Hull Zero Three

bar, head on hand, elbow resting on empty space—all long limbs and fluid poise. Nell catches my look and bristles. “You’re both handicapped,” she says. “She’s played on your emotions.”

“Who was your mother?” my twin shouts.

“I don’t think my patterns go that deep,” Nell says. “I don’t remember a childhood or a mother or a family.”

My twin’s face has screwed into tears. “Let me go to her,” he begs. “I belong with her.”

“The wrong one went aft,” Nell says, and prims her lips. Nell and Tsinoy have turned their eyes toward the windows, longing for a cleanness of vast spaces and suns, for what lies beyond Ship. The relief of infinity, of choices, of futurities lost. But the windows are still being repaired. They are fogged, dark.

I feel weak.

We hear a noise behind us. A deep brown shadow moves through darkness into the bow’s illumination.

It’s Big Yellow.

“Kim!” Nell cries. “We worried about you.”

“No need,” Kim says. “I did some gardening and got loose. I don’t think anyone got hurt. But you guys really pissed her off. She’s making her move.”

“How soon?” Nell asks, dead calm.

“Minutes, maybe. After I got loose, I passed about a dozen forest balls, and they were filled with growing things, big things and small. Worse than any I’ve seen so far.”

Kim approaches Tsinoy, who is still holding on to my twin, and reaches out with one huge hand. One finger caresses my twin’s cheek. “He’s the one she wanted, right?” he asks.

Nell nods, then points to me. “This one’s okay. I think.”

“Yeah. He did good back there.” Kim reaches out with his other hand, places it on my twin’s opposite cheek, then clamps and twists my twin’s neck. It snaps like a stick. Instantly, he just hangs.

My body jerks and I shove away from the group.

“We need to leave,” Kim says. “Back to the other hulls… anyplace but here. I don’t think even Tsinoy can fight what’s coming.”

The Tracker cradles the lifeless body and makes a soft, strange sound, then pulls back her claws, releasing it. It slips away, head bobbling, no hurry, eyes wide. Then it follows a new, slow curve toward the floor.

Tomchin looks around, stretches his arms. Points back to the transport craft.

“We should get more food and water,” Nell says.

“No time,” Kim says. He’s already grabbing and shoving, moving us toward the transport, happy to abandon the last viable hull—the last place that could feed us and clothe us.

No protest. Mother has won another round.

Aft of the staging area, in the tent-shaped chamber, we hear low, awful sounds, like whispers or snakes slithering through grass. Tsinoy shifts her muscles and bulks up, clamping her paw-claws down on the deck between us and the noises.

We pull ourselves toward the entrance of the egg-craft. I look aft. Something moves along the deck, clinging and transparent, like a wash of water but dotted with twitching, shining hairs and ruby spots for eyes. It laps up over Tsinoy’s feet. Smoke lifts and she begins to bleed—thick red drops. The liquid is cutting her up like razors. She lets go with a mewl, swiping the fluid off with quick strokes of ivory claws, and Kim grabs her outstretched limb, pulling her after the rest of us.

I catch a glimpse of what might be cherubim in the bow, little angels hovering over the lapping tide. They are jumping, climbing, yanking themselves forward—Mother’s vanguard.

The fluid is on the lip of the hatch when Nell tells it to close. We push away from Hull Zero Three. We’ve had enough of monsters, of Mothers and daughters and dreams and lies and incomprehensible wars. We can only hope the moon-bound sphere of Destination Guidance is any sort of sanctuary.

If not, we will choose black space and the deadly grit between the stars.

END DOCUMENT

SWEEP SURVEY

COMPLETE

This document has been judged original and authentic.

FILED: SHIP ARCHAEOLOGY REPORT

SURVEY TEAM PERSONAL ADDENDUM

He was you, wasn’t he?” my partner asks. “He was a Teacher, after all.”

The survey of the joined hull and all of its nooks and hiding places, the sweep of extraneous biology—what little remains—has taken our team sixty days. We’ve multitasked throughout that time, my partner and our seven team members, working other jobs, preparing the staging areas and providing instruction for both the Ship’s maintenance crew and those who will go planetside.

“But…” My partner is almost at a loss. “Was she me?”

“Which one?”

“You know which one I’m referring to.”

“No way of knowing,” I say. “No pictures. Nothing we can use to judge.”

“Ship could have kept a record of it.”

“Who understands Ship?” I ask. “We still haven’t unraveled all of the systems and controls.”

“It must have been a horrible time.”

I wonder if I’ve made a mistake by letting her read ten of the books—ten out of eleven, all contained in a ragged, tattered gray bag. No other books or bags have been found. The survey team that gathered them can’t read the writing, but for some reason I can, and so can my partner. Ship is full of languages. The books are written in colloquial English, with a heavy slant toward twenty-first century cultural values and norms. My partner and I naturally speak Pan-Sinense, perhaps like the Knob-Crest called Tomchin. We have confirmed that such physiological forms are within Ship’s creative capabilities, including the monster factors—

But there is no way to know just what our writer looked like. We can only surmise that he resembled me. No way of knowing for sure.

But I feel it. Something in the way he thinks, in the word-choices apparent even through the unfamiliar flow of characters.

My partner is less pleased with her matching.

“She seems impossible,” she says. “Have you found anything like her in the Catalog?”

“No,” I say, but that isn’t precisely the truth. I have used data tools to recover parts of the Catalog that were not completely erased, and even to evaluate the theoretical potentials of the original Klados—of which our present Ship retains but a small selection.

Once, Ship was so much greater—and yes, something like the Mother could have existed. We were sent to the stars fully equipped. If we had stayed that way, I’m convinced we would have died—Ship would have either killed itself or been extinguished.

I’ve made my decision. I can trust my partner, but observing her disgust, her sense of loss and disappointment, I realize what I must do with the last book. I am responsible for the cultural training and morale of the colonists and, ultimately, the success or failure of our long, difficult journey. It’s shocking enough to read these first ten of the recovered books and begin to understand that our histories, our past memories, have all been manufactured. More shocking still to contemplate the amoral complexities of Ship’s designers, the desperate desire to succeed at all costs, against all odds—no matter what the consequences to other worlds, other lives.

Evil.

Yes, but we might have benefited…. Something still lingers in me. Something wrong, perverse. Lovely.