Hull Zero Three

color hair—though matted with blood and slime—and roughly my features.

“Glory,” the spidery woman says. “Looks like we have two Teachers.”

DOUBLING

The rest of my group seems unremarkable now, compared to that owlish young man across the egg, who has roughly the same number of scabs, burn marks, and scars but arranged in different places and patterns—the same shape of mouth… eyes…

I don’t know which is more unsettling—meeting myself dead or meeting myself alive.

Big Yellow tends to the Knob-Crest. A little dab of water, a dirty gray bag, a little clean-up. After a few minutes, the Knob-Crest settles, watching us through sullen, pink-rimmed eyes. Traumatized but keeping still.

Somehow, we all grow quiet. Settle.

The egg-craft has been sent on some sort of automatic mission. The spidery woman has taken her former position near the hemisphere, one hand lightly resting on it—as if to affirm she has purpose.

Tsinoy has compacted near the tip, the hatch; it is quietest of all—giving the rest of the egg over to us. The two girls are wrapped tight and dozing in a loop of happy netting.

Finally, the other me pulls delicately loose and crosses the egg to enmesh by the port, nearer to me. I’ve been sneaking glances at the stars, the wisps, wondering just where we’re going—and whether any of us knows where we’re going.

“That’s a big blob of incandescent gas out there,” the other me says.

“Nova, or supernova, probably,” I say.

“Remembering much?” he asks.

“Trying,” I say.

“Well, if we’re dupes—duplicates—we can help each other. Speed things up a bit.”

“Probably,” I say. “Met me before?”

“Let’s not talk about that yet. You?”

“You’re my first… living dupe. Is that the right word?”

He lifts his hands. “How long have you been alive?”

“Tough to say. A hundred spin-ups, maybe.”

“Me, I’ve been counting, because the book suggested that was a good idea.” From his pocket, the other me removes a ragged, stained book, three times thicker than mine. “I’ve been here four hundred and twelve spin-ups, give or take ten.”

“You win,” I say.

“You started from the girdle—near the midsection of the hull?” he asks.

“I think so.”

“Me too. Behind that, it’s probably all engine. Each hull has a big engine in the rear.”

“Guess, or fact?”

“A little of both. The big water tank—that’s reaction mass mined from the ice moonlet. It’s piped up through the fairings. The struts. I’ve seen some of the robots or factors or whatever they are down there. Maybe we can spot them, if our elegant pilot can spin this thing around a little, give us a tour?” He glances over his shoulder at the spidery woman.

She smiles and rolls her hands on the blue hemisphere. “The girl seems to have set it on autopilot. I can’t change our course. But I can adjust our orientation.”

The view outside the port changes accordingly, and we guide her with competing instructions until we look directly down upon the forward tip of the moonlet… and a tiny, pale green sphere that seems to have been glued to the ice.

“Destination Guidance,” my other says. “That’s their work station and living quarters.”

“Ship Control seems worried about Destination Guidance,” I say, trying to contribute.

“You’ve talked to Ship Control?”

“Maybe. Once. Destination Guidance should all be dead by now.”

“Who are they?” the spidery woman asks.

“They choose between the best destinations at midpoint, based upon all the data gathered by Ship.” My twin is quite the professor—a better, more learned Teacher by far, it seems.

He’s right. I’m remembering a lot more. Confirmation, affirmation, plus a kind of competitive challenge. It becomes more and more obvious, more and more logical. Even the distance we had hoped to travel starts to emerge in memory—five hundred light-years.

Thirty at twenty. A journey of more than thirty centuries at twenty percent of the speed of light. An enormous velocity, but not nearly enough to noticeably shrink our subjective time. I look up from my reverie, tell him what I just thought or just remembered. “Does it match?”

My other nods. “It’s in the book. We’ve had these memories before. But… can we trust them?”

I look at his book and feel a kind of hunger. It belongs to me, too, after all. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Because we’re not born—we’re made to order,” he says.

“I know,” I say weakly.

“Ship—the hull, at least—keeps making us for some reason.”

“The little girls pray for us,” I say.

He lifts an eyebrow, crusted with blood from a cut. “Most of us die. We don’t get our memories from education or from experience, from anything we would call learning. We’re imprinted. If we come into the right situation, the imprinting emerges, and we’re complete, ready to roll. If we don’t, we flounder.”

“That’s in your book?”

“Mostly speculation, but it sounds right.”

“I’d rather be born of woman and raised by my community,” I say. “That’s what I want to remember.”

The spidery woman nods agreement.

“And maybe that’s what we will remember, if we get to where we belong,” my other says. “Illusion is everything, after all.”

That’s a little cynical, I think, but it doesn’t feel right to criticize my other self—not yet.

The girls rouse long enough to look fondly at us, at each other—all’s right with the world—there are two Teachers—then, fall back asleep. Big Yellow—who cradles the Knob-Crest in his huge arms, where he looks childish by comparison—listens with heavy-lidded eyes. Only the spidery woman is actually wide awake, energized by what little control she has over our small craft.

I look down at her—aft, rather. Ship is accelerating, creating a bit of pull. “Where are we headed?”

“To another hull, I hope,” she says. “We came from Hull Zero One. We’ve just made a lengthwise run along the flank of what I think is Hull Zero Two. It’s pretty much a wreck forward of the engine. Lots of holes, like something big blew it out. There’s Hull Zero Three, of course—on the other side—a few dozen kilometers from here. If it’s wrecked, I don’t know where we’ll go. Maybe back to where we came from.”

That draws a protest from Big Yellow. “Let me out first,” he says. “I’ll take my chances on that moon down there.”

My other smiles. “Quite a team,” he says.

“Do we all have dupes?” I ask.

“Probably. But… they look alike to me, and nobody has a name.”

“It does,” I say, pointing at the Tracker. It lifts its snout, and its pink eyes track us wearily, then close again. “Its name is Tsinoy.”

“That might not mean much,” my other says. “I think that just means ‘Chinese.’”

“Funny,” Big Yellow says, “he doesn’t look Chinese.”

None of us knows why this might be humorous, but my dupe and I and the spidery woman laugh. Maybe it isn’t funny. Maybe it’s rude. But Tsinoy doesn’t seem to mind, just rearranges in its huddle and pulls the netting tighter.