Volumetric fields wrapped the three passengers in smothering safety. Martin's eyesight suffered, as usual, but he still watched the noach transmission. A sump swallowed their flare. Little more than a rim of intense white showed, and quickly faded.
"Bon voyage," Hans said.
Martin passed the acceleration in a slice of nothingness in which only a few incoherent dreams surfaced—meeting girls at dances on the Central Ark, Mother and Father, basement sweepings from his brain, exhausting in their banality. When they had reached near-c, they coasted, their fields folded, and they faced each other balefully, cramped shipmates. Outside, space twisted and stars huddled into a blurred torque. The ship restored the star fields to a normal appearance for their benefit.
"How long until we arrive?" Giacomo asked, clearly not comfortable in the close quarters.
"A tenday," Hakim said.
"You may sleep for the first six days if you wish," the mom's voice told them.
"Earth's astronauts did this for months at a time," Hakim said.
"Yeah, but we're spoiled," Giacomo said.
"Let's sleep," Martin said.
Sleep came and went, another longer slice of oblivion. Martin awoke disoriented, drank a cup of sweetened fluid, exercised in the weightlessness, observed his companions surface from their slumbers.
He had expected the journey to add even more weight to his burden of gloom. Instead, he experienced exhilaration and freedom he had never known before.
Hakim behaved as if the burden had shifted from Martin to him. He worked quietly but without enthusiasm. Giacomo spent much of his time contemplating the small star sphere.
"We're further away from our fellows than anybody's ever been before," he said at the end of their second day awake. The derelict was now two days away.
"Farther," Hakim said softly.
"Whatever," Giacomo said. "I don't feel isolated. Do you?"
"The Dawn Treaderis pretty isolated," Martin observed.
"Yes, but they have each other… too many to keep track of. We have just three."
In natural sleep, Martin saw Rosa's dark shadow entity walk through an impossibly green field, wind knocking pieces of it away like fluff from a black dandelion. It towered over trees and hills, yet it was fragile and somehow vulnerable…
Awake, he helped Hakim prepare for their investigation. The craft mom briefed them on designs of Ships of the Law launched over the past few thousand years, though without any indication of their origins or destinations. Martin thought this was make-work; indeed, he was coming to believe their presence on this journey had more to do with ship-crew relations than practical function.
But the crew was the entire reason for the Dawn Treader'sexistence. Perhaps the 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.