ship’s mind recognized the impact of crew fears and suspicions, and was working to reduce them.
“Let’s try something,” Hakim said when boredom had set in at the end of the second day of coasting. “Let’s float by ourselves in the middle of nothing, and see what we think about.”
Giacomo gave Hakim a pained look. “You want us to go nuts?”
“It will be amusing,” he said. Hakim’s gloom had lifted, but his sense of humor had taken on a strange tinge, part fatalism, part puckishness; his face stayed calm, eyes large and inoffensive, but his words sometimes aimed at targets neither of his companions could see.
“I’m not so sure,” Giacomo said.
“You’re big and strong, a strapping theoretical fellow,” Hakim said with a smile. “Catholic cannot take a dare from a Muslim?”
Giacomo squinted. “Bolsh,” he said. “My parents didn’t even go to church.”
“Nobody mentions my religion,” Martin said. The conversation was becoming too ragged for his taste, but he could not just stay out of it.
“We don’t know what you are,” Hakim said.
Martin thought for a moment. “I don’t know myself,” he said. “My grandparents were Unitarians, I think.”
“I challenge us all to sit in the middle of a projection of the exterior, unaltered, and speak of what we experience,” Hakim said.
Giacomo and Martin glanced at each other. “Okay,” Martin said.
The craft mom obliged. Within a few minutes the exterior enveloped them: intense speckled darkness ahead, twisted torque of blurred stars, muddy warmth behind.
Martin experienced immediate vertigo. The weightlessness had never bothered him until now, and he clutched the arms of his seat and felt sweat break out. They did not look at each other for several minutes, afraid of showing their discomfort.
Strangely, it was Hakim’s voice that dispelled Martin’s sense of endless falling. “It is worse than I thought,” Hakim said. “Is everybody all right?”
“Fine,” Giacomo said tersely. “Who’s going to clean up if I vomit?”
“Hakim dared us,” Martin said.
“Hand me the mop,” Hakim said. Nervous giggles almost got the better of them.
“It’s pretty strange,” Giacomo said. “I look to my left, and… Jesus! That’s weird beyond belief. Everything twists and spins like a carousel.”
Martin tried looking to his right. The torque shivered, an infinity of stars cowed into being social, like little knots tied in strings of dissolving paint. It all seemed oceanic, the glow of an underwater volcano behind and the queer glimmer of deep water fish ahead. Galactic fish, X-ray fish in the depth of beginning time.
“What are you thinking?” Hakim asked after a few minutes of silence.
“I think I want to go inside,” Martin said.
But they remained “outside,” minutes following one on the other, and their hands crept out and grasped, their breathing came in synchrony. “Wow,” Giacomo said. “I’m not asleep, am I?”
“No,” Martin said.
“I keep seeing things out of the corner of my eye, where the star necklace tries to be. Things reaching out to touch me. Pretty spooky.”
“I hear the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer,” Hakim said. “It’s very beautiful. I wish you could hear it.”
“Are you still a Muslim, Hakim?” Martin asked.
“We are all of us Muslims,” Hakim said. “It is our natural state. We must give ourselves to Allah at some point, become obedient. Allah is looking out for us, that I feel… And Muhammad is his prophet. But what shape Allah is, who can say? And it is no use bowing to Mecca.”
“I think that means you’re a Muslim,” Martin said.
“The Pope died with Earth,” Giacomo said. “Isn’t that something? The moms didn’t save the Pope. I wonder why.”
Martin saw grass growing on the rim of a tunnel, the greenness bright and welcoming, blending toward the center.
“Remember volunteering?” Giacomo said.
“A difficult time for me,” Hakim said. “My mother did not want me to go. My father spoke to her sternly and she cried. I decided I had to go, and my mother… she ignored me from that day. Very sad.”
“The tests?”
“I didn’t take a lot of tests,” Martin said.
“I remember a lot of tests,” Giacomo said. “Physical—”
“Oh, those,” Martin said. He remembered being wrapped in fields that tingled while the moms floated in attendance, never telling whether the results were good or poor.
Martin remembered his father’s face, proud and sad, on the last day. The families in the Ark gathering at the berthing bay for the new Ship of the Law, stars visible beyond the curve of the third homeball. Some of the children barely into their teens getting caught up in the excitement. Martin remembered Rex Live Oak throwing up and a hastily spread field grabbing the expelled contents of his stomach and whisking them away. He smiled. The moms did not disqualify the children for nerves or fright.
Sleepless nights as the
Strange that he did not feel attracted to Theresa much sooner. Eighty-five young crew, given subtle guidance or no guidance by moms intent on letting their charges come to wisdom the human way, not the Benefactors’ way, whatever that might be…
“Martin,” Giacomo said. “Do you remember first meeting Jennifer?”
“Yes,” Martin said.
“Was it on the Ark?”
“No,” Martin said. “On the ship.”
“What was she like then? I just don’t remember much about her…”
They talked into the weirdness for hours, and gradually their talk fell silent, and they simply stared, or slept fitfully. The universe seemed to quiver with Martin’s heart, flinching, star necklace alive, a thinly spread tissue of life. His own scale increased to match; Martin became galactic and with his new size came a nervous euphoria.
How long they sat, Martin couldn’t tell at first. But Giacomo broke the vigil and said, “That’s enough for me.”
Hakim made a little grunt. “Why?” he said.
“Because I just had a wet dream, damn it,” Giacomo said.
They agreed to stop, and the projection folded into a small star sphere, returning them to the narrow and much more comfortable confines of the craft.
Their deceleration was brief, merely two hours, to match course and speed with the derelict. As volumetric fields faded, they waited eagerly for a first glimpse of the ship from a few kilometers.
What first appeared was almost impossible to comprehend. The ship resembled a twisted, crisped piece of paper in a fire, covered with holes, the edges of the holes burning orange and red; homeballs skeletal, debris drifting in a cloud.
“Dear God,” Giacomo said.
“What happened?” Hakim asked.
The mom took them around the derelict in a slow loop. “This ship is very old,” it said. “Central control of its
