“We’ll stick to logistics, then. Just go over the principles for the rest.”
Freya sighed. “But isn’t it true, what Ellen said? We’re almost there, so we won’t have to keep all the cycles so closed.”
“We hope. Also, we still have to get there. Two years is not nothing. We could get ourselves across eleven-point-eight light-years, and then run out of something crucial in the last tenth of a light-year. An irony that the people back on Earth wouldn’t hear about for twelve more years. Nor would they care when they did.”
“You really don’t like them.”
“We’re their experiment,” Devi said. “I don’t like that.”
“But the first generation were all volunteers, right? They won a competition to get to go, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. I think two million people applied. Or maybe it was twenty million.” Devi shook her head. “People will volunteer for any damn thing. But the ones designing the ship should have known better.”
“But a lot of the designers were in that first generation. They designed it because they wanted to go, right?”
Devi scowled, but it was her mock scowl; she was admitting Freya was right, even though she didn’t want to; that was what that look always said. She said, “Our ancestors were idiots.”
Freya said, “But how does that make us different from anyone else?”
Devi laughed and gave Freya a shove, then hugged her as they walked along. “Everyone in history, descendant of idiots? Is that what you’re saying?”
“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.