I’m dozing in and out. I can see myself—imagine myself—talking to young humans, young versions of me. They mostly pay attention, as if they don’t know what I know, and I’m saying things that are useful to them. I imagine turning my head and seeing that some of the young humans—many, actually—are female.
The little one—she was a young female human.
A girl. That’s what you call a young human female. A child.
You’re a teacher, dummy. Teachers talk to children.
“Are there still children?” I ask. Plural of “child.”
It’s time for sleep. Maybe I’ll be eaten. Maybe I’ll fall asleep in front of the children, and they will laugh at me for being silly.
The little girl with the curly hair will be in the front row, laughing the hardest.
WAKE UP
My body takes a while to come up out of a cozy hole. The floor and the walls are warm. The warmth has made me sleep so deep and hard I feel stiff. I want to keep my eyes closed. Sleeping hurts less.
Then I realize there’s more light. The wall that sealed me off has pulled back into its notch. My head casts a fuzzy shadow. Instantly, my body tenses and thrills. I get to my hands and knees. The light is so bright I blink, but nothing’s waiting for me, and there’s no sound except for my breathing. Heavy, scared breathing.
I stop breathing for a moment. Silence. Almost. There’s a light purring noise, more of a vibration in the floor than a real noise in the air.
I stand up. Step forward. Step again. Walk for a few paces, over the notch, hesitating in case the bulkhead wants to drop and squash me. The notch remains just a notch. The lips of the notch are smooth, no gaps.
But there is blood. A few drops of dark red on the brown surface. I step over the blood. All that’s left of the little one. I wonder what she was like. Teacher doesn’t have all the answers, children. Monsters are supposed to hide in the darkness, but here, they wait in the brightness. At least, one did—once. Even so, I prefer the light.
Nothing to do but walk away from the darkness and into the brightness. I’m on my own, following my own internal instructions. This is the real beginning of my journey.
But someone opened the bulkhead. Someone’s helping me.
You’re on a Ship, remember?
Not really, but that’s a good hypothesis. It fits what few impressions remain from my Dreamtime. But what the hell kind of Ship? Apparently it’s a big one. I’ve been walking for a while. Some parts cold, some warmer. Some bright, some dark. A Ship that wants to stay asleep but has to keep turning over, restless, to avoid getting stiff.
Wow. That’s a lot of stuff for one thought. Ship is a metaphor. That’s a true teacher word, and I’m embarrassed how weak it makes me feel.
The hall is getting wider, taller, and the corners are going away. The hall is turning into a wider tube. I crouch down close to the floor—keeping an eye on whatever lies ahead—and see lots of little spots of glowing stuff set randomly but evenly into the surface. That’s where the light comes from, and maybe the warmth as well.
The lights are called glim lights.
All the time I’ve been walking, I’ve felt a little dizzy. If I had food in my stomach, it might not stay there. Everything starts to feel really strange. I lean forward, then back, then sideways. My feet start to lift up from the surface. One foot stretches down and accidently kicks off and I start spinning. Up and down are going away. I’m moving along the tube, faster and faster, and I bump along like a ball, then start spinning, bounce off and hit the opposite side.… And after a few more bumps, I’ve caught up with the corridor, or the corridor with me, and I’m just floating, barely moving at all.
The dizziness is impossible to deal with, because dizzy makes you want to fall down—and without a down, just forward and back, dizzy means I might spin completely around and start walking—I mean, floating—back where I came from.
Necessary to pay attention to the little random patterns of lights. Fortunately I seem to have sharp eyesight and can tell if I’m turning around. I’m not.
But there won’t be any more sleeping, not until up and down come back.
Now, how to move! I push away from one side to the other, using my hands. I can wave my arms, but they weren’t made for flying. I’m naked, so I can’t take off my shirt or my pants or my jumper or whatever the hell and flap them like a sail. That probably wouldn’t work anyway.
But there is friction—the first teacher word that turns out to be useful. It hurts to push against the tunnel with my bare feet and hands—they’re still raw from the cold—but with some practice, I manage to control both orientation and direction. I learn the trick of drifting and echoing along the lazy curve.
My stomach has settled—no food helps.
The quality of the light ahead changes—it’s pinker, then bluer. There’s something ahead, an opening in the side of the tube. Getting to it takes me about fifty hops and pushes. Then I am there. The opening leads to a larger space, a chamber or void filled with drifting objects, large and small. Some are irregular, others geometric, smoothly curved, or angular, like pieces of structure or machinery. I recklessly kick into the space.
Something wide and black and massive wobbles out of nowhere and nearly squashes me against the outer wall. I scramble around and out from under large flopping limbs, plates and matted fur. Out of the fur seeps a glob of dark fluid that bobs against my face. With a slight suck the blob surrounds my head and I can neither see nor breathe. It’s heavy and thick like syrup and smells cloying, poison-sweet, stinging my face, and if it gets in my eyes—
Frantic swipes and wipes of my hands and arms get most of it off, but a film still clings. I fling my arms out to clear my fingers, and thick drops fly to the far walls or spatter against other masses, other shapes.
Blinking, I try to see through a blur. I’m half-blind. All I can hear—once I clear my ears—is faint sounds of bumping, knocking, sucking. One hand still clings to a hank of fur on one side of the dead creature that nearly smashed me.
More dark blobs extrude from some other nearby dead things. I can’t make out their shapes clearly. The blobs collide and merge. I dodge one about the size of my head. It wobbles and shimmers in the breezy current of my motion, then spatters against a long, hard chunk, part of a broken machine, I assume: edges irregular and hard. It’s big, three times my height. The blob wraps around one end and decides to travel up its length like paint on a stick.
In my head, I’ve been putting together some sort of diagram or map from both memory—such as it is—and logic. The hall/tube seems to run around the perimeter of something—Ship, presumably. I vaguely picture Ship spinning, pressing me down against the outer tube. When Ship spins, the hall or tube seems to curve up. Up would be inboard; down, outboard.
I take note of the fact that this void, filled with broken or dead stuff, extends from the inner circumference of the hall’s curve—what used to be the top, before everything began to float and fly.
That means the void is inboard. I’m in a floating pile of junk. Useless as I am, maybe I belong here. What original use the junk may have had is not obvious. Some of it seems to have been alive—animals of a sort, leaking life blood—but nothing I see is familiar.
An odd feeling comes back to me, however. I’ve done this before. I know from weightless. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I’ve practiced this sort of maneuver before, often—in Dreamtime.
Large masses remain dangerous even when weightless—they can crush. They can also provide good points of vantage, good sport—kickoff, flight, stopping. Big masses will move only a little if I hit them, little masses I can use to propel myself if I fling them away.
After a little practice, I will move around in the void and take an inventory of its contents, may be useful later on. Maybe I’ll find something to eat. The leaked blobs, however, did not taste at all good.
“You’re a mess.”
The high, sweet voice, is p
ractically in my ear. I can almost feel the breath on my neck. Frantic, I try to twist about, but I’m between two objects, kicking away from one and hoping to bound off another, to get back to the opening and the tube. I can turn only by pulling my arms in, and then I rotate around an axis that runs through my left shoulder through my right hip.
Only then can I catch sight of the little one, floating about three body lengths away. She’s drawn herself up in a graceful knot, legs crossed as if squatting in a lotus—another teacher word. Her arms are folded. She follows me with large gray eyes.
She looks disappointed.
“You’re not dead,” I say.
“No. But it is.” She unfolds an arm and points at the big thing that had nearly crushed me.
I manage to kick off from another jagged white mass, heavy as a boulder. The mass slowly moves in the opposite direction, knocking aside other chunks and shapes. One of those shapes, I see, is part of a human body. The head is half chewed away, the legs are missing, and one arm is gone below the elbow. My shock nearly causes me to go off course, but I correct by pushing at a blackish, rubbery shape half my size, then correct, rather skillfully, to drift slowly in front of the girl.
“He’s dead, too,” she says, indicating the mangled corpse. Her arm is wrapped in a piece of dirty gray fabric. Blood shows through.
“The big thing tried to eat both of you?” I ask.
“No,” she answers. “It doesn’t eat—it cleans things up. It’s a cleaner. Sorry about your clothes. This body has already been stripped. We can find another, with pants.”
“You rob the dead?”
“Or anyone else who isn’t paying attention.”
“This is a trash heap? We’re in a junkyard?”
She nods. “Cleaners bring stuff here. Even dead cleaners.” She looks at the square book in my left hand. I’ve managed to hold on to it for all this time, unwilling to lose my one possession, but too busy to actually open it up and look inside.
“That’s mine,” she says, her eyes bright and sad. “I earned it.”
“Is it?” I bring it close to my eyes, reluctant to give it up. Up close, I see that what I took to be seven grooves on the back cover were in fact seven groups of seven scratches.
“It is. I earned it.”
I slowly reach out and place it in her outstretched hand.
“Where do you come from?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says, clutching the book to her chest. She’s wearing a loose red tunic and shorts and looks like a dab of paint in a void otherwise filled with duns and blacks, grays and muddled whites.
“How long have you been here?” I manage to wipe my eyes clear enough to focus on the farthest wall.
“We need to get you to water. You should know better than to get that stuff in your eyes. Don’t rub.”
Water. I realize how thirsty I am and think back on the dripping condensation—how I should have caught it on my tongue, lapped it up.
“Is there water nearby?”
“There might be.”
“Where? Here?”
“No.” A sour expression. “This is just a good place to hide.”
“Why did you pull me out of the cold?”
“I get lonely,” she says with a sniff. Somehow, I doubt that’s the whole truth.
“What happened to the thing that grabbed you?”
“They killed it when it tried to clean them.”
“Who killed it?”
“Others, not like you and me. Well, maybe a little. There’s a lot of variety, most of it bad.”
This expands my thinking to a painful degree. I’m drifting away from her again on air currents, bumping up against small stuff. So many questions, and this girl has reversed roles, making herself a teacher and me a student.
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I stopped counting after forty-nine.”
Seven groups of seven.
“Forty-nine what?”
“You’re ugly without clothes,” she says. “Let’s get out of here and find you some.” She uncrosses her legs and extends her arms, then unexpectedly uses my stomach to kick off. I whoof and drift back, and she shoots away toward the tube, though how she knows where it is in all this floating stuff is beyond comprehension.
But so is everything else.
I rebound and clumsily follow. The girl keeps her legs together, toes pointed, arms at her sides, spinning like a little bird or fish, and swiftly reaches out to push or kick, to echo or deflect.
“Wait!” I shout.
“Quiet,” she says. “If you’re noisy, I’ll leave you behind. Lots of things don’t want us here.”
The girl flies well ahead of me. Her trail is a kind of vortex of objects she has used to maneuver, most of which get in my way. I wonder what will happen if the heaviness returns while we’re caught in all this debris. This thought forces a rapid learning curve—much better than the alternative, panic—and soon I’m kicking, spinning, and fending with an alacrity I hope is skill, until the half-armored furry thing looms, a wall of leaking fluid and tufty darkness, and there’s nothing I can do to avoid it. I curl into a ball and crunch up against the shiny carapace. This halts my flight abruptly and sets the dead thing spinning. Dark drops and spheroids, some trailing little tails of fluid, radiate outward in a thin, clumpy cloud.
I’m now truly adrift, nothing to kick against, and thus in a position to study the black thing more closely. It’s been severely damaged; wounded might be the right word. One whole furry side is heavily lacerated. This is the source of most of the leakage, though some fluid has also seeped from what might be a mouth, gaping beneath a trio of tiny, shiny eyes. The head, where the eyes and mouth are, is tiny, underslung, on a thick, short neck.
The sectioned carapace covers what might have been a huge hump of back, while on the sides—now spinning into view—there are six thick, equally spaced legs, culminating in flat, bristle-edged feet with central pits or holes. The legs have drawn inward in death.
As it spins, I realize that the thing has three heads, really, like the points of a rounded triangle. Two legs flank each head. To one side of a head is what might have been the ruglike appendage that scooped up the girl, now rolled tight and almost withdrawn into a sheath.
I can’t connect this creature to anything I’ve experienced, and what little I can draw out of the Dreamtime is also no help.
Another chunk of debris—flat and gray and, I am thankful, not leaking—rotates slowly into position. I pull up my legs, tuck in my arms, and wait for it to connect with my feet—flat, dense, perfect. I kick away and straighten, then draw in my legs, hold out my arms, and make wide stroking motions with my hands. I think I’m swimming.
The void’s great curving wall draws closer. I see now that its surface is spattered with carbonized, crusty stains, like the inside of an immense oven. I look for the opening that leads back to the tube. I see it, and there, just inside, waits the girl, floating in lotus again—the position named after a flower.
A flower from old Earth.
Pleased with myself—I got the words, I got the moves—I bounce and claw and push toward her. But she’s not paying me a bit of attention. Instead, hovering near the fistula that joins the tube and the junk-filled void, she’s alerted on something just out of sight, outside the void, still inside the tube. Whatever it is makes scrabbling noises—and then speaks. I hear several voices, using words I don’t understand. I stop my forward motion by setting a block of white ceramic whirling away. The block hits other objects with resonant clunks, like caroming billiard balls.
“Billiard. Billiards.” I say these words aloud. Brilliant! All my right words are returning in a rush—just in time for something to come out of the tube and kill us both.
The girl looks my way, one eyebrow lowered in disapproval, holds a finger to her slightly twisted lip, and nods, as if we understand perfectly well what we need to do next.
I shake my head, clueles
s. But I’m all she has.
The voices inside the tube grow louder, insistent. Maybe they’re calling to us. The girl isn’t about to risk revealing herself, so I keep quiet as well. I have to trust her, though if worse comes, I suspect she’ll not hesitate to sacrifice me, use me as a shield or a decoy.
The whole situation falls into a profound quiet—all but the shuffle and clunk of slowly moving, colliding objects behind and around us.
Perversely, I again notice my hunger. I wonder if the furry armored thing has any parts that are edible. My mouth starts to water with what little spit I can muster. Maybe that’s why it was killed and lacerated—to liberate chunks of food. The blood may taste bad but the rest of it good. If that’s so, then why isn’t the void swarming with hunters, diners? A Ship this size—if it is a Ship—should carry thousands like the girl and me. Hungry thousands, trying to survive in pointless chaos.
The girl points to the fistula—the opening. She jabs her finger and opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Then I see what she means.
The fistula is shrinking. All the debris is shifting in one direction—to our left. We’re moving as well. We’re going back to being heavy. The girl unfolds her arms and legs, looks for an opportunity to push off. I follow her motions and try to calculate the vectors of tons of broken objects. More bodies come into view, one or two human, most not, some much larger, unfolding long chains of armor plates—carapaces, I think.
All dead, not moving.
Except for one.
Until now, it must have been at the far side of the void, listening for movement. I glimpse it in the gaps. The gaps are closing as the debris is compressed to one side of the void, with me in it—along with what I’ve just seen, a sinuous, eel-like creature, many times my size. Thick bands of limbs spaced along its length flex in unison. A huge circular maw at one end pushes out a cone-shaped rasp, studded with glistening, silvery teeth.
The dead black cleaner comes between us. I’m on one side, the long eel on the other.