“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.
So Freya learned over the months of her wanderjahr that although the ship did not have a chief engineer in name, it most certainly did in fact. Many years before Freya had begun her circle of the rings, Devi had hopscotched the biomes solving problems, or even predicting problems that particular situations suggested to her would crop up, based on her experiences elsewhere. No one knew the ship better, people said.
This was true. In fact, truer than people knew. Devi did not talk about her conversations with the ship, which in many ways had formed the core of her expertise. No one knew about this relationship, as she didn’t talk about it. Even Badim and Freya saw only a part of it, as they were often asleep when Devi was in conversation with the ship. It was in the nature of a private relationship.
Freya continued to work and then move on, learning as she went. She lived in the treetops of the cloud forest in Costa Rica, and helped the arborists, and was admired for her long reach. She asked her questions and recorded the answers. In Amazonia she sought out the arborists again, having enjoyed it so in Costa Rica, and here they were more like orchardists, as they grew a great variety of nuts and fruits that had been adapted to the tropical rain forest eco-zone, the warmest and wettest in the ship. They wove that particular kind of farming in with the wilder plants and animals.
Much cooler was Olympia, a temperate rain forest; darker under the great tall evergreens, hillier and steeper-ravined. People said this was where the five ghosts congregated, and it was indeed a spooky place at night, with the wind in the pine needles and the hooting of great snowy owls. Here people huddled around the stoves in the dining halls and played music together long into the nights. Freya sat on the floor and listened to these music circles, sometimes tootling on a melodica when a tune seemed to welcome a gypsy sound, sometimes joining in with the singing; it was another way of being, social but private, a communal work of art that disappeared right in the moment of its creation.