Many of Hong Kong’s buildings emerge from the water of the city’s bay, a result no doubt of the big sea level rise, which some of her shipmates now claim to have read about or seen in the feed, but now it’s here below them, in the canals that thread between all the buildings closest to water, and the long, narrow boats grumbling airily past them, leaving in their wakes a slosh of waves and smell of salt and burnt cooking oil. Cry of wheeling gulls. Hot, humid, reeking. If any of their tropical biomes had felt as hot and humid as this, had smelled like this, they would have been sure something had gone wrong.
Behind all the skyscrapers are green hills, dotted everywhere with buildings. They’re still looking around at all this tremendous landscape when they are taken off their township, led into a long low ferry. It’s kind of like moving in a tram from one biome to another. No need to go outside the long cabin of the ferry, but Freya’s in a panic at the thought that she may have to. She’s been provided with boots that come up to just above her knees, and these seem to give her more support and balance than she’s been used to. She still can’t feel her feet, but as she walks the boots seem to know what she is trying for, and with some care she can walk pretty well.
Then up a tubular walkway, somewhat like one of their spoke interiors; then into an elevator car; then out into a room that opens out all along one wall to another open deck, located apparently some hundreds of meters above the bay. Up there in the sky, just under an inrush of low clouds, the marine layer, as Badim calls it. Whose idea was this?
Now the people of the ship are going out onto the open deck and very often falling down, many weeping or crying out, many going back inside the room to seek shelter. Freya huddles by the elevator. The starship’s people see her there and come over and hug her, and some of their hosts are laughing, others crying, all presumably moved to see people who have never been outdoors try to come to terms with it.
They’re like the winter lambs, some translation box says, let out of the barn in the spring.
A lot of their legs are messed up. Come on, get them back inside, the same box and voice says. You’re going to kill them with this stuff.
The box’s voice has a Terran accent, speaks English harshly and with a lot of tonal bounce. As if, Badim says, English were Chinese. Hard to understand.
Crying with embarrassment and frustration, feeling her face burn red, Freya breaks from her crowd and staggers on her new boots right out the open doorway wall, out onto the open deck, keeping her eyes squeezed nearly shut. Feeling faint, she walks to a chest-high wall with a railing on its top, something she can grasp like a lifeline.
She stands there in the wind and opens her eyes and looks around, her stomach like a black hole inside her, pulling her in. Sun incandescing through the clouds low overhead.
That’s a mackerel sky, says the translation box. Nice pattern. Warp and weft. Might rain tomorrow.
Oh my God, someone is saying over and over, and then she feels in her mouth that it’s her saying it. She stops herself with a fist in her mouth. Hangs on to the railing with her other hand. She can see so far she can’t focus on it. She closes her eyes, clenches the railing hard with both hands. Keeps her eyes closed so she won’t throw up. She needs to get back into the room, but is afraid to walk. She will fall, crawl back desperately afraid, everyone will see it. She’s stuck there, and so puts her forehead down on the railing. Tries to relax her stomach.
She feels Badim’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”
“Not really.”
After a while she says, “I wish Devi could have seen this. She would have liked it more than me.”
“Yes.”
Badim sits on the deck beside her, his back against the retaining wall. His face is tilted to the sky. “Yes, she would have liked this.”
“It’s so big!”
“I know.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”
“Do you want to move back from the edge?”
“I don’t think I can move yet. What we can see from here”—waving briefly at the bay and ocean, the hills, the skyscraper city springing up around them, the glare of the sun slanting through the clouds—“just what we can see from here, right now, is bigger than our whole ship!”
“That’s right.”
“I can’t believe it!”
“Believe.”
“But we were in a toy!”
“Yes. Well. It had to be as small as they thought would work, so they could push it to a good interstellar speed. It was a case of conflicting priorities. So they did what they could.”
“I can’t believe they thought it would be okay.”
“Well. Do you remember that time you told Devi that you wanted to live in your dollhouse, and she said you already did?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, she did. She got really mad.”
“Oh that brings it back! That time she got mad!”
Badim laughs. Freya slides down beside him and laughs too.
Badim puts his hands under his sunglasses, wipes tears from his eyes. “Yes,” he says. “She got mad a lot.”
“She did. But I guess I never really knew why, until now.”
Badim nods. He keeps his hands under his glasses, over his eyes. “She didn’t either, not really. She never saw this, so she didn’t really know. But now we know. I’m glad. She would be glad too.”
Freya tries to see her mother’s face, hear her voice. She can still do it; Devi is still there, especially her voice. Her voice, the ship’s voice. Euan’s voice, Jochi’s voice. All the voices of her dead. Euan on Aurora, loving the wind as it knocked him around. She reaches up and grabs the railing, pulls herself up and stares down at the great city. She holds on for dear life. She’s never felt sicker.
They’re put on a train to Beijing. They ride in broad plush seats, on the upper story of two long cars, linked like two biomes by a passageway. They constitute a moving party, with windows and skylight domes and the land flowing past them, flat and green, hilly and brown, on and on and on and on.
“Never have we moved so fast!” someone exclaims. It is indeed astounding how quickly the train moves over the landscape. It’s going 500 kilometers per hour, one of their hosts tells them. Aram and Badim confer, Aram smiles briefly and shakes his head, Badim laughs and says to the others, “For most of our lives we were moving one million times faster than this.”
They cheer themselves. They laugh at the craziness of it.
As the train glides with its startling rapidity over this impossibly big world, day turns to night, by way of the most lurid sunset they have yet seen, fuschia clouds blazing in a pale sky that is lemon over the black horizon, bending into green above that, then higher still a blue some say is called cyan blue, and over that an indigo that spreads all the way over their skylight to the east. All these intense transparent colors are there at once, and yet none of their Terran hosts are taking the slightest notice; they are all watching the screens on their wrists, screens that sometimes exhibit tiny images of the voyagers.
They can scroll for themselves on their wristpads and see what people are saying about them. But it’s disturbing to do so, because then they see and hear how much resentment, contempt, anger, and violent hatred is directed at them. Apparently to many people they are cowards and traitors. They have betrayed history, betrayed the human race, betrayed evolution, betrayed the universe itself. How will the universe know itself? How will consciousness expand? They have let down not just humanity, but the universe!