Hull Zero Three

Damn, another brutal dark line.

I found my own body this time. It’s true, then. I was never a baby.

It’s dark at the core. The big store of liquid water keeps it from getting too cold. I can’t see them. Don’t come here. One is small, one is big. The small one is worse

That’s it. The book has maybe five more blank pages. It had to end badly, of course, but I wonder at the strength necessary to keep writing even after being “caught”—and losing the blood that stains the cover and page edges.

It’s human blood, all right.

I’m exhausted. There’s weight now. I was decoding and reading right through spin-up, but found a corner to ride it out and hardly noticed. I stick the book in my pocket, next to the flexible mirror, and then take out the mirror and look at myself again.

It scares me, but I know I’m not going to stick around and sponge off the boy. I’m almost reconciled to that. To being a tool in some greater process. It’s not faith, it’s certainly not comforting, but holding that identity and purpose in my pocket—and maybe in my dreams—is more important than anything that’s happened to me yet.

I need to sleep. I want to see if I dream something more about the Ship, the hulls—if the book has opened the spigots of memory I know are there.

The woman and the boy shout through the open door. I’ve been dozing for what feels like minutes. In that brief time, I’ve come up with a face: a female face, not the woman who lives with the boy. I try to recover her features, but it’s no use.

The voices are insistent.

The boy and the woman drag me out of the room and down the hall to the boy’s room. The boy makes a motion with his hands on the wall and the door closes.

“They’re coming,” he says. “We stay in here and they leave us alone.”

“Where’s the girl?” I ask. I don’t see her—there’s not enough furniture to hide even her small frame.

“The girls are frail,” the woman says. “They can’t spend too much time away from their mother.”

“Where’s their mother?” I ask.

They both shrug. We sit together, saying nothing, not even looking at each other. The atmosphere is sad, stifling, like caged animals in a zoo.

Then the woman looks up at me, biting her lip. There’s sweat on her bare arm. We’re sitting on a low couch with a straight, square back that is soft enough not to hurt, but not much softer. The boy either has only a loose sort of control over this room after all, or likes it Spartan.

I have no idea what that word means, but it implies serviceable but not comfortable.

The woman slides down a little, eyes still fixed on mine, until we’re almost touching. She puts her hand on my leg. This provokes an odd feeling. I don’t know what to do. Her touch certainly isn’t appropriate, given the danger outside—but then, maybe that’s why she does it, because she’s frightened and wants reassurance.

But I know sure as God made little green apples (there it goes again! Spartan apples, maybe) that I’m not the one from whom she’s going to get reassurance. Still, I pat her hand, then remove it gently, letting it rest limp and damp on the couch. This effort has cost her. The sadness inside me is almost unbearable.

“He’s not the one for you,” the boy says to her, having watched with a detached expression. “The hull made him that way. It will never be you.”

“Shut up,” the woman says.

“You shut up,” the boy says.

The woman clears her throat. The boy gets up and places his ear against the space where the door was. He moves his hands again. Turns and smiles. The door opens. The hall beyond is quiet and empty. “They’ve gone,” the boy says.

“What were they?” I ask.

“Factors,” the boy says. “I get a feeling when they’re coming. I close the door and they pass us by.”

The woman stares into a corner. “You’ll leave now,” she says. “It’s what you always do. You read your book and then you leave. And they bring you back.” She shudders in something like resignation, maybe more like despair. “Don’t go out there. Out there is nothing but death and misery. You could stay here. There’s food and water, and we could pass the time. Talk is what I miss the most.”

But it’s clear I’ve made up my mind.

“Next time, if there’s a book, don’t give it to him,” the boy suggests.

The woman gets up. “Well, at least let me put together a bag of food and water.” She looks at the boy, who nods permission. Here, he is the master. The woman is just another piece of furniture.

It really is time for me to leave.

CENTERING

The boy seems glad that I’m moving on. He’s happy to give instruction. Make a run down the hall that passes the freezers while there’s still weight, he says—it should get warmer on the other side.

I do. I barely make it.

Spin-down finds me having to choose between a shaft that points inboard—with a ladder on one side—or a split in the corridor a few meters forward that stretches left and right, concentric with the outer hull, I presume— and there’s no way of knowing whether the corridor circles around, bringing me back here, or branches off somewhere—in other words, whether left and right are ultimately the same or lead to places very different.

With what leisure I have, I pause to analyze some of the faint markings at this juncture: more circular radiances and stripy patterns. No idea what they mean. They’re probably not for me. More likely, they’re ways to guide factors.

What’s obvious to me now is that very little of the hull is prepared for human habitation. All that I’ve seen so far has a sort of useful logic if you’re a factor, intent on specific duties and with little or no curiosity. But more senseless monotony will certainly push me into eccentricity.

I might just return to the Land of the Loaf-Eaters.

For some reason, that brings a smile. I’ve twisted words and made a joke, but I don’t know the original behind what I’ve twisted.

I take out the book and the pencil and think about writing down my joke, to add some levity to a very serious tome. I leaf through the pages, finger the black lines—and only now does the obvious occur to me: what the broad slashes mean. They’re transitions. A new hand writes after each slash.

This makes my joke more than trivial. I close the book and put away the pencil. This book has been carried by at least four of me. If it gets lost, then those who came before might as well have never lived.

How many bodies were brought back to the freezers without a record of their achievements? The others like me, who wrote in this book, saw things of interest. I hope at least to go as far as they did. I’ll eventually take the opportunity to add notes as I proceed, but there’s no point if I just duplicate what’s already recorded, so…

I haven’t earned the right to add anything yet.

No going back.

I make my choice and descend. I decide to be perverse and use my words counter to the periodic and unreliable up and down. I decide that descent means going inboard toward the core and ascent means moving outboard, toward the skin of the hull.

The “descent” is as before, but I’m getting better at it. I don’t know how far forward along the hull I’ve traveled, but not far enough toward the narrowing bow to make a substantial reduction in the circumference. That might require another kilometer or two. I think it over as I move down the shaft, keeping a lookout for more sketches, more signs of the girl or anybody or anything having made it this far… other than me, of course.