“Not yet,” the boy admits. “But we’ll join them when we can. When they contact us.”
“Why should they contact you?”
“How do you think they got away themselves? What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?”
“I’m Euan.”
His teeth are white in his dark muzzle. She is dazzled by their headlamps. She can only see what they look at, and now they’re all looking at her.
In the light reflecting from her she sees a rock in one of their wall holes. She seizes it up and holds it threateningly. “I’ll be going home now,” she says. “You aren’t real ferals.”
They stare at her. As she climbs up cut earthen steps out the hole, Euan reaches up and pinches her on the butt, trying for between her legs, it feels like. She swings the rock at him, then dashes through the park and away. When she gets home Badim is just calling for her down in the courtyard. She goes upstairs and doesn’t say anything about it.
Two days later she sees the boy Euan with some adults on the far side of the square, and says to Badim, “Do you know who those people are?”
“I know everyone,” Badim says in his joking voice, although it’s basically true, as far as Freya can tell. He peers across at them. “Hmm, well, maybe I don’t.”
“That boy there is a jerk. He pinched me.”
“Hmm, not good. Where did this happen?”
“In the park.”
He looks more closely at them. “Okay, I’ll see if I can find out. They live over there, I think.”
“Yes, of course they do.”
“I see. I hadn’t noticed.”
This strikes Freya as unlike him. “Don’t you like our new place?”
Their recent move was from Yangtze to Nova Scotia, a big move, as being from Ring A to Ring B. But everyone moves sometime, it’s important, it keeps mixing people together. Part of the plan.
“Oh I like it all right. I’m just not used to it yet. I don’t know everyone here yet. You spend more time here than I do.”
That evening as they eat a dinner of salad, bread, and turkey burgers at the kitchen table, Freya says, “So, are there really ferals? Can there be people hiding in the ship that you don’t know about?”
Badim and Devi look at her, and she explains: “Some of the kids in this town say there are ferals, who live off by themselves. I figured it was just a story.”
“Well,” Badim says, “it’s a little bit of a controversy on the council.”
Badim has been serving on the ship’s security council, and was recently made a permanent member. “Everyone is chipped at birth, and you can’t get the chip out very easily, it would take an operation. Some people may have done it anyway, of course. Or managed to deactivate them. It would explain some things.”
“What if the hidden people had babies?”
“Well, yes, that would explain even more things.” Again he stares at her. “Who are these kids you’ve been talking to?”
“Just ones in the park. They’re just talking.”
Badim shrugs. “It’s an old story. It comes up from time to time. Any time a security case goes unsolved there are people ready to bring it up. I guess it’s better than hearing about the five ghosts again.”
They laugh at this. But Freya also feels a shiver; she once saw one of the five ghosts, in the doorway of her bedroom.
“But probably there aren’t any,” Badim says, and goes on to explain that the gas balance of the ship’s air is so finely tuned that if there was a feral population it would be noticeable in the changed proportion of oxygen to carbon dioxide.
Devi shakes her head at this. “There’s too much random flux to be sure. It’s enough to disguise an extra couple dozen people, maybe more.” So to her the ferals are possible. “They could throw their salts out and grab some phosphorus and get their soils back in balance. In just the way we can’t.”
No matter which way Devi sets off, no matter how they try to distract her, she always ends up in this same spot in her head, in what she calls the metabolic rifts. Like a place where cracks in the floor have opened up. When Freya sees it happen again, a little worm of fear wakes in her and crawls around in her belly. She and Badim share a look; they both love a person who will not listen to them.
Badim nods politely at Devi; next time the security council meets, he says, he’ll mention to his colleagues that Devi feels there is no gas balance proof that ferals don’t exist. And strange things do happen in the ship, so one explanation could be that people who aren’t part of the official population are doing them. It’s more likely, Badim jokes again, than it being the work of the five ghosts.
The ghosts were supposed to be of the people who died in the original acceleration of the ship, the great scissoring. Devi rolls her eyes at this old story, wonders aloud how it endures for generation after generation. Freya keeps her eyes on her plate. She definitely saw one of the ghosts. It was after they took a trip up to the spine and visited one of the turbine rooms next to the reactor, when it was empty for repairs, and walked among the giant turbines; that night Freya had a dream in which the repair team forgot they were in there and locked them in, and the steam jetted into the big room to spin the turbines, and as they were being parboiled and cut to pieces Freya woke up, gasping and crying, and there in the doorway of her room stood a shadowy figure she could see through, a man looking at her with a wolfish little smile.
Why did you wake up from that dream? he asked.
She said, We were going to get killed!
He shook his head. If the ship tries to kill you when you are dreaming, let it. Something more interesting than death will occur.
It was obvious by his transparency that he ought to know.
Freya nodded uneasily, then woke up again. But as she sat up, it seemed to her that she had never really been asleep. Later she tried to decide it was all a dream, but no other dream she had ever had had been quite like that one. So now, as Badim declares that the five ghosts would be better than ferals, she’s not so sure. How many dreams do you remember, not just the next day, but the rest of your life?
Evenings at home are the best. Crèche is over and done, her time with all the kids she lives with so much, spending more time with them than she does with her parents, if you don’t count sleeping, so that it gets so tiresome to make it through all the boring hours, talking, arguing, fighting, reading alone, napping. All the kids are smaller than she is now, it’s embarrassing. It’s gone on so long. They make fun of her, if they think she isn’t listening to them. They take care with that, because once she heard them making those jokes and she ran over roaring and knocked one of them to the ground and beat on his raised arms. She got in trouble for it, and since then they are cautious around her, and a lot of the time she keeps to herself.
But now she’s home, and all is well. Badim usually cooks dinner, and fairly often invites friends over for a drink after dinner. They compare the drinks they’ve made, Delwin’s white wine, and the red wines of Song and Melina, which are always declared excellent, especially by Song and Melina. These days Badim always invites their new next-door neighbor, Aram, to join them too. Aram is a tall man, older than the others, a widower they call him, because his wife died. He’s important not just in Nova Scotia but in the whole ship, being the leader of the math group, a small collection of people not well-known, but said by Badim to be important. Freya finds him forbidding, so silent and stern, but Badim likes him. Even Devi likes him. When they talk about their work, he can do it without making Devi tense, which is very unusual. He makes brandy instead of wine.
After the tastings, they talk or play cards, or recite poems they have memorized, or even make up on the spot. Badim collects people he likes, Freya can see that. Devi mostly sits quietly in the corner and sips a glass of white wine without ever finishing it. She used to play cards with them, but one time Song asked her to read their tarot cards, and Devi refused. I don’t do that anymore, she said firmly. I was too good at it. Which caused a silence. Since that incident she doesn’t play any card games with them. She did still make card houses on the kitchen floor, however, when they were home alone.