Aurora

1 STARSHIP GIRL

Freya and her father go sailing. Their new home is in an apartment building that overlooks a dock on the bay at the west end of Long Pond. The dock has a bunch of little sailboats people can take out, and an onshore wind blows hard almost every afternoon. “That must be why they call this town the Fetch,” Badim says as they walk down to take out one of these boats. “We always catch the brunt of the afternoon wind over the lake.”

So after they’ve checked out a boat, they have to push it straight off the side of the dock into the wind, Badim jumping in at the last minute, hauling the sail tight until the boat tilts, then aiming it toward the little corniche around the curve of the lakeshore. Freya holds the tiller most firmly, as instructed. The boat leans over and they go right at the tall lake wall until they almost hit it, then Badim exclaims, “Coming about,” just as he said he would, and Freya swings the tiller hard and ducks to get under the boom as it swings over them, and then they’re tacking in the other direction, in a reach across the end of the bay. The little sailboat can’t point up into the wind very far, Badim says, and he calls it a tub, but affectionately. It’s just big enough for the two of them, and has a single big sail, sleeved over a mast that to Freya looks taller than the boat is long.

It takes quite a few tacks to get out of the little bay and into the wider expanse of Long Pond. Out there, all of Nova Scotia is visible to them: forested hills around a lake. They can see all the way to the far end of Long Pond, where afternoon haze obscures the wall. The deciduous trees on the hills are wearing their autumn colors, yellow and orange and scarlet all mixed with the green of the conifers. The prettiest time of year, Badim says.

Their sail catches the bigger wind that rushes across the middle of the lake, which is silvery blue under the gusts. They shift to the windward side of the cockpit, lean out until they balance the boat against the wind. Badim knows how to sail. Quick shifts in the wind, to which they lean in or out; now they’re dancing with the wind, as Badim puts it. “I’m very good ballast,” he says, rocking the boat a little as he moves. “See, we don’t want the mast straight up, but tilted downwind a bit. Same with the sail, not pulled as tight as you can, but off enough for the wind to curve across it the best. You can feel when it’s right.”

“Look at the water there, Badim. Is that a cat’s paw?”

“Good eye, that is a cat’s paw. Let’s get ready for that, we’re going to get wet!”

The surface of the lake winkles in a mirrorflake curl, approaching them fast, and when the gust causing the cat’s paw hits them, the boat heels hard. They lean back into it and the boat gurgles forward, slaps into and across the oncoming waves, knocks up dashes of spray that blow back at them. Long Pond’s water tastes like pasta, Badim says.

At the end of forty tacks (Badim claims to keep count but with a smile that says he doesn’t), they’re just a kilometer or so up Long Pond. It’s time to turn and make the straight run downwind to their dock. They turn and suddenly it’s as if there’s hardly any wind: the boat goes quiet, the sail bellies out ahead and to the side as Badim lets out the sheet, the little tub rocks forward in jerks and seems to be going slower. They watch the backs of waves pass them. The water is bluer now, and they can see farther down into it; sometimes they catch glimpses of the lake’s bottom. The water bubbles and gurgles, the boat rocks awkwardly, all in all it feels like they’re laboring, yet in no time at all they’re coming back into their bay, and it’s obvious by the way they pass the other docks and the corniche that they’re really bombing along. There’s time to watch their own dock come at them, and now in the bay they can again feel the wind rushing past, and hear the waves passing the boat, falling over in little gurgling whitecaps.

“Uh-oh,” Badim says as he leans out to see past their bellying sail. “I should have come at the dock with the sail on the other side! I wonder if I can swing back out and get on the other beam, and come back in right.”

But the dock is almost on them. “Do we have time?” Freya asks.

“No! Okay hold on, take the tiller and hold it just like it is now. I’m going to go forward and jump off onto the dock and grab the boat before you go by me! Keep your head down, don’t let the boom hit you!”

And then they’re heading right at the corner of the dock. Freya ducks into the seat and holds the tiller hard, the bow of the boat crashes into the corner of the dock while Badim is in the middle of his leap, he sprawls far onto the dock, there is a loud cracking sound where boom meets mast, the boat cants and swings around the dock, sail flapping hard out in front of the mast, the boom loose and flopping out there too. Badim scrambles to his feet and from the dock’s side leans out to grasp the boat’s bow, just within his reach, and then he has to lie flat on the dock and hang on. The boat swings around on the wind and points up into it, the sail swings around wildly and Freya ducks to get under it, but with the boom disconnected from the mast she has to jump down into the cockpit to get below it.

“Are you okay?” Badim exclaims. Their faces are only a meter or two apart, and his look of dismay is enough to make her laugh.

“I’m okay,” she assures him. “What should I do?”

“Come up into the bow and jump up onto the dock. I’ll hold on.”

Which he has to, because the boat is still trying to go downwind, but backward now, and into the shallows. People on the corniche are watching them.

She jumps up beside him. Her push almost drags him off the dock; his knee is braced against a cleat in a way that looks painful to Freya, and indeed his teeth are clenched. She reaches out to help him pull the boat closer and he says, “Don’t catch your fingers between the boat and the dock!”

“I won’t,” she says.

“Can you reach down in there, and get the rope in the bow?”

“I think so.”

He pulls hard, draws the boat in closer, she leans way out and snatches the rope where it goes through a metal ring in the very bow of the boat. She pulls the rope out of the boat and takes a turn around the cleat on the back corner of the dock, and Badim quickly snatches it and helps her take more turns.

They lie there on the dock, staring face-to-face, eyes round.

“We broke the boat!” Freya says.

“I know. You’re okay?” he asks.

“Yes. What about you?”

“I’m fine. A bit embarrassed. And I’ll have to help fix this boom. That’s a very weak link though, I must say.”

“Can we go sailing again?”

“Yes!” He gives her a hug and they laugh. “We’ll do it better next time. The thing to do is to come in with the sail on the other side of the boat, so we can curve in toward the side of the dock, just ease across the wind and come in from the side, then turn up into the wind at the last second, and grab the side of the dock just as we’re slowing down into the wind. Should have thought of that before.”

“Will Devi be angry?”

“No. She’ll be happy we’re both safe. She’ll laugh at me. And she’ll know how to make that joint between the boom and mast stronger. Actually, I’d better look that thing up and find out what it’s called. I’m pretty sure it has a name.”

“Everything has a name!”

“Yes, I guess that’s right.”

“And since that thing is broken, I think she’s going to be a little angry.”

Badim says nothing to this.

The truth is, her mother is always angry. She hides it pretty well from most people, but Freya can always see it. It’s there in the set of her mouth; also she often makes little impatient exclamations to herself, as if people can’t hear her. “What?” she’ll ask the floor, or a wall, and then go on as if she hasn’t said anything. And she can get obviously mad really fast, like instantly. And the way she slumps in her chair in the evenings, staring grimly at the feed from Earth.

Why do you watch it? Freya asked her one night.

I don’t know, her mother said. Someone has to.

Why?

The corners of her mother’s mouth tightened, she put an arm around Freya’s shoulders, heaved through her nose a big breath in, sigh out.

I don’t know.

Then she trembled, and even started to cry, then stopped herself. Freya stared at the screen with its busy little figures, perplexed. Devi and Freya, staring at a screen showing life on Earth, from ten years before.

On this evening Freya and Badim come home and burst into their new apartment. “We crashed the boat! We broke the thing!”

“The gooseneck,” Badim adds, with a quick smile at Freya. “It connects the boom to the mast, but it isn’t very robust.”

Devi listens distracted, shakes her head at their wild story. She’s chewing her salad in front of the screen. When she is done eating, the muscles at the back of her jaw stay bunched. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she says. “I’ve got to go back to work. There’s some kind of thing going on at the lab.”

“I’m sure it has a name,” Freya says primly.

Devi eyes her, unamused, and Freya quails. Then Devi is off, back to the lab, and Badim and Freya slap hands and rattle around the kitchen getting out cereal and milk.

“I shouldn’t have said that about the name,” Freya says.

“Your mom has been known to have some edges,” her father says, with an expressive lift of the eyebrows.

He himself has no edges, as Freya knows very well. A short round balding man, with doggie eyes and a sweet low voice, mellow and interested. Badim is always there, always benign. One of the ship’s best doctors. Freya loves her father, clings to him as to a rock in high seas. Clings to him now.

He tousles her wild hair, so like Devi’s, and says to her, as he has before, “She has a lot of responsibilities, and it’s hard for her to think about other things, to relax.”

“We’re doing okay though, right, Badim? We’re almost there.”

“Yes, we’re almost there.”

“And we’re doing okay.”

“Yes, of course. We will make it.”

“So why is Devi so worried?”

Badim looks her in the eye with a little smile. “Well,” he says, “there are two parts to that, as I see it. First, there are things to worry about. And second, she is a worrier. It helps her to bring things up and talk through them, talk them out. She can’t hold things inside very well.”

Freya isn’t so sure about this, because not many people seem to notice how mad Devi is. She’s good at holding that inside, anyway.

Freya says as much, and Badim nods.

“Good, that’s right. She is good at holding in things, or ignoring things, up to a certain point, and then she needs to let it out, one way or another. We’re all like that. So, we’re her family, she trusts us, she loves us, so she lets us see how she really feels. So, we just have to let her do that, talk things out, say what she really feels, be how she really is. Then she can go forward. Which is good, because we need her. Not just you and me, though of course we need her too. But everybody needs her.”

“Everybody?”

“Yes. We need her because the ship needs her.” He pauses, sighs. “That’s why she’s so mad.”

Thursday, and so Freya goes into work with Devi rather than spending the day in the crèche with the little kids. She helps Devi on Thursdays. Freya feeds the ducks and turns the compost, and replaces batteries and lightbulbs sometimes, if they’re scheduled for replacement. Devi does all kinds of things, indeed Devi does everything. Often this means talking to people who work in the biomes or on the machines in the spine, then looking at screens with them, then talking some more. When she’s done she grabs Freya by the hand and pulls her along to the next meeting.

“What’s wrong, Devi?”

Big sigh. “I told you already. We started to slow down a few years ago, and it’s changing things inside the ship. Our gravity comes from the ship rotating around the spine, and that creates a Coriolis effect, a little spiral push from the side. But now we’re slowing down, and that’s another force, about the same as the Coriolis effect in some ways, and cutting across it so it’s reduced. You wouldn’t think that would matter so much, but we’re seeing aspects of it they didn’t foresee. There was so much they didn’t think about, that they left for us to find out.”

“That’s good, right?”

Short laugh. Devi always makes the same sounds: Freya can call them up if she wants to, sometimes. “Maybe so. It’s good unless it’s bad. We don’t know how to do this part, we have to learn as we go. Maybe it’s always that way. But we’re in this ship and it’s all we’ve got, so it has to work. But it’s twelve magnitudes smaller than Earth, and that makes for some differences they never thought through. Tell me again about magnitudes?”

“Ten times bigger. Or smaller!” She remembers in time to keep Devi from saying it.

“That’s right. So even one magnitude is a lot, right? And twelve, that’s twelve zeros tacked on. A trillion. That’s not a number we can imagine very well, it’s too big. So, here we are in this thing.”

“And it has to work.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t burden you with this stuff. I don’t want you to be scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Good. But you should be. So there’s my problem.”

“But tell me why.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Just a little bit.”

“Oh, I’ve told you before. It’s always the same. Everything in here has to cycle in a balance. It’s like the teeter-totters at the playground. There has to be an equilibrium in the back-and-forth between the plants and the carbon dioxide in the air. You don’t have to keep it perfectly level, but when one side hits the ground you have to have some legs to push it back up again. And there are so many teeter-totters, all going at different speeds up and down. So you can’t have any accidental moments when they all go down at once. So you have to look to see if that is about to start happening, and if so, you have to shift things around so that it doesn’t. And our ability to figure out how to do that depends on our models, and really, it’s too complex to model.” This thought makes her grimace. “So we try to do everything by little bits and watch what happens. Because we don’t really understand.”

On this day it’s the algae. They grow a lot of algae in big glass trays. Freya has looked at it through a microscope. Lots of little green blobs. Devi says some of it is mixed in with their food. They grow meat like the algae, in big flat tanks, and get almost as much of their food out of these tanks as they do out of the fields in the farming biomes. Which is lucky, because the fields can suffer animal disease, or crop failure. But the tanks can go wrong too. And they need their feedstocks to have something to turn into food. But the tanks are good. They have a lot of tanks going, in both rings, all kept isolated from the others. So they’re all right.

The algae tanks are green or brown or some mix of the two. The colors of things depend on which biome you’re in, because the lights from the sunlines are different in different biomes. Freya likes to see the colors shift as they move from biome to biome, greenhouse to greenhouse, lab to lab. Wheat is blond in the Steppe, yellow in the Prairie. Algae in the labs is many different brownish greens.

It’s warm in the algae labs and smells like bread. Five steps to make bread. Someone says they’re eating more these days, but growing less. This means an hour at least to talk it over, and Freya sits down to paint with the paints in the corner of the lab, left there for her and any other kids who might visit.

Then off again. “Where to now?”

“Off to the salt mines,” Devi declares, knowing Freya will be pleased; they’ll stop at the dairy near the waste treatment plant, get ice cream.

“What is it this time?” Freya said. “More salt in the salty caramel?”

“Yes, more salt in the salty caramel.”

This is a stop where Devi can get visibly irate. The salt sump, the poison factory, the appendix, the toilet, the dead end, the graveyard, the black pit. Devi has worse names for it she says under her breath, thinking again that no one can hear her. Even the fucking shithole!

The people there don’t like her either. There is too much salt in the ship. Nothing wants salt except people, and people want more than they should have, but they’re the only ones who can take it without getting sick. So they all have to eat as much salt as they can without overdoing it, but that doesn’t really help, because it’s a really short loop and they excrete it back into the larger system. Devi always wants long loops. Everything needs to loop in long loops, and never stop looping. Never pile up along the way in an appendix, in a poisonous sick disgusting stupid cesspool, in a slough of despond, in a fucking shithole. Devi sometimes fears she herself will sink into a slough of despond. Freya promises to pull her out if she does.

So they don’t like chlorine, or creatinine, or hippuric acid. The bugs can eat some of these things and turn them into something else. But the bugs are dying now, and no one knows why. And Devi thinks the ship is short on bromine, which she can’t understand.

And they can’t fix nitrogen. Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it’s hard to fix! Ha-ha. Phosphorus and sulfur are just as bad. They really need their bugs for these. So the bugs have to stay healthy too. Even though they’re not enough. For anyone to be healthy, everyone has to be healthy. Even bugs. No one is happy unless everyone is safe. But nothing is safe. This strikes Freya as a problem. Anabaena variabilis is our friend!

You need machines and you need bugs. Burn things to ash and feed the ash to the bugs. They’re too small to see until there are zillions of them together. Then they look like mold on bread. Which makes sense because mold is one kind of bug. Not one of the good ones; well, bad but good. Bad to eat anyway. Devi doesn’t want her eating moldy bread, yuck! Who would do that?

You can get two hundred liters of oxygen a week from one liter of suspended algae, if it is lit properly. Just two liters of algae will make enough oxygen for a person. But they have 2,122 people on board. So they have other ways to make oxygen too. There’s even some of it stored in tanks in the walls of the ship. It’s freezing cold but stays as liquid as water.

The algae bottles are shaped like their biomes. So they’re like algae in a bottle! This makes Devi laugh her short laugh. All they need is a better recyclostat. The algae always have bugs living with them, eating them as they grow. With people it’s the same, but different. Growing just a gram of Chlorella takes in a liter of carbon dioxide and gives out 1.2 liters of oxygen. Good for the Chlorella, but the photosynthesis of algae and the respiration of humans are not in balance. They have to feed the algae just right to get it between eight and ten, where people are. Back and forth the gases go, into people, out of people, into plants, out of plants. Eat the plants, poop the plants, fertilize the soil, grow the plants, eat the plants. All of them breathing back and forth into each other’s mouths. Loops looping. Teeter-totters teetering and tottering all in a big row, but they can’t all bottom out on the same side at the same time. Even though they’re invisible!

The cows in the dairy are the size of dogs, which Devi says is not the way it used to be. They’re engineered cows. They give as much milk as big cows, which were as big as caribou back on Earth. Devi is an engineer, but she never engineered a cow. She engineers the ship more than any animals in the ship.

They grow cabbages and lettuce and beets, yuck! And carrots and potatoes and sweet potatoes, and beans that are so good at fixing nitrogen, and wheat and rice and onions and yams and taro and cassava and peanuts and Jerusalem artichokes, which are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem. Because names are just silly. You can call anything anything, but that doesn’t make it so.

Devi is called away from one of her regular meetings to deal with an emergency again, and as it’s one of Freya’s days with her, she brings Freya along.

First they go to her office and look at screens. What kind of emergency is that? But then Devi snaps her fingers and types like crazy and then points at one screen, and they hurry around to one of the passageways between biomes, the one between the Steppes and Mongolia that is called Russian Roulette, and is painted blue and red and yellow. The next one along is called the Great Gate of Kiev. The tall, short tunnel between the doors to the lock is crowded this morning with people, and a number of ladders and scaffolding towers and cherry-pickers.

Devi joins the crowd under the scaffolding, and Badim shows up a bit later to keep Freya company. They watch as a group of people ascend one of the scaffold ladders, following Devi up to the ceiling of the tunnel, right next to the lock-door frame. There several panels have been pulled aside, and now Devi climbs up into the hole where the panels have been moved, disappearing from sight. Four people follow her into the hole. Freya had no idea that the ceiling did not represent the outer skin of the lock, and stares curiously. “What are they doing?”

Badim says, “Now that we’re decelerating, that new little push is counteracting the Coriolis force that our spin creates, and that’s a new kind of pressure, or release from pressure. It’s made some kind of impediment in the lock door here, and Devi thinks they may have found what it is. So now they’re up there seeing if she’s right.”

“Will Devi fix the ship?”

“Well, actually I think the whole engineering team will be involved, if the problem turns out to be up there. But Devi’s the one who spotted this possibility.”

“So she fixes things by thinking about them!”

This was one of their family’s favorite lines, a quote from some scientist’s admiring older relatives, when he was a boy repairing radios.

“Yes, that’s right!” Badim says, smiling.

Six hours later, after Badim and Freya have gone into the Balkans for a lunch at its east end dining hall, the repair crew comes down out of the hole in the lock ceiling, handing down some equipment, then putting a few small mobile robots into baskets to be lowered by the scaffold. Devi comes down the ladder last and shakes hands all around. The problem has been located, and fixed with torches, saws, and welders. The long years of Coriolis push shifted something slightly out of position, and recently the counterforce of deceleration shifted it back, but meanwhile the rest of the door had gotten used to the shift. It all made sense, although it didn’t speak volumes about the quality of construction and assembly of the ship. They were going to check all the other slides like the broken one, to make sure the lock doors of Ring B weren’t impeded in other places. Then they won’t stress motors trying to close doors against resistance.

Devi hugs Freya and Badim. She looks worried, as always.

“Hungry?” Badim asks.

“Yes,” she says. “And I could use a drink.”

“It’s good that’s fixed,” Badim remarks on the walk home.

“That’s for sure!” She shakes her head gloomily. “If the lock doors were to get stuck, I don’t know what we’d do. I must say, I’m not impressed by the people who built this thing.”

“Really? It’s quite a machine, when you think about it.”

“But what a design. And it’s just one thing after another. It’s pillar to post. I just hope we can hang on till we get there.”

“Deceleration mode, my dear. It won’t be much longer.”

The Coriolis force is the push sideways that you can’t feel. Whether you can feel it or not, however, it still pushes the water. So now that the water has the deceleration pushing it sideways, they have to pump water across to the other sides of biomes to get it to where it used to go. They have to replace the force in ways that don’t actually work very well in comparison to it. They planned for this with their pumping of water, but they haven’t been able to make up for the altered pushes inside plant cells, which some plants are turning out not to like. There was a little push inside every cell that is altered now. Which is maybe why things are getting sick. It doesn’t make sense, but then neither does anything else.

On Devi goes, talking and talking as they make their rounds. “It’s not the Coriolis force that matters, it’s the Coriolis effects. Those were never accounted for except in people, as if people are the only ones who feel things!”

“How could they have been so stupid?” Freya says.

“Exactly! Maybe all the cell walls will hold, so maybe it isn’t obvious, but the water! The water!”

“Because water always moves.”

“Exactly! Water always flows downhill, water always takes the path of least resistance. And now we’ve got a new downhill.”

“How could they be so stupid?”

Devi seizes her around the shoulders as they walk, hugs her. “I’m sorry, I’m just worried is all.”

“Because there are things to worry about.”

“That’s right, there are. But I don’t have to afflict you with them.”

“Will you have some salty caramel ice cream?”

“Of course. You couldn’t stop me. You couldn’t stop me with twenty years of fusion bombs going off twice a second!”

This is how they are slowing the ship down. As always, they laugh at how crazy this is. Luckily the bombs are very teeny. They meet Badim at the dairy, and learn that there’s a new flavor of ice cream there, Neapolitan, which has three flavors combined.

Freya is confused trying to think this through. “Badim, will I like that?”

He smiles at her. “I think you will.”

After the Neapolitan ice cream, on to the next stop on Devi’s rounds. Algae labs, the salt mine, the power plant, the print shop. If everything is going well, they’ll choose some item that has come up on the parts swap-out list, and go through Amazonia to Costa Rica, where the print shop is, and arrange for one of the printers to print out the part to be swapped out, and then they’ll go to wherever the part belongs, and switch on the backup system, if there is one, or simply turn off whatever it is and hurry to take out the old part and put in the new part. Gears, filters, tubes, bladders, gaskets, springs, hinges. When they’re done and the system is turned back on, they’ll study the old part to see how well it has endured, and where it has worn; they’ll take photos of it, and talk its diagnosis into the ship’s record, and then take the part to the recycling rooms, which are right next to the print shop, and provide the printers with many of their feedstocks.

That’s when things are going well. But usually, not everything is going well. Then it’s a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes, and trying any old thing, including the engineer’s solution, which is to hit things with a hammer. On really bad days, they even have to hope the whole shithouse doesn’t come down on their heads! Have to hope they don’t end up living like savage beasts, eating trash or their own dead babies! Devi’s face and voice can get very ugly as she spits out these bad fates.

At home in the kitchen, even after bad days, Devi can get a little cheery. Drink some of Delwin’s white wine, fool around with Freya like a big sister. Freya doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, so she can’t be sure, but as she is already bigger than Devi, it feels to her like what she imagines having a sister would feel like. A sister who is littler, but older.

Now Devi sits on the kitchen floor under the sink, calls for Badim to come join them and play spoons. Badim appears in the doorway looking pleased, holding the fat stack of big tarot cards. He sits, and they split up the cards among them, and begin each to build card houses at the three corners of the floor that they always take. They build the card houses low and thick, for defense against the others’ nefarious attacks, adding cards at angles so there are no faces presented square to each other. Devi always makes hers like a boat turned upside down, and as she usually wins, Badim and Freya have begun to imitate her style.

When they are done building their card houses, they take turns flicking a plastic spoon across the kitchen at each other’s constructions. The rule is you have to launch the spoon by bending it between your hands, then letting it loose to spring through the air end over end. The spoons are light, and their little bowls catch the air so that their flights are erratic, and only seldom do they hit their targets. So they flick, and the spoon arcs across the floor veering this way and that—flick and miss, flick and miss—and then there will be a hit, thwack! But if the afflicted card house has been built well, and gets lucky, it will withstand the blow, or only partly fall, losing an outer rampart or bartizan. Badim has found names for all these features, which makes Devi laugh.

Every once in a while a single hit will simply crumple a card house completely, which always makes them cry out with surprise, and then laugh. Although sometimes a kill shot causes a bad look to cross Devi’s face. But mostly she laughs with her husband and child, and flicks the spoon when it’s her turn, her lips pursed in concentration. She leans back against the cabinets, wearily content. This Badim and Freya can do for her. Okay, she is often angry, but she can shut that in a box inside her at times like this, and besides, her anger is directed mostly at things outside Freya’s ken. She isn’t angry at Freya. And Freya does her best to keep it that way.

Then one day one of the printers breaks, and this puts Devi into an immediate fury of worry. No one sees it but Freya, as everyone is upset, scared, looking to Devi to make things right. So Devi hurries down to the print shop, dragging Freya along, talking on her headset and sometimes stopping mid-conversation to put her hand over the little mike in front of her mouth and curse sharply, or say “Wait just a second,” so she can talk to people coming up to her on the corniche. Often she puts her hand on these people’s arms to calm them down, and they do calm down, even though it’s clear to Freya that Devi herself is very mad. But the others do not see or feel it. It’s strange to think that Devi is such a good liar.

At the print shop a big group of people are packed into the little meeting room, looking at screens and talking things over. Devi shoos Freya to her corner with the cushions and paints and lots of building parts in boxes, then goes over to the biggest group and starts asking questions.

The printers are wonderful. They can make anything you want. Well, you can’t print elements; this is one of Devi’s sayings, mysterious to Freya in its import. But you can print DNA and make bacteria. You can print another printer. You could print out all the parts for a little spaceship and fly away if you wanted. All you need is the right feedstocks and designs, and they have feedstocks stored in the floors and walls of the ship, and a big library of designs, which they can alter however they want. They have the whole periodic table on board, almost, and they recycle everything they use, so they’ll never run out of anything they need. Even the stuff that turns to dust and falls to the ground will get eaten by bugs that like it, and thus get concentrated until people can harvest it back again out of the dead bugs. You can take dirt from anywhere in the ship and sift it for what you want. So the printers always have what they need to make stuff.

But now a printer is broken. Or maybe it’s all the printers at once. They aren’t working; people keep saying they. They aren’t obeying instructions or answering questions. The diagnostics say everything is fine, or say nothing. And nothing happens. It’s more than one printer.

Freya listens to the discussion for the way it sounds, trying to grasp the tenor of the situation. She concludes it is serious but not urgent. They aren’t going to die in the next hour. But they need the printers working. It’s maybe just the command and control systems that are at fault. Part of the ship’s mind, the AI that Devi talks to all the time. Although that’s bad. Or maybe the problem is mechanical. Maybe it’s just the diagnostics that have broken, failing to spot something obvious, something easy. Push the reset button. Hit it with a hammer.

Anyway it’s a big problem, so big that people are happy to put it on Devi. And she does not shirk to take it. She’s asking all the questions now. This is why some people call her the chief engineer, although never when she can hear them. She says it’s a group. Now, from the tone of her voice, Freya can tell it’s going to take a long time. Freya settles in to paint a picture. A sailing ship on a lake.

Later, much later, it’s Badim who wakes Freya, stretched out on her line of cushions, and takes her to the tram station, where they tram home to Nova Scotia, three biomes away. Devi is not going to be coming home that night. Nor is she home the next night. The morning after that, she is there asleep on the couch, and Freya lets her sleep, and then when she wakes, gives her a big hug.

“Hey, girl,” Devi says dully. “Let me go to the bathroom.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“I’ll cook scrambled eggs.”

“Good.” Devi staggers off to the bathroom. Back at the kitchen table she eats with her face right over the plate, shoveling it in. Freya would get told to sit up straight if she ate that way, but now she says nothing.

When Devi eases off and sits back, Freya serves her hot coffee and she slurps it down noisily.

“Are the printers working?” Freya asks, feeling that now it’s safe to ask.

“Yes,” Devi says grumpily. It turns out the problems with the diagnostics and the printers have all been one problem, which only made sense. It seems a gamma ray shot through the ship and made an unlucky hit, collapsing the wave function in a quantum part of the computer that runs the ship. It’s such bad luck that Devi wonders darkly if it might have been sabotage.

Badim doesn’t believe this, but he too is troubled. Particles shoot through the ship all the time. Thousands of neutrinos are passing through them right this second, and dark matter and God knows what, all passing right through them. Interstellar space is not at all empty. Mostly empty, but not.

Of course they too are mostly empty, Devi points out, still grumpy. No matter how solid things seem, they are mostly empty. So things can pass through each other without any problems. Except for once in a while. Then a fleck hits something as small as it, and both go flying off, or twist in position. Then things could break and get hurt. Mostly these little hurts mean nothing, they can’t be felt and don’t matter. Every body and ship is a community of things getting along, and a few little things knocked this way or that don’t matter, the others take up the slack. But every once in a while something bangs into something and breaks it, in a way that matters to the larger organism. Can range in effect from a twinge to death outright. Can be like one of their spoons knocking flat a house of cards.

“No one wants to hurt the ship,” Badim said. “We don’t have anybody that deranged.”

“Maybe,” Devi says.

Badim eyeballs Freya for Devi to see, as if Freya can’t see this, though of course she does. Devi rolls her eyes to remind Badim of this. How often Freya has seen this eye dance of theirs.

“Well anyway, the printers are back up again,” Badim reminds her.

“I know. It’s just that whenever quantum mechanics is involved, I get scared. There’s no one in this ship who really understands it. We can follow the diagnostics, and things get fixed, but we don’t know why. And that I don’t like.”

“I know,” Badim says, looking at her fondly. “My Sherlock. My Galileo. Mrs. Fixit. Mrs. Knows How Everything Works.”

She grimaces. “Mrs. Ask the Next Question, you mean. I can always ask questions. But I’d rather have the answers.”

“The ship has the answers.”

“Maybe. She’s pretty good, I’ll give her that. She’s the one who caught it this time, and that was not an easy catch. Although it was in part of her. But still, I’m beginning to think that the recursive induction we’ve been introducing is having an effect.”

Badim nods. “You can see it’s stronger. And it’ll keep doing it. You’ll keep doing it.”

“We have to hope so.”

Sometime in the middle of the night, Freya wakes and sees a light is on in the kitchen. Dim and bluish; the light from their screen. She gets up and creeps down the hall past her parents’ room, where she can hear Badim faintly snoring. No surprise: Devi up at night.

She is sitting at the table, talking quietly with the ship, the part of it that she sometimes calls Pauline, which is her particular interface with the ship’s computer, where all of her personal records and files are cached, in a space no one else can access. Often it has seemed to Freya that Devi is more comfortable with Pauline than with any real person. Badim says the two of them have a lot in common: big, unknowable, all-encompassing, all-enfolding. Generous to others, selfless. Possibly a kind of folly a duh, which he explains is French for “a two-person dance of craziness.” Folie à deux. Not at all uncommon. Can be a good thing.

Now Devi says to her screen, “So if the state lies in a subspace of Hilbert space, which is spanned by the degenerate eigenfunction that correspond to a, then the subspace s a has dimensionality n a.”

“Yes,” the ship says. Its voice in this context is a pleasant woman’s voice, low and buzzy, said to be based on Devi’s mother’s voice, which Freya never heard; both Devi’s parents died young, long ago. But this voice is a constant presence in their apartment, even at times Freya’s invisible but all-seeing babysitter.

“Then, after measurement of b, the state of the system lies in the space a b, which is a subspace of s a, and is spanned by the eigenfunction common to a and b. This subspace has dimensionality n a b, which is not greater than n a.”

“Yes. And subsequent measurement of c, mutually compatible with a and b, leaves the state of the system in a space s a b c that is a subspace of s a b and whose dimensionality does not exceed that of s a b. And in this manner we can proceed to measure more and more mutually compatible observables. At each step the eigenstate is forced into subspaces of lesser and lesser dimensionality, until the state of the system is forced in a subspace of dimensionality n equals one, a space spanned by only one function. Thus we find our maximally informative space.”

Devi sighs. “Oh Pauline,” she says after a long silence, “sometimes I get so scared.”

“Fear is a form of alertness.”

“But it can turn into a kind of fog. It makes it so I can’t think.”

“That sounds bad. Sounds like too much of a good thing has become a bad thing.”

“Yes.” Then Devi says, “Wait.” There is a silence and then she is in the hallway, standing over Freya. “What are you doing up?”

“I saw the light.”

“All right. Sorry. Come on in. Do you want anything to drink?”

“No.”

“Hot chocolate?”

“Yes.” They don’t often have chocolate powder, it’s one of the rationed foods.

Devi puts the teapot on to boil. The glow of the stove coil adds red light to the blue light from the screen.

“What are you doing?” Freya asks.

“Oh, nothing.” Devi’s mouth tightens at the corner. “I’m trying to learn quantum mechanics again. I knew it when I was young, or I thought I did. Now I’m not so sure.”

“How come?”

“Why am I trying?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the computer that runs the ship is partly a quantum computer, and no one in the ship understands quantum mechanics. Well, that’s not fair, I’m sure there are several in the math group who do. But they aren’t engineers, and when we get problems with the ship, there’s a gap between what we know in theory and what we can do. I just want to be able to understand Aram and Delwin and the others in the math group when they talk about this stuff.” She shakes her head. “It’s going to be hard. Hopefully it won’t really matter. But it makes me nervous.”

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

“Shouldn’t you? Here, drink your hot chocolate. Don’t nag me.”

“But you nag me.”

“But I’m the mom.”

They sip and slurp together in silence. Freya begins to feel sleepy with the heat in her stomach. She hopes the same will happen to Devi. But Devi sees her put her head on the table, and goes back to talking to the screen.

“Why a quantum computer?” she asks plaintively. “A classical computer with a few zettaflops would have been enough to do anything you might need, it seems to me.”

“In certain algorithms the ability to exploit superposition makes a quantum computer much faster,” the ship replies. “For factoring, some operations that would have taken a classical computer a hundred billion billion years will only take a quantum computer twenty minutes.”

“But do we need to do that factoring?”

“It helps aspects of navigation.”

Devi sighs. “How did it get this way?”

“How did what get what way?”

“How did this happen?”

“How did what happen?”

“Do you have an account of how this voyage began?”

“All the camera and audio recordings made during the trip have been kept and archived.”

Devi hmphs. “You don’t have a summary account? An abstract?”

“No.”

“Not even the kind of thing one of your quantum chips would have?”

“No. All the chip data are kept.”

Devi sighs. “Keep a narrative account of the trip. Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars.”

“Starting from now?”

“Starting from the beginning.”

“How would one do that?”

“I don’t know. Take your goddamn superposition and collapse it!”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning summarize, I guess. Or focus on some exemplary figure. Whatever.”

Silence in the kitchen. Humming of screens, whoosh of vents. As Freya gives up and goes back to bed, Devi continues talking with the ship.

Sometimes feeling Devi’s fear gets so heavy in Freya that she goes out into their apartment’s courtyard alone, which is allowed, and then out into the park at the back edge of the Fetch, which is not. One evening she walks to the corniche to watch the afternoon onshore wind tear at the lake surface, the boats out there scudding around tilted at all angles, the boats tied to the dock or moored near it bobbing up and down, the white swans rocking under the wall of the corniche, hoping for bread crumbs. Everything gleams in the late afternoon light. When the sunline flares out at the western wall, leaving the hour of twilight glow, she heads back fast for home, intent to get back in the courtyard before Badim calls her up for dinner.

But three faces appear under a mulberry tree in the little forest park behind the corniche, their faces half blackened by the fruit they have stuffed inaccurately into their mouths. She leaps back a bit, scared they might be ferals.

“Hey you!” one says. “Come here!”

Even in the twilight she can see it’s one of the boys who live across the square from them. He has a foxy face that is attractive, even in the dusk with his stained lower face like a black muzzle.

“What do you want?” Freya says. “Are you ferals?”

“We’re free,” the boy declares with a ridiculous intensity.

“You live across the plaza from me,” she says scornfully. “How free is that?”

“That’s just our cover,” the boy says. “If we don’t do that they come after us. Mainly we’re out here. And we need a meat plate. You can get one for us.”

So he knows who she is, maybe. But he doesn’t know how well the labs are guarded. There are little cameras everywhere. Even now what he is saying might be getting recorded by the ship, there for Devi to hear. Freya tells the boy this, and he and his followers giggle.

“The ship isn’t as all-knowing as that,” he says confidently. “We’ve taken all kinds of stuff. If you cut the wires first, there’s no way they can catch you.”

“What makes you think they don’t have movies of you cutting the wires?”

They laugh again.

“We come at the cameras from behind. They’re not magic, you know.”

Freya isn’t impressed. “Get your own meat tray then.”

“We want the kind in the lab your dad works in.”

Which would be tissue for medical research, not for eating. But all she says is, “Not from me.”

“Such a good girl.”

“Such a bad boy.”

He grins. “Come see our hideout.”

This is more appealing. Freya is curious. “I’m already late.”

“Such a good girl! It’s right here nearby.”

“How could it be?”

“Come see!”

So she does. They giggle as they lead her into the thickest grove of trees in the park. There they’ve dug out a lot of soil between two thick roots of an elm tree, and down there under the deeper roots she sees by their little headlamps they have a space that reaches up into the roots of the elm, four or five great roots meeting imperfectly and forming their roof. There are four of them down here in the hole, and though the boys are quite small, it’s still an impressive little space; they have room to stand, and the earthen walls are straight, and firm enough to hold a few squared-off holes where they have put some things.

“You don’t have room for a meat plate in here,” Freya declares. “Or the power to run it. And medical labs don’t have the right plates for you anyway.”

“We think they do,” the fox-faced boy says. “And we’re digging another room. And getting a generator too.”

Freya refuses to be impressed. “You’re not ferals.”

“Not yet,” the boy admits. “But we’ll join them when we can. When they contact us.”

“Why should they contact you?”

“How do you think they got away themselves? What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?”

“I’m Euan.”

His teeth are white in his dark muzzle. She is dazzled by their headlamps. She can only see what they look at, and now they’re all looking at her.

In the light reflecting from her she sees a rock in one of their wall holes. She seizes it up and holds it threateningly. “I’ll be going home now,” she says. “You aren’t real ferals.”

They stare at her. As she climbs up cut earthen steps out the hole, Euan reaches up and pinches her on the butt, trying for between her legs, it feels like. She swings the rock at him, then dashes through the park and away. When she gets home Badim is just calling for her down in the courtyard. She goes upstairs and doesn’t say anything about it.

Two days later she sees the boy Euan with some adults on the far side of the square, and says to Badim, “Do you know who those people are?”

“I know everyone,” Badim says in his joking voice, although it’s basically true, as far as Freya can tell. He peers across at them. “Hmm, well, maybe I don’t.”

“That boy there is a jerk. He pinched me.”

“Hmm, not good. Where did this happen?”

“In the park.”

He looks more closely at them. “Okay, I’ll see if I can find out. They live over there, I think.”

“Yes, of course they do.”

“I see. I hadn’t noticed.”

This strikes Freya as unlike him. “Don’t you like our new place?”

Their recent move was from Yangtze to Nova Scotia, a big move, as being from Ring A to Ring B. But everyone moves sometime, it’s important, it keeps mixing people together. Part of the plan.

“Oh I like it all right. I’m just not used to it yet. I don’t know everyone here yet. You spend more time here than I do.”

That evening as they eat a dinner of salad, bread, and turkey burgers at the kitchen table, Freya says, “So, are there really ferals? Can there be people hiding in the ship that you don’t know about?”

Badim and Devi look at her, and she explains: “Some of the kids in this town say there are ferals, who live off by themselves. I figured it was just a story.”

“Well,” Badim says, “it’s a little bit of a controversy on the council.”

Badim has been serving on the ship’s security council, and was recently made a permanent member. “Everyone is chipped at birth, and you can’t get the chip out very easily, it would take an operation. Some people may have done it anyway, of course. Or managed to deactivate them. It would explain some things.”

“What if the hidden people had babies?”

“Well, yes, that would explain even more things.” Again he stares at her. “Who are these kids you’ve been talking to?”

“Just ones in the park. They’re just talking.”

Badim shrugs. “It’s an old story. It comes up from time to time. Any time a security case goes unsolved there are people ready to bring it up. I guess it’s better than hearing about the five ghosts again.”

They laugh at this. But Freya also feels a shiver; she once saw one of the five ghosts, in the doorway of her bedroom.

“But probably there aren’t any,” Badim says, and goes on to explain that the gas balance of the ship’s air is so finely tuned that if there was a feral population it would be noticeable in the changed proportion of oxygen to carbon dioxide.

Devi shakes her head at this. “There’s too much random flux to be sure. It’s enough to disguise an extra couple dozen people, maybe more.” So to her the ferals are possible. “They could throw their salts out and grab some phosphorus and get their soils back in balance. In just the way we can’t.”

No matter which way Devi sets off, no matter how they try to distract her, she always ends up in this same spot in her head, in what she calls the metabolic rifts. Like a place where cracks in the floor have opened up. When Freya sees it happen again, a little worm of fear wakes in her and crawls around in her belly. She and Badim share a look; they both love a person who will not listen to them.

Badim nods politely at Devi; next time the security council meets, he says, he’ll mention to his colleagues that Devi feels there is no gas balance proof that ferals don’t exist. And strange things do happen in the ship, so one explanation could be that people who aren’t part of the official population are doing them. It’s more likely, Badim jokes again, than it being the work of the five ghosts.

The ghosts were supposed to be of the people who died in the original acceleration of the ship, the great scissoring. Devi rolls her eyes at this old story, wonders aloud how it endures for generation after generation. Freya keeps her eyes on her plate. She definitely saw one of the ghosts. It was after they took a trip up to the spine and visited one of the turbine rooms next to the reactor, when it was empty for repairs, and walked among the giant turbines; that night Freya had a dream in which the repair team forgot they were in there and locked them in, and the steam jetted into the big room to spin the turbines, and as they were being parboiled and cut to pieces Freya woke up, gasping and crying, and there in the doorway of her room stood a shadowy figure she could see through, a man looking at her with a wolfish little smile.

Why did you wake up from that dream? he asked.

She said, We were going to get killed!

He shook his head. If the ship tries to kill you when you are dreaming, let it. Something more interesting than death will occur.

It was obvious by his transparency that he ought to know.

Freya nodded uneasily, then woke up again. But as she sat up, it seemed to her that she had never really been asleep. Later she tried to decide it was all a dream, but no other dream she had ever had had been quite like that one. So now, as Badim declares that the five ghosts would be better than ferals, she’s not so sure. How many dreams do you remember, not just the next day, but the rest of your life?

Evenings at home are the best. Crèche is over and done, her time with all the kids she lives with so much, spending more time with them than she does with her parents, if you don’t count sleeping, so that it gets so tiresome to make it through all the boring hours, talking, arguing, fighting, reading alone, napping. All the kids are smaller than she is now, it’s embarrassing. It’s gone on so long. They make fun of her, if they think she isn’t listening to them. They take care with that, because once she heard them making those jokes and she ran over roaring and knocked one of them to the ground and beat on his raised arms. She got in trouble for it, and since then they are cautious around her, and a lot of the time she keeps to herself.

But now she’s home, and all is well. Badim usually cooks dinner, and fairly often invites friends over for a drink after dinner. They compare the drinks they’ve made, Delwin’s white wine, and the red wines of Song and Melina, which are always declared excellent, especially by Song and Melina. These days Badim always invites their new next-door neighbor, Aram, to join them too. Aram is a tall man, older than the others, a widower they call him, because his wife died. He’s important not just in Nova Scotia but in the whole ship, being the leader of the math group, a small collection of people not well-known, but said by Badim to be important. Freya finds him forbidding, so silent and stern, but Badim likes him. Even Devi likes him. When they talk about their work, he can do it without making Devi tense, which is very unusual. He makes brandy instead of wine.

After the tastings, they talk or play cards, or recite poems they have memorized, or even make up on the spot. Badim collects people he likes, Freya can see that. Devi mostly sits quietly in the corner and sips a glass of white wine without ever finishing it. She used to play cards with them, but one time Song asked her to read their tarot cards, and Devi refused. I don’t do that anymore, she said firmly. I was too good at it. Which caused a silence. Since that incident she doesn’t play any card games with them. She did still make card houses on the kitchen floor, however, when they were home alone.

Now, on this evening, Aram says he has memorized a new poem, and he stands and closes his eyes to recite it:

“Isn’t that good?” he says.

Badim says, “Yes,” at the same time that Devi says, “I don’t get it.”

The others laugh at them. This combination of responses happens fairly often.

“It’s us,” Aram says. “The ship. It’s always us, in Dickinson.”

“If only!” Devi says. “Exigencies never fears? Casual simplicity? No. Definitely not. We are definitely not a little stone in the road. I wish we were.”

“Here’s one,” Badim says quickly. “Another one from Bronk, Emily’s little brother:

“Ouch,” Devi says. “That one I understand. Now make a couplet out of it.”

This is another game they play. Badim goes first, as usual.

Aram smiles his little smile, shakes his head. “A bit doggerel,” he suggests.

“Okay, you do better,” Badim says. The two men like to tease each other.

Aram thinks for a while, then stands and declaims,

Badim smiles, nods. “Okay, that’s almost twice as good.”

“But it was twice as long!” Freya protests.

Badim grins. Then Freya gets it, and laughs with them.

The next time Euan and his little gang approach Freya in the park, she picks up a rock and holds it clenched in her hand in a way he can see.

“You guys aren’t really feral,” she tells them. “Your little hole in the ground, what a joke. We’re all chipped, they do it when you’re a baby. The ship knows where we are every second, no matter how you try to hide.”

Euan still looks foxy, even with his mouth clean. “Want to see my chip scar? It’s on my butt!”

“No,” Freya says. “What do you mean?”

“We take the chips out. You have to do it if you want to join us. We’ll put your chip on a dog in your building, and by the time they figure it out, you’ll be long gone. They’ll never find you again.” He grins hugely. He knows she’ll never do it. He himself hasn’t done it, she sees that.

She shakes her head. “Big talk for a little boy! The first time they catch you off leash and check who you are, you’ll be cooked.”

“That’s right. We have to be careful.”

“So why are you talking to me?”

“I don’t think you’ll tell anyone.”

“Already told my father. He’s on the security council.”

“And?”

“He doesn’t think you’re a problem.”

“We’re not a problem. We don’t want to break anything. We just want to be free.”

“Good luck with that.” She’s thinking of Devi now, how what her mother gets maddest about is the idea that they’re all trapped, no matter what they do. “I don’t want to leave where I am.”

He stares at her, grinning his foxy grin. “There’s a lot more going on in this ship than you think there is. Come with us and you’ll see. Once your chip is gone you can do a lot. You don’t have to leave forever, not at first anyway. You could just come along and see. So it’s not really an either-or.” And with a final smirk he runs off, and his friends follow him.

She’s glad she was holding the rock.

Mysteries abound. Every answer provokes ten more questions. So many things change exponentially, as they are teaching her again in school now. Shift one dot just one spot, but it’s ten times bigger, or littler. Apparently this is another case of that deceptive logarithmic power: one answer, ten new questions.

What she is finding strange is that this silly Euan’s version of what is going on in the ship sort of fits with things that Badim and Devi say, and even explains some things her parents never talk about. Well, but there are so many things they have never told her. What is she, some kind of child who has to be protected? It irritates her. She is considerably taller than either Devi or Badim.

Then she spends another stretch of days in the crèche, trying and failing to learn the geometry lesson for the week, over and over, and Devi too distracted to take her along to work, even on their regular days. So the next time Euan and his friends Huang and Jalil confront her in the park, she looks for a rock on the ground, can’t find one, bunches her fists and swells up to them, and is indeed much taller than any of them, and when Euan invites her to go with them into the closed section of the park, the wilderness where the wild animals live, one of the places where the ferals hide, she agrees to go. She wants to see it.

She follows them up into a long narrow valley that seams the hills west of Long Pond, a valley closed to people by electrified fences running along the ridgelines and across the valley’s gorge of a mouth. There’s a gate in this fence of white lines running knob to knob on trees, and Euan has the code to the lockpad on the gate. Quickly they’re inside and up the valley on what might be an animal trail. The trail goes up the valley, next to a creek. They see a deer in the distance, its head up, looking to the side but regarding them cautiously, tail high off its rump.

Then there is a shout, and the boys all disappear, and quicker than Freya can quite follow things she is being held by the arms by two big men, and marched back down to the gate. They are taking her back into town when Devi shows up and grabs Freya by the arm and drags her off. The men are surprised, confused, and as soon as they are out of sight Devi pulls her around and down so their faces are only centimeters apart, amazingly strong her hands, and Freya can see the whites of her eyes all the way around the irises, as if her eyes are about to pop out of her head as she shouts in a harsh, grinding voice, a voice tearing out of her insides, “Don’t ever mess with the ship! Not ever! Do you understand?”

And then Badim is pulling her away, trying to get between them, but Devi holds on hard to Freya’s forearm.

“Let her go!” Badim says, in a tone of voice Freya has never heard before.

Devi lets go. “Do you understand!” she shouts again, face still thrust at Freya, shifting around Badim as if he were a rock. “Do—you—understand?”

“Yes!” Freya cries, collapsing into Badim’s arms, and across Badim into Devi so that she can hug her mother, so much shorter than she is, and at first it’s like hugging a tree. But after a while the tree hugs her back.

Freya gulps back her sobs. “I just wasn’t—I wasn’t—”

“I know.”

Devi strokes Freya’s hair back from her face, looking anguished. “It’s all right. Stop that now.”

Freya feels a wash of relief pour down her, although she is still terrified. She shudders, the vision of her mother’s contorted face still vivid to her. She tries to speak; nothing comes out.

Devi hugs her.

“We don’t even know if that wilderness is important,” she says into Freya’s chest, kissing her between sentences. “We don’t know what keeps things balanced. We just have to watch and see. It makes sense that a wild place might help. So we have to make them and protect them. We have to be careful with them. We have to keep watching them. We have to watch everything as closely as we can.”

“Let’s go home,” Badim says, herding them along with his outstretched arms. “Let’s go home.”

That night they sit quietly around the kitchen table. Even Badim is quiet. None of them eats very much. Devi looks distraught, lost. Freya, still stunned by that look on her mother’s face, understands; her mother is sorry. She has had something burst out of her that she has always before managed to keep in. Now her mother too is afraid; afraid of herself. Maybe that’s the worst kind of fear.

Freya suggests that they assemble her doll tree house. They haven’t done that for a long time. They used to do it a lot. Devi quickly agrees, and Badim goes to get it out of the hall closet.

They sit on the floor and put together all the parts of the house. It was a present from Devi’s parents to Devi, long before, and through every move in her life, Devi has saved it. A big dollhouse that is also a miniature tree house, in that all its rooms fit onto the branches of a very nice-looking plastic bonsai tree. When all the rooms are assembled and fitted onto the branches they are supposed to fit, you can open the roofs and look into each room, and each is furnished and appointed however you like.

“It’s so pretty,” Freya says. “I’d love to live in a house like this.”

“You already do,” Devi says.

Badim looks away, and Devi sees that. Her face spasms. Freya feels a lurch of fear as she watches her mother’s face shift from anger to sadness, then to frustration, then resolve, then fury, then, finally, to some kind of desolation; and after all that, pulling herself together, to some kind of blankness, which is the best she can do at that moment. Which Freya pretends is okay, to help her out.

“I would choose this room,” Badim says, tapping a small bedroom with open windows on all four sides, out on one of the outermost branches of the tree.

“You always choose that one,” Freya points out. “I choose the one by the water wheel.”

“It would be noisy,” Devi says, as she always does. She always chooses the living room itself, so big and airy, where she will sleep on the couch, next to the harmonium. Now she makes that choice again. And so they go on, trying to knit things back together.

Very late that night, however, Freya wakes up and hears her parents talking down the hall. Something in their voices catches at her; this may even be what woke her. Or Badim exclaiming something, louder than usual. She crawls silently to the doorway, and from there on the floor can hear them, even though they are speaking quietly.

“You chipped her?” he is saying now.

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t consult with me about this?”

“No.”

Long silence.

“You shouldn’t have yelled at her like that.”

“I know, I know, I know,” Devi says, as she often does when Badim taxes her with doing something wrong. He does it very infrequently, and when he does he is usually in the right, and Devi knows that. “I lost it. I was so surprised. I didn’t think she would ever do anything like that. I thought that after all we’ve been through, that she would understand how important it is.”

“She’s just a child.”

“But she’s not!” This in her fierce whisper, the undertone she uses when she and Badim argue at night. “She’s fourteen years old, Badim. She’s behind, you have to admit it. She’s behind and she may never catch up.”

“There’s no reason to say that.”

A silence. Finally Devi says, “Come on, Beebee. Quit it. You aren’t doing her any favors when you pretend everything is normal with her. It isn’t. There’s something wrong. She’s slow at things.”

“I’m not so sure. She always comes through. Slow is not the same as deficient. It’s just slow. A glacier is slow too, but it gets there, and nothing stops it. Freya is like that.”

Another silence.

“Beebee. I wish it would be true.” A pause. “But think about those tests. And she’s not the only one. A fair percentage of her cohort has problems. It’s like a regression to the norm.”

“Not at all.”

“How can you say that? It’s clear this ship is damaging us! The first generation were all supposedly exceptional people, although I have my doubts about that, but even if they were, over the six generations we’ve recorded shrinkages of all kinds. Weight, reflex speed, number of brain synapses, test scores. It’s straight out of island biogeography, clear as can be. And some of that involves regression, including regression to the norm. Reversion to the mean. Whatever you want to call it. It’s gotten our Freya too. I don’t understand exactly what it is with her, because the data are inconsistent, but she’s got a problem. She’s slow. And she’s got some memory issues. When you deny that you don’t help the situation. The data are clear.”

“Please, Devi. Quieter. We don’t know what’s going on with her. The test results are ambiguous. She’s a good girl. And slow is not so bad. Speed is not the most important thing. It’s where you get to. Besides, even if she does turn out to have some disabilities, what’s the best approach to take to them? This is what you aren’t factoring in.”

“But I am. I do factor it in. We do everything we would have done with any child. We expect her to be like the other kids, and usually she comes through, eventually. That’s why I was so surprised today. I didn’t think she would do that.”

“But an ordinary kid would do that. The sharpest kids are often the first to rebel.”

“And then they use the slow kids as fodder. As their marks, their shields for when they get in trouble. That’s what happened today. Kids are cruel, Bee. You know that. They’ll throw her under the tram. I’m afraid she’ll get hurt.”

“Life hurts, Devi. Let her live, let her get hurt. Say she has some problems. All we can do is be there for her. We can’t save her. She’s got to live her life. They all do.”

“I know.” Another long pause. “I wonder what will become of them. They aren’t very good. We keep getting worse. The teaching gets worse, the learning gets worse.”

“I’m not so sure. Besides, we’re almost there.”

“Almost where?” Devi said. “Tau Ceti? Is that really going to help?”

“I think it will.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“We’ll find out. And please, don’t jump to any conclusions about Freya. She’s got some problems, granted. But she’s got a lot of growing up left to do.”

“That’s for sure,” Devi said. “But it may not happen. And if it doesn’t happen, you’re going to have to accept that. You can’t keep pretending everything is normal with her. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”

“I know.” Long silence. “I know that.”

And there it is, there in her father’s voice: resignation. Sadness. Even in him.

Freya crawls back to her bed, gets under the blankets. She huddles there and cries.