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.
But now that moment had come for the rest of them.
The children gathered on the tiers of an amphitheater that had risen from the floor of the schoolroom at Martin’s command. They wore black and white paint on their faces and forearms, “To eliminate the gray feelings, the neutralities, the indecisions.” Even Martin wore the paint.
A mom floated near the middle of the schoolroom. Within the star sphere, a red circle blinked around the white point of the Buttercup star. Martin approached the mom with small pots of black and white paint in one hand, and a brush in the other.
“To show our resolve, to show our change of state, to strengthen our minds and our courage, we appoint this mom a War Mother. The War Mother will be here to speak with any of us, at any time.
“Now is our time.”
Martin applied the brush thick with white paint to one side of the mom’s stubby, featureless head. The other half he carefully painted black. Then, to complete the effect—something he had thought of himself—he painted a divided circle where the “face” might have been, reversing the colors, black within white, white within black. No grays, but cautious judgment