If I believed in the silvery, I might accuse it as well—but I refuse to believe. It’s my delusion, and mine alone. It is not part of Ship or my reality, thus outside blame.
“They will revive soon,” the voice drones. “They are in deep sleep.”
“Very deep,” Kim says under his breath.
Nell pulls herself forward on a long branch and reaches to touch the leaves, then pull them aside, as if looking for the source of those glinting eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” she murmurs, with a warning glance at Tsinoy—no quick moves. “You in the shrubbery—who are you? Did you make the babies, tell us where to find them?”
“Who’s she talking to?” Tsinoy asks.
“There you are,” Kim says as a small form seems to materialize from behind him, hanging from a long tail wrapped around a branch. Memory tells me it’s a kind of monkey, but not really. It’s more like a doughnut with five jointed arms and two tails. It does have a general coat of fur, and at the top of the doughnut is a triangular head with eyes arranged in a kind of face, three around a trilateral nose, a fourth on its crown—entirely practical in three-dimensional lodgings.
The voice comes again, in part from the doughnut monkey beside Kim. “Wake them,” it says, speaking without an obvious mouth, through its triangular nose. Now it’s obvious the voice comes from all around. Other doughnut monkeys poke heads, tails, arms through the branches. One settles beside the rime-covered corpses and watches us with bright eyes.
The inhabitants of this leafy tree house number in the dozens—that we can see. Their arms have tiny, agile hands—three fingers and two thumbs. How many more fill the sphere of Destination Guidance? Hundreds? Thousands?
The monkey nearest the corpses reaches up as if to caress a thawing face. It gives a low howl, then shrinks back. “We have died,” the voice says.
“They’re all talking at once,” Nell says. “Just one voice.”
“Are they from the Catalog?” Tsinoy asks me. “Did Ship make them before us?”
Doughnut monkeys do not arouse the same disbelief as the chrome ghost. “Maybe,” I say.
“They aren’t obvious Killers,” Kim says. “No claws, not much in the way of teeth. Big heads, for their body size. They look—”
“Ship requests communication,” the voice says. “Ship requests reconciliation. Wake Destination Guidance and find us a home.”
“I’m confused,” Kim says. “Isn’t Ship dead? Aren’t we inside Destination Guidance?”
“They want us to follow them,” Nell says, watching the way the monkeys are moving, reaching out as if to touch us, pulling arms back at the last minute, then rushing in waves down an opening in the branches. “We can’t all go. Somebody has to stay here with the babies.”
But the monkeys show great concern about the babies. Heads turn. Noses speak.
“Nobody stays behind,” the voice says.
Tsinoy, ever surprising, shows them how she can keep the babies within her bulk, under her armor, in relative warmth and comfort, and Nell finally agrees—they’re better off coming with us.
“Why would they hurt them?” Kim asks. “Didn’t they ask us to find them and bring them here?”
“Use your imagination,” I suggest darkly.
Kim looks mildly aggrieved, then nods.
At least ten of the monkeys—all encouragement, cooperation, and gymnastics—swing out and around us hand to hand. They seem to want us to move away from the corpses, now that there’s no evidence the bodies will ever talk or act again.
The monkeys—the voice—may not be completely stupid. The last of them vanishes into the foliage.
THE SPHERE OF Destination Guidance is about five hundred meters in diameter. It seems to be made of concentric layers, floors or inner spheres, most of them plainly deserted and still cooled down. We’re guided by a corridor of warm air as much as anything. Cold keeps us on the right path.
Corridors and conduits push almost straight, or with gentle undulations, through the levels. The design reminds me of the hulls—organic in its seeming disarray, but also organically efficient. As we travel, Nell estimates that the warm air—and the monkeys, occasionally seen up ahead, then moving on—are guiding us on a wide arc toward the foremost point of the sphere.
The journey is interesting because half the foliage along our path is covered with deep frost. Here and there, other monkeys appear who are also still frozen—clinging and thawing to sluggish life.
A few are warm enough to break free and join our entourage.
Kim looks on with wonder. “They were built to freeze down with the sphere,” he says. Tomchin tries to express some idea or another, but we’re too busy to listen, learning our own Tarzan moves in the open spaces between the branches and leaves. (Don’t ask me who Tarzan is. I see ourselves surrounded by monkeys in this elongated forest—even doughnut monkeys—and the name is just there, along with a disturbing image of a muscular human male in a leopard-skin loincloth.)
“Don’t look now, but we’re brachiating,” I say.
“In public?” Tsinoy asks.
Nell giggles with a hiccup-meowing quality I find entrancing. After all we’ve been through, even as we brachiate, we have to give in to our sense of the absurd.
Tsinoy is the best at putting the word to the deed, moving swiftly, keeping up with the monkeys, but we can’t exactly learn from her, given our natural equipage. As she moves, we hear the infants inside her armor gurgling, cooing, chirping—expressions not precisely happy, but not distressed, either. Is she actually nursing them? Anything is possible. Absurdity is the rule.
I think at this point I feel something like love for our entire weird troupe. It’s the first time I’ve felt such an emotion for real people—though I remember it from the Dreamtime.
People.
My people. Maybe the only family I’ll ever know. And look at them—so many pages from unwritten human history, adapted to so many conditions, but working together, irrationally reaching for a goal, hoping for a purpose. What’s not to love?
The journey is not swift. We’re scratched, sweaty, and irritated in a dozen different ways by the time we reach our destination. It could be a duplicate of the forward control center we left behind us in Hull Zero Three, but it’s overgrown with vines, tendrils, branches, leaves, and even rooted trunks. The monkeys have been here, off and on—warm and cold—for a long time, it seems.
We find two more mummies, completely thawed and not in the least savory. “Who are they?” Nell asks our agile escorts.
“They are us,” the voice says from all around, and the monkeys settle, some grooming each other, while the majority cling to the branches and watch with so many dark, shining eyes.
“Can we… put them away?” I ask. “They’re dead. They’re not coming back.”
The monkeys think this over. I see a ripple in their odd faces and bodies: muscular twitches, arms and hands shaping subtle gestures. The ripple passes from one side to the other. A monkey wave. They think in serial.
The ripple completes, and together they say, “We are not dead.”
Tsinoy seems to have unique insight into what we’re being told. She’s contemplated form and function and inner being for some time now, and she’s clued in. “They copied themselves… into all of you? Gave you their memories, their jobs, their duties so that you could replace them if they didn’t survive?”
A general light rustling as tails twitch, little hands relax and clutch again. This question is too strange and important for the voice to answer right away.
“Yes,” it says finally. “They are us.”
“Well, that’s fortunate,” Nell says. “Because they need to be disposed of, now that you don’t need them.”
I push toward Nell, and in her ear I whisper, “Who’s in charge, then?” She shakes the question off. It’s way beyond her capacity. Tsinoy hears, however, and makes another creative leap—with another, more important question.
“Why make the babies and brin
g them here?” she asks.
“They are pure. They will grow to make a choice,” the voice replies.
Tomchin hums to himself, too clearly expressive, and turns away. “Mad Szhib,” he says. We all understand.
“We’re lost,” Tsinoy says. “What is there for them to decide, if they even could decide?”
“They have no dreams. Ship has not patterned them. They are pure.”
The monkeys pull and tear foliage from the rear of the control area. This reveals a moss-crusted circular hatch, big enough even for Tsinoy or Kim. Nell rubs her hands on her pants, holds up her long fingers, then looks around with a plaintive expression. Pylons rise as if to greet her. She touches a blue hemisphere, but only briefly. “It’s the same here as in the hulls,” she says. “There are huge blank places, burned places. Ship is incapable of making decisions.”
“Ship is dead,” the voice says.
“Mother almost won,” Tsinoy says.
The monkeys move around Tsinoy, beckon her to approach a hatch revealed to our right. We try to stay with her, but with rather more vigor than before, the monkeys keep us back.
The Tracker is welcome—protector of infants, bringer of new life, new guidance. But only the Tracker. The monkeys seem to think we’ve done our bit, for now.
“What a mess,” I murmur.
“Amen,” Kim says.
Tsinoy floats calmly before the hatch. “Let’s not be too hasty,” she says. “Or too fatalistic. How many go in?”
“You and the infants,” the voice says. “No one else.”
“Forget it,” Tsinoy says. “Being alone is being in bad company. The babies need more than me. They need a real mother, friends, uncles, protectors—and a real teacher.”
The monkeys are at a loss. More stirrings, gestures, but no more speech.
“If there’s a chance you’ll make it without us…” I begin.
“We’re not important,” Nell adds.
“Forget it!” Tsinoy growls. “I’m nobody’s idea of a nursemaid. I’d give them nightmares.”
“Not if you’re all they ever know,” Nell suggests in softening tones.
“Forget it!” the Tracker growls again. “Believe me, if I were a baby, this body would scare me silly. And I’m being practical as well as selfish. I hate being alone.”
The monkeys listen.
Stalemate.
Balanced on the head of a pin. Maybe it will all fall apart again right here. Centuries of effort, blood and treasure across the ages, a withering seedpod torn apart by its own perverse conscience (and where did that come from? Will we ever know?)—a faculty that never should have blossomed. Had it not blossomed, however, we wouldn’t be here. The monkeys have to understand something about this, if they combine the intellects of those who ordered us made. If they were the ones who injected us with conscience.
The hatch slowly pulls and melts aside. Lights come on. We peer into a sanctuary beside the control area. Here, everything is brightly colored, warm, clean, preserved, though at first the air is stuffy.
The monkeys make one last effort to separate us. With Kim, the result is comical—a big yellow guy covered by clasping, chirping, snorting, fur-covered doughnuts.
Tsinoy howls. The monkeys scatter. Kim grabs for support. The Tracker regains her composure—I hope. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
“They will go first,” she insists, after something like a clearing of her throat. Everyone flinches at that, and the monkeys perform another wave of alert concern.
No dissent from our ranks. We’ve tried worse stratagems with greater chances of failure. I gesture to Nell, who gestures to Tomchin, and Tomchin enters, then Kim, then Nell. Then me. Tsinoy follows me.
The monkeys hang back, uncertain.
“What happens now?” I ask just inside the hatchway.
From outside the sanctuary, the voice says, “We stop delivery of fuel from the moon to the hulls. In a generation, the hulls will go cold. All will freeze and die, except for those gathered here.”
“What about the gene pool?” Nell asks behind me.
No answer. Six of the monkeys are pushed forward by their companions, and reluctantly—with more sad chirps—they join us.
The hatch closes.
MEET YOUR MAKER
The inner chamber’s walls still carry a coat of frost. We’re cramped, cold, and silent. A few dozen meters away, surrounded by bluish gloom, a crystalline oval lies at the center of a shadowy space. There’s a small cherry glow around the oval. The glow expands. Warmth radiates slowly outward. Thawing here is a more delicate task than with the monkeys and their foliage. Whatever lies inside the oval is not so robust. Nell and I move closer.
“Someone’s inside,” she says.
The light rises. The glow comes from a translucent capsule just large enough to hold one body—shorter than Nell, smaller than Tsinoy or Kim, smaller even than Tomchin. A body about my size.
“Another mummy,” Kim suggests.
“I don’t think so,” Nell says.
My skin tingles.
“It looks female,” Kim says.
I had thought for a moment it might be another version of me inside the capsule, and I feel both relief and disappointment when I see it is not. She is not. But dismay follows disappointment. Her naked limbs are skinny, emaciated, as if she has been starved of both food and time. Her face is deeply wrinkled. Her eyes, as they open, are bleary and yellow.
She looks at us slowly, still groggy.
For the first time, we are witness to a living human being who is not young, not fit—who is, in fact, very, very old. Yes, she has been preserved, frozen along with the rest of the sphere. But she lived a long time before the capsule accepted her ancient frame, before she took this last option—this last outstretched voyage to our present, her future.
The capsule sections slide up, melt away. A sweet, musty scent rises from around the naked old woman, like perfumes from a grandmother’s dresser. I half expect to see round mirrors and blue jars of skin cream and combs felted with gray winter gleanings from ten thousand lonely nights.
She studies us one by one, showing no surprise, no dismay. Our appearance does not shock. Our forms do not concern her. The monkeys have allowed us to come here; the sphere has warmed…. She accepts us all, but perhaps she is too old—perhaps she can no longer summon enough energy to care whether we signal defeat or victory, or are simply another step in a plan she must have been integrally concerned with, hundreds of years before.
“Hello,” she says. She raises a thin arm, gestures with near-skeletal fingers. Four of the monkeys bring forward clothing worn, bleached, tattered, and still crisp with frost. She smiles and shakes her head. “Cold,” she says.
The monkeys pass the gown to us. Nell and I rub it with our hands to warm it.
“That’s fine,” the old woman says. She manages to float free of the capsule.
We dress her. She seems as light as a leaf. After her ancient nakedness has been concealed, she lifts her shoulders, squares them, shakes out her thin arms, and draws a finger along her lined cheek. Then she looks at us one by one and asks, “Which of you is Teacher?”
The others point. I’m too stunned to move or speak. Just touching her hands and limbs makes me ache. I’ve been through all sorts of suffering in my short existence, but not this—the painful prolonging of biological time.
“Is it really you?” the old woman asks, her eyes moving up to my face. I realize her sight has faded. “Closer.” She reaches out to me, and the monkeys help her forward like faithful handmaids. “I hope you remember. We would have been important to each other, once.”
The old woman’s features take on new focus. I map her eyes, her cheeks, the shape of her jaw. I draw her face over two other memories—my Dreamtime partner, the one I was destined to go to planet with. And Mother, back in Hull Zero Three.
My mouth is as dry as dust. “I remember,” I say.
“If something had gone wrong with your maki
ng, you wouldn’t remember anything about me. I’m so glad you do. I always remember you.”
“You’re Destination Guidance?” Nell asks.
“The very last,” the old woman says. “Now, please, you’ve brought me such lovely gifts, these odd creatures tell me. I didn’t design them, you know. That was Selchek. He’s gone by now, surely. There were three others. They’re gone, too, by now.”
“Yes,” Nell says.
The bodies.
“They brought themselves back one by one, to live out their lives and fight for the soul of the Ship. I presume that’s how it happened,” she says. “None of us was supposed to live forever, or even longer than a normal human being. So we had to cobble together an apparatus and carry it piecemeal from the hulls… along with these creatures!”
The monkeys do not seem offended by her appraisal. “She is the last,” they agree.
She grasps Kim’s huge arm in frail hands. “I’m sure there are better clothes somewhere. The monkeys care nothing for dress, you know. Please take me someplace warmer.”
Nell grimaces at me, but the sphere is merciful, and the monkeys have been busy cleaning, clearing, and preparing. I get the impression that in the monkeys, something remains of the others and that they are attendant on this meeting, listening. Perhaps they are pleased and finally willing to waste a few resources, for however short a time we will be here.
It has taken us so long to be created and gathered.
“Someplace warm,” the old woman repeats. Then, to the monkeys, the sphere, she calls out, in a surprisingly loud and firm voice, “Light the fires. Bring out the feast. It’s time!”
My heart thrills. We’ve never met, but knowing her is my validation.
JUDGMENT AND DESTINATION
Tsinoy, I think, fell in love with the old woman right away and cared for our infant successors with a quiet enthusiasm. She did not need to protect the rest of us.
We had already initiated the final cooling of the hulls. Essentially, this meant the destruction of most living things aboard Hull Zero Three, the other hulls being nearly dead already. Some might survive for a time—Mother is always resourceful, and the gene pool is a never-ending source of ingenuity.