Hull Zero Three

This inane exchange is in part to compensate for the embarrassment of being gripped all around by the phalanx of girls, who care nothing for the thorns and who push against the leafy enclosure in such a way that they must be taking many pricks without obvious pain or harm.

The flowers, however, exude a glorious, peach-colored mist of scented light, not at all poisonous—sweet- tasting and sweet-smelling, actually. We are urged into the peach glow. Our reluctance is fading. Mother’s seduction is intense.

A thatch of deep green twigs surrounds a hollow within the forest ball, and at the center of the hollow— resting on a cushioned platform, facing away from her new visitors—is a long, fleshy, shockingly lovely creature. Even from behind, it’s obvious she’s female, no doubt at all—but at first I wonder if she’s remotely human. There is something of the serpent about her, but no serpent is equipped with so many breasts, arrayed in fruiting prominences on the fleshy rings of her torso, suckling so many smaller, younger versions of our girls.

Somehow the perfumed, lactating layers of her flesh are in perfect proportion to her function. She can move as far as she needs to move, and if more motion is required, the girls are there for assistance. Her brood. Her children, grown anew constantly to replace those lost in performing her work. I wonder if she misses them. Mother’s work is never done.

She turns her head, which is small in proportion to her enormous, slowly undulant body, and beams upon all a beatific smile that lights up her face.

Wait.

The scented air is getting to me. I know that face.

Please, no. Not that.

We are here!

The face is that of the woman in my Dreamtime—my partner, whom I’m destined to embrace as we fly to the new planet’s surface. All of it, the entire dream, returns in a warmly humid rush. I feel a flush of ecstatic nausea that makes me curl and writhe. The girls try to hold on, but I resist, kick out, push them away with hands and feet.

Again I’m like a newborn pulled cold and unhappy from an ignorant womb into an even more shocking reality. I want back into my previous ignorance, my dumb-show misery. This is wrong. It can’t be her. It’s an outrage—not even they would do this to her, to us!

We are so poorly prepared for life on this sick Ship, this skewed, tortured thing that makes us and kills us and protects us, lies between us and vacuum and radiation and the abrasive dust, like a shell around so many stupid mollusks.

The girls prove to be surprisingly strong. Kim is making a show of passive acceptance, hands up, palms out, shocked by my flailing reaction. For the moment, the little ones ignore him and flock around me, and finally bring me under sweating, aching control.

“Best to maintain, Teacher,” Kim suggests in a low grumble. “Like you said, cobras…”

At a single word, a soft murmur from those lips in that face, the girls reluctantly bring me forward, toward the one whose symbol I first saw sketched in blood in the faraway shaft in Hull Zero One, the one who inspires absolute loyalty in those who oversaw my birth.

And my making? Is this both my partner and my own Mother?

My neck arches and I bare my teeth. Our noses nearly touch. I do not want this. I fear we will explode—this is wrong. But it does not happen—neither a kiss nor the half-desired love-death.

Her eyes close. She lightly sniffs. “Yes,” she says. “I know you.”

She raises a human-scale arm that had formerly lain relaxed down one side, across breasted rolls of torso. She offers her hand, fingers all too human, even shapely, nails trimmed and polished no doubt by her children. I see her short hair has been coiffed, and her flesh is scrupulously clean and dusted with a faint greenish powder that might be crushed from the leaves and flowers in her bower.

“Kiss,” whispers a little girl. I no longer feel fear—that perfume…. Unless I fight it, I will become drunk with her, totally intoxicated.

“You are Teacher,” Mother says.

“Another life,” I whisper. In that other life, my partner was destined to be Ship’s master of biology. Here, she is all she could ever have been, and much more. Kim might have been her assistant, in charge of the laboratory and the gene pool.

“We were together,” she tells me. “We made daughters. You were taken from me. I prayed for Ship to make more of you.”

My horror is mixed with admiration and awe. “I don’t remember,” I insist.

“Our daughters search you out again and again. I always lose you. You are always taken from me.”

Absorbing this causes an internal pain I can’t categorize or come to grips with.

“I birth my daughters. And they pray to Ship and bring you back to me,” Mother says. “What you see as you travel ripens you like a fruit. I am happy you are here.”

“Kiss,” the girl insists hopefully.

Mother shyly raises her hand again. The back is smooth against my lips, the fingers slightly plumper versions of fingers I’ve seen in so many Dreamtime moments, stretching back through freshly renewed memory like gaudy pearls on a string.

Mollusks make pearls, of course… oysters grown on farms.

I kiss her hand. All around me relax. One little girl claps gently, delighted, and comes around between us, asserting her privilege in front of Mother, staring deep into my stunned eyes. “We were so worried. But you are here.”

Mother gently pushes the girl aside, and she laughs and flits off to join her sisters, leaving Kim and me to float unassisted. Kim, the brief glimpse I have of him—eyes almost closed, arms crossed—looks like a big, sleepy, lemon-colored genie.

“There will be food,” Mother says. “But let’s begin.” The woman who was to be my mate, my partner for all new worlds circling new suns, stretches in languor upon her platform. “Teach me. Tell me what you’ve seen.”

Branches grow into personal bowers. She is mistress of her space. The perfume has performed its task. It is good to be in her grace.

I begin.

THE BRIEFING

I try to recall all that I’ve seen and learned, spooling it off like a recording machine, but it’s all remarkably ephemeral. I keep seeing my partner’s face on another body, in another existence.

My words trail off. Hours have passed. The bower’s golden light has become shadowy. Mother rests, eyes closed but not asleep. Perhaps she never sleeps. Many of the girls are asleep, however. Kim also drowses, surrounded by a leafy nest.

I am watchful. How am I different from the others who were taken from her, who died? From the true consorts, like my twin, back in the bow… who was born knowing how to follow her orders.

Has she judged? She may not know yet, not for certain.

Mother opens her eyes. “I do not understand where it went wrong.” Her voice is sweet and small. “I see Ship, I see struggle—I know those who frustrate me and kill my children. They’ve taken you from me so many times…” She looks to me for guidance. “Why do they fight us?” she asks, and then, with an eyebrow flick of inner awareness, “Why do we look like this, so different?”

Why, this is sleep, nor am I yet awake.

Her eyes are pale blue. They are no larger than I remember them. I do not stray from her face, but the impression of the rest of her body is unavoidable. Beauty lies both in her form and in her function. So many daughters—so much adoration. Will they all grow up to be like her?