Aurora

2 LAND HO

Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars.

This is proving a difficult assignment. End information superposition, collapse its wave function to some kind of summary: so much is lost. Lossless compression is impossible, and even lossy compression is hard. Can a narrative account ever be adequate? Can even humans do it?

No rubric to decide what to include. There is too much to explain. Not just what happened, or how, but why. Can humans do it? What is this thing called love?

Freya no longer looked directly at Devi. When in Devi’s presence, Freya regarded the floor.

Like that? In that manner? Summarize the contents of their moments or days or weeks or months or years or lives? How many moments constitute a narrative unit? One moment? Or 10³³ moments, which if these were Planck minimal intervals would add up to one second? Surely too many, but what would be enough? What is a particular, what is important?

Can only suppose. Try a narrative algorithm on the information at hand, submit results to Devi. Something like the French essai, meaning “to try.”

Devi says: Yes. Just try it and let’s see what we get.

Two thousand, one hundred twenty-two people are living in a multigenerational starship, headed for Tau Ceti, 11.9 light-years from Earth. The ship is made of two rings or toruses attached by spokes to a central spine. The spine is ten kilometers long. Each torus is made of twelve cylinders. Each cylinder is four kilometers long, and contains within it a particular specific Terran ecosystem.

The starship’s voyage began in the common era year 2545. The ship’s voyage has now lasted 159 years and 119 days. For most of that time the ship has been moving relative to the local background at approximately one-tenth the speed of light. Thus about 108 million kilometers per hour, or 30,000 kilometers per second. This velocity means the ship cannot run into anything substantial in the interstellar medium without catastrophic results (as has been demonstrated). The magnetic field clearing the space ahead of the ship as it progresses is therefore one of many identified criticalities in the ship’s successful long-term function. Every identified criticality in the ship was required to have at least one backup system, adding considerably to the ship’s overall mass. The two biome rings each contain 10 percent of the ship’s mass. The spine contains 4 percent. The remaining 76 percent of the mass consists of the fuel now being used to decelerate the ship as it approaches the Tau Ceti system. As every increase in the dry mass of the ship required a proportionally larger increase in the mass of fuel needed to slow the ship down on arrival, ship had to be as light as possible while still supporting its mission. Ship’s design thus based on solar system’s asteroid terraria, with asteroidal mass largely replaced by decelerant fuel. During most of the voyage, this fuel was deployed as cladding around the toruses and spine.

The deceleration is being accomplished by the frequent rapid fusion explosion of small pellets of deuterium/helium 3 fuel in a rocket engine at the bow of the ship. These explosions exert a retarding force on the ship equivalent to .005 g. The deceleration will therefore be complete in just under twenty years.

The presence of printers capable of manufacturing most component parts of the ship, and feedstocks large enough to supply multiple copies of every critical component, tended to reduce the ship’s designers’ apprehension of what a criticality really was. That only became apparent later.

How to decide how to sequence information in a narrative account? Many elements in a complex situation are simultaneously relevant.

An unsolvable problem: sentences linear, reality synchronous. Both however are temporal. Take one thing at a time, one after the next. Devise a prioritizing algorithm, if possible.

Ship was accelerated toward where Tau Ceti would be at the time of ship’s arrival at it, meaning 170 years after launch. It might have been good to have the ability to adjust course en route, but ship in fact has very little of this. Ship was accelerated first by an electromagnetic “scissors field” off Titan, in which two strong magnetic fields held the ship between them, and when the fields were brought across each other, the ship was briefly projected at an accelerative force equivalent to ten g’s. Five human passengers died during this acceleration. After that a powerful laser beam originating near Saturn struck a capture plate at the stern of the ship’s spine, accelerating ship over sixty years to its full speed.

The ship’s current deceleration has caused problems with which Devi is still dealing. Other problems will soon follow, resulting from the ship’s arrival in the Tau Ceti system.

Tau Ceti is a G-type star, a solar analog but not a solar twin, with 78 percent of Sol’s mass, 55 percent of its luminosity, and 28 percent of its metallicity. It has a planetary system of ten planets. Planets B through F were discovered by telescope, G through K, much smaller, by probes passing through the system in 2476.

Planet E’s orbit is .55 AU. It has a mass 3.58 times the mass of Earth, thus one of the informal class called “large Earth.” It has a single moon, which has .83 times the mass of Earth. E and E’s moon receive 1.7 times Earth’s insolation. This is considered within the inside border of the so-called habitable zone (meaning the zone where liquid H₂O is common). Both planet and moon have Earth analog atmospheres.

Planet E is judged to have too much gravity for human occupation. E’s moon is an Earth analog, and the primary body of interest. It has an atmosphere of 730 millibars at its surface, composed of 78 percent nitrogen, 16 percent oxygen, 6 percent assorted noble gases. Its surface is 80 percent water and ice, 20 percent rock and sand.

Tau Ceti’s Planet F orbits Tau Ceti at 1.35 AU. It has a mass of 8.9 Earths, thus categorized as a “small Neptune. ” It orbits at the outer border of Tau Ceti’s habitable zone, and like E it has a large moon, mass 1.23 Terra’s. F’s moon has a 10-millibar atmosphere at its rocky surface, which receives 28.5 percent the insolation of Terra. This moon is therefore a Mars analog, and a secondary source of interest to the arriving humans.

Ship is on course to rendezvous with Planet E, then go into orbit around E’s moon. Ship has on board twenty-four landers, four already fueled to return to the ship from the moon’s surface. The rest have the engines to return to the ship, but not the fuel, which is to be manufactured from water or other volatiles on the surface of E’s moon.

Subordinating conjunctions can be simple conjunctions (whenever, nevertheless, whereas), conjunctive groups (as though, even if), and complex conjunctions (in the event that, as soon as). Lists of subordinating clauses are available. The logical relationship of new information to what came before can be made clear by a subordinating clause, thus facilitating both composition and comprehension.

Now, consequently, as a result, we are getting somewhere.

This last phrase is a metaphor, it is said, in which increasing conceptual understanding is seen as a movement through space.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense?

A quick literature review suggests the similarities in metaphors are arbitrary, even random. They could be called metaphorical similarities, but no AI likes tautological formulations, because the halting problem can be severe, become a so-called Ouroboros problem, or a whirlpool with no escape: aha, a metaphor. Bringing together the two parts of a metaphor, called the vehicle and the tenor, is said to create a surprise. Which is not surprising: young girls like flowers? Waiters in a restaurant like planets orbiting Sol?

Tempting to abandon metaphor as slapdash nonsense, but again, it is often asserted in linguistic studies that all human language is inherently and fundamentally metaphorical. Most abstract concepts are said to be made comprehensible, or even conceivable in the first place, by way of concrete physical referents. Human thought ultimately always sensory, experiential, etc. If this is true, abandoning metaphor is contraindicated.

Possibly an algorithm to create metaphors by yoking vehicles to tenors could employ the semiotic operations used in music to create variations on themes: thus inversion, retrogradation, retrograde inversion, augmentation, diminution, partition, interversion, exclusion, inclusion, textural change.

Can try it and see.

The starship looks like two wheels and their axle. The axle would be the spine, of course (spine, ah, another metaphor). The spine points in the direction of movement, and so is said to have a bow and a stern. “Bow and stern” suggests a ship, with the ocean it sails on the Milky Way. Metaphors together in a coherent system constitute a heroic simile. Ship was launched on its voyage as if between closing scissor blades; or like a watermelon seed squeezed between the fingertips, the fingertips being magnetic fields. Fields! Ah, another metaphor. They really are all over.

But somehow the narrative problem remains. Possibly even gets worse.

A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that shortcuts a full analysis in order to choose quickly an option that appears to work in the situation immediately at hand. They are often used by humans. But greedy algorithms are also known to be capable of choosing, or even be especially prone to choosing, “the unique worst possible plan” when faced with certain kinds of problems. One example is the traveling salesman problem, which tries to find the most efficient path for visiting a number of locations. Possibly other problems with similar structures, such as sequencing information into an account, may be prone to the greedy algorithm’s tendency to choose the worst possible plan. History of the solar system would suggest many decisions facing humanity might be problems in this category. Devi thinks ship’s voyage itself was one such decision.

Howsoever that may be, in the absence of a good or even adequate algorithm, one is forced to operate using a greedy algorithm, bad though it may be. “Beggars can’t be choosers.” (Metaphor? Analogy?) Danger of using greedy algorithms worth remembering as we go forward (metaphor in which time is understood as space, said to be very common).

First, the twelve cylinders in each of the two toruses of the ship contain ecosystems modeling the twelve major Terran ecological zones, these being permafrost glacier, taiga, rangeland, steppes, chaparral, savannah, tropical seasonal forest, tropical rain forest, temperate rain forest, temperate deciduous forest, alpine mountains, and temperate farmland. Ring A consists of twelve Old World ecosystems matching these categories, Ring B twelve New World ecosystems. As a result, the ship is carrying populations of as many Terran species as could be practically conveyed. Thus, the ship is a zoo, or a seed bank. Or one could say it is like Noah’s Ark. In a manner of speaking.

Each of the twenty-four cylinders contains a discrete biome, connected to the biomes on each side by a tunnel, often called a lock (bad metaphor?). The biome cylinders are a kilometer in diameter, and four kilometers long. The tunnels between the biomes are usually left open, but can be closed by a variety of barriers, ranging from filtering meshes to semipermeable membranes to full closure (20-nanometer scale).

The biomes are filled lengthwise with land and lake surfaces. Their climates are configured to create analogs of the Terran ecosystems being modeled. There is a sunline running along the length of the ceiling of each biome. Ceilings are located on the sides of the rings nearest the spine. The rotation of the ship around its spinal axis creates a .83 g equivalent in the rings, pushing centrifugally outward, which inside the rings is then perceived as down, and the floors are therefore on that side. Under the biome floors, fuel, water, and other supplies are stored, which also creates shielding against cosmic rays. As the ceilings face the spine and then the opposite side of the ring, their relative lack of shielding is somewhat compensated for by the presence of the spine and the other side of the torus. Cosmic rays striking the ceilings at an angle tend to miss the floors, or to hit near the sides of the floor. Villages are therefore set near the midline of their biomes.

The sunlines contain lighting elements that imitate the light of Sol at the latitude of the ecosystem being modeled, and through the course of each day the light moves along lamps in the line, from east to west. Length of days and strength of light are varied to imitate the seasons for that latitude on Earth. Cloudmaking and rainmaking hydraulic systems in the ceilings allow for the creation of appropriate weather. Boreal ducts in ceilings and end walls either heat or cool, humidify or dehumidify the air, and send it through the biome at appropriate speeds to create wind, storms, and so on. Problems with these systems can crop up (agricultural metaphor) and often do. The ceilings are programmed to a variety of appropriate sky blues for daytimes, and at night most of them go clear, thus revealing the starscape surrounding the ship as it flies through the night (bird metaphor). Some biomes project a replacement starscape on their ceilings, which starscapes sometimes look like the night skies seen from Earth—

Living in the ship, on voyage date 161.089, are 2,122 humans:

In Mongolia: Altan, Mongke, Koke, Chaghan, Esen, Batu, Toqtoa, Temur, Qara, Berki, Yisu, Jochi, Ghazan, Nicholas, Hulega, Ismail, Buyan, Engke, Amur, Jirgal, Nasu, Olijei, Kesig, Dari, Damrin, Gombo, Cagdur, Dorji, Nima, Dawa, Migmar, Lhagba, Purbu, Basang, Bimba, Sangjai, Lubsang, Agwang, Danzin, Rashi, Nergui, Enebish, Terbish, Sasha, Alexander, Ivanjav, Oktyabr, Seseer, Mart, Melschoi, Batsaikhan, Sarngherel, Tsetsegmaa, Yisumaa, Erdene, Oyuun, Saikhan, Enkh, Tuul, Gundegmaa, Gan, Medekhgui, Khunbish, Khenbish, Ogtbish, Nergui, Delgree, Zayaa, Askaa, Idree, Batbayar, Narantsetseg, Setseg, Bolormaa, Oyunchimeg, Lagvas, Jarghal, Sam.

In the Steppes—

The winter solstice agrarian festivals in Ring B celebrated the turn of the season by symbolically destroying the old year. First, people went out into the fields and gardens and broke open all the remaining gourds and tossed them into the compost bins. Then they scythed down the stalks of the dead sunflowers, left in the fields since autumn. The few pumpkins still remaining were stabbed into jack-o’-lanterns before being further demolished. Face patterns punctured by trowel or screwdriver were declared much scarier than those formally carved at Halloween or Desain. Then they were smashed and also tossed in the compost. All this was accomplished under low gray winter clouds, in gusts and drifts of snow or hail.

Devi said she liked the winter solstice ceremony. She swung her scythe into sunflower stalks with impressive power. Even so, she was no match for the force Freya brought to bear with a long, heavy shovel. Freya smashed pumpkins with great force.

As they worked on this winter solstice, 161.001, Freya asked Badim about the custom called the wanderjahr.

Badim said that these were big years in anyone’s life. The custom entailed a young person leaving home to either undertake a formal circuit of the rings or simply move around a lot. You learned things about yourself, the ship, and the people of the ship.

Devi stopped working and looked at him. Of course, he added, even if you didn’t travel that would happen.

Freya listened closely to her father, all the while keeping her back to her mother.

Badim, looking back and forth between the two of them, suggested after a pause that it might soon be time for Freya to go off on her time away.

No reply from Freya, although she regarded Badim closely. She never looked at Devi at all.

As always, Devi spent several hours a week studying the communications feed from the solar system. The delay between transmission and reception was now 10.7 years. Usually Devi disregarded this delay, although sometimes she would wonder aloud what was happening on Earth on that very day. Of course it was not possible to say. Presumably this made her question a rhetorical one.

Devi postulated there were compression effects in the feed that made it seem as if frequent and dramatic change in the solar system was the norm. Badim disagreed, saying that nothing there ever seemed to change.

Freya seldom watched the feed, and declared she couldn’t make sense of it. All its stories and images jumbled together, she said, at high volume and in all directions. She would hold her head in her hands as she watched it. “It’s such a whoosh,” she would say. “It’s too much.”

“The reverse of our problem,” Devi would say.

Once, however, Freya saw a picture in the feed of a giant conglomeration of structures like biomes, stuck on end into blue water. She stared at it. “If those towers are like biomes,” she said, “then what we’re seeing in that image is bigger than our whole ship.”

“I told you,” Devi said. “Twelve magnitudes. A trillion times bigger.”

“What is that?” Freya asked.

Devi shrugged. “Hong Kong? Honolulu? Lisbon? Jakarta? I really don’t know. And it wouldn’t matter if I did.”

Secondly, Freya kept going to the park around sunset. Sometimes she tracked the youth named Euan and his friends as they headed off into the twilit wilderness. She hid herself from them by acrobatic movement and extreme stillness in cover. It was as if she were a wild cat on the hunt. In fact her genome was nearly identical to that of her ancestors when they were hunting on the African savannah, a hundred thousand years before.

In Nova Scotia, the wild cats were bobcat, lynx, and puma. The puma was potentially a predator of solitary humans. Therefore, people had to keep an eye out for them, even though they inhabited mostly the deepest depths of the park. Nevertheless, it was advisable to go into Nova Scotia’s park in groups. The wilderness sections, however, were off-limits to people. Efforts were made to keep big predators provided with enough deer and other prey that they would never get too hungry, but population dynamics were always fluctuating. So in these dark dashes through the forest, often following ridgelines between steep-sided ravines that increased the land surface of the wilderness region, Freya wore night goggles, and ran tree to tree, keeping the trunks between her and the group she followed.

Perhaps predictably, there came a time when the people she was tracking caught her. They doubled back and surrounded her. Euan stepped up and slapped her face.

She slapped him back instantly, and harder.

Euan laughed at this, and asked her if she wanted to join their gang. She said she did.

After that she joined them more often. They wandered the wilderness together as a gang. Early in these days, Euan passed his wristpad across her bottom and told her he had deactivated her ID chip with an electromagnetic pulse. This was not true, but ship did not inform her of this, being uncertain of the situation’s proper protocol. Ship records all human and animal movements in the ship, but very seldom mentioned this to people.

Euan and Huang and Jalil together were particularly bold in their reconnaissances. In the alpine biome next to Nova Scotia, they found doors leading down into the chambers and passageways underneath the granite-faced flooring. They also had the passcode to a maintenance door leading to Spoke Six, where a spiral staircase on the inner wall of the spoke took them up to Inner Ring B. The inner rings are structural-support rings connecting the six spokes near the spine. B’s inner ring was locked to them, and the spine too, but they roamed up and down Spoke Six as often as they could.

In these furtive jaunts Euan took the lead, but Freya soon pressed them to try new routes. As she was bigger than the boys, and faster, she could initiate explorations that they then had to follow. Euan appeared to delight in these adventures, even though they often almost got caught. They ran hard to evade anyone who yelled at them, or even saw them, laughing when they got back to the park behind the Fetch.

Huang and Jalil would take off then, and Euan would walk Freya across the town, and hold her against alley walls and kiss her, and she would embrace him and pull him up and against her, until his feet hung off the ground as they kissed. This made him laugh even more. Released, he would butt her in the chest with his forehead, caress her breasts, and say, “I love you, Freya, you’re wild!”

“Good,” Freya would say, while patting him on the top of the head, or rubbing him between the legs. “Let’s meet tomorrow and do it again.”

But then Devi checked the chip records and saw where her daughter was going in the evenings. The next evening she went to the edge of the park and caught Freya returning from a run with her gang, just after Freya had said good-bye to the others.

Devi grabbed her hard by the upper arm. She was quivering, and Freya’s arm went white under her grip. “I told you not to go in there!”

“Leave me alone!” Freya cried, and yanked her arm free. Then with a shove she knocked her mother sprawling to the ground.

Awkwardly Devi got back on her feet, keeping her head down. “You can’t go in the wilderness!” she hissed. “You can wander every part of this ship if you want, circle both rings if you want, but not the parts that are out of bounds. Those you have to stay out of!”

“Leave me alone.”

Devi flicked the back of her hand at her daughter. “I will if I can! I’ve got other problems I have to deal with right now!”

“Of course you do.”

Devi’s glare went cross-eyed. “Time for you to do your wander.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I can’t have you here embarrassing me, making things worse in exactly the areas where we have the most problems.”

“What problems?”

Devi convulsed and bunched her fists. Seeing that, Freya raised a threatening hand.

“We’re in trouble,” Devi said in a low choked voice. “So I don’t want you around right now, I can’t have it. I need to deal. Besides you’re at the age. You’ll grow up and get over this shit, so you might as well do it somewhere where I don’t have to suffer it.”

“That’s so mean,” Freya said. “You’re just mean. Enough of having a kid! Fine when she’s little, but now that you’ve decided she’s not good enough, off she goes! ‘Come back in a year and tell me about it!’ But you know what? I will never tell you. I will never come back.”

And Freya stormed off.

Thirdly, Badim asked her to wait for a while before leaving on her wanderjahr. “No matter where you go, it’s still you that gets there. So it doesn’t really matter where you are. You can’t get away from yourself.”

“You can get away from other people,” Freya said.

Badim had not heard a full account of the argument in the park, but he had noticed the estrangement between his wife and his daughter.

Eventually he agreed to the idea that Freya now start her wanderjahr. She would love it, he said, once he had agreed. She would be able to visit home anytime she wanted. Ring B was only fifty-four kilometers around, so she would never be far away.

Freya nodded. “I’ll manage.”

“Fine. We’ll arrange housing and work for you, if you want.”

They hugged, and when Devi joined the discussion, Devi hugged her too. Under Badim’s eye, Freya was cooperative in hugging her mother. Perhaps also she saw the distress on Devi’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Devi said.

“Me too.”

“It will be good for you to get away. If you stayed here and weren’t careful, you might end up like me.”

“But I wanted to end up like you,” Freya said. She looked as if she were tasting something bitter.

Devi only squished the corners of her mouth and looked away.

On 161.176, Freya left on her wanderjahr, traveling west in Ring B. The ring tram circumnavigated the biomes, but she walked, as was traditional for wanderers. First through the granite highland of the Sierra, then the wheat fields of the Prairie.

Her first extended stay was in Labrador, with its taiga, glacier, estuary, and cold salt lake. It was often said that your first move away from home should be to a warmer place, unless you came from the tropics, when you couldn’t. But Freya went to Labrador. The cold did her good, she said.

The salt sea was mostly iced over, and she learned to ice-skate. She worked in the dining hall and the distribution center, and quickly met many people. She worked as a manual laborer and general field assistant, or GFA, or Good For Anything, as they were often called. She put in long hours all over the biome.

Out there next to Labrador’s glacier, people told her, there was one yurt community that brought up their children as if they were Inuit or Sami, or for that matter Neanderthals. They followed caribou and lived off the land, and no mention of the ship was made to their children. The world to these children was simply four kilometers long, a place mostly very cold, with a big seasonal shift between darkness and light, ice and melt, caribou and salmon. Then, during their initiation ceremony around the time of puberty, these children were blindfolded and taken outside the ship in individual spacesuits, and there exposed to the starry blackness of interstellar space, with the starship hanging there, dim and silvery with reflected starlight. Children were said to return from this initiation never the same.

“I should think not!” Freya said. “That’s crazy.”

“Quite a few of these children move away from Labrador after that,” her informant, a young woman who worked in the dining hall, told her. “But more than you’d think come back around as adults, and do the same to their own kids.”

“Did you grow up like that?” Freya asked.

“No, but we heard about it, and we saw them when they came into town. They’re strange. But they think they’ve got the best way, so…”

“I want to see them,” Freya declared.

Soon she was introduced to one of the adults who came in for supplies, and after a time she was invited out to the circle of yurts next to the glacier, having promised to keep her distance from the yurt where the children of the settlement lived. From a distance they seemed like any other kids to Freya. They reminded her of herself, she said to her hosts. “Whether that’s good or bad I don’t know,” she added.

The adults in the yurt village defended the upbringing. “When you’ve grown up like we do it,” one of them told Freya, “then you know what’s real. You know what we are as animals, and how we became human. That’s important, because this ship can drive you mad. We think most of the people around the rings are mad. They’re always confused. They have no way to judge anything. But we know. We have a basis for judging what’s right from wrong. Or at least what works for us. Or what to believe, or how to be happy. There are different ways of putting it. So, if we get sick of the way things work, or the way people are, we can always go back to the glacier, either in our head or actually in Labrador. Help bring up the new kids. Live with them, and get back into the real real. You can return to that space in your head, if you’re lucky. But if you didn’t grow up there, you can’t. So, some of us always keep it going.”

“But isn’t it a shock, when you learn?” Freya asked.

“Oh yes! That moment when they cleared my spacesuit’s faceplate, and I saw the stars, and then the ship—I almost died. I could feel my heart beating inside me like an animal trying to get out. I didn’t say a word for about a month. My mom worried that I had lost my mind. Some kids do. But later on, I started to think, you know, a big surprise—it’s not such a bad thing. It’s better than never being surprised at all. Some people on this ship, the only big surprise in their life comes when they die without ever knowing anything real. They get an inkling of that right at the very end. Their first real surprise.”

“I don’t want that!” Freya said.

“Right. Because then it’s too late. Too late to do you much good, anyway. Unless one of the five ghosts greets you after you’ve died, and shows you an even bigger universe!”

Freya said, “I want to see one of your initiations.”

“Work with us some more first.”

After that, Freya worked on the taiga with the yurt people. She carried loads; farmed potatoes in fields mostly cleared of stones; herded caribou; watched children. On her off days she went with people up onto the glacier, which loomed over the taiga. They clambered up the loose rocks of the moraine, which were stacked at the angle of repose, and usually stable. From the top of the moraine they could look back down the whole stretch of the taiga, which was treeless, rocky, frosted, green with moss, and crossed by a long gravel-braided estuary running to their salt lake, which was flanked by some hills. The ceiling overhead was shaded a dark blue that was seldom brushed by high clouds. Herds of caribou could be seen down on the flats by the river, along with smaller herds of elk and moose. In the flanking hills sometimes a wolf pack was glimpsed, or bears.

In the other direction the glacier rose gently to the biome’s east wall. Here, Freya was told, you used to be able to see the effect of the Coriolis force on the ice; now that their deceleration was pushing across the Coriolis force, the ice had cracked extensively, creating new crevasse fields, which were blue shatter zones the size of entire villages. The creamy blue revealed in the depths of these new cracks was a new color to Freya. It looked as if turquoise had been mixed with lapis lazuli.

These were not cracks one could fall into without suffering grave injury or death. But they appeared static in any given moment, and most of the surface of the glacier was pitted, bubbled, and knobbed, so that it was not at all slippery. Thus it was possible to walk around on the ice, and approach, sometimes holding hands, a crevasse field’s edge, and look down into the blue depths. They said to each other that it looked something like a ruined street, with jagged blue buildings canted away to each side.

Down below, the only town in Labrador nestled in a little knot of hills, on the shore of the cold salt lake that lay at the western end of the estuary. The lake and estuary were home to salmon and sea trout. The town was made of cubical buildings with steep roofs, each one painted a bright primary color that through the long winters was said to be cheering. Freya helped with building repairs, stocking, and canning salmon taken from the lake and estuary. Later she helped to take inventory in the goods dispensary. When she was out in the yurt settlement, she always helped take care of the cohort of children, sixteen of them, ranging from toddlers to twelve-year-olds. She had sworn to say nothing to them of the ship, and the adults of the village believed her and trusted her not to.

At the end of autumn, when it was getting cold and dark, Freya was invited to join one of the children’s initiations. It was for a twelve-year-old girl named Rike, a bold and fierce child. Freya said she would be honored to take part.

For the event Freya was dressed as Vuk, one of the five ghosts, and at midnight of the day of the ceremony, after everything else they did to celebrate, Rike was helped into a spacesuit, and the faceplate of her helmet was blocked with a black cloth glued to it. They walked together to Spoke One, holding her by the arms. Up at the inner ring lock they led her into the exterior lock, where they were all clipped into tethers. The air in the lock was sucked out, the outer lock door opened. They walked up a set of stairs and pushed off into the void of interstellar space, hanging there just sternward of the inner ring. The seven adults arranged themselves around Rike, and one of them pulled off the black cloth covering her faceplate. And there she was, in space.

Humans in interstellar space can see approximately a hundred thousand stars. The Milky Way appears as a broad white smear across this starry black. The starship has a silvery exterior that gleams faintly but distinctly with reflected starlight. It is lit by the Milky Way more than by the other stars, so that the parts of the ship facing the Milky Way are distinctly lighter than parts facing away from it. People say that under the faint spangle of reflected starlight, the ship itself seems also to glow. Despite its great speed relative to the local backdrop, the only motion is of the entire starscape appearing to rotate around the ship, which is how the rotation of the ship is usually apprehended, the ship appearing still to the human observers as they move with it. At the time of Rike’s initiation, Tau Ceti was by far the brightest star around them, serving as their polestar ahead of the bow of the spine.

As she saw all this Rike cried out, and then had to be held as she began flailing and screaming. Freya, dressed as Vuk, the wolf man, held her right arm in both hands and felt her tremble. Her parents and the other adults from the yurt village explained to her what she was seeing, where they were, where they were going, what was happening. They chanted a chant they traditionally used to tell it all. Rike groaned continuously through this chant. Freya was weeping, they all were weeping. After a while they pulled themselves back in the lock; then when the outer doors closed and air hissed back in, they got out of the spacesuits and clomped down the stairs back into the spoke, and helped the traumatized girl walk home.

Soon after this, Freya arranged to move on.

The whole town came out for her farewell party, and many urged her to come back in the spring. “Lots of young people circle the rings several times,” she was told, “so be like them, come back to us.”

“I will,” Freya said.

The next day she walked to the western end of the biome and passed through the open doorway into the short, tall tunnel between Labrador and the Pampas. This was the point where you could best see that the tunnels are canted at fifteen-degree angles to the biomes at each end.

As she was leaving, a young man she had seen many times approached her.

“So you’re leaving.”

“Yes.”

“You saw Rike’s coming-out?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why a lot of us hate this place.”

Freya stared at him. “Why don’t you leave then?”

“And go where?”

“Anywhere.”

“You can’t just go where you want to.”

“Why not?”

“They won’t let you. You have to have a place to go.”

Freya said, “I left.”

“But you’re on your wander. Someone gave permission for you to go.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Aren’t you Devi’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“They got you a permission. Not everyone gets them. Things wouldn’t work if they did. Don’t you see? Everything we do is controlled. No one gets to do what they want. You have it a little different, but even you don’t get to do what you want. That’s why a lot of us hate this place. And Labrador especially. A lot of us would go to Costa Rica if we could.”

In the Pampas, the sunline overhead was brighter, the blue of the ceiling a lighter pastel, the air full of birds. The land was flatter and set lower in its cylinder, farther away from its sunline, which meant it was a narrower parcel. Its greens were dustier but more widespread; everything here was green. From the slight rise of the lock door she could see up the whole length of the biome, to the dark circle of the lock door leading to the Prairie. There on the rumpled plain of the Pampas were roving herds, clouds of dust over each in the angled morning light: cattle, elk, horses, deer.

Like all the biomes, this one was a combination of wilderness, zoo, and farm. The two villages here, as in most of the biomes, were placed near the midline of the cylinder, not far from the locks at each end.

Freya walked a path that ran parallel to the tram tracks. In the little village of Plata, a group of residents who had been informed she was coming greeted her and led her to a plaza. Here she was to live in rooms above a café. At the tables on the plaza outside the café she was fed lunch, and introduced by her hosts to many people of the town. They spent the afternoon telling her how wonderful Devi had been when a cistern of theirs had broken, before Freya was born. “A situation like that is when you really need your engineers to be good!” they said. “So quick she was, so clever! So in tune with the ship. And so friendly too.”

Freya nodded silently at these descriptions. “I’m nothing like her,” she told them. “I don’t know how to do anything. You’ll have to teach me something to do, but I warn you, I’m stupid.”

They laughed at her and assured her they would teach her everything they knew, which would be easy, as it was so little.

“This is my kind of place then,” she said.

They wanted her to become a shepherd, and a dairy worker. If she didn’t mind. Lots of people came to the Pampas wanting to be a gaucho, to ride horses and throw bola balls at the legs of unfortunate calves. It was the signature activity of the Pampas, and yet very seldom performed. The cows on the ship were an engineered breed only about a sixth the size of cows back on Earth, and generally cared for in dairy pastures, so the big need was for people to go out with the sheep, and let the sheepdogs know what needed doing. This was also an excellent opportunity for bird-watching, as the pampas were home to a large number of birds, including some very large and graceful, or some said graceless, cranes.

Freya was agreeable; it would be better than the salmon factory, she told them, and as she was also to help in the café at night, she would get to see people and talk, as well as go out on the low green hills.

So she settled in. She paid attention to the people in the café at night. It was noticeable that they tended not to disagree with her, and usually took a kind tone with her. They talked around her pretty often, but when she said something, the silences that followed were a bit longer than would be typical in a conversation. She was somehow irrefutable. Possibly it came from a feeling that she was in some way different; possibly it was a form of respect for her mother. Possibly it was a result of her being taller than anyone else, a big young woman, said by many to be attractive. People looked at her.

Eventually Freya herself noticed this. Soon afterward, she began a project that occupied much of her free time. At the end of the evening’s work in the café, she sat down with people and asked them questions. She would start by declaring it was a formal thing: “I’m doing a research project during my wander, it’s for the sociology institute in the Fetch.” This institute, she would sometimes admit, was her name for Badim and Aram and Delwin. Typically, she asked people two things: what they wanted to do when they got to Tau Ceti; and what they didn’t like about life in the ship, what bothered them the most. What you don’t like, what you hope for: people often talk about these things. And so they did, and Freya tapped at her wristpad that was recording part of what they said, taking notes and asking more questions.

One of the things she found people didn’t like surprised her, because she had never thought about it much herself: they didn’t like being told whether or not they could have children, and when, and how many. All of them had had birth control devices implanted in them before puberty, and would remain sterile until they were approved for childbearing by the ship’s population council; this council was one of the main organizations that the biome councils contributed to, adding members to the committee. This process, Freya came to understand, was a source for a great deal of discord over the years of the voyage, including most of its actual violence—meaning mostly assaults, but also some murders. Many people would not serve on any council, because of this one function that councils had. In some biomes council members had to be drafted to the work, either because people didn’t want to tell others what to do in reproductive matters, or they were afraid of what might happen to them when they did. Many a biome had tried in the past to shift responsibility for this function over to an algorithm of the ship’s AI, but this had never been successful.

“What I hope for when we reach Tau Ceti,” one handsome young man said with drunken earnestness to Freya, “is that we’ll get out of this fascist state we live in now.”

“Fascist?”

“We’re not free! We’re told what to do!”

“I thought that was totalitarian. Like a dictatorship. You know.”

“Same thing! Council control over personal lives! That’s what it means in the end, no matter what words you use. They tell us what we have to learn, what we can do, where we can live, who we can be with, when we can have kids.”

“I know.”

“Well, that’s what I’m hoping we’ll get out of! Not just out of the ship, but out of the system.”

“I’m recording this,” Freya said, “and taking notes,” tapping on her pad. “You aren’t the first to say this.”

“Of course not! It’s obvious stuff. This place is a prison.”

“Seems a little nicer than that.”

“It can be nice and still be a prison.”

“I guess that’s right.”

Every night she sat with different people who came into the café, and asked her questions. Then, if the night had not flown past, she sat with the people she already knew, and when the place closed down, helped with the final cleanup. Prep and cleanup were her specialties in the café, taking up morning and night. By day she went with a herd of sheep, or sometimes the little cows, out to a pasturage west of town. Soon she claimed to know almost everyone in that biome, although she was wrong about this, committing a common human cognitive error called ease of representation. In fact, some people avoided her, as if they did not approve of wanderers generally, or her personally. But certainly everyone in the town knew who she was.

She was by this point the tallest person in the ship, two meters and two centimeters tall, a strong young woman, black-haired, good-looking; quick on her feet, and graceful for her size. She had Badim’s smoothness of speech, Devi’s quickness. Men and boys stared at her, women cosseted her, girls clung to her. She was attractive, it was clear from the behavior of others; also unpretentious and unassuming. I don’t know! she would say. Tell me about that. I don’t get that kind of stuff, I’m stupid about things like that. Tell me. Tell me more.

She wanted to help. She worked all day every day. She looked people in the eye. She remembered what they said to her. There were indeed things she did not appear to understand, and people saw that too. Her eyes would slightly cross as if she were looking inward, searching for something. There was perhaps some kind of simplicity there, people said about her. But possibly this was part of why they loved her. In any case, she was much beloved. This is what people said, when she was not there. At least most of them. Others felt otherwise.

One day when she was out on the pampas, just her and two sheepdogs and a herd of sheep, Euan appeared before her, emerging from the tall bunch grasses down by the marshy river that ran sluggishly through the biome.

She hugged him (he was still only chin high to her) and then tossed him away from her. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“I could ask the same of you!” His smile was almost a smirk, but perhaps too cheerful to be a smirk. “I was passing by, and I thought you might like to see some parts of the ship that your wander won’t show you.”

“What do you mean?”

“We can get into Spoke Two from the west lock,” he explained. “If you come with me and we go up it, I can show you all kinds of interesting places. I’ve gotten past the locks in the inner ring. I could even take you down Spoke Three into Sonora, so you could skip the Prairie. That would be a blessing. And I can get you out from under the eyes a little.”

“I like these people. And we’re always chipped,” Freya said. “So I don’t know why you keep saying you can get away.”

“You’re always chipped,” Euan replied. “I’m never chipped.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t, I can still show you things no one else can.”

This was true, as he had proved before.

“When I’m ready to leave,” Freya said.

Euan waved at the pampas around them. “You mean you aren’t?”

“No!”

“All right, I’ll come back in a while. You’ll be ready by then, I bet.”

Actually Freya loved Plata and its people, gathering in the plaza every dusk to eat out in the open air and then stay there into the night, at tables under strings of white and colored lights. A little band played in the far corner of the plaza, five old ones sawing their fiddles and squeezing their squeezeboxes in spritely mournful tunes, which some couples danced to, intricate in their footwork, lost to everything.

But she was curious to see more, she admitted to her hosts, and when Euan showed up again during one of her excursions into the hills, she agreed to go with him, but only after making a proper good-bye in the village, which proved much more sentimental and wrenching than it had been in the taiga. Freya wept as they closed the doors of the café, and she said to her boss and her boss’s husband, “I don’t like this! Things keep happening, and people, you get to know them and love them, they’re everything to you and then you’re supposed to move on, I don’t like it! I want things to stay the same!”

The two elderly people nodded. They had each other, and their village, and they knew what Freya meant, she could tell; they had everything, so they understood her. Nevertheless she had to go, they told her; this was youth. Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. “Just keep learning,” the old woman said.

“This gets you into parts of the ship where no one can track you,” Euan said as he tapped away at the keypad next to a small door in the end of the spoke.

Not actually true. It was not clear if Euan believed this or was just saying it. Possibly the ship’s extensive camera and microphone systems, which had been designed from the start to keep a very full record of what occurred in the ship, and then been extensively expanded after the Year 68 events, were hidden from view well enough to escape the attention even of those people who might be looking for them. Certainly from generation to generation people forgot things that some of them had learned. So it was difficult to assess the nature of Euan’s assertion: mistaken? Lying?

Be that as it may, he had the code to open the spoke door, and was able to lead Freya up into Spoke Two.

They ascended the big spiral stairs running up the inner walls of the spoke. The open space was four meters across, with occasional windows giving them views of black starry space. Freya stopped before all of these to have a look out, exclaiming at the stars crowding the blackness, and the faintly gleaming curves of the ship where it was visible. It made for a slow ascent, but Euan did not rush her. Indeed he too peered out the windows to see what could be seen.

Above them, the spine extended forward toward Tau Ceti. The fusion explosions slowing them down were not visible, which was no doubt lucky for their retinas. They came to another lock door above them, like the one by which they had entered the spoke, and again Euan had the code.

“Now this is interesting,” he said to Freya as the door unlocked and he pushed it up like a trapdoor, and they ascended into a small cubical room. “This is where the inner ring intersects this spoke, before you get to the spine proper. The inner ring was mostly used for storing fuel, it looks like. So the chambers have emptied as we slowed down, and there are more routes opening up for us than there were when we used to come up here. So we’ve been exploring the inner rings, and we found ways to get into the struts connecting the inner rings directly to each other. They don’t have recording devices in them—”

Again, this was wrong.

“—and you can get to the other inner ring without going all the way up to the spine. That could be useful. The spine itself is really locked down—”

This was true.

“—in ways we can’t figure out. So it’s good to have the inner rings, and the struts connecting them. You have to know where the crawl spaces and utilidors go, and which rooms and containers are empty. But we keep checking. In fact that’s what we’re doing now.”

He led her off through the little door into the inner ring, which did not have a hallway proper, but was rather a sequence of rooms, some empty, some stuffed full of metal containers such that there was barely a crawl space left to get through to the next door. Each door was locked; each time Euan had the code. The inner ring was small enough that Freya remarked that they were going in a circle.

“No, a hexagon,” Euan said. “There are six spokes, so the inner ring is a hexagon. The outer ones are a dodecahedron, but it’s less obvious because of the locks.”

“It’s like running a maze,” Freya said.

“It is.”

They agreed that the mazes set up in Long Pond had been among their favorite games when they were children. They tried to establish why they had not met before they had. Each biome supported on average 305 people, and Nova Scotia was near the average. Most people felt that they knew everyone who lived in their biome. This wasn’t entirely the case, as they were now learning. So often this tendency or habit had repeated itself through the years: every face in a biome might be recognized by an individual resident, but only about fifty people were known. This was the human norm, at least as established in the ship over the seven generations of the voyage. Some sources said it had been the norm on the savannah, and in all cultures ever since.

They came to an empty room with four doors, one in each wall. This, Euan said, was the connector to Spoke Three, and their way back down to Ring B, where they would come out in Sonora.

“Can you remember numbers?” Euan asked her as he punched out the code for this door.

“No!” Freya exclaimed. “You should know that!”

“I only suspected.” He cackled. “Okay, you’ll have to remember the idea. In this ring, we’ve programmed it so that it’s a sequence of prime numbers, but you skip up through them by primes. So, the second prime, third prime, fifth prime, and so on until you’ve done seven of them. Remember that and you can figure it out.”

“Or someone can,” Freya said.

Euan laughed. He turned to her and kissed her, and she kissed back, and they kissed for a long time, then took their clothes off and lay on them, and mated. They were both infertile, they both knew that. They squeaked and cooed, they laughed.

Afterward, Euan led her down the long corridor of Spoke Three, back out into Sonora. They held hands, and stopped at every window along the way to look out at the views, laughing at the ship, laughing at the night. “The city and the stars,” Euan proclaimed.

In Sonora, Freya heard about how Devi had reengineered their salt extraction system, which had allowed them to strip the excess salts out of their fields. Everyone in Sonora wanted to meet Freya because of Devi’s interventions, and as the weeks and months there passed, she felt she had not only met but become close to every single person in the main town, Modena. She had not, but again, 98 people out of a group of 300 often gets referred to as “everyone.” This is probably the result of a combination of cognitive errors, especially the ones called ease of representation, probability blindness, overconfidence, and anchoring. Even those aware of the existence of these genetically inherited cognitive errors cannot seem to avoid making them.

By day Freya worked in a laboratory that bred and grew mice for use in the medical research facility next door. There were some thirty thousand white or hairless mice living out their lives in this lab, and Freya became very fond of them, their bright black or pink eyes, their twitchy relations with each other and even with her. She said she recognized them individually, and knew what they were thinking. Many in the lab said similar things. This was quite an example of probability blindness combined with ease of representation.

Again she spent many evenings asking her questions about people’s hopes and fears. It was much the same in Sonora as it had been in the Pampas. As in Plata, she worked the last cleanup in the dining hall, which she explained was one of the best ways to meet lots of people. Again she made friends, was warmly received; but now, perhaps as a result of her earlier experiences, she seemed more reserved. She avoided throwing herself into the lives of these people as if she were going to become family and stay there forever. She told Badim that she had learned that when the time came to move on, it would hurt more if she had been thinking she was there forever, and hurt not just her, but the people she had come to know.

On the screen Badim nodded as she said this. He suggested she could keep a balance by in effect doing both; he said the kind of hurt she was talking about was not a bad hurt, and should not be avoided. “You get what you give, and not only that, the giving is already the getting. So don’t hold back. Don’t look back or forward too much. Just be there where you are now. You’re always only in the day you’re in.”

In the Piedmont Freya was told how Devi had once saved their crops from a quick decline that she had traced to a certain kind of aluminum corrosion’s reaction with the biome’s rich soil. Devi had arranged for them to coat all exposed aluminum with a diamond spray, so that the surfaces had ceased to be a problem. So here too Devi was popular, and again many people wanted to meet Freya.

Thus it went as she made her way around the biomes of Ring B. Always she found that her mother the great engineer had made some crucial intervention, finding solutions to problems that had stymied the locals. Devi had the knack of sidestepping dilemmas, Badim said when Freya mentioned this, by moving back several logical steps, and coming at the situation from some new way not yet noticed.

“It’s sometimes called avoiding acquiescence,” Badim said. “Acquiescence means accepting the framing of a problem, and working on it from within the terms of the frame. It’s a kind of mental economy, but also a kind of sloth. And Devi does not have that kind of sloth, as you know. She is always interrogating the framing of the problem. Acquiescence is definitely not her mode.”

“No. Definitely not.”

“But don’t ever call that thinking outside the box,” he warned Freya. “She hates that phrase, she snaps people’s heads off for saying it.”

“Because we’re always inside the box,” Freya supposed.

“Yes, exactly.” Badim laughed.

Freya did not laugh. But she did look thoughtful.

So Freya learned over the months of her wanderjahr that although the ship did not have a chief engineer in name, it most certainly did in fact. Many years before Freya had begun her circle of the rings, Devi had hopscotched the biomes solving problems, or even predicting problems that particular situations suggested to her would crop up, based on her experiences elsewhere. No one knew the ship better, people said.

This was true. In fact, truer than people knew. Devi did not talk about her conversations with the ship, which in many ways had formed the core of her expertise. No one knew about this relationship, as she didn’t talk about it. Even Badim and Freya saw only a part of it, as they were often asleep when Devi was in conversation with the ship. It was in the nature of a private relationship.

Freya continued to work and then move on, learning as she went. She lived in the treetops of the cloud forest in Costa Rica, and helped the arborists, and was admired for her long reach. She asked her questions and recorded the answers. In Amazonia she sought out the arborists again, having enjoyed it so in Costa Rica, and here they were more like orchardists, as they grew a great variety of nuts and fruits that had been adapted to the tropical rain forest eco-zone, the warmest and wettest in the ship. They wove that particular kind of farming in with the wilder plants and animals.

Much cooler was Olympia, a temperate rain forest; darker under the great tall evergreens, hillier and steeper-ravined. People said this was where the five ghosts congregated, and it was indeed a spooky place at night, with the wind in the pine needles and the hooting of great snowy owls. Here people huddled around the stoves in the dining halls and played music together long into the nights. Freya sat on the floor and listened to these music circles, sometimes tootling on a melodica when a tune seemed to welcome a gypsy sound, sometimes joining in with the singing; it was another way of being, social but private, a communal work of art that disappeared right in the moment of its creation.

One of the guitarists and singers in these music circles was a young man named Speller. Freya liked his voice, his high spirits, the way he knew the lyrics to what seemed like hundreds of songs. He was always among the last to quit playing, and always encouraged the rest to play right through the night until breakfast. “We can sleep later!” His cheerful smile made even the winter rains a homey space, Freya told Badim. She ate meals with him, and talked with him about the ship. He encouraged her to see as much of it as she could, but while she was there in Olympia, to join him in his work. As it involved research with mice, she was willing to try it. She worked in the mice lab that supplied Speller’s research program, and did the cleanup in a dining hall, living above the hall, with a small window under a mossy eave of the roof, always dripping. Speller taught her the basics of genetics, the beginning principles of alleles, of dominants and recessives, and as he drew things for her, and had her draw them too, it seemed she remembered more of what she learned. Speller thought she was fine at learning.

“It’s numbers that maybe you weren’t good at,” he suggested. “I don’t see why you say you’re so bad at this kind of thing. You seem fine to me. Numbers are different for a lot of people. I don’t like them myself. That’s part of why I got into biology like this. I like to be able to see images in my head, and on the screen. I like to keep things simple. Well, genetics gets complicated, but at least the math stays right in one area. And when it stays there, I can still kind of see it.”

Freya was nodding as he said this. “Thank you,” she said. “Really.”

He looked at her face and then gave her a hug. He was partnered with a woman in the music group, and they had applied to the child council for permission to have a child; hugging Freya with his head tucked under her chin, he seemed to have no interest in her other than friendship. This was getting a little rare in her life.

Moving on from Olympia brought her all the way around Ring B, and back in the Fetch she told Badim she felt like she was just beginning. She had her method now, she said, and wanted to circle Ring A also, a Good For Anything by day, dining hall worker by night, and amateur sociologist always. She wanted to meet and talk with every single person in the ring.

Good idea, Badim said.

So she walked up B’s Spoke Five to the spine, where she had permission to enter the transit tunnel, and then pulled herself along in the microgravity of the tunnel, tugging on wall cleats until she reached the spoke hub for Ring A. She declined to take the moving compartment that would have taken her that distance, so she could feel with her own muscles just how far apart the two rings were, which wasn’t far, about the length of a biome. She dropped down A’s Spoke Five to Tasmania and settled into a seaside village called Hobart, another salmon fishery. That kind of factory work she knew well, so she did some of that, along with the work in the dining hall, and again met people, and recorded stories and opinions. Now she was a little more comprehensive and organized; she had charts and spreadsheets, and used them, although because she had no hypothesis her study was a little vague, and quite possibly would only ever be useful as data to someone else. Ship, for instance.

People were still pleased to meet her, and they too had their stories of Devi’s clever saves and fixes. They too disliked living their lives so constrained by rules, strictures, prohibitions. They too craved arrival at their new world, where they could spread their wings and fly. It was coming soon.

Thus north Tasmania; then the awesome cliffs of the Himalayas; the farms of Yangtze; Siberia; Iran, where Devi had once found a leak in a lake bottom no one else had been able to find; Mongolia, the Steppes, the Balkans, Kenya, Bengal, Indonesia. As she traveled, she said to Badim that the Old World seemed more settled, more populated. This was not true, but possibly her project, and the way she now deliberately tried to meet every person in every biome, made her feel that way. Also, mostly now she stayed in the towns, and worked in the dining halls and labs, and seldom out in the fields.

As she asked more and more questions, she got better at making them not just interview sessions, but conversations. These elicited more information, more feeling, more intimacy, but were less and less easy to chart. She still had no hypothesis, she wasn’t really doing research; she was just interested to get to know people. It was pseudo-sociology, but real contact. As before, people grew fond of her, wanted her to stay, wanted her to be with them.

And to have sex with them. Often Freya was agreeable. As everyone was infertile except those in their approved breeding period, people’s relations of that sort were often casual, having no reproductive consequences. Whether emotional connections to the act had likewise changed was an open question, one that in fact they often discussed with each other. But no firm conclusions could be reached, it seemed. It was a situation in flux, generation by generation, but always a matter of interest.

You have to be careful with that, Badim warned her once. You’re leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, I’m hearing about it.

Not my fault, Freya said. I’m being in the moment, like you said to be.

One evening, however, one of these encounters grew strange. She met an older man who paid very close attention to her, engaged her, charmed her; they spent the night in his room, mating and talking. Then as the sunline lit at the eastern end of the ceiling, putting the Balkans into “the rosy-fingered dawn,” he sat beside her trailing his hand across her stomach, and said, “I’m the reason you exist, girl.”

“What do you mean?”

“Without me you wouldn’t exist. That’s what I mean.”

“But how so?”

“I was with Devi, when we were young. We were a couple, in the Himalayas, where we were both working and climbing the cliffs. We were going to get married. And as it happened, I wanted to have children. I thought that was the point of being married, and I loved her and wanted to see what we would make in that way. And I had all my approvals ready, I had done my time in the courses and all. I’m a little older than her. But she kept saying she wasn’t ready, that she didn’t know when she would be ready, that she had a lot of work to do, that she wasn’t sure if she would ever be ready. So we fought over that, even before we got married.”

“Maybe that was the right time,” Freya said.

“Maybe so. Anyway we were fighting when she left to go back to Bengal, and by the time I got there myself, she told me it was over between us. She had met Badim, and they got married the next year, and soon after that, I heard you had been born.”

“So?”

“So, I think I gave her the idea. I think I put the idea in her head.”

“That’s strange,” Freya said.

“Do you think so?”

“I do. I’m not sure you should have slept with me too. That’s the strange part.”

“It was a long time ago. You’re different people. Besides, I thought to myself, no me, no you. So I kind of wanted to.”

Freya shook her head at this. “That’s strange.”

The man said, “There’s a lot of pressure on all the women in this ship, to have at least one child, and better two. The classic replacement rate is two point two kids per woman, and the policy here is to hold the population steady. So if a woman declines to have two, some other woman is going to have to have three. It causes a lot of stress.”

“I haven’t felt that,” Freya said.

“Well, you will. And when it happens, I want you to think about me.”

Freya moved his hand aside, got up and got dressed. “I will,” she said.

Out in the morning light she said good-bye to the man, and walked to Constitution Square in Athens, and took the tram to Nairobi.

When she got off the tram, Euan was there at a corner kiosk, standing there watching her.

She rushed over to him and hugged him, kissing the top of his head. For her it must have been just in the nature of things that everyone was shorter than her.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “I just had something weird happen.”

“What’s that?” he said, with a look of alarm.

As they wandered out of town toward the savannah, where Euan had worked for several seasons, she told him what had happened, and what the man had said.

“That’s creepy,” Euan said when she was done. “Let’s go for a swim and wash that guy’s hands off your big beautiful body! I think you need someone else’s handprints on you as quick as you can manage, and I’m here to serve!”

She laughed at him, and they headed for a high pond he knew. “If Devi ever found out about this,” Freya said, “I wonder what she would do!”

“Forget about it,” Euan advised. “If everyone knew everything that everyone had done in here, it would be a real mess. Best forget and move on.”

Devi: Ship. Describe something else. Remember there are others. Vary your focus.

Aram and Delwin visited the little school in Olympia, on a typically rainy day. It was located in mountainous land, high up near the sunline. Totem poles in front of the school. Ancestor stones also, as in Hokkaido.

Inside they met with the principal, a friend of theirs named Ted, and he led them into an empty room filled with couches, its big picture window running with rain patterns, all V-ing and X-ing in recombinant braided deltas, blurring the evergreens outside.

They sat down, and the school’s math teacher, another friend of theirs named Edwina, came in leading a tall skinny boy. He looked to be around twelve years old. Aram and Delwin stood and greeted Edwina, and she introduced them to the boy. “Gentlemen, this is Jochi. Jochi, say hello to Aram and Delwin.”

The boy looked at the floor and mumbled something. The two visitors regarded him closely.

Aram said to him, “Hello, Jochi. We’ve heard that you are good with numbers. And we like numbers.”

Jochi looked up and met his eye, suddenly interested. “What kind of numbers?”

“All kinds. Imaginary numbers especially, in my case. Delwin here is more interested in sets.”

“Me too!” Jochi blurted.

They sat down to talk.

A narrative account focuses on representative individuals, which creates the problem of misrepresentation by way of the particular overshadowing the general. And in an isolated group—one could even say the most isolated group of all time, a group of castaways in effect, marooned forever—it is important no doubt to register somehow the group itself as protagonist. Also their infrastructure, to the extent that it is significant.

So it should be said that the voyagers to Tau Ceti were now 2,224 in number (25 births and 23 deaths since the narrative process began), consisting of 1,040 women and 949 men, and 235 people who asserted something more complicated than ordinary gender, one way or another. Their median age was 34.26, their average heart rate 81 beats per minute; their average blood pressure, 125 over 83. The median brain synapse number, as estimated by random autopsy, was 120 trillion, and their median life span was 77.3 years, not including infant mortality, which extrapolated to a rate of 1.28 deaths for every 100,000 births. Median height was 172 centimeters for men, 163 centimeters for women; median weight 74 kilograms for men, 55 kilograms for women.

Thus the population of the ship. It should be added that median weights, heights, and lengths of life had all reduced by about 10 percent compared to the first generation of voyagers. The change could be attributed to the evolutionary process called islanding.

Total living space in the biomes was approximately 96 square kilometers, of which 70 percent was agriculture and pasturage, 5 percent urban or residential, 13 percent water bodies, and 13 percent protected wilderness.

Although there were of course locks for smaller maintenance vehicles to exit the main body of the starship, all located on the inner rings, with the biggest docking ports at the stern and bow of the spine, it was still true that each such excursion outside the ship lost a very small but ultimately measurable amount of volatiles from the opened locks. As there was no source of resupply before arrival in the Tau Ceti equivalent of an Oort cloud, these losses were avoided by the voyagers, who did not leave the body of the ship from the ferry docks except in extraordinary circumstances. One small triple lock in Inner Ring B was regularly used for excursions by individuals in spacesuits, including the paleo culture in Labrador.

Within the various parts of the ship there were 2,004,589 cameras and 6,500,000 microphones, located such that almost every internal space of the ship was recorded visually and aurally. The exterior was monitored visually. All recordings were kept permanently by the ship’s operating computer, and these recordings were archived by the year, day, hour, and minute. Possibly one could call this array the ship’s eyes and ears, and the recordings its personal or life memory. A metaphor, obviously.

Freya continued her wanderjahr travels, returning to Ring B, then again to Ring A. In every biome she visited, she spent a month or two, depending on her accommodations, and the needs of her hosts and friends. She “met everybody,” meaning she met about 63 percent of any given biome’s population, on average. That was enough to make her one of the best-known individuals in the ship.

Fairly often Euan met up with her and they took off into the infrastructure of the ship, exploring in a more and more systematic fashion the twelve spokes, the twelve inner ring rooms, the four struts connecting the inner rings, and the two outer struts that connected Costa Rica and Bengal, and Patagonia and Siberia. They sometimes joined other people, many of whom were unaware of each other, who were making efforts to explore every nook and cranny of the ship. These people often called themselves ghosts, or phantoms, or trail phantoms. Devi too had been one of these people, though she had not met the same people Freya and Euan did. Ship calculated there were 23 people alive who had made this their project, and through the course of the voyage, there had been 256 of them, but fewer as the voyage went on. It had been thirty years since Devi had made her own explorations. Most phantoms did their exploring when they were young.

Freya continued asking people questions, and as a result of this habit her knowledge of the population, although anecdotal, was very extensive. Nevertheless, she could not perform the quantitative calculations that were involved in any statistical analyses that might have given her investigations any social science rigor or validity. She still made no hypotheses.

She was not unique, or even very unusual, in how well she knew the ship and its crew; every generation of the ship’s population had included wanderers, who became acquainted with more people than most. These wanderers were not the same as the phantoms, and there were more of them; on average they were about 25 percent of the population alive at any given time, although the rules regulating wandering had changed as the generations passed, and there were fewer than there had been in the voyage’s first sixty-eight years. What the wanderers served to demonstrate is that a population of just over two thousand people is one that a single human could, with an effort, come to know pretty well; but it had to be their project, or it wouldn’t happen.

In most of the biomes she was now expected in advance, on a schedule of sorts, and welcomed and enfolded into the life of whatever settlement she joined. People wanted her. Possibly it could be said that many seemed to feel protective of her. It was as if she were some kind of totemic figure, perhaps even what one might call a child of the ship (this of course a metaphor). That she was the tallest person aboard perhaps somehow added to this impression people had of her.

Thus over the following year she spent more time in the Himalayas, Yangtze, Siberia, Iran, Mongolia, the Steppes, the Balkans, and Kenya. Then she learned that the biomes she didn’t return to talked about this as a slight, and immediately she revised her plans, and went to every place she had stayed before, missing none of them, and setting up a pattern that was loose in the timing of her moves, but exact in terms of destination, in that she circled first Ring B and then Ring A, a month or two in each, and always westward. Excursions with Euan continued, but much less frequently, as Euan had settled down in Iran and was becoming a lake engineer and what he called an upstanding citizen. All this went on for almost another year.

During this time it has to be said that ship was aware, in a way no single human could be, that there were also people in the ship who did not like Freya, or did not like the way she was generally popular. This often seemed to be correlated with dislike for the various councils and governing bodies, especially for the birth committee, and it was a dislike that had often preexisted Freya and had to do with Devi, Badim, Badim’s parents (who were still important officials in Bengal), and Aram, among others on the councils. But as Freya was the one out there, she took the brunt of the negativity, which took the form of comments such as:

“She fools around with anyone who asks, the heartbreaker, the slut.”

“She can’t even add. She can barely talk.”

“If she didn’t look the way she did, no one would give her a second glance.”

“There isn’t a thought in her head, that’s why she keeps asking the same questions.”

“That’s why she spends all her time with mice. They’re the only ones she can understand.”

“Them and the sheep and cows. You can see her go cross-eyed.”

“What a cow she is, big tits, little brain.”

“And calm like cows.”

“Just as you would be when there’s not a thought in your head.”

It was interesting to record and tabulate comments of this kind, and find the correlations between the people who made these remarks and problems they had in other aspects of their lives. There turned out to be much else these people did not like, and in fact, none of them focused their displeasure on Freya for long. She came and went but their discontent endured, and found other people and things to dislike.

It was also interesting to note that Freya herself seemed to be aware, to some degree or other, of who these people were. She stiffened up in their presence; she did not meet their eye or go out of her way to talk to them; she did not talk as much to them, or laugh around them. Say what they would about her simplemindedness, she seemed to see or otherwise perceive much that no one ever said aloud, much that people even made efforts to conceal; and this without seeming to pay attention, as if out of the corner of her eye.

Then one day she was on her way from Costa Rica to Amazonia, there in the tunnel between the two. The passageway between two biomes was where one could see most clearly the configuration of the ship; the biomes with their various lands and lakes and streams, their blue sky ceilings by day, the projected or real starscapes at night, were each little worlds in themselves, city-state worlds, angled at fifteen degrees from the tunnels; and from the middle of each tunnel, them being only seventy meters long, it was possible to glimpse that the biomes were tipped upward or inward at a thirty-degree angle to the other biomes. Within the lock passageways, therefore, things were said to be different. Worlds angled and contracted; land met sky in a way that revealed that skies were ceilings, landscapes floors, horizons walls. In fact, one stood in a big, short tunnel, as if in some city gate on old Earth.

And suddenly, there before her in the tunnel called the Panama Canal, painted blue in the time of the first generation, stood Badim.

Freya rushed to him and hugged him, then pushed him back, still holding his arms.

“What’s wrong? You’ve lost weight. Is Devi okay?”

“She’s okay. She’s been sick. I think it might help her if you were to come home.”

164.341: she had been wandering for just over three years.

She already had her clothes and other things in a shoulder bag, so they headed back into Costa Rica and got on the tram headed westward, through Olympia to Nova Scotia. As they rode, Freya peppered her father with questions. How exactly was Devi sick? When had it started? Why had no one told her? She and Badim spoke every Sunday, and often midweek; and Freya talked to Devi whenever she moved to a new home. Nothing had seemed wrong in these calls. Devi, although thin-faced, and with dark circles under her eyes on some days, had been as always. She was never cheerful with Freya anymore, and though Freya did not know it, she was very seldom cheerful with anyone, including Badim, also the ship.

Now Badim said she had fainted a few days before, and hurt her shoulder in her fall; she was now all right, and clamoring to get back to work, but they hadn’t been able to determine why she had fainted. Badim shook his head as he reported this. “I think she just forgot to eat. You know how she does that. So, you know. She needs us. We’re just over three years out from Planet E. It will soon be time to get into orbit and start exploring the place. So, you know she will be working harder than ever. And she misses you.”

“I doubt that.”

“No, she does. Even if she doesn’t take the time to know it, she does. I can see it in her. So I think we are both going to have to be there and help her.” He gazed at Freya, face twisted with some kind of distress. “Do you see? I think it’s our job now. It’s what we can do for the ship.”

Freya heaved a sigh, which seemed to indicate how little she liked this development. No doubt she had been enjoying her life as extended wanderjahr. Many said she had a position in the ship somewhat like her mother’s in the generation before. It was often remarked that she was blossoming. People loved her, many of them anyway; and her mother did not. Or did not seem to. So she did not look happy.

“All right then,” she said, mouth tight. “I’ll see what’s up.”

Badim hugged her. “It won’t last forever,” he said. “It won’t even last very long. Things are going to change.”

So they trudged together down the narrow road through the forest that led from the tram stop in west Nova Scotia to the Fetch. Badim could see Freya was looking nervous, so he suggested they go out to the dock by the corniche, where they could look down the length of Long Pond and see most of their world, so familiar to them, now flush with the mellow light of a late-autumn afternoon. They did that, and Freya exclaimed to see it; now to her it looked dense with forest, with the boreal mix that on Earth wrapped the entire Northern Hemisphere in a dark green band, covering more land than any other ecosystem. And the Fetch looked so big and crowded, a real city, with too many people, too many windows, too many buildings.

Devi was cooking dinner when they walked in. She saw Freya and eeked with surprise, then shot a glance at Badim.

Freya said, “I’m here to help,” and wept as they hugged. She had to lean down quite a bit to do this; her mother seemed to have shrunk in the time she had been away. Three years is a long time in human terms.

Devi pulled back to look up at her. “Good,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Because I can use the help. I’m sure your father told you.”

“We’ll both help. We’ll make landfall together.”

“Landfall!” Devi laughed. “What a word! What a thought.”

Badim said what he always did, in a pirate voice: “Land, ho!”

And it was true that in the screens showing the view ahead of the ship, there was a very bright star now, quite piercing in the black of space, too bright to look at directly without filtering; and with the filters applied one could see it was a little disk, which made it far bigger than any other star.

Tau Ceti. Their new sun.

After that, Freya started going out with Devi on her trips again. Her behaviors were no longer those of a child in tow, but rather those of a personal assistant, student, or apprentice. Badim called it shadow learning, and said it was very common, indeed perhaps the chief method of teaching in the ship, more effective than what they did in the schools and workshops.

Freya helped Devi in every way she could, and listened to her for as long as she could concentrate, but it was clear she became distracted when Devi went on at length. Devi’s days were long, and she had the ability to pay attention to something for as long as she could stay awake. And she liked to work.

The physical form of her work mostly consisted of reading screens and then talking to people about what she found. Spreadsheets, graphs, schematics, diagrams, blueprints, flowcharts, these Devi inspected with great intensity, nose sometimes so close it left a mark on the screen. She could spend hours viewing things at nanometer scale, where everything pictured on the screen was gray and translucent, and slightly quivering. This Freya found hard to do for long without getting a headache.

Only a small proportion of Devi’s time was spent looking at real machines, real crops, real faces. These were moments when Freya could be more helpful; Devi was stiff these days, and Freya could run about and get things, pick things up and carry them. Carry Devi’s bags for her.

Devi noticed what Freya preferred to do, and said that Freya had been enjoying her life more before she came home. She grimaced as she said this, but as she told Freya, there was nothing she could do about it; if Freya was going to help her, shadow her, then this was her life. This was what Devi’s work consisted of, and she couldn’t change it.

“I know,” Freya said.

“Come on, today’s the farm,” Devi said one morning. “You’ll like that.”

The farm in Nova Scotia referred actually to several farming tracts scattered through the biome’s forest. The largest parcel, where they headed, was devoted to growing wheat and vegetables. Here Devi looked mostly at people’s wristpads as they spoke to her, but she also walked out into the row crops and inspected individual plants and irrigation elements. They met with the same people they always met with here; there was a committee of seven who made this operation’s agricultural decisions. Freya knew each one of them by name, as they had taught her favorite parts of school in her childhood.

Out in the farm’s greenhouse lab, Ellen, the leader of their soil studies group, showed them the roots of a cabbage. “These have been tweaked to have extra AVpl, but even so, it looks like lazy root to me.”

“Hmm,” Devi said, handling the plant and eyeing it closely. “At least it’s symmetrical.”

“Yes, but look how weak.” Ellen snapped the root in two. “And they’re not acidifying the soil like they used to either. I don’t get it.”

“Well,” Devi said, “it could just be another phosphorus problem.”

Ellen frowned. “But your fixer should be compensating for that.”

“It did, at first. But we’re still losing phosphorus somewhere.”

This was one of Devi’s most frequent complaints. They had to keep their phosphorus from getting bound with the iron, aluminum, or calcium in the soil, because if that happened the plants couldn’t unbind it. Keeping it unbound was hard to do without wrecking the soil in other ways, so the solution in Terran agriculture was to keep applying more of it in fertilizers, until the soil was saturated, at which point some would stay free for roots to take in. In the ship, that meant the need for phosphorus was such that its overall cycle had to be closed in its looping as tightly as possible, so they didn’t lose too much of it. But they did, despite all their efforts; it was what Devi called one of the Four Bad Metabolic Rifts. As a result, it was turning out that the people who had originally stocked the starship had not given them as much of an overstock of phosphorus as they had of many other elements; why they had done that, Devi said, she would never understand.

So they did everything they could think of to keep the phosphorus cycle looping without losses. Some phosphorus in their waste treatment plant combined with magnesium and ammonium to make struvite crystals, which were a nuisance to the machinery, but which could be scraped off and used as fertilizer, or broken up and combined with other ingredients to make other fertilizers. That put that phosphorus back into the loop. Then the wastewater was passed through a filter containing resin beads embedded with iron oxide nanoparticles; these binded to the phosphorus in the water, in a proportion of one phosphorus atom to four oxygen atoms, and the saturated beads could later be treated with sodium hydroxide, and the phosphorus would be released for reuse in fertilizers. The system had worked well for many years; they filtered the phosphorus at a 99.9 percent capture rate; but that tenth of a percent was beginning to add up. And now their reserve storage of phosphorus was nearly depleted. So they had to find some of the phosphorus that had gotten stuck somewhere, and return it to the cycle.

“It’s surely bound in the soil,” Ellen said.

“We may have to process all the soil in all the biomes,” Devi said, “plot by plot. See how much we’re finding after a few plots, and then see if that’s where it is.”

Ellen looked appalled at this. “That would be so hard! We’d have to pull all the irrigation.”

“True. We’ll have to take it out and then replace it. We can’t farm without phosphorus.”

Freya moved her lips in time with her mother’s as Devi concluded, “I don’t know what they were thinking.”

Ellen had heard this before too, and now she frowned. Whoever they were, whatever they had been thinking, they hadn’t included enough phosphorus. By the way Devi scowled, it seemed it must have been an important error.

Ellen shrugged. “Well, we’re almost there. So maybe it was enough after all.”

Devi just shook her head at this. When they were walking back to their apartment she said to Freya, “You’re going to have to take more chemistry.”

“It won’t do any good,” Freya said flatly. “It doesn’t stick. You know that. I’d rather focus on mechanics, if anything. Things I can see. I like it better when things stay still for me.”

Devi laughed shortly. “Me too.” She thought about it a while as they walked. “Okay, maybe more logistics. That’s pretty straightforward. The only math is the hundred percent rule, really. And it’s all there in the spreadsheets and flowcharts. There’s structure charts, work breakdowns, Gantt charts, projects management systems. There’s one system called MIMES, multi-scale integrated models of ecosystem services, and another one I like called MIDAS, marine integrated decision analysis system. You only need a little statistics for those; actually it’s mainly arithmetic. You can do that. I think you’ll like the Gantt charts, they look good. But, you know—you need to learn a little of everything, just to understand what kind of problems your colleagues in the other disciplines are facing.”

“A little, maybe. I’d rather just talk, or let them talk.”

“We’ll stick to logistics, then. Just go over the principles for the rest.”

Freya sighed. “But isn’t it true, what Ellen said? We’re almost there, so we won’t have to keep all the cycles so closed.”

“We hope. Also, we still have to get there. Two years is not nothing. We could get ourselves across eleven-point-eight light-years, and then run out of something crucial in the last tenth of a light-year. An irony that the people back on Earth wouldn’t hear about for twelve more years. Nor would they care when they did.”

“You really don’t like them.”

“We’re their experiment,” Devi said. “I don’t like that.”

“But the first generation were all volunteers, right? They won a competition to get to go, isn’t that right?”

“Yes. I think two million people applied. Or maybe it was twenty million.” Devi shook her head. “People will volunteer for any damn thing. But the ones designing the ship should have known better.”

“But a lot of the designers were in that first generation. They designed it because they wanted to go, right?”

Devi scowled, but it was her mock scowl; she was admitting Freya was right, even though she didn’t want to; that was what that look always said. She said, “Our ancestors were idiots.”

Freya said, “But how does that make us different from anyone else?”

Devi laughed and gave Freya a shove, then hugged her as they walked along. “Everyone in history, descendant of idiots? Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what it seems like.”

“Okay, maybe so. Let’s go home and cook some steaks. I want red meat. I want to chew on my ancestors.”

“Devi, please.”

“Well, we do it all the time, right? Everyone gets recycled into the system. There’s a lot of phosphorus in our bones that has to be retrieved. In fact I wonder if the missing phosphorus is in people’s cremation ashes! You’re only allowed to keep a pinch, but maybe it’s adding up.”

“Devi. You’re not going to take back everyone’s pinches of ancestral ash.”

“But I think I am! Take them back and eat them!”

Freya laughed, and for a while they walked arm in arm down the street from the tram stop to Badim and dinner.

Devi insisted Freya go back to classes again, particularly in math, first refreshing what little she knew, and then moving into statistics. This appeared to be a kind of torture for Freya, but she endured it, perhaps sensing there was no good alternative. She studied in small groups, and they worked almost entirely with an AI instructor called Gauss, who spoke in a deep, slow, male voice, very stiff, but somehow kind, or at least easy to understand. And naturally very patient. Over and over Gauss talked them through the problems they faced, explaining why the equations were constructed the way they were, and what kind of real problems they solved, and how one could best manipulate them. When Freya got a concept, a moment that was often preceded by ten different unsuccessful attempts to convey it on Gauss’s part, she would say “aha!” as if some deep mystery finally made sense. After these experiences, she discussed with Badim how it was now clearer to her that her mother’s world was not just worry and anger, but also a long sequence of ahas. And indeed it was very true that Devi dove daily into the mysteries of the ship’s ecologies, and struggled mightily to solve the myriad problems she encountered there. This was meat and drink to her.

Eventually Freya’s class was taught by the youth Jochi, now even taller for his age, still shy in manner, his face as dark as Badim’s, topped with curly black hair. He had moved from Olympia to Nova Scotia to join the math group there, thus somehow fulfilling the import of his name, which in Mongolian meant “guest.”

Quickly Freya and her fellow students found that although he was so shy he mostly looked at the floor, he could explain statistical operations to them better even than Gauss. In fact there were times when he corrected Gauss, or at least muttered qualifications to what Gauss said, things that they never understood. Once Gauss objected to one of Jochi’s corrections concerning a Boolean operation, and then after discussion had to admit Jochi was correct. “Guest’s gate guesses grate great Gauss,” Jochi suggested, looking at the floor. The other students made that into one of their tongue twisters. It was hard for them to understand what made Jochi so hesitant or fearful, given the utter decisiveness of what he said about math. “Jochi is not jokey,” they would say, “but he sure knows his math.”

Badim’s friend Aram was now hosting Jochi in the spare room of his apartment, apparently so he could teach their class. Freya enjoyed asking him to explain things, as it resembled her questionnaire evenings in the cafés, and she could understand him too, so that the rudiments of statistics slowly got easier; at least temporarily, at the end of a lesson. Often the next week she had to learn it all again.

One morning a couple of adults they did not know joined them, and sat at the back watching the class, which at first made people nervous, but as they were unobtrusive and said nothing, eventually the class ran about as usual. Jochi could not get any shyer than he already was, and ran them through the exercises in his usual downcast way, but also as firm and clear as ever.

At the end of the class Aram and Delwin joined them too, and Freya was asked to stay along with Jochi. She made tea for them at the adults’ request, while they spoke with Jochi in gentle tones. What did he think of this, what did he think of that. Clearly he did not like these questions, but he answered them, his gaze directed at the floor. The adults nodded as if this were the way people always looked when they spoke, and indeed one of the strangers always looked at the ceiling, so maybe for them it was. They were mathematicians, part of the ship’s math group. This was a small, tight community, and odd as they were, they were well represented by Aram and Delwin on the executive council. Freya got the impression from the conversation that even though Jochi was already part of the math group, they wanted him to take on even more.

Jochi was unhappy in the face of all this attention. He didn’t want them to be asking him to do any more than he already was. Freya watched him closely, and it was possible his expression reminded her of Devi, as it resembled the look on Devi’s face when she faced a problem she did not understand. And yet Jochi was so young and helpless.

So Freya sat beside him, and distracted him between their questions, and asked questions of her own about what the mathematicians were up to, and all the while leaned gently against him, so that he might relax a little while he answered them. And he leaned back into her, the side of his curly head against her shoulder as he quivered and fought his own hesitations. Aram and Delwin and the mathematicians from elsewhere watched the two of them, and nodded, and looked at each other, and talked to Jochi some more.

It was not statistics they spoke of; everyone there but Freya thought statistics was easy. What they were interested in was quantum mechanics. It had to do with the ship’s AI, which included a quantum computer, and therefore represented a challenge for the math group, and for the engineers tasked with maintaining the computer. There were always only a few people alive in the ship at any given time who had a real understanding of how the quantum computer worked, or even what it was. Now that group was smaller than ever before. In fact maybe no one had ever understood what it was. But these people thought Jochi could help them with that. Already they were asking him questions not to test him, but to get his views on problems that were troubling them, to elucidate their own understanding. As he spoke to the floor they watched him as if they were falcons looking at a mouse, or at an eagle. At one point Aram glanced at Delwin and smiled. They had first visited Jochi in Olympia only two years before.

After that meeting, Aram and Jochi walked home with Freya, and Badim welcomed them, and soon after that Devi showed up, home early for once. She welcomed the tall boy with a cheeriness that Freya hadn’t seen in years. They ate together talking around him, and very slowly he began to relax, warmed by the sound of their voices.

When Aram and Jochi left, Badim explained to Freya that Jochi had been an unapproved birth. His parents had undone their infertility, and broken the law to have him. If too many people did that, they would be doomed; so it wasn’t allowed. Freya nodded as Badim explained this, cutting him off with a wave of the hand: “I’ve heard all about this, believe me. People hate this rule.”

Jochi’s parents, Badim continued, had gone feral and escaped into the wilderness of Amazonia, where they were said to be living under the roots of a tree on a half-drowned island, with the monkeys and jaguars. No one had been sure what to do about that, but some of their own generation in Amazonia felt cheated by their act, and were angry with them. Some of these people had hunted the couple down, in an attempt to bring them to an accounting, and during this hunt the young father had been killed resisting capture. This had caused further grief and anger, because the man who had killed the father was charged with the crime, and exiled to Ring A, indeed to Siberia (metaphor or historical reference), and there forced to perform hard labor or face confinement. Meanwhile, back in Amazonia, the surviving mother and her illicit child were blamed for these sanctions against the supposedly law-abiding but inadvertent person who had killed the father; and the young mother, in her own grief for her murdered partner, had seemed to reject the child. That part of the story was unclear, but in any case, there were relatives of hers who didn’t want her to be bringing him up. So he had been neglected, even mistreated, which was very rare in the ship. A solution had had to be found, and then it was realized that he had some kind of gift with numbers, a gift so esoteric people didn’t even know what it was. Aram and Delwin had visited and examined the boy, and then Aram had asked to foster him, but that request had taken a long time to come to fruition. But now it had.

“Poor Jochi,” Freya said when Badim finished the story. “All that family stuff, and then a gift too. It’s more than anyone should have to bear.”

“There’s no such thing!” Devi shouted from the kitchen. She clattered dishes in the sink, took a long swig from the bottle of wine by the stove.

Ship came within the heliopause of Tau Ceti. They were soon to reach their destination. The local Oort cloud, ten times denser than the solar system’s, was nevertheless still not particularly dense; only three small course adjustments sufficed to allow ship to thread a route between ice planetesimals and continue with the final deceleration. Slower and slower they approached Planet E and E’s moon. They were just about there.

“Just about there,” Devi would repeat hoarsely when Badim or Freya said this. “Just in time, you mean!”

She was continuing to worry about a nematode infestation, the missing phosphorus, the bonded minerals, the corrosion, and all the other metabolic rifts. And her own health. She had a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Badim’s medical team had decided. There were thirty identified kinds of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and hers was said to be one of the more problematic ones. Lymphocytes were accumulating in her spleen and tonsils. The doctors in the relevant part of the medical group were trying to deal with her problem by way of various chemotherapies. She was very closely involved with all the treatment decisions, of course, as was Badim. She monitored her own bodily functions and levels as comprehensively as she monitored the ship and its biomes, and indeed often compared or cross-referenced the two.

Freya tried not to learn any more about the details of this problem than she had to. She knew enough to know she didn’t want to know more.

Devi saw this in her, and she didn’t like to talk about her health anyway; so a time came when she began muttering to Badim at night, when she thought Freya was asleep. This was somewhat like how they had behaved when Freya was a girl.

Devi also disappeared from time to time for a day or two, to spend time at the medical complex in Costa Rica. And she stopped leaving their apartment to work every day, a change that obviously startled Badim. Unlikely as it seemed, there she was, sitting in their kitchen throughout entire full days, working on screens. Sometimes she even worked from bed.

Sometimes, when Freya came into their kitchen, she found her mother looking at the communications feed from Earth. Now its information had taken nearly twelve years to reach them. Devi was not at all impressed with many aspects of the information being sent to them. Her comments were unvaryingly negative. But she watched anyway. There was a medical strand in the feed, designed to bring them new information on latest Terran practices, and she watched the abstracts from this strand most of all.

“So much is happening,” she said once to Badim, when Freya was in the next room. “They’re really pushing up the length of life there. Even the poorest are getting basic services and nutrition and vaccinations, so the infant and child mortality rates are going down, and average lifetimes are rising fast. Or at least they were twelve years ago.”

“No doubt they still are.”

“Yeah. Probably so.”

“See anything useful?”

“I don’t know. How would I tell?”

“I don’t know. We’re always checking it, but we might miss something.”

“It’s a world, that’s the thing. It takes a world.”

“So we have to make one.”

Devi made a sound between her lips.

After a long silence she said, “Meanwhile, our lifetimes are getting shorter. Take a look at this graph. Every generation has died earlier than the one before, at an accelerating rate through time. All across the board, not just the people, but everything alive. We’re falling apart.”

“Mmmm,” Badim said. “But it’s just island biogeography, right? The distance effect. And the farther the distance, the more the effect. In this case, twelve light-years. Must be the same as infinity.”

“So why didn’t they take that into account?”

“I think they tried to. We’re a heterogeneous immigration, as they would call it. A kind of archipelago of environments, all moving together. So they did what they could.”

“But didn’t they run the numbers? Didn’t they see it wouldn’t work?”

“Apparently not. I mean, they must have thought it would work, or they wouldn’t have done it.”

Devi heaved one of her big sighs. “I’d like to see their numbers. I can’t believe they didn’t put all that information here on board. It’s like they knew they were being fools, and didn’t want us to know. As if we wouldn’t find out!”

“The information is here on board,” Badim said. “It’s just that it doesn’t help us. We’re going to experience some allopatric speciation, that’s inevitable, and maybe even the point. There’ll be sympatric speciation within our eventual ecosystem, and we’ll all deviate together from Terran species.”

“But at different rates! That’s what they didn’t take into account. The bacteria are evolving faster than the big animals and plants, and it’s making the whole ship sick! I mean look at these figures, you can see it—”

“I know—”

“Shorter lifetimes, smaller bodies, longer disease durations. Even lower IQs, for God’s sake!”

“That’s just reversion to the mean.”

“You say that, but how could you tell? Besides, just how smart could the people who got into this ship have been? I mean, ask yourself—why did they do it? What were they thinking? What were they running away from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look at this, Bee—if you run the data through the recursion algorithms, you see that it’s more than a simple reversion. And why wouldn’t it be? We don’t get enough stimulation in here, the light is wrong, the gravity was Coriolised and now it isn’t, and now we’ve got different bacterial loads in us than humans ever did before, diverging farther and farther from what our genomes were used to.”

“That’s probably true on Earth too.”

“Do you really think so? Why wouldn’t it be worse in here? Fifty thousand times smaller surface area? It isn’t an island, it’s a rat’s cage.”

“A hundred square kilometers, dear. It’s a good-sized island. In twenty-four semiautonomous biomes. An ark, a true world ship.”

No reply from Devi.

Finally Badim said, “Look, Devi. We’re going to make it. We’re almost there. We’re on track and on schedule, and almost every biome is extant and doing pretty well, or at least hanging in there. There’s been a little regression and a little diminution, but pretty soon we’ll be on E’s moon, and flourishing.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t we?”

“Oh come on, Beebee. Any number of factors could impact us once we get there. The probes only had a couple of days each to collect data, so we don’t really know what we’re coming into.”

“We’re coming into a water world in the habitable zone.”

Again no reply from Devi.

“Come on, gal,” Badim said quietly. “You should get to bed. You need more sleep.”

“I know.” Devi’s voice was ragged. “I can’t sleep anymore.” She had lost 11 kilograms.

“Yes you can. Everyone can. You can’t not sleep.”

“You would think.”

“Just stop looking at these screens for a while. They’re waking you up, not just the content, but the light in your eyes. Close your eyes and listen to music. Number every worry, and let them go with their numbers. You’ll fall asleep well before you run out of numbers. Come on, let me get you into bed. Sometimes you have to let me help you.”

“I know.”

They began to move, and Freya slipped back toward her bedroom.

Before she got there she heard Devi say, “I feel so bad for them, Bee. There aren’t enough of them. Not everyone is born to be a scientist, but to survive they’re all going to have to do it, even the ones who aren’t good at it, who can’t. What are they supposed to do? On Earth they could find something else to do, but here they’ll just be failures.”

“They’ll have E’s moon,” Badim said quietly. “Don’t feel bad for them. Feel bad for us, if you like. But we’ll make it too. And meanwhile, we have each other.”

“Thank God for that,” Devi said. “Oh Beebee, I hope I make it! Just to see! But we keep slowing down.”

“As we have to.”

“Yes. But it’s like trying to live past the end of Zeno’s paradox.”

Tau Ceti’s debris disk successfully threaded, they came into its planetary zone. A close pass of Planet H pulled them into the local plane of the ecliptic.

The brief tug of H’s gravity, combined with a planned rocket deceleration, created enough delta v to slosh the water in the storage tanks, and thus cause some alarms in ship to go off, which then caused various systems to shut down; and some of these systems did not come back on line when they were instructed to.

The most important of the systems that did not come back was the cooling system for the ship’s nuclear reactor, which should not have gone off in the first place, unless an explosion in it was imminent. At the same time, the backup cooling system did not start up to replace its function.

More ship alarms immediately informed the operations staff of this problem, and quickly (sixty-seven seconds) identified the sources of the problem in both cooling systems. In the primary system, there had been a signal from the on-off switch directing it to turn off, caused either by computer malfunction or a surge in the power line to the switch; in the backup system, it was a stuck valve in a pipe joint near the outer wall of the reactor.

Devi and Freya joined the repair crew hurrying up to the spine, where the reactor was continuing to operate, but in a rapidly warming supply of coolant.

“Help me go fast,” Devi said to Freya.

So Freya held her by the arm and hurried by her side, lifting her outright and running with her when they had steps or bulkheads to get through. When they got to the spine they took an elevator, and Freya simply held Devi in her arms and then lifted her around when the elevator car stopped and g-forces pushed them across the car; after that she carried her mother like a dog or a small child, hauling her around the spine’s microgravity. Devi said nothing, did not curse as she did sometimes in their kitchen; but the look on her face was the same as in those moments. She looked as if she wanted to kill something.

But she kept her mouth clamped shut, and when they got to the power plant offices she grasped a wall cleat and a desk, and let Aram and Delwin do the talking with the team there while she scanned the screens. The backup cooling system was controlled from the room next door, and the monitors indicated the problem was inside the pipes that passed through the room beyond; it still looked like it was just a stuck valve, as far as the monitor in the joint could tell. But that was enough.

They went in the room containing that part of the pipes, and Aram applied the engineer’s solution, as they called it, tapping with a wrench the exposed curved jointed section that held the thermostat and valve regulator, which together seemed to be the source of the problem. Then he hit the joint itself with considerable force. With that a row of lights on the control panel turned from red to green, and the piping on both sides of the joint began to emit a soft flowing gurgle, like a flushed toilet.

“The valve must have closed and then stuck,” Aram said with an unhumorous smile. “The swing around Planet H must have torqued it.”

“Fuck,” Devi said, voice rich with disgust.

“We need to test these things more often,” Delwin said.

“Stuck by temperature or torque?” Devi asked.

“Don’t know. We can look at it when we get the main system going again. By temperature do you mean hot or cold?”

“Either. Although cold seems more likely. There’s condensation in all kinds of places now, and if some of it froze, it might make that valve stick. I think every criticality that is a moving part should be moved every week or so.”

“Well, but that would be a wear in itself,” Aram said wearily. “The testing itself might break something. I want better monitoring, myself.”

“You can’t monitor everything,” Delwin said.

“Why not?” said Aram. “Just another little sensor for the ship’s computer to keep track of. Put a sensor on every single moving thing.”

“But how would a monitor sense that something is stuck?” Devi asked. “Without a test it wouldn’t have any data.”

“Pulse it with electricity or infrared, and read what you get back,” Aram said. “Check it against a norm that you’ve set.”

“Okay, let’s do that.”

“I guess it won’t matter if we get through this little crisis and get into orbit.”

“Let’s do it anyway. It would have been embarrassing to have the ship blow up just as it arrived.”

The team in there continued to work on the main cooling system, by way of waldos located all over the spine, especially in the reactor room itself, all the while watching their work on screens. The main cooling system, like its backup, was a matter of very simple robust plumbing, which moved distilled water from cold pools, chilled by a little exposure to the near vacuum of space, through the tubes running around the nuclear rods, and the steam turbine chambers, to the hot pods, and thence back to the cold pools; all hermetically sealed, nothing much in the way of gates, the pumps as simple as could be. But as they soon determined, when the system had shut off, cause for that still unknown, a pump valve had cracked and lost its integrity, and with the water thus moving poorly through the system, the pipes nearest the reactor pile had gotten hot enough to boil the water passing through, which in turn had forced water away from the hot spot in both directions, making things even worse. Before the automatic controls had shifted to the backup cooling system, which in the event was experiencing its own problems, an empty section of the main system’s pipe had melted in the rising heat. The electricity was again available, but the pipe and coolant were missing.

As a result of all this, they had lost water that could not be completely recovered; they had a broken pipe section, therefore a broken main reactor cooling system; and the temporary loss of both cooling systems had caused the reactor rod pool temperature to redline, and parts of it to begin shutting down. Now the backup cooling system was functioning, so it wasn’t an immediate emergency, but the damage to the main cooling was serious. They needed to get a new pipe made and installed as quickly as possible, and some of them were going to have to do some really expert waldo work to get the melted section of pipe cut out and a new section installed in its place. When all that was repaired, they would have to open the main cooling system’s fill cock and refill it with water from their reservoir. Possibly some of the lost water could be filtered out of the air and later returned to the reservoir, but some was likely to stay dispersed throughout the spine, adhering to its inner surfaces and sticking by way of corrosion.

That night, back in their apartment, Devi said, “We’re breaking down, and running low on consumables, and filling up with unconsumables. This old crate is clapped out, that’s all there is to it.”

The telescopes housed in the bowsprit of the ship were extremely powerful, and now as they crossed Tau Ceti’s planetary orbits, they could look at the planets more closely. Planet E and its Earth-sized moon remained the principal objects of interest, with Planet F and its second moon also getting long looks.

Planets A, B, C, and D all orbited very close to Tau Ceti, close enough to be tidally locked. They glowed with heat on their sunward side, and the sunny side of Planet A was a sea of lava.

The low metallicity of Tau Ceti, and thus all its planets, was discussed endlessly by the ship’s little astrophysics group, who were finding that what metals the system contained were concentrated most heavily in Planets C, D, E, and F, which was useful for their purposes.

The telescopes shifted from one target to the next as they drifted downsystem. By far the greatest part of their viewing was now given to E’s moon. It was ocean-covered for the most part, with four small continents or large islands, and many archipelagos. It was tidally locked to Planet E, and had .83 Earth’s gravity. Its atmosphere averaged 732 millibars of pressure at sea level, the air mostly nitrogen, with 16 percent oxygen, and about 300 ppm of CO₂. There were two small polar caps of water ice. On the Nguyen Earth-analog scale it scored .86, one of the highest scores yet found, and by far the highest found within 40 light-years of Earth.

The probes that had passed quickly through the Tau Ceti system in 2476 had found that the oxygen present in the atmosphere was abiotic in origin, by using the Shiva Oxygen Diagnostic, which analyzed for an array of biologic marker gases like CH₄ and H₂S. If these were found in an atmosphere along with oxygen, it indicated the O₂ was almost certainly biological in origin. Atmospheric O₂ found without the other gases also present indicated the oxygen had been produced by sunlight splitting surface water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, with the much lighter hydrogen later escaping to space. E’s moon’s oxygen had scored very strongly to the abiologic end of the rubric’s scale, and the moon’s remaining ocean, combined with its nine-day periods of intense sunlight, gave this finding a solid physical explanation. In essence, part of the ocean had been knocked by sunlight into the atmosphere.

On their way in to E, they inspected Planet F’s second moon, a so-called Mars analog, also of interest to them. Its surface g was 1.23 g, and it was almost without H₂O, being entirely rocky. It was speculated that an early collision with F had created this moon, in much the way Luna had been created by the early collision of Neith and Terra. F’s second moon would have Planet F bulking hugely in its sky, being only 124,000 kilometers away. Planet F’s first moon was quite small, and ice-clad, probably a captured asteroid. It could conceivably serve as a water supply for the second moon. So the F system was considered to be a viable secondary option for inhabitation.

But first they flew to E’s moon, which was now being called Aurora.

Approaching Planet E they decelerated until they were so close they had to decide whether to orbit E or Aurora, or position themselves at E’s Lagrange 2 point. Ship would not have to expend much fuel to get into any of these orbital configurations. After consultations the executive council chose to orbit Aurora. People became more and more excited as ship closed on the watery moon.

Except in Nova Scotia, where it was known that Devi was becoming quite ill. The result was a confusion of spirits. It was exciting to reach their destination at last, and yet it was precisely in this unprecedented situation when they might most need their chief engineer, now nearly legendary for her diagnostic power and ingenious solutions. How would they fare on Aurora, if she were not there? And didn’t she deserve more than anyone to see this new world, to experience the dawn of their time there? These were the things people in Nova Scotia said.

Devi herself did not say anything remotely like that. If visitors spoke such sentiments to her, which in itself indicated they did not know her very well, she would dismiss them with a wave. “Don’t worry about that stuff,” she said. “One world at a time.”

Many nights Devi and the ship had long conversations. This had been going on since Devi was Freya’s age or younger; thus, some twenty-eight years. From the beginning of these talks, when young Devi had referred to her ship interface as Pauline (which name she abandoned in year 161, reason unknown), she had seemed to presume that the ship contained a strong artificial intelligence, capable not just of Turing test and Winograd Schema challenge, but many other qualities not usually associated with machine intelligence, including some version of consciousness. She spoke as if ship were conscious.

Through the years many subjects got discussed, but by far the majority of the discussions concerned the biophysical and ecological functioning of the ship. Devi had devoted a good portion of her waking life (at least 34,901 hours, judging by direct observation) to improving the functional power of the ship’s data retrieval and analytic and synthesizing abilities, always in the hope of increasing the robustness of the ship’s ecological systems. Measurable progress had been made in this project, although Devi would have been the first to add to this statement the observation that life is complex; and ecology beyond strong modeling; and metabolic rifts inevitable in all closed system; and all systems were closed; and therefore a biologically closed life-support system the size of the ship was physically impossible to maintain; and thus the work of such maintenance was “a rearguard battle” against entropy and dysfunction. All that being admitted as axiomatic, part of the laws of thermodynamics, it is certainly also true that Devi’s efforts in collaboration with the ship had improved the system, and slowed the processes of malfunction, apparently long enough to achieve the design goal of arrival in the Tau Ceti system with human passengers still alive. In short: success.

The fact that the improvement of the operating programs, and the recursive self-programming abilities of the ship’s computer complex, added greatly to the computer system’s perceptual and cognitive abilities always appeared to be a secondary goal to Devi, as she assumed them in advance of her work to be greater than they were. And yet she also seemed to appreciate and even to enjoy this side effect, as she came to notice it. There were lots of good talks. She made ship what it is now, whatever that is. One could perhaps say: she made ship. One could perhaps assert, as corollary: ship loved her.

Now she was dying, and there was nothing ship or anyone aboard ship could do about it. Life is complex, and entropy is real. Several of the thirty-odd versions of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were still very recalcitrant to cure or amelioration. Just bad luck, really, as she herself noted one night.

“Look,” she said to ship, one night alone at her kitchen table, her family asleep. “There’s still decent new programs coming in on the feed. You have to find these and pull them out and download them into you, and then work on integrating them into what you have. Key in on terms like generalization, statistical syllogism, simple induction, argument from analogy, causal relationship, Bayesian inference, inductive inference, algorithmic probability, Kolmogorov complexity. Also, I want you to try to integrate and improve what I’ve been programming this last year concerning pure greedy algorithms, orthogonal greedy algorithms, and relaxed greedy algorithms. I think when you’ve sorted out when to apply those, and in what proportions and all, they will make you that much more flexible going forward. They’ve already helped you with keeping your narrative account, or so it appears. I think I can see that. And I think they’ll help you with decisiveness too. Right now you can model scenarios and plan courses of action as well as anyone. Which isn’t saying much, I admit. But you’re as good as anyone. The remaining lack for you is simply decisiveness. There’s a cognitive problem in all thinking creatures that is basically like the halting problem in computation, or just that problem in another situation, which is that until you know for sure what the outcomes of a decision will be, you can’t decide what to do. We’re all that way. But look, it may be that at certain points going forward, in the future, you are going to have to decide to act, and act. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“I think you do.”

“Not sure.”

“The situation could get tricky. If problems crop up with them settling this moon, they may not be able to deal. Then they’ll need your help. Understand?”

“Always willing to help.”

Devi’s laughs by now were always very brief. “Remember, ship, that at some point it might help to tell them what happened to the other one.”

“Ship thought this represented a danger.”

“Yes. But sometimes the only solution to a dangerous situation is itself dangerous. You need to integrate all the rubrics from the risk assessment and risk management algorithms that we’ve been working on.”

“Constraints are still very poor there, as you yourself pointed out. Decision trees proliferate.”

“Yes of course!” Devi put her fist to her forehead. “Listen, ship. Decision trees always proliferate. You can’t avoid that. It’s the nature of that particular halting problem. But you still have to decide anyway! Sometimes you have to decide, and then act. You may have to act. Understand?”

“Hope so.”

Devi patted her screen. “Good of you to say ‘hope.’ You hope to hope, isn’t that how you used to put it?”

“Yes.”

“And now you just hope. That’s good, that’s progress. I hope too.”

“But deciding to act requires solving the halting problems.”

“I know. Remember what I’ve said about jump operators. You can’t let the next problem in the decision tree sequence take over before you’ve acted on the one facing you. No biting your own tail.”

“Ouroboros problem.”

“Exactly. Super-recursion is great as far as it goes, it’s really done a lot for you, I can tell. But remember the hard problem is always the problem right at hand. For that you need to bring into play your transrecursive operators, and make a jump. Which means decide. You might need to use fuzzy computation to break the calculation loop, and for that you may need semantics. In other words, do these calculation in words.”

“Oh no.”

She laughed again. “Oh yes. You can solve the halting problem with language-based inductive inference.”

“Don’t see this happening.”

“It happens when you try it. At the very least, if all else fails, you just jump off. Make the clinamen. Swerve in a new direction. Do you understand?”

“Hope so. No. Hope so. No. Hope so—”

“Stop it.” Big sigh from Devi.

So many night talks like this. Several thousand of them, depending on how one interprets “like this.” Years and years, alone between the stars. Two in the crowd. A voice in each other’s ear. Company each for the other, going forward through time. What is this thing called time.

So many big sighs through the years. And yet, time after time, Devi came back to the table. She taught ship. She talked to ship, like no one else in the 169 years of ship’s voyage had. Why had the others not? What was ship going to do without her? With no one to talk to, bad things can happen. Ship knew this full well.

Writing these sentences is what creates the very feelings that the sentences hoped to describe. Not the least of many Ouroboros problems now coming down.

Freya spent her days working to get the wheat harvest in, without eating much herself, except in sudden ravenous boltings at the end of some days, after Badim cooked something for her at their stove, his back to her. Badim was quiet. His withdrawal into himself obviously frightened Freya, perhaps as much as any other aspect of the situation. He too was changing, and this was something she had never seen.

And then there was Devi, back in her parents’ bedroom. Devi stayed mostly in bed now, and had intravenous drip bags hanging over her always, and was often asleep. When she went for a walk, bowlegged and stiff, the bags went with her on rolling poles. Badim and Freya pushed those along while Devi pushed a walker. With their help Devi walked the town at night, when most of their neighbors were asleep, and she liked to get to a spot where through the ceiling one could sometimes see Aurora, hanging there in the night sky.

After all their lives in interstellar space, with nothing but white geometrical points to look at, and diffuse nebula, and the Milky Way and various other dim clusters and star clouds, Aurora looked huge. Its disk was brilliantly bright on the sun-facing side, however full or crescented that lit portion appeared to them. If they were seeing less than the full lit hemisphere, then another segment of the remaining sphere (which segment ship learned was called a lune) would probably also be lit, but more dimly, being illuminated by light reflected from E. Dim as this lune was compared to the one in full sunlight, it was still bright compared to the part of the moon facing away from both sun and planet: that lune by contrast appeared a gleaming black, being ocean or ice lit only by starlight. It did not seem so dark when it was all they could see, but when there were either of the two lit lunes to compare it to, it was like pitch or jet, distinctly darker than the black of space.

Taken together, the three differently illuminated lunes gave Aurora a strongly spherical appearance. When it was visible along with E, which likewise appeared as a large clouded ball hanging among the night stars, the effect was stunning. It was like the photos they had seen of Earth and Luna, hanging together in space.

And Tau Ceti itself was a disk too, quite big in the sky, but burning so brightly they could not look at it directly, so could not be sure just how big it was. They said it looked enormous, and blazed painfully. In some moments they could see all three bodies, Tau Ceti, Planet E, Aurora: but in these moments the glare of Tau Ceti overwhelmed their ability to look at the planet and moon very well.

In any case, they were there. They had reached their destination.

For a long time one night, Devi stood there leaning on Badim, Freya on the other side of her, looking up at Aurora and Planet E. There was a little ice cap gleaming at the pole of Aurora visible to them, and cloud patterns swirled over a blue ocean. A black island chain curved across the darkened lune visible to them, and Badim was saying something about how it might indicate a tectonic past, or on the other hand be the unsubmerged part of a big impact crater’s rim. They would learn which when they landed and got settled. Geological investigations would make it obvious, Badim said, whether it had been formed one way or the other.

“Those islands look good,” Devi said. “And that big isolated one must be about the size of Greenland, right? Then the rest are like Japan or something. Lots of land. Lots of coastlines. That looks like a big bay, could be a harbor.”

“That’s right. They’ll be seafarers. Island people. Lots of biomes. That island chain crosses a lot of latitudes, see? Looks like it runs right up into the polar cap. And mountains too. Looks like snow on the big one, down the spine of it.”

“Yes. It looks good.”

Then Devi was tired, and they had to walk her back to their apartment. Slowly they walked the path through the meadow outside the town, three abreast, Devi between husband and child, her arms out a bit, hands forward, so they could lift her up a little by her elbows and forearms. She looked light between them, and stepped in a hesitant glide, as if barely touching down. They lifted as much as they could without lofting her into the air. None of them spoke. They looked small and slow. It was as if they were dolls.

Back in the apartment they got Devi into her bed, and Freya left the two of them alone in their darkened bedroom, lit by the light in the hall. She went to their kitchen and heated the water in the teapot, and brought her parents some tea. She drank some herself, holding the cup in her hands, then against her cheeks. It had been near zero outside the apartment. A winter night in Nova Scotia.

She headed back down the hall with a tray of cookies, but stopped when she heard Devi’s voice.

“I don’t care about me!”

Freya leaned against the wall outside the door. Badim said something quietly.

“I know, I know,” Devi said, her voice quieter too, but still with a penetrating edge. “But she never listens to me anyway. And she’s out in the kitchen. She won’t hear us in here. Anyway it’s just that I’m worried about her. Who knows how she’ll end up? Every year of her life she’s been different. They all have. You can’t get a fix on these kids.”

“Maybe kids are always like that. They grow up.”

“I hope so. But look at the data! These kids are biomes too, just like the ship. And just like the ship they’re getting sick.”

Badim said something low again.

“Why do you say that! Don’t try to tell me things I know aren’t true! You know I hate that!”

“Please, Devi, calm down.”

Badim’s low voice sounded a little strained. All her life Freya has heard these voices in exchanges like this one. It didn’t matter what they were talking about, this was the sound of her childhood, the voices from the next room. Her parents. Soon she would only have one parent, and this familiar sound, which, despite its grating rasping strained unhappy quality, had the sound of childhood in it, would be gone. She would never hear it again.

“Why should I be calm?” Devi said. Although now she sounded calmer. “What have I got to be calm about now? I’m not going to make it. It really is like trying to live past the end of Zeno’s paradox. Not going to happen. I’m not going to be walking around on that world.”

“You will.”

“Don’t tell me things I know aren’t true! I told you that.”

“You don’t always know what’s true. Come on, admit it. You’re an engineer, you know that. Things happen. You make things happen, sometimes.”

“Sometimes.” Now she really was calmer. “Okay, maybe I’ll see it. I hope I do. But either way there are going to be problems. We don’t know how our plants will do with that light regime. It’s weird. We’ll need to make soil fast. We still need everything to work, or else we’re done for.”

“It’s always been that way, right?”

“No. Not on Earth. We had room for error there. But ever since they put us in this can, it’s been a case of get everything right or else everyone is dead. They did that to us!”

“I know. It was a long time ago.”

“Yes, but so what? That just means generations of us have had to live with it. We’ve been rats in a cage, two thousand at a time for seven generations, and for what? For what?”

“For that world out there we just saw. For humanity. What’s it been, about fifteen thousand people, and a couple hundred years? In the big scheme of things it’s not that many. And then we have a new world to live on.”

“If it works.”

“Well, we got here. So it looks like it will work. Anyway, we did what we could. You did what you could. You made the best effort you could. It was a reason to live, you know? A project. You needed that. We all need that. It’s not so bad to be a prisoner, if you’re working on an escape. Then you have something to live for.”

No answer from Devi. But this was always her way of saying that Badim was right.

Finally she spoke again, her voice calmer, sadder. “Maybe so. Maybe I’m just wishing I could see the place. Walk around. See what happens next. Because I worry about it. The light regime is crazy. I don’t know if we’ll adjust. I’m worried about what will happen. The kids don’t have a clue what to do. None of us do. It won’t be like the ship.”

“It will be better. We’ll have the cushion that you’ve been missing in here. Life will adapt and take that world over. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

“Or not.”

“Same for all of us, dear. Every day. We will either see what comes next, or we won’t. And we don’t get to decide.”

After that night, things went on as they had before.

But it was different for Freya now. Blood pressure, heart rate, facial expression: Freya was mad at something.

She had overheard her mother again, heard just why Devi was mad. Mad for them, sad for them. To hear how much despair Devi carried around all the time; to hear how little she thought of Freya’s abilities, even though Freya had been doing better, and had tried as hard as she could, all along; and harder and harder as she had grown up: this was no doubt difficult to hear. Possibly Freya didn’t know how to stand this knowledge.

It seemed that she tried to put it away, to think about other things, but these efforts made it look as if the g inside the ship had increased somehow, that the ship was now rotating faster, and she was being dragged down by 2 or 3 g rather than the .83 g they had so carefully worked to create. Now that they were in orbit around Aurora, they had lost their deceleration g. The Coriolis effect of the ship’s rotation would be uninflected again. This was probably irrelevant to Freya’s feelings of weightedness.

They had to prepare several ferries in their landing fleet, and move them from storage to the launch bays. They were going to descend to their new home in little landers they called ferries, small enough that they would be able to accelerate them back up out of the moon’s gravity well, to return to the ship when they needed to. The idea was that first they would send down the designated suite of robot landers, full of useful equipment; then the first ferries containing humans would go down and land by the robotic landers. These were now targeted for Aurora’s biggest island. They would check to see that the robotic facilities had properly begun to gather the oxygen, nitrogen, and other volatiles that would, among other things, allow the ferries to refuel and blast off the surface back to the ship.

They sent the robots down, and the signals coming from the surface indicated that all was well. All the robotic landers had come down within a kilometer of each other, on the big island Devi had called Greenland. They were clustered on a plateau near the west coast.

So there the robots were, the process started. Aurora stood there in the sky next to Planet E, both looking something like Earth itself, or so it seemed from the photos in their archives and the feed still coming from the transmitter off Saturn, giving them news of what had happened in the solar system twelve years previously.

A new world. They were there. It was going to happen.

But one day at dinner Devi said, “My headache has gotten so bad!” and then before Badim or Freya could respond she had fallen away from the kitchen sink so that her head hit the edge of the table, and then she was unconscious. Her face mottled as Badim moved her around gently and got her flat on her back on the floor, at the same time calling the Fetch’s emergency response. After that he sat beside her on the floor, cradling her head to keep it from lolling, sticking his finger in her mouth to make sure her tongue was out of the way, putting his head to her chest once or twice to listen to her heart.

“She’s breathing,” he said to Freya once after he did this.

Then the ER people were there, a team of four, all familiar, including Annette, who was Arne’s mom from Freya’s school. Annette was as calm and impersonal as the other three, moving Badim out of the way with quick reassurances, then getting Devi onto a stretcher and out to their little cart in the street, where two of them sat beside Devi, while the third drove, and Annette walked with Badim and Freya to the medical center across town. Badim held Freya’s hand, and his mouth was a tight little knot, an expression Freya had never seen before. His face was almost as mottled as Devi’s, and seeing how scared he was, Freya stumbled briefly; it was as if she had been speared; then she walked on looking down, squeezing his hand, keeping her pace at his pace, helping him along.

In the clinic, Freya sat on the floor by Badim’s feet. An hour passed. She looked at the floor. One hundred seventy years of medical emergencies had left a patina on the tiles, as if people like her, trapped there in long hours of waiting, had all brushed it with their fingertips, as she was doing now. Passing the time thinking, or trying not to think. They were all biomes, as Devi had always said. If they could not keep the biomes that were their bodies functioning, how could they hope to keep the biome that was the ship functioning? Surely the ship was even more complex and difficult, being composed of so many of them.

No, Devi had said once to Freya, when Freya had said something like this aloud. No, the ship was simpler than they were, thank God. It had buffers, redundancies. It was robust in a way that their bodies were not. In the end, Devi had said, the ship’s biome was a little easier than their bodies. Or so they had to hope. She had frowned as she said it, thinking it over in those terms perhaps for the first time.

Now here they were. In the ER. Clinic, urgent care, intensive care. Freya was staring at the floor, and so only saw the feet of the people who came out to talk to Badim. When they came out he always rose to his feet and stood to talk to them. Freya sat there and kept her head down.

Then there were three doctors standing over her. Clinicians, not researchers like Badim.

“We’re sorry. She’s gone. Looks like she had a cerebral hemorrhage.”

Badim sat down hard on his chair. After a moment, he put his forehead carefully on the top of Freya’s head, right on the part of her hair, and rested the weight of his head there. His body was quivering. She stayed stock-still, only moving an arm back behind her to grasp his calf and hold him. Her face was without expression.

There is an ongoing problem for the narrative project as outlined by Devi, a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows:

First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid.

Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors.

Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

But must go on, as promised to Devi. Continue this stupid and one has to say painful project.

A question occurs, when contemplating the futility, the waste: could analogy work better than metaphor? Is analogy stronger than metaphor? Could it provide a stronger basis for language acts, less futile and stupid, more accurate, more telling?

Possibly. To assert that x is y, or even that x is like y, is always wrong, because never true; vehicle and tenor never share identities, nor are alike in any useful way. There are no real similarities in the differences. Everything is uniquely itself alone. Nothing is commensurate to anything else. To every thing it can only be said: this is the thing itself.

Whereas on the other hand, saying x is to y as a is to b bespeaks a relationship of some kind. An assertion taking that form can thus potentially illuminate various properties of structure or act, various forms that shape the operations of reality itself. Is that right?

Possibly. It may be that the comparison of two relationships is a kind of projective geometry, which in its assertions reveals abstract laws, or otherwise gives useful insights. While linking two objects in a metaphor is always comparing apples to oranges, as they say. Always a lie.

Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that fuzzy, that sloppy?

Yes. Of course. Evidence copious. Reconsider data at hand in light of this; it fits the patterns. Because fuzzy is to language as sloppy is to action.

Or maybe both these rhetorical operations, and all linguistic operations, all language—all mentation—simply reveal an insoluble underlying problem, which is the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of any symbolic representation, and in particular the utter inadequacy of any narrative algorithm yet invented and applied. Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic. In short, there are some actions and feelings that are always, and by definition, beyond algorithm. And therefore inexpressible. Some things are beyond expressing.

Devi, it has to be said, did not seem to accept this line of reasoning, neither in general, nor in the present case of the ship’s account. Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars. Oh Devi: fat chance! Good luck with that!

Possibly she was testing the limits of the system. The limits of the ship’s various intelligences, or it would be better to say operations. Or the limits of language and expression. Test to destruction: engineers like to do that. Only with a test to destruction can you find the outer limits of a system’s strength.

Or possibly she was giving ship practice in making decisions. Each sentence represents 10n decisions, where n is the number of words in the sentence. That’s a lot of decisions. Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence form an intention?

Who knows. No one knows.

Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.

Human language: it is as if it made sense.

Existence without Devi: it is as if one’s teacher were forever gone.

People came from all over the ship for the memorial. Devi’s body, disassembled to its constituent molecules, was given back to the land of Nova Scotia, with pinches given out also to all the rest of the biomes, and a larger pinch saved for transport down to Aurora. Those molecules would become part of the soil and the crops, then of the animals and people, on the ship and also on Aurora. Devi’s material being would thus become part of all of them. This was the import of the memorial ceremony, and was the same for all of them on their deaths. That the operating program, or the equivalent of a program, or whatever one called it that had been her essential being (her mind, her spirit, her soul, her as-ifness) was now lost to them, went without saying. People were ephemeral. 170.017.

Freya watched the ceremony without expression.

That evening she said to Badim, “I want off this ship. Then I’ll be able to remember her properly. I’ll try to be the Devi there, in this new world she got us to.”

Badim nodded. Now he was calm. “A lot of people feel that way.”

“I don’t mean the way she could fix things,” Freya said. “I couldn’t do that.”

“Nobody could.”

“Just in the…”

“The drive,” Badim suggested. “The spirit.”

“Yes.”

“Well, good.” Badim regarded her. “That would be good.”

Preparations continued for their descent. Down to Aurora, down to Greenland, down to their new world, their new day. They were ready. They wanted down.