The bombships and rifles opened their sides with soft hisses. The children deftly kicked themselves into the cockpits. Ladders vanished once the hatches smoothed shut. Martin entered his rifle last, feeling the soft interior conform to his shape.
“This craft belongs to Martin Spruce,” the rifle told him. The children knew the voice of the moms, warmly impersonal, craft voices cool and technical, and ship’s voice, rarely heard, soft and pleasant, not quite feminine. Martin believed they were actually all the same, but that was one of the questions not answered.
“All wands slaved to your wand, simulation drill,” the craft voice told him. “May we draw the simulation plan from your wand?”
“Yes,” Martin said.
The simulation began. The craft did not move from their docked positions. The children became enmeshed in the drill, and time passed.
They skimmed the cloud tops of a gas giant planet three times larger than Jupiter, while the Ship of the Law grazed the atmosphere ahead of them, wrapped in plasma friction fire. The Dawn Treader’s wing-like scooping fields dragged huge gouts of atmospheric hydrogen and methane and ammonia from the thick atmosphere, slowing the ship at dozens of g’s, torquing it tail over nose, and the smaller weapons sped ahead of the ship, encountering enemy craft, setting up a circuit of protection, drawing the attention of kinetic weapons designed to smash into them at high speed, using the roiling energies of the fireball created by the Dawn Treader’s passage to deflect energy beams…
As usual, they did well.
They had done well at this sort of drill for years now. It was second nature to them. It had also become a kind of game, difficult to connect to reality, to the actual performance of the Job itself. However convincing the simulations—and they were very convincing—they no longer expanded the children’s skills.
Still, they drilled tenday after tenday, year after year…
Growing older. Martin could feel their impatience, and it worried him.
He was responsible. He had been Pan for six months.
Martin laddered deep past the pipes and conduits in the long first neck of the Ship of the Law, going to the forward homeball and the schoolroom to meet with a mom and report for the tenday.
Aboard the Dawn Treader there were twenty-eight hours to each day, three tendays in a month, twelve months in a year.
Once each tenday, it was Martin’s duty as Pan to report to the mom. To tell what the children had been up to, and listen if the mom had anything to say.
He completed his climb through the neck, into the homeball and down a long cylindrical corridor to the homeball’s center. His ladder field stopped at a wide hatch; he kicked away and grabbed a metal pole within, swinging gracefully until the friction of his hand stopped him.
The schoolroom periphery was cool and dark. Light from the corridor cut at an angle and made a spot on the opposite curved wall.
Martin had arrived fifteen minutes early. He was alone.
Under weightless conditions, the schoolroom took a shape like the empty interiors of two wheels run through each other, sharing a common center, axes perpendicular. Twenty meters below, at the hub of the schoolroom, the homeball’s center, hung a spherical blackness filled with stars, a window to what lay outside the ship—but not directly viewed; like so much else in their life, a simulation.
At their present speed, the universe outside the Dawn Treader did not much resemble this pretty simulation. Outside the true stars were gnarled and twisted, rotated and compressed into a scintillating ring that flexed around the ship like a loose bracelet, blue on one side—the direction in which they flew—and red on the other, with a muddy and narrow mix of colors between. Ahead lay a pit empty to the unaided eye but in fact filled with hard radiation; behind, another pit, touched with weird sparkles of red-shifted X-ray sources, distant galaxies dying or being reshaped, dead stars ghoulishly eating their young.
The starry sky in the sphere appeared little different than it had on Earth, unless Martin looked for familiar constellations. None were visible; the Dawn Treader had travelled too far. Associations of the brightest stars had changed radically.
He took his wand from a pocket and let it hang in the air, floating beside him in the warm twilight. Martin and the wand precessed slowly, blown by idle air currents. Martin reached out with a finger and wrote two names large in the air: Theresa, William. The names glowed pink