The walls of the shaft from this point on are covered with spiraling sweeps of soot and rainbow-oily discolorations. The surface has been heat-treated. Burned. The rungs are still intact and strong… so far.
Another hour.
I’m not feeling all that bright. I wonder if I’m taking the same path I took the last time, or whether my counterparts followed one or both of the forking corridors. The shaft gets more soot-stained. Then I see it clear.
A swirl of superheated air or actual flame, carrying bits of fuel, swept down the shaft and came up against the cleaner, just doing its duty but plugging the flow. It crisped, died, and jammed, and debris fell on its upper surface. Parts of bodies.
This is like a war.
This is a war.
Another half hour of climbing and I arrive at the end. Not the end of the shaft as designed, but a shattered, burned stump of internal piping, intimate ship architecture opening onto dark, smelly nastiness.
Thrusting into amazing destruction.
The melted and cracked rim of the broken shaft rises three meters from a shadowy churn of broken bulkheads, conduits, decking. I poke up and look around.
I’m on one side of a roughly cylindrical void about sixty meters across. I now weigh considerably less than I did when I began. I might be half a kilometer closer to the center of the hull. Much farther inboard and spin-up will be little more than a nuisance—my weight will be negligible.
I can’t make sense of the mess. Any prior design, any obvious function has been obliterated. The pervasive smell is bitter-flowery, nauseating. Everything around me is coated with an iridescent film. I reach out from the last rung to touch the outer surface of the shaft, and my finger comes away slick. Using the inadequate illumination from the shaft’s few remaining glim lights, I hold my finger close to my eye and see that the film is trying to bead up, organize. It doesn’t want to have anything to do with my flesh.
I wipe the film off on the shaft’s internal surface. There, I watch it spread out and join with other patches of iridescence, migrating toward the ruined edge. The patches are trying to form a kind of dressing. The film wants to completely coat the destruction and begin… what? Repairs?
Ship can fix itself even without factors? Or is the film another kind of factor, another lively tool?
There’s movement on the opposite side of the void. Something large clambers over the wreckage, hooking its way, then stopping to hang loose—a shiny black conoid trunk with a skirt or fringe and twelve long, sinuous but jointed appendages, delicately poking, feeling, attempting to shift broken pieces, as if putting together a shattered vase. It emits soft wheeps and whirs, despondent, overwhelmed. Its trunk, fringe, and radiating limbs flicker with channeled spots of blue and red luminescence.
Some wreckage breaks away and falls casually to my side of the void, jarring the conoid. Its fringe rises in a lapping wave. The limbs sweep the stinking air. It could be a fixer—one of the factors you’d expect in a ruined space. Drawing up its estimate for repairs and not happy with the bill.
Above me, I make out a breach in a far bulkhead, and beyond that, a fluctuating brightness like cold flame. Another fixer squeezes into the void through the breach and scuttles to join its fellow, knocking loose more debris. I duck into the tube as a conduit slams onto the top of the shaft, falls to one side, wobbles, settles. I poke up again. The fixers touch limbs, whir and wheep with a dignified musical pattern.
In a short while, after spin-down, I’ll try to leap across to the breach, which seems to offer access to another chamber beyond. I have no notion whether the space will be undamaged or livable, but the smell here is intolerable.
I look around the void and wonder what spin-down will do to the wreckage—how it will rearrange, drift loose. I’ve already had experience with junk in free fall and don’t wish to repeat it. I could drop back into the shaft and hide, but there’s no guarantee the wreckage won’t cover the opening. No, my only chance is to kick out across the damaged space to the breach as soon as spin-down is complete and hope for the best.
I measure the distance and the angle with my eye, searching for a relatively smooth surface from which to kick off.
Any reasonable trajectory will take me across two-thirds of the void. The breach is three meters wide. A tiny target to reach in one jump.
Something becomes silhouetted within the blue glow. It might be a head. I can’t see clearly. The sting in the air is filming my eyes, and wiping them seems a bad idea. The next time I get a good look, the breach is open, empty.
I’m sure some of the film has coated my clothes, where it’s unhappily trying to clump up and break loose. Much longer in this space and I’ll likely have enough of the active stuff in my lungs to kill me.
The lurch comes. I grab a rung and hang on. All around, wreckage tumbles, rolls, cascades away from the outer reaches of the void. Big pieces break loose and wobble and spin. The whole void becomes a noisy, slamming, chiming circus of mindless debris—all of it tending toward the opposite of our spin. There, it loosely gathers, bounces, and with spin-down finished, drifts across my proposed path with all the leisure of strolling elephants.
I stay low in the shaft but keep an eye on the blue glow within the breach. Debris transits. Some pieces threaten to enter the shaft—but miss. I can’t make out the fixers. If they’ve lasted this long, they’ve likely hooked themselves down and are patiently waiting out the change of momentum.
My jumping-off point, a relatively smooth, broad shaft edge, is just above the last rung. I give some thought to using the rung itself, but it’s too narrow to accommodate both my feet.
Things aren’t going to get any better.
I swing out like an inchworm (another amusing but useless image—some sort of young insect, not a spider) and straddle the edge of the shaft, then grip it with my thighs, straighten my torso, transfer grip to my hands, and arch my back again—plant my feet firmly, bend my knees, look over my shoulder…
A piece the size of a horse just misses me. I don’t give a damn what a horse is.
I kick off. It’s a solid kick, the angle looks good. I sail across the void at a decent clip. Still looks good. I draw in both arms and a leg to avoid a twirling chunk of pipe about as wide as my thigh. This starts me wheeling around an axis through my hips. I can’t stop it, but the motion is slow enough not to cause injury, unless I collide with something sharp. I see lots of sharp things. I count the rotations, having nothing better to do, but at the end of five, something large and translucent dims the light from the breach. Could be the film in my eyes. I don’t see it now—don’t want to see it, can’t help but look. Something big and confusing, like an animal made of rods of glass. Not entirely colorless, however. A small, bright red spot clues me that the thing is actually moving in my direction, not just spreading out….
Maybe ten seconds more until I’m at the breach. My hip pirouette is infuriating. I want to stare without interruption, keep track of the cracked and warped walls, the twirling debris, and make sure I’m not being hunted by a glassy haystack blur with a red spot.
Five seconds before the breach. Desperate, I reach out and grab a chunk of flat bulkhead. I stop both my motion toward the breach and my precession. I see… nothing, of course.
A kick at the bulkhead sends me off at the wrong angle. I reach out as far as I can. Two fingers grab hold of a burned, curled edge, and after a few seconds of utterly graceless scrambling, I’ve pulled myself out of the stinking, rubble-filled void, through the breach, and into a quiet, calm blue space that seems to go on forever….
Where I stare into the biggest eye in the entire universe.
CORE
The eye looms over me, a curved, transparent wall about a hundred meters wide. I’m on one side of a space that caps the eye like a gigantic goggle. Behind the eye is liquid water—lots and lots of water, blue green and lovely, filled with an amazing array of bubbles huge and small, moving in sluggish leisure with the residual currents from the l
ast spin-up—very slowly wobbling, jiggling, breaking up, rejoining.
Fizz in a giant’s soda bottle.
The eye has immense depth. It’s the forward end of a huge tank. This leaves me limp with awe, and after I slow my heart and breathing and realize I’m not in immediate danger, the view jogs my memory, filling in basic knowledge from Dreamtime.
Ship needs fuel and reaction mass. The dirty ice moonlet supplies both. Mining machines on the surface send up chunks of ice that get stored in the tanks. That’s where the serpent gouge comes from—machinery digging. The moonlet is mostly water, a small portion of which is deuterium; this can be used in a fusion reaction. Fusion is the process of combining the nuclei of atoms into larger nuclei. This requires lots of energy to get started but then releases enormous amounts. But that’s only the beginning. The fusion is just a starter for something even more powerful—bosonic reduction.
For hundreds of years, Ship’s drive has been pumping out broken bits of atoms and streams of high-energy light in a twisting, glowing stream. Ultimately, Ship’s velocity climbs to about twenty percent of the speed of light, .2 c—that is, sixty thousand kilometers per second. It takes something as big as the moon to fill out the requirements of the basic equations that move Ship between the stars. Just on the edge of memory—like something fading after a vivid dream—I see the moonlet being chosen from a dusty, frozen cloud far, far out from the sun. The name of the cloud is incomprehensible, Hort or Hurt—
Ice is transported up the struts to the hulls, then melted, pumped through the sluices—stored in a big tank.
Lots of water.
None for me. I’m exhausted, in pain, thirsty. I squeeze water from my own bottle into my mouth, start to choke, and spit weightless beads. Trying to draw breath and steady myself, I see the red spot from a bleary corner of my eye.
Spin-up resumes with a lurch. My hand loses its grip, and I roll around the perimeter wall of the tank’s cap. Here, at or near the core, the centrifugal force is minimal but still catches me by surprise. I roll, kick, float free for a moment, and look around. The haystack blur must have come through the breach while I was captivated by the slow blue-green roil inside the tank. I can’t find it again. There’s something outboard, to my left—movement opposite the motion of the hull. My head pivots like a bird’s. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s an illusion, and when I can wash out my eye, it will be gone.
Leave me be.
Across the cap, near the broad forward end, hatches line the perimeter wall. I try to stand, but my feet pull out from under me, and I bounce again, then drift outboard—down. Here, if I can keep up with the rotating wall, I’ll weigh a fraction of a kilogram. But I’m getting dizzy. I roll until my palms skid on the wall, thankfully smooth but for the jagged edges around the breach. I push off and let the breach roll on by. Finally, I drop and spread flat, relying on friction to gather the necessary force. I’m riding with the wall, spread-eagled and vulnerable to anything with better means of locomotion, better control in the wide spaces.
I have a good view of what’s going on inside the tank. The huge liquid volume reacts to spin-up with an amazing display of fluid dynamics. The bubbles slowly try to coalesce at the center, but currents keep breaking them up, thrusting them outward, until they rebound and gurgle in again. The tank’s contents swish into a massive, godly whirlpool. This would be a beautiful vision to go out on—waiting for the water to surround the long air pocket like a tornado….
Looking inboard, up, I again see the blur—larger now and growing, the red speck revolving on the outside of a fine maze of glassy fibers, gleaming straws flexing and pulling. The thing is a network of glistening rods tied together with tiny blue knots.
Across its surface flash narrow concentric bands of pale color, expanding and contracting, whirling blue and black and green, drawing my gaze inward, then reversing, whirling outward.
Much more fascinating than the tank.
Mesmerizing.
It’s beautiful, ghostly, and I hope quick and strong. I’m resigned. This must be one of the large Killers—not the worst way to go, according to my book.
A brilliant bronze-colored beam shoots across the chamber and spears the hypnotic mass. The beam flicks and cuts the thing in half. The two halves writhe. Its bands of color fade. Black spots appear. The beam flicks again and quarters it. The severed masses catch fire and burn with intense blue flames. I smell caramel and acid. A slow rain of corrosive droplets strikes my body, my face, stinging, hissing.
I scream—and look down. A sharp pain has shot up my right arm. A spear pierces the bicep. There’s a cord attached. I grab the cord, and it jerks through my hands as I’m yanked clockwise, out from under the burning fragments.
The last bits of the glass haystack with the red eye impact the outer wall with a series of gluey plops. The flames intensify—the bits pop and explode.
I’m being pulled toward an open hatch—already halfway across. I use one hand to take the excruciating pressure off the spear shaft and try not to scream again. There’s a head and a torso silhouetted in the hatch’s dim orange glow. I see a face. Quizzical, large eyes.
It’s the girl. One of the girls.
She looks vexed. “Come here, you!” she grunts, and reels me in.
TAKING THE BOW
Through the hatch, the next figure I see is large and yellow with greenish accents, like an unripe lemon. Two muscular arms, two tree-trunk legs—human enough in this place. Except for his color and something about the texture of his skin, waxy and finely pitted, he does not remind me at all of fruit. His head is broad, set low on thick shoulders, with wide-set eyes, small nose, and narrow, almost doll-like lips. I say “he,” but of course this is just a guess.
He grabs me gently enough, then pushes the end of the spear. The barbs retract. Swiftly, he pulls the shaft from my arm, then reaches into a gray bag slung around his wrist and smears something onto the bleeding wound. His hands are huge and fast and delicate as a jeweler’s. The bleeding stops, and with it most of the pain.
“He’s Teacher,” the girl says to Big Yellow, and makes a gesture. “I grabbed him back behind the sluice.”
“You sure he’s the same?” Big Yellow asks.
The girl takes my shoulders and peers at me. “Do you know me?”
I favor my arm. My eyes sting, my lips burn—corrosive drops on my face. “I’ve met you,” I say to the girl. “Two of you.”
The girl reaches into her own bag and hands me a bottle of water. “Wash your face,” she says. “We’ve got a place forward where we can fix you up. The others should be coming back soon.”
I’m sure she’s seen me before—this particular me. And I’ve seen her before. “You’re the one who pulled me out of the sac?”
She nods. I find the gesture strangely human, which implies that I’m beginning to regard the girl as something other, though I can’t say why.
“Midwife,” Big Yellow says. His voice is rich. I’d love to hear him sing. I’d love to hear any kind of music. Funny, to think of music now, but I lift the bottle above my head and rinse out my eyes. After a while, they don’t sting as much, and my lips feel better. I drink a little and return the bottle.
“That’s yours,” she says. “I left my book behind. Did you find it?”
“I found it in a bag. Something else stole it. A silvery shape—”
“They don’t exist,” the girl says with a stern look.
“Right. One of you—I think—drew something in the shaft. In blood. What was it supposed to be?”
Pique turns to embarrassment.
“Careful,” Big Yellow warns. “She’s your sponsor. You need her.”
I can accept that—for now. “The shapeless haystack thing?”
“A factor,” Big Yellow says. “I’ve never seen one like it before.”
“A Killer,” the girl says.
“What happened to Picker and Satmonk?”
The girl shakes her head. “They’re strong and
friendly, but they don’t last long.”
“And your sister?”
“Don’t ask,” Big Yellow advises.
The girl ignores the question.
I rub my arm. The tugged muscles hurt more than the wound itself. It could have been worse—that shaft could have penetrated bone. “What did you shoot me with?” I ask.
Big Yellow lifts the apparatus, a bent piece of spring—a bow—strung with a twisted length of black fiber. The shaft is a thin, hollow tube; the barbs, more pieces of metal, spring-loaded in roughly cut notches at the tip. Pulling on the cord the right way retracts the barbs. He waggles the bow. It’s broken in two.
“Found it in a junk pile. Now it’s ruined.”
“Sorry,” I say.
He manages a grin. “Have to find another,” he says.
We appear to be in a space actually made for long-term human occupation—unlike the no-frills pads and lockers or even the boy’s tailored space. More style, something on the order of decorated, personalized, even pretty. Nets arranged along the wall support glassy objects of many shapes and colors. The curving inboard ceiling has been painted with pictures of trees and clouds, as if we’re sitting under a leafy bower. This arouses erratic memories of poetry and botany.
Big Yellow and the girl bob slowly up and down on their toes, watching me intently. Waiting for a reaction. I try to smile. “Nice.” I haven’t seen the entire scene, but the human touches are compelling—sympathetic. Somebody lived here for a while—not, I think, my present hosts. The centrifugal tug is no greater here than in the cap of the water tank. I rotate on one toe, like a ballet dancer, arms out, gently push off, rising, then drop to the outboard deck. Bobbing is pleasant. I like it.
Curved rails and cables have been raised and slung in strategic positions from floor and ceiling. The bottom edge of the farthest wall, intersecting the bulkhead to my left, with its hatch, is barely visible beyond the curve of the ceiling. Big. Deluxe accommodations.