and processors. Cleaners or scouts call fixers if the Ship has been damaged. They’re pretty single-minded, but they’re only dangerous if you get between them and something that needs fixing. Processors look scary and can be very dangerous, but they tend to stick around junk balls. The toothy eel is a processor. It converts dead organic material to simpler slush. Ugh.
Fixers and processors are getting rare, I hear. I’ve seen only two.
Scouts: smaller, thinner. Rare now as well.
Gardeners: They’re the only factors that have real color. The others are dark brown or dark gray or black.
Factors see heat and are generally inactive during cooldown.
And there are Killers. That’s what I call them. Knob-heads call them Xhh-Shaitan. Hard to pronounce, even if I hold my nose. It seems to mean “Maker of Pain.”
Killers.
Only a few of us have seen a Killer and survived. No one I’ve met can give a clear description. Killers destroy and leave the dead behind, but they also collect—alive. Where they take those they collect is unknown. The hull cooperates with Killers. They can go anywhere—fast. Makes me angry, like the deck is stacked against us. (Think about that and try to remember card games—their play and their rules make excellent metaphors around here.)
Sometimes, the hull helps us—why this contradiction, I don’t know.
Now—why the hull gets cool. There are three hulls. Based on Dreamtime, I think they are supposed to join at some point and become one, but that’s not clear yet. The Blue-Blacks say the hull gets cool because something wants us all to die. The little girl said it’s to save power, and she seemed to know a lot—but she wanted her mother badly, and was losing her own energy—fading rapidly.
Killers or cold or making other mistakes eventually remove us all from the scene.
And of course there are lots of versions of me, all dead. That means there’s a template. Maybe a lot of templates. For some reason, a word sticks up now—Klados. I don’t know what that means.
But hull is sick. Ship is sick. Something broke or went wrong—or something deliberately changed the rules. That’s why I’m heading forward—to answer those questions.
I rested for a while with the sluggards. The sluggards have a comfortable place and they just stay there. The boy in particular has made a cozy den. The room obeys his instructions but doesn’t cooperate with the rest of us. I wonder why. The woman is discouraged, maybe because she has to rely on the boy—and he can be irritating.
They aren’t going to go with me or help me find answers.
If they give you this, then you know about the freezers and the bodies. You know I’m dead. Take a deep breath. When you go forward—and you will—it gets worse.
Something doesn’t want us going forward. That might be Destination Guidance. I have no idea what that is—or who.
I’ve gone forward and down to the core. Here’s a little map.
Follows a sketch showing the tip of the spindle, an X marking the beginning of my (his) trip, and a dotted line zigging rather mysteriously toward the middle of the spindle and then jogging forward the merest fraction—a dot and a half, almost.
I passed three forest balls and several junk balls. Processors were recycling broken parts—including factors. Lots of factors damaged recently. Are there wars in the hull? I believe I’ve found a
A brutal dark line.
The Ship is very badly off. I’ve come upon a crude membrane that separates much of the forward sections from (I assume) vacuum. Pressure bellies the membrane outward from surviving bulkheads and stanchions, and it’s translucent, I think, but I can’t make out anything except a grayish blur that might be the ice ball—our big/little moon. The moon with the snake carved into it. Serpent Moon.
Considering how near the core I think I am, that means a pretty big chunk of the Ship is missing on the ice ball side. Factors are still cleaning up; it’s dangerous to travel around here because they might mistake me for debris and haul me to a junk ball. Some chambers are so badly scarred I can’t imagine they’ll ever be recovered, but repair factors are still at work, moving sluggishly, relaying the active surfaces a few centimeters at a time, working only during spin-down. I’d describe these spaces but you’ll
Another dark line.
This has to be quick. I think I know a little about Destination Guidance. There was a work party revived a long time ago. All this is vague, because the concepts that support my suppositions are still buried somewhere in Dreamtime. I think the Ship (we are definitely on a Ship in space, between the stars—physically, really, not just a mock-up) came to a point in its journey where a decision had to be made between two or more candidates, planets or stars with planets. A team was created to make that decision. I don’t believe they ever lived in the hulls. They were probably created on a station or “bridge” down on the ice moon. Far away—down below, inboard, and maybe a little behind the leading points of the hulls.
Covering most of a page in the book is something fascinating—a quick sketch of part of Ship. It looks like this:
I suppose if someone draws a map for a baby, the baby has to spend years growing up enough to even begin to understand. But we are not exactly babies. This sketch means a lot of things to me. It graphically confirms what I thought I saw in the observation blister and in my dream. The scale is off—the moon/ice ball should be much bigger, the spindles longer and smaller in comparison to the moon—but the rough truth of it is evident.
This is Ship, then. Three hulls shaped like spindles, one big oblong ice moon, and something I think must be at the leading point of the moon, between the spindles… way down below.
It makes sense. It arouses things from Dreamtime that start me quivering until I worry I won’t be able to stop. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. The Ship is not just sick, it’s gone
I read on.
The little sphere down there, from what I’ve been told, is actually pretty big, but not nearly as big as the spindles. She’s visited, the tall, lean one, kitten-gray, kind of pretty. She may or may not be a sport. But she’s gone now. Little Killer got her.
And inside this sphere, Destination Guidance was born and was supposed to make decisions about which planet or star we would fly toward. There were five.
The tall one seemed to have her own set of patterning, her own knowledge. She knew a lot about Ship that I don’t. She said Destination Guidance is raised from true infants, originals, unblemished—unpatterned.
I’m not sure what she meant. I certainly remember being a child, even being a baby—some things, anyway.
But after they do their job, they are supposed to retire or maybe even just die. I don’t know how long they were supposed to work. From what I’ve seen, however, I think a mistake was made. A bad mistake. It nearly destroyed this hull. The other hulls might be all right—I don’t know, since I can’t see them directly, only in this walking dream I have. (That’s walking, not waking. I walk over the ice ball and look up sometimes. But you probably have the same dream.)
Destination Guidance. Something scared them badly, maybe started all this, made the Ship sick, I’m learning from
