Aurora (12 page)

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.”