HULL ZERO THREE
Greg Bear
FOR VINCE GERARDIS,
Master of the Big Idea
PART ONE
THE FLESH
Cloud modest, the planet covers herself.
Our chosen is perfect—more than we could have hoped for. Rolling beneath, she slips aside her creamy white veil to reveal the sensuous richness of blue water, brown and tan prairies, yellow desert, a wrinkled youth of gray mountains hemmed by forest so green it is almost black—and the brilliant emerald sward of spring pastures.
Impossibly rich.
My flesh is partner to the long journey. Like a hovering angel, I look down upon the dazzling surface and yearn. All the springs of my youth flow toward this new Earth. A long limb of dawn in the east—how lovely! Our world turns wisely widdershins—the best of luck. There are two moons, one close in, the second much farther out and large enough for icy mountains under a thin atmosphere. We will explore that other promise once we are established
We want to spread and lock limbs. We want to couple. We are eager to meet children as yet unconceived— eager to hurry them along so they can share this beauty with proud parents.
We!
Kinetic, no longer pent up or potential… The long centuries are over.
We are
Planters and seedships have descended before we came awake. They have analyzed and returned with the facts. Our chemistry now matches this world’s.
Fountainhead.
I don’t remember the name we’ve chosen, it’s on the tip of my tongue—not that it matters. I’m sure it is a beautiful name.
We form teams, holding hands in waving, weightless lines in the blister, calling to each other using our Dreamtime names and smiling until our cheeks sting. We make awful, funny faces, like clowns, to smooth and relax the muscles of our joy. Soon we will choose new names: land names, sea names, air names, poetically spun from the old.
My new name is on the tip of my tongue—
Our lines move toward the chrome-silver gate in the translucent white bulkhead. We are moving into the staging area. Landers await us there, sleek shadows ghostly gray.
Our beautiful Ship is too large to land—twelve kilometers long, huge and lonely. Once she embraced an irregular ball of rocky ice over a hundred kilometers in diameter—the shield and yolk of our interstellar journey. She still clutches a wasted chunk of the Oort moonlet—just a few billion tons. We decelerated with fuel to spare and now orbit the prime candidate.
The years are spread out cold and quiet behind us, the long tail of our journey. We do not remember those years intimately, there were so many.
It doesn’t matter. I will look at the log when there is time, after the teams are chosen to make our first journey to the planet’s surface.
Our new names are called, and we arrange ourselves in the loading bay, ceremonial outfits like so many brilliant daubs of paint, the better to see and be seen.
I recognize so many from the Dreamtime. Friendly, joyous, hugging, shaking hands, congratulating. Words spill. Our tongues are still clumsy but our passions are ancient.
A smooth jolt of perfectly designed machinery—
Severing connections with Ship. The lander is less than a hundred meters long, a tiny thing, really, yet sleek and fresh.
Time is moving so fast.
I unhitch and push off my harness to be closer to
Viewing Ship from outside, along her great length, we marvel at her condition, weathered yet intact. Noble, protecting.
Ship, combined from an early formation of three hulls, now resembles two ancient stupas joined at their bases. Designed to protect against the hard wind between the stars, streamers of plasma convection once flowed and glowed ahead of and around the hulls like foggy gold rivers, ferrying interstellar dust—icy, glassy, metallic—aft, where it was processed into fuel or forged to replace Ship’s ablated outer layers.
Now, the last of the plasma feebly glows around the pinched middle, a vestigial beacon. The view distracts us for only a moment. We are lost in simple wonder. One out of a hundred ships, we were told, would survive. And yet we have made the longest journey in the history of humanity, we are alive, and