Aurora (15 page)

“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.