PRINCE IS wet, cold. His eyes are open, but his gaze holds something glassy and he doesn’t seem conscious. As the pipe of the service elevator dumps us in the anteroom before the servants’ cubicles and then retreats, his legs fail and his head drops back.
I grab him under his armpit. He’s light, delicate. Too much, and my stomach knots. Is he okay? Did everything work properly? He’s not too scrawny? Weak? Shit, his skin is deadly cold. Did I take him out of the sarcophagus too soon? But the alien was coming—what the hell was I supposed to do?
I take Prince in my arms and listen, still. I’m two or three levels under the sarcophagus cocoon, but I can hear the alien anyway. Ship’s as silent as a tomb, and I sense the vibrations of footsteps as the alien moves inside the empty cocoon. Did it see us sneak out in the service elevator?
Silence, then more steps and bumps. I think the alien is way too big to squeeze itself into the service elevator, but I’m not totally sure, and a veil of sweat forms on my face. I have to take Prince away from here. Far away, where their instruments can’t perceive us.
I exit into the dark corridor and start to run.
Prince’s so thin I can carry him without effort. He’s even small. In the brief moment when he stood inside the service elevator his head barely reached my shoulder. Now his cold cheek rests on my collarbone, and a lot of wet hair covers his face. He’s no longer still, because he’s started to tremble convulsively. This scares me.
I reach the intersection with the main gallery on this level, and I stop, panting. I don’t know how many aliens are on board. I saw three dots on the map, but there may be more by now. Yes, they walk loudly on those spider legs, but the risk of finding one of them in front of me is too big, while the aliens probably have sophisticated instruments to run scans of Ship to sense us.
I have to go as far as possible, hoping to escape the reach of their instruments.
I crawl in another service elevator, and I stand Prince in front of me. His head dangles and his legs fail, all that wet hair stuck to his face. He remains upright only because we are squeezed into the tiny tube with no space to fall.
Where am I going? Lower levels or higher levels?
I consider for a moment hiding in the storerooms. But there are goods, and if the aliens are seeking goods, that’s where they’ll find them. And it seems like a bad idea to stress Prince with heavy gravity.
Okay. I shoot both of us to the higher levels. The farthest is level one, the one Blasius called Main Bridge.
Even though we move at high speed, the journey takes a long time, sending my stomach into my throat, and I’m worried about Prince’s condition. When the elevator vomits us out in a service area, I take him in my arms before he can fall to the floor.
I look around. I haven’t been here for years. We are in a dusty exchange hall, in which ten service elevators arranged in a ring come out. Gravity is lighter than I’m used to, but comfortable, with no danger of going flying in the air at every abrupt movement. This is the highest level I can reach before the Command Bridge. We could hide even in the Command Bridge, but it seems to be a bad idea. Gravity is almost absent there, plus the aliens could visit it searching for Captain.
Blasius said that once upon a time, in the Command Bridge, there was a deity called Captain. Captain sailed Ship through Outside under Corp’s orders. I visited the place, which is a ring platform on top of the reactor pit. I saw nothing, apart from empty consoles and broken pipes hanging from the ceiling and trails of debris sailing adrift in the air, like small constellations made of dust. And spiders. Their cobwebs become fantastic three-dimensional constructions in zero gravity. At the center of the platform, the reactor’s hole is scary. From the dark, huge pit comes a deep vibration that resonates in your bones. Down below are Ship’s nuclear reactors. Captain was able to dominate them.
Maybe we can hide in one of the officers’ quarters. They are full of servants’ cubicles, where there shouldn’t be anything interesting for aliens.
With Prince in my arms, I exit the hall, and find myself on a small suspended sidewalk. Under and around me yawns all the magnificence of the Main Bridge.
This level extends through an open space that would normally be equivalent to two or three regular levels. Suspended walkways, spiral staircases, and huge platforms cross the dark, immense space, and the depth of Outside seems to swallow me from the enormous transparent slices in the distant ceiling. Galaxies and constellations provide the only illumination. Over my head, Outside shines with a trillion stars, and I stagger, dizzy. Gravity seems too weak and I panic. At once, I’m sure the force of attraction is not sufficient to keep my feet on the platform. I can’t grab the handrail, because Prince is in my arms, so I lean on the wall behind me. I close my eyes for three deep breaths.
“Don’t worry, it’s fine.”
I flinch at the sound of my own voice. I spoke to Prince many times while he was asleep, but doing it now seems so strange. Disrespectful, maybe. However, he continues to shake, his face buried on my shoulder, and I doubt he can hear me.
Prince’s fragility terrifies me. Inside his sarcophagus he was unchanging and eternal, like Ship and like the stars. It was enough to control the lights to keep him safe. Now his survival is literally in my arms and a red-hot blade of anxiety slices through my belly.
“Better to move.”
I start to walk, unstable at the beginning, but more confident as I realize gravity works. I move toward one of the housing districts, irregular clusters that seem suspended in the air. Since the elevators throughout this section have been disabled, I begin to climb a flight of suspended stairs.
Blasius told me that once stairs and bridges moved on their own, carrying people where they wanted to go without them having to take a step, but I’ve always been quite skeptical about this fact. Wasting so much energy just to spare a walk? What did they fill their lives with, if they weren’t even walking? People who once lived inside Ship were quite strange, though.
After a long climb, I finally reach one of the luxurious quarters atop the housing district. In all the accommodations on this level, the doors are open and the environments have been completely cleared out, leaving rooms similar to empty shells, so I can go wherever I want. I enter one of the residential units. In front of me, in the darkness barely dissipated by the stars peeping through the transparent sections of the ceiling, opens an empty space, punctuated by arcs and intricate clusters of columns. A circular depression opens in the floor at my feet. I know that holes like these were pools filled with real water, because Blasius told me, but the reason why anyone would keep a tank of water in his housing unit escapes me.
I walk across the huge hall. Only one or two high-ranking people lived in all this space, Blasius said. I never believed this, either. Apartments like these contain a dozen cubicles for servant clones, and I just can’t understand how so many clones could serve a single human being. Maybe Blasius was making fun of me.
I keep walking, but at once an apparition makes me shout in terror.
I stop, shocked.
A monstrous, gigantic thing rises from the transparent slices in the ceiling. First it is just a crescent, but then it grows gradually, until it almost completely prevents my view of Outside. The enormous thing hangs over Ship as if about to fall, flows over my head, then begins to descend to the other side.
It is a huge, circular object, greenish, with pipes, vents, antennas, hatches, and Corp knows what else sprouting from its surface. The surface is metal. I can recognize the metal.
Slowly, I understand.
This is another Ship.
This is Alien Ship, orbiting around us.
My voice trembling and scared, I moan, “Oh, Corp.”
I FIND a cubicle. Here even the servants’ cubicles are luxurious. This is twice the size of mine, and a strip of transparent ceiling opens above it. All the systems are turned off; the sanitizer and the goods chutes don’t work, of course, but the cot is still in place, being embedded in the bulkhead. Thanks to weak gravity, not that much dust has settled, and I brush all of it away before depositing Prince on the bare padding foam.
I free Prince’s face from his hair, and his eyes are closed. He curls up on the mattress and starts shaking so hard I fear the electricity that hit him inside the sarcophagus still wanders through him. His skin is gray and cold. I have to warm him up somehow, but I have nothing to cover him with.
I’m afraid. I yank off my uniform top and use it to cover him, but it’s a ridiculously small garment. In the end, I climb on the bed and clench Prince’s stiff body to my chest. I don’t know what else to do.
His cold cheek presses on my bare chest. I squeeze his limp body against mine and stroke his back; I take his hands and massage them until a bit of warmth returns to his fingers.
His body has the same consistency as mine. This amazes me. I thought he could be a kind of statue, different, even though I don’t know exactly how. His arms and his hands, although small and delicate, are just like mine. His nails are long and white and protrude from the tips of his fingers, and I wonder if they grew during the long period of suspended animation. Same thing for his hair, a mysterious golden thing made of silk threads. I know silk. Blasius told me silk is the delicate cocoon the caterpillar weaves around its body to become a moth. As it dries up, Prince’s hair becomes exactly like silk.
Slowly, very slowly, his tremors decrease, but I keep massaging and squeezing him. For a moment the close contact with his body also lowers my temperature, but as I continue, as I study his limbs and his bones with analytic curiosity, the heat comes over me again and my face and chest are on fire. Prince’s trembling vanishes, apart from an occasional jolt.
I check his face, still resting on my collarbone, and I jump, realizing that not only are his eyes wide open, but he’s watching me carefully from among the silk of his hair.
“Who are you?”
Oh, Corp. He talks!
His voice is feeble and hoarse, but he talks, and I can understand him.
“I’m your guardian angel. Don’t worry. You are safe now.”
Awkwardly, he raises a hand and moves a lock of hair from his face. His first movement, apart from the trembling.
Prince blinks, focusing on me.
Damn, I never saw his eyes. They are different from mine. Green. I know the green color—the color of the lights when everything works—but I’ve never seen a green like that. Deep, liquid, profound, with particles drifting inside. It enchants me.
Prince speaks again.
In my dreams, whenever he woke up, he asked me different things. He smiled, or was angry, and sometimes cried; most of the times he wondered where he was and why. Over the years, in the course of my whole life, he wanted to know a lot of things. But he never asked a question like this.
Looking at me, Prince asks, “Who am I?”