration reaches maximum, I crawl up toward the hole, cross through into another bubble—the one formerly occupied by the girl, now empty and no blood—and find another gray bag. Hers. Quickly, I empty the bag into my own—water bottle half filled, a mostly eaten chunk of loaf. Then back to my bubble and out through the exit formerly plugged by Blue-Black, where I hang for a moment by my hands, bag trailing by my hips, and let go.
I fall. It’s the only thing I can do. My fall takes on an angle—a curve. The Ship reaches maximum spin before I land, and I realize I’ve miscalculated. I almost miss the bridge and land heavily on my legs, then topple over and lie there, sick, dizzy, and in pain.
Looking up at the cluster of domiciles. Around to the broken body of Pushingar, hanging over the rail a few meters away.
No sign of the others.
I get to my feet and take a quick look at the dirty snowball rolling once more beneath the Ship, seemingly around the Ship. Above the far limb of the snowball, I can see another part of the Ship—a part I couldn’t see in my dream. What I can see, what is not hidden behind the crusty surface, looks like part of a long spindle, thick in the middle, drawing to a point forward. The sleeping vision was correct. There are other parts of Ship. Maybe those parts are better off, better organized than this one. Maybe I can escape and cross over.
But that thought is of no use now.
I walk the last hundred meters to the end of the bridge, across the blister. I pause and look back “up,” inboard at the cluster of bubbles, translucent structures turned into homes by others before us—or traps baited with food and water.
Traps laid by something that waits until you sleep.
Despite the shock and the fall, rest and sustenance have made me stronger. My brain is working through a long list of clues and puzzles and problems—until it comes up with something obvious. Something unpleasant but necessary.
I stop, turn around, and walk back along the bridge to where Pushingar hangs lifeless and broken. He doesn’t need his clothing. My lips form conciliatory words as I lug him off the rail and lay him out as straight as I can and strip him.
Soft, meaningless words of apology. I wonder if he knew the name the girl had given him. There’s remarkably little blood staining the fabric, given he was practically
disembowele
. That’s a word I don’t like—not at all.
The clothes hang on me, but I tuck up the pant legs, roll up the sleeves, and then resume my walk.
Soon the cold will come.
Time once more to chase heat.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE

I’ve got some water—two bottles, each half full—and enough food to last maybe a day or two. Though without clocks, time is a shapeless thing. Each spin-up lasts for perhaps four or five hours—no way of being certain. Already I’m hungry. It seems I’ll never stop being hungry.

I’m back in a corridor, but this one is wide and rectangular in cross section. There’s a walkway and a rail on the right side, and to the left, on the other side of a double rail with rungs that can also serve as a ladder, two curved channels extend from the blister to wherever the corridor ends. Giant balls could roll in these channels. Maybe they are tracks for some sort of train or conveyance. I wonder at the size and obvious design and the equally obvious lack of occupants, passengers—colonists.

How many colonists could this ship—perhaps one of three—support, if it were functioning properly? The awful thought occurs to me that perhaps it
is
functioning properly. Perhaps we’ve all done something wrong and have been transported to this painfully difficult environment as punishment. It could be a prison for useless people, misbegotten servants, filled with things that lay traps and kill.

But things that don’t always eat what they kill—the decayed corpse in the blister.
Only now do I wonder what became of that corpse while we slept. Did something come back and finally finish it off—consume what was left, after waiting a decent interval for it to “ripen”?
I see spots of blood and other tissues and fluids on the floor and on the walls. I stop and examine smears, handprints, and find the tips of a few broken spikes, sharp and orange. Another struggle. Maybe Picker and Satmonk injured whatever it was that killed Pushingar. Why would anything want to carry them this far? Where would it be taking them?
Someplacetoeattheminprivae.Chasingheat,justlikeyou.
The illumination in the corridor dims. Cold is coming. Ahead, I see something large, dark, and broken-looking sprawled across the walkway, draped over the railing. It’s another dead cleaner, like the one in the trash chamber. As I get close, I see that the body has been cut or pulled into several large pieces. The shell has been split. Dark fluid everywhere, leaving an oily sheen.
I see no other bodies, unless they’re stuck underneath the cleaner. I bend over and lift up a flat, limp “paw,” and there’s no sign of human remains. I squeeze past the broken shell and lifeless limbs, the somehow pitiful heads— three of them, as before—with their shiny, blind eyes.
Easy prey. Everyone kills cleaners—except the girl, who could not fight back.
I’ve been walking for some time now, and the wide corridor finally reaches its end. A wall with two hemispheric bumps forms the terminus of the twin grooves, and at the conclusion of the walkway is a circular indentation about two meters wide, carved or molded into the wall’s grayish surface.
I look back. The faintest breath of cold air washes over me. Soon the corridor will be unlivable. Likely the observation blister and the corpse of BlueBlack are already frozen. No going back without dying, and, apparently, no going forward.
I put down the bags. I haven’t touched the girl’s bottle or her piece of loaf. In gratitude for rescuing me, for not letting me die, for poking me along on a course to survival—up to this point—I hope to present her with these remnants if we meet again.
I lean against the wall at the end of the walkway. “Is there anybody else on this ship?” I wonder out loud.
“Whom are you addressing?” a voice asks. For a moment, it seems to be many voices, but then, I think, no, it’s just one.
I jump back from the wall and spin to face it. I can’t even begin to hope the voice is real. I don’t want to test it by speaking again, much less asking another question. Perhaps there are only a few possible answers remaining—or silence. Perhaps I’ve used up my last question, made my last request for information—my one and only wish.
The cold is getting intense.
“How do I get through? Is there a door?”
I’m surprised by my audacity. I can’t remember even formulating these questions.
“What is your origin, and what is your occupation?”
I think this over. “I’m a teacher. Others came this way, and I’d like to join them.”
“Are you part of Ship Control?”
I don’t think so. “No,” I say.
“Then I made you. You’re in the outer regions of Hull Zero One. It is not safe here. Move inboard, to the core.”
Before I can react, the indentation deepens and the circle spins outward, leaving an opening. Beyond the opening is more darkness and only a little warmth. I step halfway through, then pause, waiting to be grabbed after being lured into a trap.
“Has anyone else come this way?” I ask.
“This opening will close in five seconds.”
“Who are you?”
The circle starts to close. I jump through at the last second and roll on the other side, coming to rest against a sloping surface—a low, broad mound, smooth and, of course, gray. Little lights everywhere twinkle faintly in the gloom. Above me, the lights grow brighter.
I see I’m at the bottom of a wide, deep shaft. There’s a tiny circle at the top of the shaft. The walls of the shaft join the floor in a curve, the mound in the center about three meters wide and a meter high.
The surface behind me shows no sign of the circular door. Up the shaft— inboard—is the only way out.
My left hand reaches out and encounters another bag—almost empty. Inside I feel only one thing, small and square.
A book.
I undo the knot in the drawstring and remove the book. It has a silver cover and forty-nine fine notches in seven rows of seven. The girl was brought this way. Knob-Crest and Scarlet-Brown might still be with her. Perhaps they escaped during the struggle with the cleaner—they certainly weren’t strong enough to pull the cleaner to pieces. Cutting is more their style. The cleaner might have distracted the thing with the reddish spiky claw—that might explain the broken spikes on the floor.
They might have gotten away.
I can climb the rungs, or I can wait for spin-down and weightlessness. Examining the shaft, I see the best option—in the time remaining—is to climb.
I sling the bags over my shoulder, then adjust Blue-Black’s loose overalls, trying to cinch the waist tighter. No use. After a bite of my loaf and a gulp of water, I piss against a wall—
Markingmytrai
, I think, and grimace.
I start climbing. My mind is racing, stumbling over ideas and rough schematics, based on what I saw from the blister, the observation chamber, and remembering my walk in the drowsing dream.
The spindle—Hull Zero One, as the voice called it—rotates like a long, tapering axle within some sort of wheel fixed on the end of a strut. There are probably three parallel hulls at the ends of three struts, spaced equilaterally around the big chunk of dirty ice. The struts connect each hull to rails attached to the ice ball’s wiry, confining cage. The hulls can move forward and aft along those rails.
I think I’m heading forward within Hull Zero One. I could also be in the rear half, moving aft. Orientation is difficult to judge with what little I know.
My best guess as to the size of this hull is that it’s about ten kilometers long and perhaps three kilometers wide at the widest. As to the size of the ice ball, it’s not really a ball. From what I saw, it’s more like a
footba
, oblong and at least a hundred kilometers long. The ice chunk dwarfs the hulls.
Toobig.Shouldbemuchsmalerbynow.
Something has to push the hulls and the lump of dirty ice through space. Where are the motors? The engines? It seems likely that the engines are pretty powerful and not pleasant to be around. I have to conclude that the two halves of each spindly hull serve very different purposes.
I’m almost certainly heading forward.
What about the sinuous rill, the serpent shape carved into the ice? Now my head
realy
hurts.
I keep climbing. The outward tug grows weaker. Moving inboard reduces my centrifugal acceleration. The farther I go, the less the spin-up affects me. The effect is gradual but for some reason makes me feel even woozier than the intervals of spin-up and spin-down.
At least the climb gets a little easier.
I can’t think of any reason for spin-up, spin-down. None of what we’ve experienced in the way of weight or lack of weight makes any sense, though I wonder if I might understand the theory behind cooling and heating. The hulls are huge and mostly hollow, with lots of spaces and volumes requiring lots of energy to maintain—assuming they’re uniformly and constantly maintained. If we’re not at the conclusion of whatever voyage we’re making, and the passengers haven’t been awakened…
“ThenImadeyou.”
The voice at the door. This derails my thought process but makes no more sense than anything else, so I rejoin the track I’d been following:
If most of the passengers haven’t been awakened, then the spaces might be heated and allowed to cool at regular intervals, to keep the hull from warping. Or to save energy.
The passengers, the colonists, are all frozen, anyway—perhaps stored near the core, away from the outer hull, where there might be more radiation on a long, long journey.
So who woke up the monsters?
Not enough facts, not enough experience, far too much trauma, yet still not enough to complete my integration.
Climbing toward the core. I look down—and that’s a mistake. My stomach almost spits back the loaf I’ve eaten. I concentrate on where I’m going. My feet are no longer necessary for the climb, so I just pull myself hand over hand.
“Where do these loaves come from? And the voice at the door?” The reverberation of my voice in the huge shaft is hollow but comforting. “Who or what is Ship Control?” The echo is too muddled to use as any sort of indicator as to how far I’ve come.
Spin-down catches me by surprise. My fingers are cramping. I’ve gotten used to reducing the strength of my grip on the rungs, so the gentle lurch and the resulting breeze in the shaft breaks one of my hands loose. I dangle for a moment, pulled more toward my left and the near wall of the shaft than down. I grab hold of the rungs with hands and toes and cling until the last little sensation of weight is gone.
Then, feet pointed toward the center of the shaft, perpendicular to the line of rungs, I continue on. It’s almost like walking on my hands.
It’s almost like being a spider.
Spide.
That word—and the image it conveys, of something traveling along a sticky strand, part of a web—sends a shiver through me. I don’t know what spiders are, how big they are, or where they’re from. A
spider
could have snatched my companions. But the more I search the shreds of my knowledge, the more I think spiders are too small—though still creepy.
Of course, it’s always possible that in this life I’m very small as well.
I hate the uncertainty. Whoever woke me up, woke
us
up, was doing none of us any favors. What use are we? Maybe our only purpose is to be swept up, smashed around, destroyed—swatted like
flie
.
s
Spideseatflies.
Ugh.
But so far, I’ve outclimbed and survived the cold. This part of the shaft seems to maintain a more constant temperature. Perhaps the core is more stable. The little lights in the walls of the shaft are dimming. Then brightening again. The intervals seem to be random. So much for stability. Things don’t make sense here, either.
I’ve been focusing on my climb for so long that only when I reach down to scratch my hip and hitch up my pants do I look at a nearby patch of wall, a meter or so to my left. Some sort of scratch there. Then I see a lot of little abrasions—more scratches, lots of them, in an irregular circle all the way around the shaft, sweeping up and down—along with a few deep gouges.
Something strong, with strong claws, paused here and scrabbled against a spin-up. Something big enough to span the shaft—maybe five meters wide, limbs and all. Maybe it fell and was cleaned up.
Above the circle of scratch marks, there’s something smaller, different, a patch of irregular lines. I reverse and overhand to where I might be able to identify it.
It’s a drawing. A drawing in dark, dried paint—or something else. The smell has lingered faint in the air since I arrived in the shaft, but I’ve been trying very hard to ignore it—more human blood.
Usewhatyoucamewith.
The sketch is crude, simple. Maybe it’s not just a sketch, but an identifying mark. My eyes hurt trying to focus—the lights are dimming again. Finally I dangle and stretch out with one foot looped under a rung. My calf and ankle muscles bring me right up to the wall.
The sketch shows a plump, almost round figure. It could be human, though the head is small and round and has no features except a kind of line where the eyes should be. The legs are squat and come together to form a point, with no discernible feet. I see a separate blotch, less than a centimeter broad—a fingerprint. I hold up my forefinger and compare. The lines were painted by a much smaller finger. A finger dipped in blood.
It seems likely the little girl drew this figure in the shaft—but why?
Below the rounded head, protruding like little sacs from the round body, are breasts—twelve of them. Twelve breasts, three rows of four. Only a few of the breasts have nipples. No time to dab them all in, I guess.
I swing slowly around. Fifty or sixty centimeters away, almost too faint to see—as if the supply of blood was running low—there’s a handprint, the signature of the artist, just about the size of the girl’s hand.
For a moment, whatever took her from the observation blister paused here, leaving scratches and gouges, while she made her own marks. In her own blood.
No time for wonder or fear or despair. I’m hungry and I’m thirsty. I move on. Try not to think. Try to keep breathing steadily. Then, before I know it, I’m at the top of the shaft, where I almost bump my head. There’s a kind of big lid. On one side it’s been raised enough to allow me through.
I’ve climbed perhaps two hundred meters inboard. If the hull is as thick as I think it might be, I’m not much nearer the core than when I began—but the shaft has reached an end, I’m tired, and I want to just drift for a moment.
Somewhere inboard I hear a deep, rhythmic sound, pervasive and faint— very distant. Like breathing. The entire ship, breathing. With the accompanying low thump of a calm, steady heartbeat.
I squeeze up through the gap between the lid and the shaft, then reach out and tap the lip with one hand, rotating to inspect the surroundings. I’m in a space that for the first time looks human scale, suited for habitation by my kind of human, with my kind of memory. A kind of room.
I catch my breath and hold out my hand to stop. The space at the top of the shaft is long, low, narrow. Lumpy shapes rise from the outboard “floor.” In the shadows, I wonder if they might be furniture. As elsewhere in this hull, the walls glow with tiny spots of light, but here the illumination flows from place to place like waves on a pond, a kind of shimmer of light that somehow conveys the Ship is alive, watching—
Not that I can remember ever visiting a
pond
. A lot of things in my memory have no hooks in my real life.
Like smells. I smell a faint hint of char. My eyes are already adjusted, but it takes a physical inspection, moving slowly from ceiling to floor, approaching the lumpy objects on the floor, to learn that this space is designed to have an up and a down—designed for a sense of weight. I reach out to feel the objects that might be furniture and realize they’re lumpy because they’ve melted, or perhaps never finished forming. Couches, chairs, tables… stunted like burned young bushes or trees. My fingers come away covered with oily soot. A blaze swept through the chamber some time ago. Floating close to the wall, squinting, I make out large, sweeping smudges from swirling flames. Many of the glim lights could have been burned, overheated. Getting closer, feeling around gently, as if dealing with singed flesh, I study the resulting tiny pits.