At least five of those blue eyes turn on me.
That’s it. My legs pull up, hauling the Knob-Crest with them. I’m locked in a fetal curl, practically crushing the girl, rotating and falling to my left. The girl still clings to my waist. The Knob-Crest thinks better and drops loose, then flurries his arms and hands against more tendrils. Enough for all.
Still no saviors, no lasers. But the spidery woman is back. She’s pulled off her shoes and with her long black toes grasping a massive limb, swings a thorny branch like a quarterstaff. (I don’t give a damn about the new words.) She handily snatches and clears tendrils from around our group.
Big Yellow returns from the gloom with yet another body slung over his shoulder—a small one, head hanging limp, eyes glazed—looks dead. Another girl.
The girl around my waist stops kicking. A sister.
“Get out of here!” Tsinoy shouts from below, lifting its snout and shaking aside cracked fragments of shell. “More coming!” Then it sinks its snout in a large hole it’s dug in the red carapace, crooks each limb, and spins the shell around and around.
I look up. My eyes see better now. The dead forest is alive with shapes—all sorts, all different shades, too many to count. The hull aft must be dead, as all the beasts gather here to finish their job. If the hull can fill itself with wave upon forward wave of Killers, nothing will survive. Leaving is our only option.
Big Yellow hands off the second girl, then pushes all three of us toward the hatch. He lifts up the Knob-Crest and shoves him after.
“We’ll stop them here!” Big Yellow shouts.
The second sister lifts her head and thrusts out a scrawny arm to point. “One more,” she says, blinking rapidly. “I prayed for one! I found him!”
I encourage the Knob-Crest to crawl with me. We pass through the hatch, confused motives propelled by abject fear. If I live, this dead forest ball is never going to leave me—my slumber will forever fill with horrors. The girls cling to me, to each other, limbs twined, trying to caress and kiss—
And it’s all a haze of passages and acrobatics, clumsy enough to make me pull back my lips in a hideous grin, a mockery of mocking, humor my last resort now that fear has finally run dry.
We find the hatch to the transfer craft. The spidery woman is right behind us. She’s wiping her eyes and facial fur with a sleeve and a loose bag. When she sees the two girls, she scoops them to her breast, cooing in a strange, high voice—motherly instinct, I suppose—but then she spins around to find the panel that closes the hatch. It swiftly cuts us off from the rest of the hull. Breathless, she says, “We have to leave now. I never thought…”
She doesn’t finish. A slamming sound comes from outside. The spidery woman and I look at each other—no choice. We have to open the hatch again.
Tsinoy pushes through with another limp body. Big Yellow follows close behind, saying, “That’s it, let’s go,” and the hatch closes.
One of the sisters is the one who pulled me from the birthing sac, who fought to get me here. The other is regaining strength, crying lustily. She clambers over the netting to the limp, pale body in Tsinoy’s grasp and checks his neck for a pulse. The new girl clambers over the netting to a blue sphere, places both her hands on it, and murmurs something to its smooth surface.
The blue surface illuminates.
“Hey!” the spidery woman says in surprise.
The craft moves, shoving us inboard, and then spins around. The netting grips our hands, our arms, even loops around Tsinoy’s spiny limbs. We’re away, shoving off into space, weightless again. A humming starts. Air flows.
The little girl rubs the hemisphere with her hands, murmuring sweetly. The spidery woman looks on in stunned appreciation. “I didn’t know she could do that,” she says.
“They knew it was here all along,” I say, rubbing my shoulders, my knees. “Why wait until we’re nearly killed?”
Big Yellow says, “Our little group wasn’t finished. But now they miss their mother.”
The pale fellow’s eyes open. He looks at Big Yellow, the brightest thing in the room, then at me—half-blind. The Knob-Crest won’t stop hooting and writhing. I can intuit the whole situation. He feels betrayed, almost left behind. He was the girl’s companion, her partner—until she found the pale man, roughly my size, with roughly my color hair—though matted with blood and slime—and roughly my features.
“Glory,” the spidery woman says. “Looks like we have two Teachers.”
DOUBLING
The rest of my group seems unremarkable now, compared to that owlish young man across the egg, who has roughly the same number of scabs, burn marks, and scars but arranged in different places and patterns—the same shape of mouth… eyes…
I don’t know which is more unsettling—meeting myself dead or meeting myself alive.
Big Yellow tends to the Knob-Crest. A little dab of water, a dirty gray bag, a little clean-up. After a few minutes, the Knob-Crest settles, watching us through sullen, pink-rimmed eyes. Traumatized but keeping still.
Somehow, we all grow quiet. Settle.
The egg-craft has been sent on some sort of automatic mission. The spidery woman has taken her former position near the hemisphere, one hand lightly resting on it—as if to affirm she has purpose.
Tsinoy has compacted near the tip, the hatch; it is quietest of all—giving the rest of the egg over to us. The two girls are wrapped tight and dozing in a loop of happy netting.
Finally, the other me pulls delicately loose and crosses the egg to enmesh by the port, nearer to me. I’ve been sneaking glances at the stars, the wisps, wondering just where we’re going—and whether any of us knows where we’re going.
“That’s a big blob of incandescent gas out there,” the other me says.
“Nova, or supernova, probably,” I say.
“Remembering much?” he asks.
“Trying,” I say.
“Well, if we’re dupes—duplicates—we can help each other. Speed things up a bit.”
“Probably,” I say. “Met me before?”
“Let’s not talk about that yet. You?”
“You’re my first… living dupe. Is that the right word?”
He lifts his hands. “How long have you been alive?”
“Tough to say. A hundred spin-ups, maybe.”
“Me, I’ve been counting, because the book suggested that was a good idea.” From his pocket, the other me removes a ragged, stained book, three times thicker than mine. “I’ve been here four hundred and twelve spin-ups, give or take ten.”
“You win,” I say.
“You started from the girdle—near the midsection of the hull?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“Me too. Behind that, it’s probably all engine. Each hull has a big engine in the rear.”
“Guess, or fact?”
“A little of both. The big water tank—that’s reaction mass mined from the ice moonlet. It’s piped up through the fairings. The struts. I’ve seen some of the robots or factors or whatever they are down there. Maybe we can spot them, if our elegant pilot can spin this thing around a little, give us a tour?” He glances over his shoulder at the spidery woman.
She smiles and rolls her hands on the blue hemisphere. “The girl seems to have set it on autopilot. I can’t change our course. But I can adjust our orientation.”
The view outside the port changes accordingly, and we guide her with competing instructions until we look directly down upon the forward tip of the moonlet… and a tiny, pale green sphere that seems to have been glued to the ice.
“Destination Guidance,” my other says. “That’s their work station and living quarters.”
“Ship Control seems worried about Destination Guidance,” I say, trying to contribute.
“You’ve talked to Ship Control?”
“Maybe. Once. Destination Guidance should all be dead by now.”
“Who are they?” the spidery woman asks.
“They choose
between the best destinations at midpoint, based upon all the data gathered by Ship.” My twin is quite the professor—a better, more learned Teacher by far, it seems.
He’s right. I’m remembering a lot more. Confirmation, affirmation, plus a kind of competitive challenge. It becomes more and more obvious, more and more logical. Even the distance we had hoped to travel starts to emerge in memory—five hundred light-years.
Thirty at twenty. A journey of more than thirty centuries at twenty percent of the speed of light. An enormous velocity, but not nearly enough to noticeably shrink our subjective time. I look up from my reverie, tell him what I just thought or just remembered. “Does it match?”
My other nods. “It’s in the book. We’ve had these memories before. But… can we trust them?”
I look at his book and feel a kind of hunger. It belongs to me, too, after all. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Because we’re not born—we’re made to order,” he says.
“I know,” I say weakly.
“Ship—the hull, at least—keeps making us for some reason.”
“The little girls pray for us,” I say.
He lifts an eyebrow, crusted with blood from a cut. “Most of us die. We don’t get our memories from education or from experience, from anything we would call learning. We’re imprinted. If we come into the right situation, the imprinting emerges, and we’re complete, ready to roll. If we don’t, we flounder.”
“That’s in your book?”
“Mostly speculation, but it sounds right.”
“I’d rather be born of woman and raised by my community,” I say. “That’s what I want to remember.”
The spidery woman nods agreement.
“And maybe that’s what we will remember, if we get to where we belong,” my other says. “Illusion is everything, after all.”
That’s a little cynical, I think, but it doesn’t feel right to criticize my other self—not yet.
The girls rouse long enough to look fondly at us, at each other—all’s right with the world—there are two Teachers—then, fall back asleep. Big Yellow—who cradles the Knob-Crest in his huge arms, where he looks childish by comparison—listens with heavy-lidded eyes. Only the spidery woman is actually wide awake, energized by what little control she has over our small craft.
I look down at her—aft, rather. Ship is accelerating, creating a bit of pull. “Where are we headed?”
“To another hull, I hope,” she says. “We came from Hull Zero One. We’ve just made a lengthwise run along the flank of what I think is Hull Zero Two. It’s pretty much a wreck forward of the engine. Lots of holes, like something big blew it out. There’s Hull Zero Three, of course—on the other side—a few dozen kilometers from here. If it’s wrecked, I don’t know where we’ll go. Maybe back to where we came from.”
That draws a protest from Big Yellow. “Let me out first,” he says. “I’ll take my chances on that moon down there.”
My other smiles. “Quite a team,” he says.
“Do we all have dupes?” I ask.
“Probably. But… they look alike to me, and nobody has a name.”
“It does,” I say, pointing at the Tracker. It lifts its snout, and its pink eyes track us wearily, then close again. “Its name is Tsinoy.”
“That might not mean much,” my other says. “I think that just means ‘Chinese.’”
“Funny,” Big Yellow says, “he doesn’t look Chinese.”
None of us knows why this might be humorous, but my dupe and I and the spidery woman laugh. Maybe it isn’t funny. Maybe it’s rude. But Tsinoy doesn’t seem to mind, just rearranges in its huddle and pulls the netting tighter.
“Third try’s the charm,” the spidery woman says. “Come up here if you want to see what we’re up against.”
My twin floats toward the port, near the blue hemisphere. “There’s room for you, too,” she says to me, her voice silky. She enjoys being in control, in her element—who wouldn’t? She might even enjoy the company of me and my dupe. But I’m pretty sure she doesn’t understand the vast scheme of things any better than we do. She just knows her way around the hulls, and that’s the kind of knowledge we need right now. She’s more important than any number of Teachers.
I lay my hand next to hers on the blue sphere. Instantly, without benefit of the port, I’m out in deep space, no egg-craft, just flying in the emptiness, thick stars ahead and that awesome nebula to one side.
Something is glowing at the nebula’s core—several things, actually, almost unbearably bright.
I feel her fingers move mine, instructionally, and my point of view spins around. I seem to face the hulls, the moonlet, all in a broad sweep.
“Isn’t it grand?” she asks.
It is impressive. The glimpse through the observation blister in the first hull did not begin to do it justice—nor did my dream-vision. The totality of Ship is huge. Hundreds of thousands could live in the forward space of each spindle-shaped hull—but that isn’t what the hulls are for. They’re not meant to be big apartment buildings. They could be huge testing areas for the Klados, preparing for planetfall.
Klados. It’s a Greek word. Cladistics is derived from it—whatever that is. The Klados describes us, links us to everything that comes from the Catalogs. Where are the Catalogs kept? How are they accessed? Who controls the birthing chambers?
The egg-craft moves in toward the last uninspected hull. There’s its number, a big 03, painted on the outboard side. The paint—along with the hull’s entire surface—looks scarred and pitted and gray as we pass around the blunt nose, searching for another docking port.
I’ve learned enough about the sphere that I move my fingers and twirl around, facing forward. I’m not looking for the nebula or the stars, but for that other glow that spreads like an umbrella ahead of Ship.
I move to Ship’s outboard side, near the origin of a pale grayish beam emanating from the third hull. The beam shoots forward, then fans out into space. Similar beams radiate from the other two hulls, but the beam from Hull Zero Two flickers weakly. It’s not up to full strength.
The beams merge somewhere ahead and form a barely discernible gray shield that must be hundreds of kilometers wide. Every so often, the shield sparks—infinitely small glints spread across its surface, then travel down the gray beams. Spinning around slowly to follow the progress of a parade of these sparks, I notice that there are runnels or small channels carved aft along each hull—lots of them.
I tell nobody in particular, “Ship scoops up dust. I wonder if it scoops fuel?”
“Ship won’t get much fuel from the interstellar medium,” Tsinoy says behind us. Again, the Tracker’s expertise is surprising, almost shocking. “It’s too thin. Not much out there, actually. But if Ship encounters dust, it could use it to replenish hull surfaces. Lots of wear and tear. We’ve been traveling a long time.”
I pull my fingers away from the sphere. “Another sleeper awakes,” I say, impressed. “Maybe you should come up here.”
“My claws might damage it,” the Tracker says.
“Nonsense,” the spidery woman says. “Come try. You’re waking up faster than some of the rest of us.”
“Let’s not name names,” Big Yellow says.
“Come take the big view,” the spidery woman insists. “See what it means—what it brings back.”
Tsinoy unfolds and expands. Having seen the Tracker in real action, I cringe. I can’t help it, even after it saved our lives. I pull away from the hemisphere and give it a wide berth. Maybe that’s sad. Maybe it isn’t. We’ve all had a rough time of it lately.
The girls are awake and watch us closely.
Tsinoy places its front paws—claws, hands, grippers, whatever—on the blue hemisphere and seems to relax. All its muscles loosen, and some even let go of their holdfasts on the bones, creating that puffed-up look. The spidery woman doesn’t seem to have any difficulty staying close.
After a moment of remote viewing, it says, “We??
?re still at speed. We should be asleep—stored away.”
“Right,” my other says.
“Only the first hull is doing spin-up and spin-down. The second hull is dead—no motion. The third seems to be rotating at constant speed,” Tsinoy says. “Something’s happened, something bad. If Destination Guidance was supposed to find a safe harbor for us, they failed.”
The spidery woman says, “What…” but she pauses to choose her next few words, as if they take some effort. “What’s a nova, or a supernova?”
Tsinoy answers. “Remember what a sun is, a star?”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Right. We shouldn’t ever come close to the kind of system where a nova could happen. A nova is a star disaster, a huge explosion. A supernova, even bigger—so powerful it could engulf hundreds of stars with deadly radiation in just a few years.” Tsinoy’s muscles rearrange again. It takes up a fresh, bunchy form, like a frosted hedgehog—yet another shape to haunt my dreams. A Killer—and a scientist. “This might be my specialty—stars, the interstellar medium.”
“Maybe you’re from Destination Guidance,” Big Yellow says. We all glare at him. “What?”
Tsinoy looks around some more, indicated by movement of its pink eyes, a slight nod and twitch of its canine head. “We seem to be emerging from one arm of a bright nebula,” Tsinoy says. “Those central stars, an empty space surrounded by brilliant strands… a pulse or wave front of radiation ionizing the interstellar medium. Recent supernova, perhaps. The explosion may be fifty years or more in the past. If we were within range, that could explain the damage to Ship.”
“Whoa,” Big Yellow says. “How could that happen?”
“Accident,” my twin says. “Or a major screwup.”
“Or sabotage,” the spidery woman says. Into our silence, she asks what option we’re going to choose—find a docking port on the last intact hull or return to our birthplace. She actually uses that word, birthplace. I don’t like it. But I can’t argue.
“We need Mother,” the girls say, not quite in unison.