by Greg Bear
A wind sighs through the larger bubble, swirling around the bridge rails and decking. Without thinking, I realize that I had put on the shorts before crossing the bridge. I didn’t want to die naked and exposed.
The girl lets go of the ladder and floats in front of me. The last of the wind shoves her forward toward the glassy sphere. I let go of the ladder and follow.
The three other humans—Picker, Pushingar, Satmonk—not exactly like me or the girl but capable of laughter and kindness and solidarity, the best human traits of all, follow close behind.
REST AND DIE
The first thing I see in the sphere is a floating body—fully clothed, slowly rotating on an axis through its shoulders. It’s an adult female, I think, but badly decayed or eaten away. There’s no way of knowing what type of human she once was.
“The cleaners aren’t very active here,” the girl says, her lips prim in disapproval. She shoves away from the end of the bridge and intersects the body, then, as the others move toward the opposite side of the sphere, clambers around it and shows us that it’s wearing a kind of backpack. Thrusting her hand into the pack, she pulls part of it inside out—it’s empty.
“No book,” she says with a chuff. She kicks violently away from the body, and both go in opposite directions, just as Newton intended—
Newton.
The first name I’ve recovered—a name apparently more important than my own.
That big outboard mass of gray and brown and white very slowly comes back into view, then stops, parking itself “below” us at about two o’clock as I look outboard and forward. Clockwise. Clock hands. Rotation. Degrees and radians. That starts to make visual and other kinds of sense.
I shake my head in mixed wonder and sorrow, and precess until my hand clenches the end of the railing and stops me. I’m looking inboard now, away from the spectacular view, “up” toward a dark, shadowy section of the sphere. There’s stuff way up there—smaller clumped spheres, like magnified foam, each filled with one or more couches, chairs—and dark boxes. Places to rest. Places to explore.
The girl grabs hold of my shoulder. We wobble together until my wrist tightens and damps our motion.
“That woman was coming here for a reason,” she says. “Something didn’t want her here.”
“What?” I ask.
“Not a friend.”
Already Picker and Satmonk have kicked away from the end of the bridge to ascend toward the glimmering cluster. The girl joins them. With my usual finesse, I follow and arrive after a couple of clumsy rebounds.
The cluster’s curved, pushed-together surfaces are fogged by a layer of staticky dust. The cluster looks more and more like a bunch of soap bubbles pushed together—but with an access hole cut between each bubble. More scraps of clothing float in their quiet confines.
The girl is working on opening one of the boxes. She succeeds, but it’s empty. Satmonk is in another bubble, his leg wrapped around a couch as he breaks a box loose of some sort of stringy glue. The lid comes open, and he gives a bird warble and shows it to the rest. I’m at a bad angle, but the others instantly move into his sphere of influence and generosity.
Once again, I’m the last to join them. The girl has managed to save me a large gray bag. Other bags, liberated from the box, have been apportioned, first come, first served.
“Just say thanks,” she tells me, and pulls her own bag close.
The bags are all tied shut with a drawstring. I watch the others, then pull the bow knot—
And out comes a loaf of heavy brownish cake ten or so centimeters long and half as wide and deep—a really big chunk of something that smells fruity and fishy. Fruit I get. The clusters around us are like grapes, in a weird way. I can taste a grape in memory. We eat fruit in Dreamtime.
Fishy is more difficult. I’m not sure what that really means, though I see oceans and silvery creatures in the water. But this is just a distraction. I’m eating the loaf before I give a damn what it smells like.
Also in the bag is a head-sized, squishy oval ball filled with—I hope—water. The cake is dry, and my mouth starts to fill with crumbs I can’t swallow without gagging. The girl shows me how to hold the ball up to my mouth and squeeze. Wherever my mouth is, liquid shoots out. It’s water, all right—about two liters of it, almost without taste.
“Don’t drink it all at once, and don’t eat all of the cake,” the girl tells me.
“Thanks,” I say.
Picker agrees with a nod. His cheeks are packed.
“He looks like a squirrel,” I say, laughing, spraying soggy crumbs.
“What is squirrel?” Picker honks. He can eat and talk at the same time. I tap my own full cheeks. Again, we’re laughing—laughing, eating, drinking. The cake tastes brown and dry and a little sweet. I can feel the food and water in my blood. Wonderful and strange, like I’m a husk filling out with both liquid and energy.
We strap ourselves into the couches within the dusty bubbles. I look through the hazy surface at the decayed body floating near the center of the big sphere.
“Somebody brought all this stuff here before they died,” the girl says. “We should take the clothes. Even her clothes. They’ll fit in one of these bags.”
“Where does this stuff come from?” I ask. “I mean, where do you go to find it and bring it back?”
“Don’t worry about that,” the girl says. “Nothing makes sense until you find your book. Let’s sleep.”
Satmonk is already asleep. Nobody seems inclined to stay awake and keep watch. I really don’t want to sleep. But I don’t have much choice. My eyelids are the only thing about me that has weight.
Too bad.
It turns out to be a big mistake.
REASON IN SLEEP
Parts of my brain have time now to ask impossible questions. The body has time to assess its damage and register complaints to the incompetent management. Sleeping becomes a dark reservoir of itching, plus real pain—both sensations I can’t wake up from—and then, those questions.
Part of me thinks it should be easy to return to Dreamtime and gets peevish when that doesn’t happen—not the way I want it to happen. Dreamtime is the reality, obviously, and what I’ve just experienced is a nightmare, but struggle as hard as I can, there’s no way to invert the relationship.
I remember joy and joining. I remember a tremendous sense of accomplishment and of camaraderie. Everyone cooperates. Everyone is anxious to get on with some exciting, monumental task.
Everyone looks like me, more or less.
It would be so wonderful to go back and rejoin my real friends—familiar and filled with unbridled hope. What’s holding me back? Clearly, I’ve done something wrong. Maybe I’ve been winnowed out, or maybe I’ve been cleaned and put in the Ship’s trash bin with the other rejects.
Maybe I’m in hell.
Not hell. Sick Ship.
What could I have done to deserve such judgment?
I can feel my body writhing on the couch, my slack mouth making embarrassing, primal sounds, but I still can’t wake up. Instead, I drop into a different dream.
I’m trekking on the surface of that gigantic dirty snowball, naked again, lacking even tight, bloodstained shorts. As I stand on the crusty, frozen surface, not far from one of the sweeping, rising bands of that gigantic enveloping cage, I try to breathe—and realize I can’t.
There’s no air.
I’m in space. Isn’t that obvious?
But not being able to breathe doesn’t seem to matter. I’m compelled to learn by exploring, so I walk—and then try to look up. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t raise my head. My sight lines stay level with the horizon.
I know the Ship is above me, but I have no idea what it looks like. This dirty snowball I’ve seen from above—I’m familiar with it. I can fill in the details, or at least make them up, make them convincing and self-consistent. The snowball is huge. I could walk for hours and not go all the way around it. The snowball is—
&nbs
p; Water.
Mostly water and rock.
I begin to see how to play the game. Somewhere inside me there’s knowledge, but it isn’t integrated. It can only be unleashed by a combination of experience, observation, and… guilt. Trauma. I will learn by screwing up. Following that reasoning, I might learn a lot by dying.
Somehow, I’ve walked partway around the snowball, and I think maybe now I can look up and see something…. But I can’t. I know something new, different, is above me. It’s another Ship at the end of another broad spar, attached to the snowball on the opposite side. Not quite opposite, actually.
I don’t know what that part looks like, either.
The Ships are big, but they are dwarfed by the snowball, of course—any schoolchild knows that. The snowball is like a gigantic yolk. It contains all the stuff necessary to get us to where we’re going….
But I dreamed we had already arrived. The Dreamtime told me
WE!
ARE!
HERE!
Obviously we are not. The size of the snowball proves that fact. It should be smaller, a lot smaller, almost used up.
I’m still walking. Now and then, I can look up and see that incredible spray of pinpoints, the universe. Stars. Wisps with ghostly thin color. The galaxy. Then I’m walking over a third spot on the snowball where I can’t look up—again, because I know what’s there but I don’t know what it looks like, either… yet.
A third Ship. A third part of Ship, actually. A trio strapped to a big snowball moon, under clouds and stars.
No. Between the stars. A serpent-marked moon lost and wandering between the stars.
I hate this hallucinogenic guesswork. The mind shouldn’t be a game. Knowledge is who we are—memory and knowledge should be organized and easily available. After all, I’m a teacher.
I have to pee, but I’m also very thirsty.
I open my eyes. Really. I’m waking up. Heavy sleep still murks my thoughts. Something important came to me in the sleep—three Ships. Three parts. Not where we should be. Nothing the way it should be.
My bag floats in front of my couch, attached by its drawstring to my wrist. I undo the couch straps and float free, wondering how one pees in weightless conditions, and rummage in the bag for the bottle of water.
Then I hear shouts and screams.
The shock makes me wet my shorts. Pee dribbles out and floats. I can’t see through the smaller bubble where I’ve been sleeping. I focus on the translucent surface. It had been fogged with dust. Now it’s spattered and smeared reddish brown. There’s a handprint at the end of one smear, and streaks from trailing fingers.
Shadows move outside, forming silhouettes on the spatters and dust. From the light, I can see the ice ball is below us, reflecting up through the large blister. The shadows move fast, and hollow thumps echo through the domiciles.
The honking and warbling is awful. Then the honking stops. I can’t hear screams now—the girl is silent. Maybe she got away—maybe she’s hiding.
I look at the bubble’s entrance. The opening is beyond the end of the couch.
Something big and red reaches through the hole and waves inside my bubble. I think it’s an arm—it’s covered with thick bristles or spikes and the end is like a spiky club. The club splits into a claw. I try to hide behind the couch, grabbing a strap and pulling myself down, then embracing the cushions and climbing under. I stop, wedged between the couch and the bubble, trying not to make a sound.
Trying not to scream.
The red spiky arm thumps against the couch, grabs it, tries to yank it out to get hold of me. It knows where I am. It wants me.
As if things aren’t complicated enough, I feel another push. The Ship is spinning up. Weight is returning. I’m shoved by invisible forces away from the couch, can’t grab hold soon enough or tightly enough, and hang from the strap, muscles straining as the outboard acceleration grows stronger.
The spiky arm pulls back—I can see it swinging outside in wide, nasty arcs. More blood flicks against the bubble. I smell blood in the air—human blood—nasty, sweet. I still the whimpers that rise from inside my chest. If I let them out, they’ll turn into screams, and the red jointed arm will come back for me—I just know that whatever is at the other end of the arm loves for living things to scream.
Then I hear a whimper. It’s not the girl, not Knob-Crest—not Picker. Picker was the one hooting and honking earlier, and it might be his blood I see on my bubble.
There’s a fight going on. The brownish red arm swings back with someone dark gripped in the spikes and slams him into the bubble, making the cluster vibrate and wobble.
I slip from behind the couch, grab the strap again, and drop-angle away from the center. The entrance to the bubble is near my head. I look down—the weight puts it below me, facing outboard—and consider just reaching out and pulling myself through, dropping away, hoping the spiky arm will be too busy to grab me, hoping there’s not another of them, a whole nest of them….
Before I can make another move, shadows completely cover and obscure the light from outside. With a crunch, something dark is wedged into the hole—doubled up, feet toward me, arm toward me, hand curled into a fist—so close it almost touches my nose.
I shove myself sideways, feet bracing against the couch, and for a terrible moment, I’m face-to-face with Blue-Black, Pushingar, jammed in like a cork. He looks right at me, but in his agony he can’t see me or doesn’t care. His eyes shiver, then close. His mouth hangs open.
The arm drops back. The shadows outside pull or fall away. The weight is acting on all of us, pulling us counterclockwise and outboard. I’m stuck in the bubble. For the moment, this seems a good place to be—with Pushingar blocking the entrance. I look inboard and to my left—the smaller hole into the other bubbles is clear, just wide enough for someone my size or the girl, too small, I hope, for the creature with the spiky arm.
Spin-up gets more aggressive.
The body starts to tug free. The arm swings loose, and suddenly the whole corpse falls out. Through the spatters and smears, I see Pushingar drop away. His belly has been ripped open. Entrails precede him.
He lands with a ringing thump on the bridge.
I’m far from fear. Death doesn’t matter—it’s been certain from the beginning. I’m just a pair of eyes on the end of a stalk of neck with a brain and some hands and legs attached.
Before the acceleration reaches maximum, I crawl up toward the hole, cross through into another bubble—the one formerly occupied by the girl, now empty and no blood—and find another gray bag. Hers. Quickly, I empty the bag into my own—water bottle half filled, a mostly eaten chunk of loaf. Then back to my bubble and out through the exit formerly plugged by Blue-Black, where I hang for a moment by my hands, bag trailing by my hips, and let go.
I fall. It’s the only thing I can do. My fall takes on an angle—a curve. The Ship reaches maximum spin before I land, and I realize I’ve miscalculated. I almost miss the bridge and land heavily on my legs, then topple over and lie there, sick, dizzy, and in pain.
Looking up at the cluster of domiciles. Around to the broken body of Pushingar, hanging over the rail a few meters away.
No sign of the others.
I get to my feet and take a quick look at the dirty snowball rolling once more beneath the Ship, seemingly around the Ship. Above the far limb of the snowball, I can see another part of the Ship—a part I couldn’t see in my dream. What I can see, what is not hidden behind the crusty surface, looks like part of a long spindle, thick in the middle, drawing to a point forward. The sleeping vision was correct. There are other parts of Ship. Maybe those parts are better off, better organized than this one. Maybe I can escape and cross over.
But that thought is of no use now.
I walk the last hundred meters to the end of the bridge, across the blister. I pause and look back “up,” inboard at the cluster of bubbles, translucent structures turned into homes by others before us—or traps baited with food
and water.
Traps laid by something that waits until you sleep.
Despite the shock and the fall, rest and sustenance have made me stronger. My brain is working through a long list of clues and puzzles and problems—until it comes up with something obvious. Something unpleasant but necessary.
I stop, turn around, and walk back along the bridge to where Pushingar hangs lifeless and broken. He doesn’t need his clothing. My lips form conciliatory words as I lug him off the rail and lay him out as straight as I can and strip him.
Soft, meaningless words of apology. I wonder if he knew the name the girl had given him. There’s remarkably little blood staining the fabric, given he was practically disemboweled. That’s a word I don’t like—not at all.
The clothes hang on me, but I tuck up the pant legs, roll up the sleeves, and then resume my walk.
Soon the cold will come.
Time once more to chase heat.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
I’ve got some water—two bottles, each half full—and enough food to last maybe a day or two. Though without clocks, time is a shapeless thing. Each spin-up lasts for perhaps four or five hours—no way of being certain. Already I’m hungry. It seems I’ll never stop being hungry.
I’m back in a corridor, but this one is wide and rectangular in cross section. There’s a walkway and a rail on the right side, and to the left, on the other side of a double rail with rungs that can also serve as a ladder, two curved channels extend from the blister to wherever the corridor ends. Giant balls could roll in these channels. Maybe they are tracks for some sort of train or conveyance. I wonder at the size and obvious design and the equally obvious lack of occupants, passengers—colonists.
How many colonists could this ship—perhaps one of three—support, if it were functioning properly? The awful thought occurs to me that perhaps it is functioning properly. Perhaps we’ve all done something wrong and have been transported to this painfully difficult environment as punishment. It could be a prison for useless people, misbegotten servants, filled with things that lay traps and kill.
