Hull Zero Three

Not at any cost.

Then… the love is gone. As if those memories had never been, I see Mother’s features glaze over, harden. I am a fraud. So is Kim. I am not the consort she needs. He is not the assistant she had hoped for. My fear would be intense if the bower’s perfume didn’t dull my responses.

“I have heard you,” Mother says. “I am not the first Mother. My daughters are not the first daughters.”

Four of the girls enter the bower, trailing cords on which many small gray bags are hooked like fish on a string. The bags twirl and bump and break branch and leaf, which another girl carefully gathers, crushes in her hands, and stuffs into a smaller bag at her waist.

“They have found these scattered in all the hulls. The testimony of many who did not live. I no longer have need of them. Perhaps they will serve you.”

The bags are cinched at the neck, looped together, and filled with small, square objects.

The end of the string is handed to me. I pull up one bag by a scruff of fabric, feeling the objects within. Books. A dozen or more per bag. Hundreds in all.

“Teacher, go back. Tell the other Teacher to come forward. Kim, you will stay here and tell me more of what you know about the Klados.”

Kim doesn’t look at all happy at this prospect. But as the girls surround us, it seems he relishes a fight even less. He’s the assistant. Mother would have been his boss. He has his own Dreamtime memories now.

Mother gives me one last, lingering look. She says,

“‘But her heart it is another’s—
It never can be mine.’”

I am not the one Mother needs. But she cannot bring herself to dispatch me.

The other must come forward, and until he does, she will hold Kim hostage.

TALES BETWEEN MY LEGS

Two of the girls accompany me. The book bags have been arranged more conveniently in a larger bundle. Still they are cumbersome. No doubt Mother has read them already, or they have been read to her by my others—all the reports of consorts and daughters, and the daughters of other Mothers before her, who died before their books could be delivered.

More histories of the war between Ship Control—represented or personified, perhaps, by Mother, taking all its memories and duties into her form—and Destination Guidance. The Ship became a charnel house long before this mother was made. A bad decision, possibly initiated by an accident between the stars—the supernova. Damage, confusion, and what else? Something more, surely. I’ve died; they’ve died; we’ve all died over and over… and I’m thinking it’s increasingly unlikely, almost down to zero chance, that any of us will survive much longer, much less fulfill our destiny.

I have to ask, as I pull the bundle along—as the two daughters travel without complaint and hardly any emotion, moving away from Mom again, no joy in that—

The answer to many questions lies in knowing what part of the Klados Mother fulfills. What planet was she designed to inhabit? What circumstance would favor her kind of society, her kind of progeny, rather than, say, those my Dreamtime partner and I would have produced?

Mother makes sense only in the context of a damaged Ship, Ship at war with itself. We are all expedients.

I’m not even a teacher, not really. The great Dreamtime story was ever and always a travesty, a trick.

“Faster,” the closest daughter tells me as we push down the striped tube, past signs that would guide factors to wherever they need to go, moving forward supposedly to deliver this bundle of histories to readers who might already be less than sympathetic, more dangerous to Mother, and who, by now, looking deeper into the mirror, have likely recovered and rediscovered even more than Kim and I. Nell was on a roll, after all. But how does that make sense?

Why give knowledge to those who will fight you?

As for my twin…

I feel utterly spent and useless.

And so it is with little surprise, and perhaps even a dark joy, that I hear one of the daughters say we have taken a wrong turn. They are concerned. We are not moving forward.

The other daughter approaches, her hand pushing the wall, her foot kicking back, echoing, her other hand hooked in the clasp of her overalls. Her face is serious. “This place is not the same.”

“Tunnels might have shifted. Is that it?” I ask with a touch of glee. Nell was made to talk to Ship. Is she redirecting Ship’s architecture—foiling Mother’s plans?

The girl gives me a look that strikes me straight to my heart, even after all we’ve been through, a look of childlike dismay that says, how could you be so mean?

“Okay,” I say, pulling back my Schadenfreude. Strange word, but I know what it means. Maybe I can be their teacher after all—an instructor in mean thoughts and gross ironies. “What now?”

“If we go back, we will be late,” one daughter says. “But we do not know how to go forward, or even how to find our way back….” She looks so lost, but I feel no sympathy.

They can’t take me where Mother wants me to go—to my death. The books will be destroyed, they’re useless anyhow—like me. How will they finish me?

Will there be one last Killer waiting at the end of the line?

They float before me, holding hands. I take a short breath, calm myself. I will send them home. That is the least I can do. “How good is your memory?” I ask.

“Pretty good,” the other daughter says.

“Remember what you saw when you went forward or aft in the hulls—can you see the symbols, the radiances, how they were oriented or how frequent the stripes were in a given stretch of corridor?”

The daughters look puzzled. Their mouths open, showing pink tongues and tiny, well-ordered teeth… milk teeth. They’re lost in deep recall.

“Maybe,” the girl on my left says.

“The corridors have a code,” I say. I had watched Kim examining the signs and ovals and striping, and suspected he was figuring out how factors—and perhaps even people—could learn where they were, inside the hull, by reading the coded patches. It seems logical that as the hull adjusts, the signs will also adjust, but a lot has to rest on faith. “We can read the code—if we apply ourselves.”

They come to silent agreement, then return their eyes to me. The girl on the right says, “I remember better than she does.”

“I thought you were all alike,” I say.

“That would be silly,” they say together.

Despite everything, I have to laugh. One of the girls begins to crack what might be a smile, the first hint of humor, the first recognition of human individuality in all its absurdity, but the smile vanishes so quickly I wonder if I just imagined it. “Can you figure it out by yourselves?” I ask.

After a few seconds, the sharper daughter points behind us and says, “This way.”

We’re going to have to part company soon. If I want to get back to the bow and not join all my rejected, dead brothers.

I start to haul the books again, but the girls wave their arms. “Leave them,” they say. “We have to move quickly. We can come back for them.”

“Your sisters and others died for these books,” I say, surprised by my heat.

“Let’s not join them,” a daughter says.

I reluctantly untie the band and leave the bag drifting in the corridor. Despite everything, I’m curious about