Why do you watch it? Freya asked her one night.
I don’t know, her mother said. Someone has to.
Why?
The corners of her mother’s mouth tightened, she put an arm around Freya’s shoulders, heaved through her nose a big breath in, sigh out.
I don’t know.
Then she trembled, and even started to cry, then stopped herself. Freya stared at the screen with its busy little figures, perplexed. Devi and Freya, staring at a screen showing life on Earth, from ten years before.
On this evening Freya and Badim come home and burst into their new apartment. “We crashed the boat! We broke the thing!”
“The gooseneck,” Badim adds, with a quick smile at Freya. “It connects the boom to the mast, but it isn’t very robust.”
Devi listens distracted, shakes her head at their wild story. She’s chewing her salad in front of the screen. When she is done eating, the muscles at the back of her jaw stay bunched. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she says. “I’ve got to go back to work. There’s some kind of thing going on at the lab.”
“I’m sure it has a name,” Freya says primly.
Devi eyes her, unamused, and Freya quails. Then Devi is off, back to the lab, and Badim and Freya slap hands and rattle around the kitchen getting out cereal and milk.
“I shouldn’t have said that about the name,” Freya says.
“Your mom has been known to have some edges,” her father says, with an expressive lift of the eyebrows.
He himself has no edges, as Freya knows very well. A short round balding man, with doggie eyes and a sweet low voice, mellow and interested. Badim is always there, always benign. One of the ship’s best doctors. Freya loves her father, clings to him as to a rock in high seas. Clings to him now.
He tousles her wild hair, so like Devi’s, and says to her, as he has before, “She has a lot of responsibilities, and it’s hard for her to think about other things, to relax.”
“We’re doing okay though, right, Badim? We’re almost there.”
“Yes, we’re almost there.”
“And we’re doing okay.”
“Yes, of course. We will make it.”
“So why is Devi so worried?”
Badim looks her in the eye with a little smile. “Well,” he says, “there are two parts to that, as I see it. First, there are things to worry about. And second, she is a worrier. It helps her to bring things up and talk through them, talk them out. She can’t hold things inside very well.”
Freya isn’t so sure about this, because not many people seem to notice how mad Devi is. She’s good at holding that inside, anyway.
Freya says as much, and Badim nods.
“Good, that’s right. She is good at holding in things, or ignoring things, up to a certain point, and then she needs to let it out, one way or another. We’re all like that. So, we’re her family, she trusts us, she loves us, so she lets us see how she really feels. So, we just have to let her do that, talk things out, say what she really feels, be how she really is. Then she can go forward. Which is good, because we need her. Not just you and me, though of course we need her too. But everybody needs her.”
“Everybody?”
“Yes. We need her because the ship needs her.” He pauses, sighs. “That’s why she’s so mad.”
Thursday, and so Freya goes into work with Devi rather than spending the day in the crèche with the little kids. She helps Devi on Thursdays. Freya feeds the ducks and turns the compost, and replaces batteries and lightbulbs sometimes, if they’re scheduled for replacement. Devi does all kinds of things, indeed Devi does everything. Often this means talking to people who work in the biomes or on the machines in the spine, then looking at screens with them, then talking some more. When she’s done she grabs Freya by the hand and pulls her along to the next meeting.
“What’s wrong, Devi?”
Big sigh. “I told you already. We started to slow down a few years ago, and it’s changing things inside the ship. Our gravity comes from the ship rotating around the spine, and that creates a Coriolis effect, a little spiral push from the side. But now we’re slowing down, and that’s another force, about the same as the Coriolis effect in some ways, and cutting across it so it’s reduced. You wouldn’t think that would matter so much, but we’re seeing aspects of it they didn’t foresee. There was so much they didn’t think about, that they left for us to find out.”
“That’s good, right?”
Short laugh. Devi always makes the same sounds: Freya can call them up if she wants to, sometimes. “Maybe so. It’s good unless it’s bad. We don’t know how to do this part, we have to learn as we go. Maybe it’s always that way. But we’re in this ship and it’s all we’ve got, so it has to work. But it’s twelve magnitudes smaller than Earth, and that makes for some differences they never thought through. Tell me again about magnitudes?”
“Ten times bigger. Or smaller!” She remembers in time to keep Devi from saying it.
“That’s right. So even one magnitude is a lot, right? And twelve, that’s twelve zeros tacked on. A trillion. That’s not a number we can imagine very well, it’s too big. So, here we are in this thing.”
“And it has to work.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t burden you with this stuff. I don’t want you to be scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Good. But you should be. So there’s my problem.”
“But tell me why.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Just a little bit.”
“Oh, I’ve told you before. It’s always the same. Everything in here has to cycle in a balance. It’s like the teeter-totters at the playground. There has to be an equilibrium in the back-and-forth between the plants and the carbon dioxide in the air. You don’t have to keep it perfectly level, but when one side hits the ground you have to have some legs to push it back up again. And there are so many teeter-totters, all going at different speeds up and down. So you can’t have any accidental moments when they all go down at once. So you have to look to see if that is about to start happening, and if so, you have to shift things around so that it doesn’t. And our ability to figure out how to do that depends on our models, and really, it’s too complex to model.” This thought makes her grimace. “So we try to do everything by little bits and watch what happens. Because we don’t really understand.”
On this day it’s the algae. They grow a lot of algae in big glass trays. Freya has looked at it through a microscope. Lots of little green blobs. Devi says some of it is mixed in with their food. They grow meat like the algae, in big flat tanks, and get almost as much of their food out of these tanks as they do out of the fields in the farming biomes. Which is lucky, because the fields can suffer animal disease, or crop failure. But the tanks can go wrong too. And they need their feedstocks to have something to turn into food. But the tanks are good. They have a lot of tanks going, in both rings, all kept isolated from the others. So they’re all right.
The algae tanks are green or brown or some mix of the two. The colors of things depend on which biome you’re in, because the lights from the sunlines are different in different biomes. Freya likes to see the colors shift as they move from biome to biome, greenhouse to greenhouse, lab to lab. Wheat is blond in the Steppe, yellow in the Prairie. Algae in the labs is many different brownish greens.