Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear Read Free Book Online Page A

sympathize if that was their plan.
But I know it isn’t.
These guys are human . Different kinds of my people. How I know this, I can’t say, but before I can catch up with the girl, we’re closer to the bluish light, and I see that the hallway no longer curves up but opens out on each side— expands. The floor ends, but a kind of bridge goes on, surrounded by a cage of rails. The rail on our left supports a ladder at shoulder level.
But none of that is important. The part of the bridge we’re currently walking on—let’s call it a floor, though it’s different from the floor of the hall—is not solid, but made of grating over crossbars and connected to the cage and the long rails.
We can see to either side, and down.
We have to stop and look. Below the bridge is an intense darkness, filled with little tiny lights—not at all like the glim lights. These are pointlike and bright, and there are so many of them I could spend a long lifetime just counting.
“What is that?” the girl asks, her voice a tiny squeak. She hasn’t seen any of this before. Her face expresses resistance to revealing either ignorance or curiosity. She doesn’t like new, large things or ideas—or perceptions.
“It’s sky ,” I say. “It’s the universe. Those are stars.”
“This is Ship,” Picker says. “Big, sick Ship.”
“Where are we?” the girl asks, her voice tremulous.
“A viewing chamber,” I say. “I remember them from Dreamtime.”
And I do, vaguely. All of us would gather in a place like this to look down on a new world. Except I don’t see anything like a new world. But there’s something ahead and below, mostly obscured by the curve in the bridge and the rails. As we walk farther, the object comes into view. We’re moving—it’s moving, and rather rapidly. Soon it will pass right underneath us. I’m confused for a moment, so I stop walking and grip the railing.
“Is that our world?” the girl asks. She seems to remember something out of Dreamtime as well.
The object is passing right underneath—outboard, far down. It’s big, all right—big and mottled white, cracked, cratered, covered with thin, confining bands and stripes. It’s like a huge caged snowball. A very dirty snowball. The cage wraps around the snowball and reaches up in a gigantic strut—curved, graceful, big.
And that strut or support or brace climbs all the way up from the dirty snowball to where we are.
It connects the big snowball to Ship.
The snowball and the strut move clockwise to the other side and pass out of sight. Compared to the size of that lump of dirty ice, Ship is tiny. Ship rotates in some sort of cradle suspended above the snowball—or the snowball flies around us. But that doesn’t make as much sense.
We’re inside a spinning something, probably a cylinder. The spin causes the acceleration and the feeling of weight.
Ship is spinning.
“It’s not our world,” I say.
Satmonk seems to agree, shaking his head, holding out flat hands as if to reject all of it. I might know what the dirty snowball is, but I don’t want to make that particular guess. Because if my guess is correct, then Ship is very sick indeed.
The snowball is muchtoolarge
It comes around again. I make out a sinuous rill along one side, where ice has apparently been dug out, perhaps mined. Ril That’s good. Ril actually means a small river, but this is all ice. It reminds me of a snake , a serpent
For the time being, what we’re seeing is impressive, it’s frightening, and it’s informative in a stunning, useless sort of way—but it isn’t food.
The bridge isn’t a comfortable place to rest and try to remember, so we continue across until we reach the middle. There, the bridge reaches and then apparently passes through a glassy sphere about forty meters in diameter. The sphere lies suspended on the bridge, over the bliser that reveals the stars and the serpent-marked ice ball. This is a place where people are meant to stop, look, and marvel. A