Hull Zero Three

“My daughters tell me there is another Teacher. Yet he stayed behind. Why?”

“We wanted to make sure the journey was safe,” I tell her, and hope she believes me.

Mother turns her face away. “My daughters did not pray for this yellow one, or for the others. Only for you.”

“We traveled and fought together,” I say. “The girls brought all of us to this hull.”

“Not all,” she reminds me. “Many died. You accessed the records of the Klados, as I hoped, but you are upset. What did you see that upset you?”

“I don’t like the memories they reveal in me. That is not Ship as I know it. Not me.”

“Oh, but it is.” Mother regards me with half-closed eyes, shrewd, rich, suffused with immense, private hormonal flows that do not dull but forcefully direct. She brushes my face. The scent intensifies. The bower has brought us closer. “We only protect Earth. You know Earth.”

“Yes.” I am drunk with her. I am drunk with Earth. For the moment, I forget that I never lived those memories, that they are false.

Mother is my mirror. Looking at her, I remember…

———

GOLDEN LIGHT OVER a small clearing. I’m taking my rest after a long hike, sitting on a fallen log surrounded by green-black trees. The air is hushed by falling flakes of snow, each painted pale yellow by a diffuse wintry sunset. A lithe brown animal with a long neck watches from the edge of the clearing. A deer. It bolts and vanishes. I know there are other animals in the black woods. Bears, squirrels, and nearby, rainbow-gleaming fish swim in a rushing, ice-cold river.

I’ve been walking with my partner as she finishes a survey. It’s more of a ritual than a scientific necessity. All of this will be coming with us. It will be her job to protect the records of life on Earth and to carry them to the stars. My job is to keep her happy and to provide the colonists with cultural structure, social instruction. We are in a sense opposites—she will transport Earth’s life; I will transport humanity’s history and thought.

My partner emerges from the shadows and sits on the log with me. I kiss the back of her hand.

“You’re back,” I say.

“‘He sent them word I had not gone,’” she quotes a poem from one of our favorite stories. I taught it to her back at the training center, where our love began. “Will we ever know what that means?”

“It’s nonsense,” I say. “Always will be.”

“And you call yourself a teacher.” She lifts her hand and marks the air with the words of the poem.

“‘He sent them word I had not gone
(We know it to be true):
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?’”

On the log, in the quiet and the peace, I am the happiest I’ve ever been, the most contented, the most fulfilled. I am lost in admiration as well as love. We often play with poems and words, but I can’t play with what she does: life itself. As chief biologist, my partner will ensure that Earth lives on in Ship. I am proud of her. My job—our job—is part of the greatest endeavor in human history. We have visited cities and towns, forests and jungles and deserts. We have met with schoolchildren and farmers, scientists and celebrities. We are the chosen. We are famous.

“It still doesn’t make sense to you?” she chides.

“Sorry.”

She continues:

“‘I gave her one, they gave him two,
You gave us three or more;
They all returned from him to you,
Though they were mine before.’”

I pick up with the next few lines.

“‘If I or she should chance to be
Involved in this affair,
He trusts to you to set them free
Exactly as we were.’”

“Good,” she says, wrapping her arm around me and hugging me close in the evening chill. “If we get lost out there, this is how we’ll know each other. Like a secret song.”

“We’re not going to get lost,” I say.

“No,” she says. “But still…

“‘My notion was that you had been
(Before she had this fit)
An obstacle that came between
Him, and ourselves and it.

“‘Don’t let him know she liked them best,
For this must ever be
A secret kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.’”

“You forgot the first stanza,” I say.

“It’s not important,” she says. “These are all you need to know to find me.”

For some reason, I quote part of the original song from which Lewis Carroll’s enigmatic parody was drawn.

“‘She’s all my fancy painted her—
Ye Gods! She is divine.
But her heart it is another’s—
It never can be mine.’”

She makes a wry face. “Ye Gods,” she says. “You are so didactic.”

Ours has been called a great romance, perhaps the greatest romance ever—love that will fly out between the stars, love that will survive chill centuries to be warmed anew. Fulfillment and destiny and preparedness: The emotions are utterly warm and embracing and richly detailed.