After that meeting, Aram and Jochi walked home with Freya, and Badim welcomed them, and soon after that Devi showed up, home early for once. She welcomed the tall boy with a cheeriness that Freya hadn’t seen in years. They ate together talking around him, and very slowly he began to relax, warmed by the sound of their voices.
When Aram and Jochi left, Badim explained to Freya that Jochi had been an unapproved birth. His parents had undone their infertility, and broken the law to have him. If too many people did that, they would be doomed; so it wasn’t allowed. Freya nodded as Badim explained this, cutting him off with a wave of the hand: “I’ve heard all about this, believe me. People hate this rule.”
Jochi’s parents, Badim continued, had gone feral and escaped into the wilderness of Amazonia, where they were said to be living under the roots of a tree on a half-drowned island, with the monkeys and jaguars. No one had been sure what to do about that, but some of their own generation in Amazonia felt cheated by their act, and were angry with them. Some of these people had hunted the couple down, in an attempt to bring them to an accounting, and during this hunt the young father had been killed resisting capture. This had caused further grief and anger, because the man who had killed the father was charged with the crime, and exiled to Ring A, indeed to Siberia (metaphor or historical reference), and there forced to perform hard labor or face confinement. Meanwhile, back in Amazonia, the surviving mother and her illicit child were blamed for these sanctions against the supposedly law-abiding but inadvertent person who had killed the father; and the young mother, in her own grief for her murdered partner, had seemed to reject the child. That part of the story was unclear, but in any case, there were relatives of hers who didn’t want her to be bringing him up. So he had been neglected, even mistreated, which was very rare in the ship. A solution had had to be found, and then it was realized that he had some kind of gift with numbers, a gift so esoteric people didn’t even know what it was. Aram and Delwin had visited and examined the boy, and then Aram had asked to foster him, but that request had taken a long time to come to fruition. But now it had.
“Poor Jochi,” Freya said when Badim finished the story. “All that family stuff, and then a gift too. It’s more than anyone should have to bear.”
“There’s no such thing!” Devi shouted from the kitchen. She clattered dishes in the sink, took a long swig from the bottle of wine by the stove.
Ship came within the heliopause of Tau Ceti. They were soon to reach their destination. The local Oort cloud, ten times denser than the solar system’s, was nevertheless still not particularly dense; only three small course adjustments sufficed to allow ship to thread a route between ice planetesimals and continue with the final deceleration. Slower and slower they approached Planet E and E’s moon. They were just about there.
“Just about there,” Devi would repeat hoarsely when Badim or Freya said this. “Just in time, you mean!”
She was continuing to worry about a nematode infestation, the missing phosphorus, the bonded minerals, the corrosion, and all the other metabolic rifts. And her own health. She had a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Badim’s medical team had decided. There were thirty identified kinds of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and hers was said to be one of the more problematic ones. Lymphocytes were accumulating in her spleen and tonsils. The doctors in the relevant part of the medical group were trying to deal with her problem by way of various chemotherapies. She was very closely involved with all the treatment decisions, of course, as was Badim. She monitored her own bodily functions and levels as comprehensively as she monitored the ship and its biomes, and indeed often compared or cross-referenced the two.
Freya tried not to learn any more about the details of this problem than she had to. She knew enough to know she didn’t want to know more.
Devi saw this in her, and she didn’t like to talk about her health anyway; so a time came when she began muttering to Badim at night, when she thought Freya was asleep. This was somewhat like how they had behaved when Freya was a girl.
Devi also disappeared from time to time for a day or two, to spend time at the medical complex in Costa Rica. And she stopped leaving their apartment to work every day, a change that obviously startled Badim. Unlikely as it seemed, there she was, sitting in their kitchen throughout entire full days, working on screens. Sometimes she even worked from bed.
Sometimes, when Freya came into their kitchen, she found her mother looking at the communications feed from Earth. Now its information had taken nearly twelve years to reach them. Devi was not at all impressed with many aspects of the information being sent to them. Her comments were unvaryingly negative. But she watched anyway. There was a medical strand in the feed, designed to bring them new information on latest Terran practices, and she watched the abstracts from this strand most of all.
“So much is happening,” she said once to Badim, when Freya was in the next room. “They’re really pushing up the length of life there. Even the poorest are getting basic services and nutrition and vaccinations, so the infant and child mortality rates are going down, and average lifetimes are rising fast. Or at least they were twelve years ago.”
“No doubt they still are.”
“Yeah. Probably so.”
“See anything useful?”
“I don’t know. How would I tell?”
“I don’t know. We’re always checking it, but we might miss something.”
“It’s a world, that’s the thing. It takes a world.”
“So we have to make one.”
Devi made a sound between her lips.
After a long silence she said, “Meanwhile, our lifetimes are getting shorter. Take a look at this graph. Every generation has died earlier than the one before, at an accelerating rate through time. All across the board, not just the people, but everything alive. We’re falling apart.”
“Mmmm,” Badim said. “But it’s just island biogeography, right? The distance effect. And the farther the distance, the more the effect. In this case, twelve light-years. Must be the same as infinity.”
“So why didn’t they take that into account?”
“I think they tried to. We’re a heterogeneous immigration, as they would call it. A kind of archipelago of environments, all moving together. So they did what they could.”
“But didn’t they run the numbers? Didn’t they see it wouldn’t work?”
“Apparently not. I mean, they must have thought it would work, or they wouldn’t have done it.”
Devi heaved one of her big sighs. “I’d like to see their numbers. I can’t believe they didn’t put all that information here on board. It’s like they knew they were being fools, and didn’t want us to know. As if we wouldn’t find out!”
“The information is here on board,” Badim said. “It’s just that it doesn’t help us. We’re going to experience some allopatric speciation, that’s inevitable, and maybe even the point. There’ll be sympatric speciation within our eventual ecosystem, and we’ll all deviate together from Terran species.”
“But at different rates! That’s what they didn’t take into account. The bacteria are evolving faster than the big animals and plants, and it’s making the whole ship sick! I mean look at these figures, you can see it—”
“I know—”
“Shorter lifetimes, smaller bodies, longer disease durations. Even lower IQs, for God’s sake!”
“That’s just reversion to the mean.”
“You say that, but how could you tell? Besides, just how smart could the people who got into this ship have been? I mean, ask yourself—why did they do it? What were they thinking? What were they running away from?”