Aurora - Страница 17

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.