Aurora (10 page)

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.”