Sleepless nights as the Dawn Treaderrose into darkness, climbing for almost a year on a torch dipped into a sump. The classes, momerath refreshers, Martin's first tryst with Felicity Tigertail, awkward and delicious, a little scary to him, how much he fixed on her. With a little more innate physical wisdom, she did not fix on him, gently repulsed his further advances, introduced him without embarrassment to her other boyfriends…
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 shape has failed. Fake matter is decaying. Within a few hundred years, there will be only the shells of real matter."
"There are no survivors?" Hakim asked.
"We guessed that much already," Martin said.
"Not with certainty," Hakim persisted.
"There are no survivors," the mom said. "The ship's mind is inoperative. We will search for deep time memory stores."
A hole opened in the side of their craft. Martin pushed himself through first, wrapped in a spherical field with a green balloon of life support.
"It's like being in a soap bubble," he said. They had not practised with these fields before. Martin pulled down an ephemeral control panel and touched arrows to indicate the direction he wanted to move. The bubble thrust away from the craft with a barely audible tinkand a tiny flash of light—individually matched atoms of anti em and matter, their explosions cupped against a mirror-reflective field the size of his hand.
Giacomo emerged next, then Hakim. Except for their few words and the sounds of breathing, again they were enveloped by the universe, although in the form of an undistorted field of stars. Martin saw the constellation of the Orchid. In that direction, visually aligned within a degree of the star known to humans as Betelgeuse, lay the Dawn Treader, two hundred billion kilometers away.
He rotated his bubble toward the constellation Hakim had named Philosopher. The derelict crossed the sweep of the Philosopher's hand.
"What was its name?" Giacomo asked.
The craft mom's voice answered, "I do not know."
They pushed slowly across the two kilometers. Martin trailed Giacomo's balloon, watching the staccato, firecracker punctuations of dying atoms.
"I feel like an angel. This is incredible," Hakim said, following Martin.
Martin's attention focused on the disintegrating hulk looming before them. He could make out the three homeballs, reduced to psychedelic leaf-skeletons, all edges glowing red and orange and white.
"I knew it took energy to maintain fake matter… I didn't know it would just fizzle out," Giacomo said. Martin spun around and urged his bubble toward the third homeball, leaving Giacomo and Hakim near the middle. He had spotted a hole big enough to squeeze his bubble through, and with the craft mom's approval, he was going to attempt entry.
Beside him followed a half-sized copper-bronze mom; he had not seen the craft produce the little robot, but no explanations were necessary. The diminutive mom advanced on its own firecracker bursts.
"What do I look for?" he asked the little mom.
"Ship's mind will have left a marker that will interact with close fields. The deep time memory store will probably reside within the third homeball, in the densest concentrations of real matter."
His bubble passed through what must have once been the hatch to the weapons store. "This ship wasn't attacked, was it?"
"No," the little mom said. "It ceased performing its mission."
"Why?"
"We have insufficient information to answer," the little mom said. Martin watched an extrusion of glowing scrap push against his bubble. He slowed and moved deeper, through layer after glimmering layer; walls, distorted cubicles, warped structural members. Sheets of disengaged matter—real matter, not subject to deterioration—hung undisturbed, brushed against his bubble, bounced aside silently, rippling like cloth. He could see now how little real matter actually coated the fake matter within a Ship of the Law; no thicker than paint.
"I'm inside the second homeball," Giacomo said.
"I'm entering the first neck," Hakim said. "It's really thinning out here—not much holding it together. I'll go forward."
Within a dark cavity, wrapped by sheets of pitted matter, Martin saw an intriguing shadow, something that did not appear to be part of the ship. He extruded a green field to push aside the sheets. A shriveled cold face stared at him, eyes sunk within their orbits, long neck desiccated to knots of dried skin and muscle around sharply defined bone.
"I've found one of the crew," he said.
"Freeze dried?" Giacomo asked.
"Not exactly. Looks like it died and mummified, then was exposed to space, maybe centuries later."
"One of our sauropods?"
Martin transmitted an image to satisfy their curiosity. A flapping sail of matter tapped the corpse and knocked lines of powder free.
He maneuvered around the corpse and pushed deeper.
His bubble pulsed suddenly, glowed pale green, returned to normal.
"That is the beacon," the little mom said. "We are near a deep time memory store."
"I've found more bodies," Giacomo said. "Dozens of them. They look like they fell asleep, or died quietly—like they're lying down."
"The ship must have been accelerating when they died," Hakim said. "Unless we are seeing peculiar patterns of rigor."
Martin wiped his eyes with a sleeve. "Really awful," he murmured.
"Do you think they just gave up, or did they run out of fuel?" Giacomo asked. Nobody could answer. "What happened to them?"