After sufficient time had passed—perhaps two hours of steady concentration, in complete silence—the moms gathered at the center of the schoolroom, and the first mom said, “What is your judgment?”
“Comments first,” Paola Birdsong insisted.
The comments were more expressions of personal involvement and emotion than substantive questions or objections; this much Martin had expected. He had watched the group reach consensus on other matters far less important than this, and this was how they worked: speaking out, finding individual roles.
Mei-li Wu-Hsiang Gemini, a small, quiet woman with the Starsigns family, asked whether there were other civilizations within the close vicinity of this group. Hakim called up a display already shown: all stars that might have harbored planets with life, within twenty-five light years of the group. None had shown even the most subtle signs of civilized development. That was not conclusive evidence one way or another; left alone, the planets might not have developed intelligent life—though the chances were two in five, for so many stars, that at least one civilization would have evolved.
There was always the possibility that the intelligences might have been smarter than humanity, keeping silent even in their technological youth.
But added to the other evidence, the lack was significant.
“What are the chances that civilizations would die off or abort themselves, in so many planetary systems?” George Dempsey asked.
The first mom said, “Given the number of systems with planets, and the probability of life arising, and the probability of that life developing technological ability—” The figures flashed before them again. Martin did not bother doing the momerath; he had done it already, the first time around. Chances were, so had Dempsey. This was socialization, not serious cross- examination.
Time of accepting what they all knew must come next…
More questions, for yet another hour, until Martin’s eyes and tense muscles burned. He could sense the group’s fatigue. He glanced at the remaining children in his mental queue, decided they would not have anything substantive to add, and said, “All right. Let’s get down to it.”
“You’re prepared to make a decision?” the first mom asked.
“We are,” Martin said.
Grumbling and rustling, the children rearranged themselves into their families and drill groups. They felt much more comfortable among their chosen peers; this was not an easy thing and none was happy to be hurried along.
“You are deciding whether to decelerate, at substantial fuel cost, and direct this Ship of the Law into the stellar group we have observed, to investigate the intelligent beings there, and to judge whether they built the machines that destroyed your world,” the first mom said. “Pan will count your votes.”
One by one, they voted, and Martin tallied. There could be no more than ten abstentions in the entire group, or the process would begin again. Seven abstained, including Ariel. Sixty-one voted to go in and investigate. Fourteen voted to pass the group by, to search for something more definite.
“We need an opposition Pan,” Ariel insisted. Paola Bird-song, who had voted to investigate, disagreed.
“We’ve followed procedures,” she said. “It’s done.”
“We’ve followed the moms’ procedures,” Ariel said.
“They train us and instruct us,” Ginny Chocolate said. “I don’t see what you’re after.”
“Are we puppets?” Ariel asked, glaring around the groups.
The other children seemed confused. The grumbling increased. Martin felt his stomach twist.
Jorge Rabbit intervened. Olive skinned, with thick black hair, quick with jokes, Jorge was popular in the group. “This is enough, poor children, Martin is right. We are here to do this work. We are not puppets; we are students.”
Ariel tightened her jaw and said no more. Martin felt a sudden perverse tug for her.
“It’s done,” he said. “The children have voted. We go.”
Martin ate in the cafeteria with the day’s drill group when the maneuvers began.
The children felt it first as a deeper vibration through the ship, singing in their muscles and bones.
“Oh, man,” Harpal Timechaser said. He brought out his wand and let it drift in the air. Slowly, precessing this way, then that, as the ship maneuvered to bring its drives to bear, the wand spun slowly, drawing their complete attention.
The vibration increased. The Dawn Treader’s hull made a melodic singing noise, deep and masculine, as all the stresses of the drive pushed through its fabric. The wand began to settle, first toward one wall. They felt themselves “pushed” with it, and they yelled with excitement, then groaned as the room oriented within the ship, as if spun on gimbals, one flat wall becoming a floor, the other a ceiling.
A gentle ten percent g as the drives came alive, stretched, clearing their throats.
“I’m going to be sick,” Paola Birdsong said. “Why don’t they smooth it for us?”
“Because we hate that more than this,” Martin reminded her.
Half an hour later, the ship sang again, on an even deeper note. Martin saw the ship in momerath, felt its load of fuel decreasing steadily, flare of particles and radiation disappearing into the bottomless darkness of the ship’s external sump, a way to conceal their wastes by scattering them across the surrounding light years as an increase in the energy of the vacuum.
They were going where fuel would be difficult to find.
Full gravity returned. The halls and quarters filled with complaints, more excitement; painted, half-dressed children running, stumbling, cursing, grimacing, trying to leap; falling, cursing again.
Two children broke bones in the first few hours. Their casts, applied by a mom in the dispensary after bone-knitting therapy, served as warning notice for the rest. Martin called a general meeting in the full-gravity schoolroom and the injured showed off their trophies.
The injured would be well within two days… The moms’ medicine was potent. But until the casts were off, they could not participate in most of the drills.
The ship transformed itself subtly like a living thing, usually when no one was watching. Throughout, rooms oriented to the end of weightless coasting.
Once past their initial excitement, the children did not find the change disturbing. Psychologically, it was a return to the old patterns of the Ark, and to their year-long acceleration to near light speed away from the Sun. Not to mention their years on Earth…
More changes would come soon—two g’s, a heavy burden—and if they decided to go for orbital insertion into the Buttercup system, the action would be spectacular.
They had never before experienced the Ship of the Law demonstrating its full power and sophistication…
The Dawn Treader was a single virus about to enter a highly protected and extremely powerful host, with unknown capabilities. Martin would report to the moms every day now, and a mom would be constantly available in the schoolroom; the same mom, with an identifying mark painted on it by Martin, at the suggestion of Jorge Rabbit and Stephanie Wing Feather, who thought it would boost morale.
The marking ceremony was attended by all the children. Just before his suicide, Theodore Dawn had written of this expected time: “We’ll get dressed up in war paint and war uniforms, and we’ll swear an oath, like mythic pirates or the Three Musketeers, and it won’t be all nonsense, all childsplay. It will mean something. Just wait and see.” The search for a meaningful ceremony had come too late for Theodore, Martin thought.