Perhaps predictably, there came a time when the people she was tracking caught her. They doubled back and surrounded her. Euan stepped up and slapped her face.
She slapped him back instantly, and harder.
Euan laughed at this, and asked her if she wanted to join their gang. She said she did.
After that she joined them more often. They wandered the wilderness together as a gang. Early in these days, Euan passed his wristpad across her bottom and told her he had deactivated her ID chip with an electromagnetic pulse. This was not true, but ship did not inform her of this, being uncertain of the situation’s proper protocol. Ship records all human and animal movements in the ship, but very seldom mentioned this to people.
Euan and Huang and Jalil together were particularly bold in their reconnaissances. In the alpine biome next to Nova Scotia, they found doors leading down into the chambers and passageways underneath the granite-faced flooring. They also had the passcode to a maintenance door leading to Spoke Six, where a spiral staircase on the inner wall of the spoke took them up to Inner Ring B. The inner rings are structural-support rings connecting the six spokes near the spine. B’s inner ring was locked to them, and the spine too, but they roamed up and down Spoke Six as often as they could.
In these furtive jaunts Euan took the lead, but Freya soon pressed them to try new routes. As she was bigger than the boys, and faster, she could initiate explorations that they then had to follow. Euan appeared to delight in these adventures, even though they often almost got caught. They ran hard to evade anyone who yelled at them, or even saw them, laughing when they got back to the park behind the Fetch.
Huang and Jalil would take off then, and Euan would walk Freya across the town, and hold her against alley walls and kiss her, and she would embrace him and pull him up and against her, until his feet hung off the ground as they kissed. This made him laugh even more. Released, he would butt her in the chest with his forehead, caress her breasts, and say, “I love you, Freya, you’re wild!”
“Good,” Freya would say, while patting him on the top of the head, or rubbing him between the legs. “Let’s meet tomorrow and do it again.”
But then Devi checked the chip records and saw where her daughter was going in the evenings. The next evening she went to the edge of the park and caught Freya returning from a run with her gang, just after Freya had said good-bye to the others.
Devi grabbed her hard by the upper arm. She was quivering, and Freya’s arm went white under her grip. “I told you not to go in there!”
“Leave me alone!” Freya cried, and yanked her arm free. Then with a shove she knocked her mother sprawling to the ground.
Awkwardly Devi got back on her feet, keeping her head down. “You can’t go in the wilderness!” she hissed. “You can wander every part of this ship if you want, circle both rings if you want, but not the parts that are out of bounds. Those you have to stay out of!”
“Leave me alone.”
Devi flicked the back of her hand at her daughter. “I will if I can! I’ve got other problems I have to deal with right now!”
“Of course you do.”
Devi’s glare went cross-eyed. “Time for you to do your wander.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I can’t have you here embarrassing me, making things worse in exactly the areas where we have the most problems.”
“What problems?”
Devi convulsed and bunched her fists. Seeing that, Freya raised a threatening hand.
“We’re in trouble,” Devi said in a low choked voice. “So I don’t want you around right now, I can’t have it. I need to deal. Besides you’re at the age. You’ll grow up and get over this shit, so you might as well do it somewhere where I don’t have to suffer it.”
“That’s so mean,” Freya said. “You’re just mean. Enough of having a kid! Fine when she’s little, but now that you’ve decided she’s not good enough, off she goes! ‘Come back in a year and tell me about it!’ But you know what? I will never tell you. I will never come back.”
And Freya stormed off.
Thirdly, Badim asked her to wait for a while before leaving on her wanderjahr. “No matter where you go, it’s still you that gets there. So it doesn’t really matter where you are. You can’t get away from yourself.”
“You can get away from other people,” Freya said.
Badim had not heard a full account of the argument in the park, but he had noticed the estrangement between his wife and his daughter.
Eventually he agreed to the idea that Freya now start her wanderjahr. She would love it, he said, once he had agreed. She would be able to visit home anytime she wanted. Ring B was only fifty-four kilometers around, so she would never be far away.
Freya nodded. “I’ll manage.”
“Fine. We’ll arrange housing and work for you, if you want.”
They hugged, and when Devi joined the discussion, Devi hugged her too. Under Badim’s eye, Freya was cooperative in hugging her mother. Perhaps also she saw the distress on Devi’s face.
“I’m sorry,” Devi said.
“Me too.”
“It will be good for you to get away. If you stayed here and weren’t careful, you might end up like me.”
“But I wanted to end up like you,” Freya said. She looked as if she were tasting something bitter.
Devi only squished the corners of her mouth and looked away.
On 161.176, Freya left on her wanderjahr, traveling west in Ring B. The ring tram circumnavigated the biomes, but she walked, as was traditional for wanderers. First through the granite highland of the Sierra, then the wheat fields of the Prairie.
Her first extended stay was in Labrador, with its taiga, glacier, estuary, and cold salt lake. It was often said that your first move away from home should be to a warmer place, unless you came from the tropics, when you couldn’t. But Freya went to Labrador. The cold did her good, she said.
The salt sea was mostly iced over, and she learned to ice-skate. She worked in the dining hall and the distribution center, and quickly met many people. She worked as a manual laborer and general field assistant, or GFA, or Good For Anything, as they were often called. She put in long hours all over the biome.
Out there next to Labrador’s glacier, people told her, there was one yurt community that brought up their children as if they were Inuit or Sami, or for that matter Neanderthals. They followed caribou and lived off the land, and no mention of the ship was made to their children. The world to these children was simply four kilometers long, a place mostly very cold, with a big seasonal shift between darkness and light, ice and melt, caribou and salmon. Then, during their initiation ceremony around the time of puberty, these children were blindfolded and taken outside the ship in individual spacesuits, and there exposed to the starry blackness of interstellar space, with the starship hanging there, dim and silvery with reflected starlight. Children were said to return from this initiation never the same.
“I should think not!” Freya said. “That’s crazy.”
“Quite a few of these children move away from Labrador after that,” her informant, a young woman who worked in the dining hall, told her. “But more than you’d think come back around as adults, and do the same to their own kids.”