Download the Book - Islam and Science Fiction

If Jabril had been Chuck, or even Liam, or any other man I'd ever
known for an extended period of time, there would've been many
things to consider at such a request. With some men, those simple
words would have been issued as a command. With others, I would
have heard the pleading in their voices, the hope. With the worst of
them I would have probably been able to detect the underlying threat,
which so often seems a subtle subtext of much of what men say all the
time, probably without ever realizing.
But with him of all the men I'd met, I felt none of those things.
There was simply a hand stretched toward me, and a few simple
words. I took his hand, curling my fingers under his.
If my mind had been less numb, I would probably have realized
where we headed. We glided through the silent halls of the ship; past
the closed door of Chuck's sleeping quarters; past the unlit corridor
leading to the galley; past the door to the darkened recreation room
where an old movie played, punctuated with Liam's laughter at jokes
he'd heard a hundred times. We glided right up to the stairtube to the
observation bubble, and Jabril set my hand on the rung of the ladder.
I pulled myself through the narrow tunnel in what even then, even
way out there, felt like up. Control was crucial in those tight spaces;
small, careless movements could send one face-first into protruding
metal. Not fatal, and rarely with the force of our little accident
earlier, but painful and inconvenient enough to make one wary after
the first few blunders.
I rose up out of the stairtube into the tinted globe of impossibly
strong polymer glass. Earthside, the bubble had been touted as one of
the greatest achievements, one of the biggest improvements over all
previous interplanetary flights. But on our ship it had come to feel so
much like Jabril's room, his private study and place of prayer, the rest
of us never went there. Liam preferred his movies, and Chuck was
more an audio man than a visual one.
In a sling on the wall lay Jabril's prayer rug, a small roll of
vibrant, thickly-woven silk. I experienced a sudden voyeuristic and
what felt like totally inappropriate urge to watch him at prayer. I was
suddenly envious of his devotion--his devotion to anything.
The sun was a hard, cold brightness. The bubble's shielding was
designed to protect us from radiation greater than any which ever
reached the soil of Earth, so far away. I couldn't even distinguish
Earth from the bubble, not without orienting myself. Mars, however,
seemed incredibly close. From our vantage it didn't look red at all. A
shiver of the old enthusiasm skittered along my spine. For the first
time in weeks I recalled a tiny fraction of why I'd traveled all that
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