Aurora (11 page)

“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.