The disembarkation stage is a broad cylinder slung with cables and nets. The end of the cylinder is open—but beyond lies frigid darkness. The moon-bound sphere was never designed for spin-up. Whatever lived here, lived in eternal weightlessness. Did they also live in eternal cold?
“Tell it to be hospitable,” I suggest to Nell.
“All right,” she says. “A little help, please!”
No response.
“How about some heat?” she adds.
“Sure you weren’t speaking to a ghost?” Kim asks, shoulders flexing. He drifts out of our hatch. No one wants to touch the frosted cables or netting. The air hurts our noses and burns our lungs. At least it’s breathable, aside from the cold.
There’s a flash, a streak of light. It’s in my eyes, not from any illumination in Ship itself. Everyone makes a startled sound, even Tsinoy. We all saw it.
“Cosmic ray,” Tsinoy suggests.
But I’ve seen something like it before. My saving ghost. The one that can’t possibly exist.
A small glow begins, blue-green, then brightens to a dim yellow. The interior of the chamber beyond the landing stage is equipped with tiny glim lights, like the walls of the hulls. I’m back where this all began—moving toward light, chasing heat.
“I get it,” Nell says. “We were taught to fear Destination Guidance because Mother didn’t want us to come down here.”
“Or because it’s dangerous. Maybe they aren’t even remotely like us….” Kim trails off on that idea, and we cringe at the rudeness of even suggesting such a thing, at this of all times.
“That’s confusing,” Tsinoy says. “If we were chosen by Destination Guidance…”
“We could still be dangerous,” I say. “We’re still Mother’s children. In a way.”
Tomchin makes a humming proclamation I don’t catch.
Another streak of light. Tsinoy whistles and begins to bulk up. We gather close as she puts out more heat.
“Don’t cook the babies,” I remind her.
She turns her eyes on me and blinks slowly—three different lids, all transparent. She doesn’t sleep, doesn’t stop seeing—ever. I know the babies are fine—warmer than us, but fine.
We hold our ground, like children on the porch of a haunted house. Autumn leaves, moonlit October nights, long dirt roads alive with tree shadows, bags filled with candy… flickering candles in carved-out pumpkins. So much in the way of lost, false memory wells up at that comparison—haunted houses and small towns and Halloween—that I’m momentarily blinded by tears.
Someone had fun with me way back when—had fun putting me together. Or perhaps I’m based on someone real, long dead, way back on Earth.
I’m the haunted house. My brain is the ghost here.
“Nothing,” Nell says. “You try.” She points to me, then around to all of us. “We’ll all try, one at a time—but you first.”
“A little help down here!” I call out, my breath turning to snow. More minutes pass. Nell raises her hand toward Kim, and then we feel a current of air lightly flow along the cylinder. The darkness begins to creak, snap, and then groan—long metallic groans underscored by a low whoosh. We move back toward the hatch, having had quite enough, thank you—just before the warmer air brushes our faces, circles us, caresses our hands, luffs at our clothing, rustles Tsinoy’s spines—and becomes a wind.
The sphere is finally coming to life.
A voice speaks. We all recognize the gentle, precise tones. “I await a decision,” it says.
“About what?” I ask.
No answer. Nell moves forward. “We need to shut down Hull Zero Three. We don’t like what’s happening there. How can we do that without damaging Ship?”
“Ship is already damaged,” the voice says. Lights brighten. The darkness beyond the cylinder vestibule is filled with smoothly curved surfaces, volumes, in strikingly beautiful colors and patterns, some translucent, others pale and milky. It’s like nothing we’ve seen elsewhere on Ship, as if a mad artist began blowing huge glass shapes and arranged them to an irrational aesthetic.
But this is just one tiny part of the sphere, which is at least half a kilometer in diameter. It could be a greeting, meant to impress—or a distraction to hold and confuse us while examinations are made; a 3-D psychological test that might determine whether we live or die, are welcomed, or are flushed back into space.
“Did you make this?” Kim asks, and I see that of all of us, he’s the most affected by the unexpected elegance and beauty.
“This space was designed by Destination Guidance,” the voice says.
“Are you Destination Guidance?” Nell asks.
“No.”
“Are you Ship Control? You sound familiar….”
The voice asks, “What do you not like about Ship and its operations?”
This is a loaded question, obviously, and we need some time to think it over. We haven’t moved from the cylinder, our hole of relative safety on the edge of a coral reef of color and unfamiliar beauty. If we venture out, will something grab us while we’re distracted?
Put an end to all our worries?
“What do you not like about Ship operations?” the voice asks again.
Nell swallows, presses her hand against her lips, and looks to me. They’re all looking to me.
“We think there was a war to stop Ship from killing a planet. We’re refugees.” I stop, feeling foolish again and totally unprepared. And besides, who or what am I talking to? There’s nobody here, nobody visible. The space is warming quickly. Soon, we might be invited in… sit down for tea and cookies, discuss the local interstellar weather.
“What is conscience?” the voice asks.
But not until we pass our biggest test.
“The willingness to sacrifice for a greater good,” I say.
“Sacrifice what?”
“Dreams. Plans. Personal stuff.”
Nell is getting irritated. Tsinoy, on the other hand, is shrinking—pulling in, drawing back. I glance over my shoulder at her.
“She’s designed to be a Tracker, a Killer,” I say. “But she refuses to give in to her design. There’s something better inside her. Inside all of us.”
“Did she acquire that by herself, or was it put there?”
“I own my feelings,” Tsinoy growls. “I am what I want to be.”
“Absolutely,” I agree. “We’ve been through the wringer.”
“Tell me what that means.”
“Just wait a goddamned minute!” I shout. “We’ve been put through a living hell to get here. We’ve been chased and expelled and murdered and deceived….”
“You were created by Ship,” the voice says. “Would you rather not have been created?”
Tsinoy shrinks back as if kicked. We’re about to act like whipped dogs, all of us. Enough.
“You want our gratitude?” I cry out. Nell touches my arm.
“Ship has a mission. Would you have Ship continue on that mission if it guaranteed your personal survival—and if ending that mission meant your death?”
Tsinoy says, “We are not the only ones here.” She lifts her spines and delivers the babies, still in their bags, then hands them to the rest of us, like talismans or shields. She’s offering up the little ones she’s protected and making the rest of us their protectors as well.
Tomchin looks distressed and holds his bag out as if it’s a bomb. Kim tucks his in the crook of one huge arm. As we receive our own infants, Nell looks at me, and we move closer, until our arms touch. It’s an awkward, scary, strangely lovely moment. I almost don’t care if we live or die. We’ve made our peace with fate.
“We’re all human here,” I say. “You can’t judge us. You’re just a machine.”
“Machines have not been in control for a very long time. Come in. Finish birthing the young ones, and they will be fed. There is food for you as well.”
Nell opens her bag. “What do you think?” she asks me.
Tsinoy moves first. Her claw delicately slits one side of the membrane. The baby comes out, and along with it, a small stream of reddish fluid. Tomchin just about loses it and starts to babble a nasal protest, offering his gray bag—now quite active—to anyone. But he’s in this with all of us.
The other membranes are tough, but one by one, the sacs are carefully cut open and the babies withdrawn.
I massage mine instinctively, then turn it around with country doctor wisdom, hold it with one hand, and slap its bottom with the other. Fluid gushes from its mouth as it empties its lungs. Suddenly it draws breath and starts to pinwheel its arms, then cry.
“It’s a boy,” I say.
Nell follows suit, then the others—even Tomchin.
“Mine’s a girl,” Nell says.
We use the bags to wipe them down, dry them off. We compare our infants as if we’ve opened Christmas packages—another memory that only compounds my irrational joy. Three girls, two boys. My eyes stream with tears. It’s warm enough in the vestibule that we don’t feel the need to swaddle them.
I clean gunk from my boy’s mouth, swipe his eyes clear, pinch his nose to squeeze out the last fluid. Hold him out with the others, to our judge, our sponsor—whatever it may be. A desperate, defiant act. We hope for sympathy in a violent, damning, world, all that we’ve known and experienced in real life—as opposed to phantom memory. We long for confirmation and completion and justification—and we also long to survive and learn that our reckless existence has meaning.
The glass pillars light up and separate, showing a passage through alternating ribs of steel, into what might be a frozen jungle. I’m not sure I like that. And more glass, lit within by green sparkles, undulating through the interior of the sphere for a hundred meters or more.
We carry the infants and move cautiously toward the center. Streaks of green and pink ripple over the inner wall of some sort of sanctuary.
“Welcome,” the voice says.
The wall melts aside. Within, all is frost-covered, leafy green. Furniture comfortable for weightlessness has been shaped and positioned in and around branches, much as in Mother’s bower. I see for a moment small eyes, in pairs and triplets—many of them, staring out from between the leaves, and expect we are about to discover another female like Mother, another trap, another challenge—followed swiftly by more Killers.
But the eyes blink and withdraw. The lights rise, and a blue glow like terrestrial sky suffuses the glade, the tree house—that’s what this all reminds me of, a tree house deep inside a jungle.
And at the atrium where guests might be greeted, welcomed, or captured, a curling flash of silver moves between the branches in ways I can barely follow, as if its time flows in a way different from mine. It’s like trying to watch a ghost made of sky and chrome, a glinting creature all thin limbs and curves, glassy apparel flowing around its lithe body like spilled milk, decorated with jeweled beads, aquamarine and emerald. And rising above this splendor, a tall, slender head, humanoid in one respect—that there are eyes, nose, something like ears on the side of the head.
Not part of my memory—not part of Ship. Something far outside the Klados.
A silvery.
“Welcome to Destination Guidance.”
The apparition is not speaking—it isn’t the being behind the voice. For a moment, it looks at me, lifts a finger to its lips, and smiles the most frightening, beautiful smile. It has no teeth.
It drops its hand—and melts away.
For my eyes only. The others saw nothing.
Nell notices my violent shiver. “Come on, it’s not that bad,” she says.
I want to throw up, but there’s nothing to expel.
Inner lights rise. A small space has been cut out of the branches. The space is partly walled with milky panels, slender wires forming what might have once been sleeping pods. Within two of the pods are dark brown robes, and almost hidden in the robes two figures, mostly black, with touches of grayish pink, still crusted with spots of ice and frost—but rapidly thawing.
“Are you here to relieve and replace Destination Guidance?” the voice asks.
I wonder how these shriveled bodies can make any sound. But it’s quickly obvious, from a rising sour smell, that neither of these cold husks is the one speaking. They’ve been dead a long time.
“I spoke with Ship,” Nell says. “We need pure Ship—the one that woke us up, that taught us how to access the Klados and Ship’s memory. No go-between. No tricks.”
“I am not that Ship,” the voice says. “A decision must be made, but I am not empowered to make it. A new destination has been found. Guidance team has been frozen and preserved. They will revive soon.”
Kim studies the corpses. Nell keeps back with Tsinoy. All of us feel the danger. What fought against our birth, our survival? What made creatures to kill us? Mother, Ship, or these corpses?
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 bring 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.