“How big is it?” I asked Hollus, who was floating weightlessly next to me.

“About a kilometer,” she said. “The block-shaped part is the propulsion module; the struts are crew habitats — one for Forhilnors, the other for Wreeds. And the disk at the end is the common area.

“Thank you again for taking me along,” I said. My hands were shaking with excitement. Back in the eighties, there had been some brief talk about someday sending a paleontologist to Mars, and I’d daydreamed that it might be me. But of course they’d want an invertebrate specialist; no one seriously believed that vertebrates had ever inhabited the red planet. If Mars did once have an ecosystem, as Hollus contended, it probably lasted only a few hundred million years, ending when too much atmosphere had bled off into space.

Still, there’s a group called the Make-A-Wish Foundation that tries to fulfill final requests of terminally ill children; I don’t know if there’s a comparable group for terminally ill adults, and, to be honest, I’m not sure what I would have wished for had I been given the chance. But this would do. It would certainly do!

The starship continued to grow on the viewscreen. Hollus had said it had been cloaked, somehow, for more than a year, making it invisible to terrestrial observers, but there was no need for that anymore.

Part of me wished there were windows — both here on the shuttle and on the Merelcas. But apparently there were none on either; both had unbroken hulls. Instead, pictures from outside were conveyed to wall-sized viewscreens. I’d loomed in close at one point and couldn’t discern any pixels or scan lines or flicker. The screens served just as well as real glass windows would — indeed, were better in many ways. There was no glare whatsoever from their surface, and, of course, they could zoom in to give a closeup, show the view from another camera, or indeed display any information one wanted. Perhaps sometimes the simulation is better than the real thing.

We flew closer and closer still. Finally, I could see something on the starship’s green hull: some writing, in yellow. There were two lines of it: one in a system of geometric shapes — triangles and squares and circles, some with dots orbiting them — and the other a squiggle that looked vaguely like Arabic. I’d seen markings like the first set on Hollus’s holoform projector, so I assumed that was the Forhilnor language; the other must have been the script of the Wreeds. “What’s that say?” I asked.

“ ‘This end up,’ ” said Hollus.

I looked at her, mouth agape.

“Sorry,” she said. “A little joke. It is the name of the starship.”

“Ah,” I said. “Merelcas, isn’t it? What does that mean?”

“ ‘Vengeful Beast of Mass Destruction,’ ” said Hollus.

I swallowed hard. I guess some part of me had been waiting for one of those “It’s a cookbook!” moments. But then Hollus’s eyestalks rippled with laughed. “Sorry,” she said again. “I could not resist. It means, ‘Stellar Voyager,’ or words to that effect.”

“Kind of bland,” I said, hoping I wasn’t giving offense.

Hollus’s eyestalks moved to their maximum separation. “It was decided by a committee.”

I smiled. Just like the name for our Discovery Gallery back at the ROM. I looked again at the starship. While my attention had been diverted, an opening had appeared in its side; I have no idea whether it had irised open or some panel had slid away. The opening was bathed in yellow-white light, and I could see three other black wedge-shaped landers positioned inside.

Our shuttle continued to grow closer.

“Where are the stars?” I asked.

Hollus looked at me.

“I expected to see stars in space.”

“Oh,” she said. “The glare from Sol and Earth washes them out.” She sang a few words in her own language, and stars appeared on the wallscreen. “The computer has now increased each star’s apparent brightness enough so that it is visible.” She pointed with her left arm. “See that zigzag there? That is Cassiopeia. Just below the central star in the pattern are Mu and Eta Cassiopeae, two of the places I visited before coming here.” The indicated stars suddenly had computer-generated circles around them. “And see that smudge below them?” Another circle obligingly appeared. “That is the Andromeda galaxy.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

Soon, though, the Mercelcas filled the entire field of view. Everything was apparently automatic; except for the occasional sung command, Hollus had done nothing since we entered the shuttle.

There was a clanging sound, conducted through the shuttle’s hull, as we connected with a docking adapter on the far wall of the open bay. Hollus kicked off the bulkhead with her six feet and sailed gently toward the door. I tried to follow, but I realized I’d drifted too far from the wall; I couldn’t reach out to kick or push off anything.

Hollus recognized my predicament, and her eyestalks moved with laughter again. She maneuvered her way back and reached out a hand to me. I took it. It was indeed the flesh-and-blood Hollus; there was no static tingle. She pushed off the bulkhead again with three of her feet, and we both sailed toward the door, which dutifully opened as we approached it.

Waiting for us were three more Forhilnors and two Wreeds. The Forhilnors would be easy to tell apart — each one had a cloth wrapped around its torso of a different color — but the Wreeds looked awfully similar to each other.

I spent three days exploring the ship. The lighting was all indirect; you couldn’t see the fixtures. The walls, and much of the equipment, were cyan. I assumed that to Wreeds and Forhilnors, this color, not too far removed from that of the sky, was considered to be neutral; they used it everywhere humans used beige. I visited the Wreed habitat once, but it had a moldy smell I found unpleasant; I spent most of my time in the common-area module. It contained two concentric centrifuges that spun to simulate gravity; the outer one matched the conditions on Beta Hydri III, and the inner one simulated Delta Pavonis II.

All four of us passengers from Earth — me; Qaiser, the schizophrenic woman; Zhu, the ancient Chinese rice farmer; and Huhn, the silverback gorilla — enjoyed watching the fabulous spectacle of the Earth, a glorious sphere of polished sodalite, receding behind us as the Merelcas began its voyage — although Huhn, of course, didn’t really understand what he was seeing.

It was less than a day later before we passed the orbit of the moon. My fellow passengers and I were now farther into space than anyone from our planet had ever gone before — and yet we’d only covered less than one ten-billionth of the total distance we were going to traverse.

I tried repeatedly to have conversations with Zhu; he was initially quite wary of me — he later told me I was the first Westerner he’d ever met — but the fact that I spoke Mandarin eventually won him over. Still, I suppose I revealed my ignorance more than a few times in our chats. It was easy for me to understand why I, a scientist, might want to go off to the vicinity of Betelgeuse; it was harder for me to understand why an old peasant farmer would wish to do the same. And Zhu was indeed old — he himself wasn’t sure what year he’d been born, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been prior to the end of the nineteenth century.

“I am going,” said Zhu, “in search of Enlightenment.” His voice was slow, whispery. “I seek prajna, pure and unqualified knowledge.” He regarded me through rheumy eyes. “Dandart” — that was the Forhilnor who had bonded with him — “says the universe has undergone a series of births and deaths. So, of course does the individual, until Enlightenment is achieved.”

“So it is religion that brings you here?” I asked.

“It is everything,” said Zhu, simply.

I smiled. “Let’s hope the trip is worth it.”