Places, Birds, Gifts, Plants, Foods, twenty-one families in all. Some chose not to associate, or free-lanced, as Hans did, though originally he had belonged to the Birds.
A Pan was required to be more circumspect than other children. Martin came by it naturally; he wore no designs, and had never worn paint, though he belonged in a semi-formal way to the Trees family. Behind him, bulky, strong Rex Live Oak followed with an oak leaf on each cheek; Stephanie Wing Feather carried parrot feathers in her hair; and so on, back through the ranks, climbing through the dim, close spaces of the second neck, dipping hands and toes into ladder fields. They used ladders in the neck to keep discipline before drill. The bunched-up colors of twenty ladders—personally selected shades of red, green, blue and yellow—made a dim rainbow down the neck’s clear center aisle, smearing like paint poured down a gutter.
Each child carried a wand, a cylinder of steel and glass about nine inches long and two inches wide, with no buttons or visible moving parts. The wands served as monitors and communicators and gave them access to the ship’s mind, the libraries, and to the moms. Nobody knew where the ship’s mind or the libraries resided—nobody knew where the moms went when they were not among the children, or even how many moms there actually were.
The wormspaces this far to the rear smelled of water and exercise, but that cleared with the push of air to the ship’s aft homeball. Around them, dark protrusions—round-edged cubes, lines of hemispheres, undulating conduits—reflected the light of their passage and their murmurs of conversation. There was always a steady breeze in the wormspaces, cooling and fresh.
The children’s sense of smell was acute, and even slight differences in odor were apparent. They knew each other by smell as well as by sight. The children had not known colds since the first few weeks on the Ark; there was nothing in the Dawn Treader to cause allergic reactions, except the cats and birds, and for one reason or another they did not.
Their physical health was perfect. They did not suffer ill-effects from weightlessness. Minor wounds healed quickly. Wendys did not get pregnant.
For five years the children had been training and drilling, at first under the steady tutelage of the moms, then, as their social structure became solid, under their own leaders and appointed teachers. At the start of the voyage, the children had been divided into four teams: navigation, planning, crew maintenance, and search. Martin had been placed in charge of Navigation and had learned the techniques of controlling ship motion.
After the first few months, however, navigation became unnecessary or routine. The Dawn Treader was largely self-directed, and the children all knew that much of the work was for their own benefit. Emphasis had then been switched to drill and study; Martin had become more interested in crew maintenance and the search team.
The Job they trained for was at once simple to express and almost too large to understand: if and when they located the civilization that had made the machines that destroyed Earth—the Killers—they would pass judgment and carry out the Law. The core of the Law had been translated for the children at the beginning of their training: “All intelligences responsible for or associated with the manufacture of self-replicating and destructive devices will be destroyed.” The message had dug deep, expressing in stiff, cold words the hatred and need they all felt. The Law was administrated by an alliance of civilizations, the Benefactors, that built machines to search out the Killers’ machines, to thwart them and destroy them, and to track down their makers.
The Law required that some of Earth’s survivors partake in the hunt and the destruction. To those who killed the Earth: beware her children!
Destroying an advanced civilization was a daunting task, even with the weapons contained within the Ship of the Law. Still, it was possible for the small and relatively simple to destroy the large, the powerful, and the complex. The moms had taught them tactics and general strategies; how to use the weapons, and how to avoid direct encounters with superior defenses.
But the moms had not told them everything they wanted to know, and as time progressed, the lack of trust or confidence or whatever it might be called rankled many of the children.
Martin tried not to question. He tried not to think too deeply; to lose himself in the drills and the training, and to concentrate on