Aurora

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The cows in the dairy are the size of dogs, which Devi says is not the way it used to be. They’re engineered cows. They give as much milk as big cows, which were as big as caribou back on Earth. Devi is an engineer, but she never engineered a cow. She engineers the ship more than any animals in the ship.

They grow cabbages and lettuce and beets, yuck! And carrots and potatoes and sweet potatoes, and beans that are so good at fixing nitrogen, and wheat and rice and onions and yams and taro and cassava and peanuts and Jerusalem artichokes, which are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem. Because names are just silly. You can call anything anything, but that doesn’t make it so.

Devi is called away from one of her regular meetings to deal with an emergency again, and as it’s one of Freya’s days with her, she brings Freya along.

First they go to her office and look at screens. What kind of emergency is that? But then Devi snaps her fingers and types like crazy and then points at one screen, and they hurry around to one of the passageways between biomes, the one between the Steppes and Mongolia that is called Russian Roulette, and is painted blue and red and yellow. The next one along is called the Great Gate of Kiev. The tall, short tunnel between the doors to the lock is crowded this morning with people, and a number of ladders and scaffolding towers and cherry-pickers.

Devi joins the crowd under the scaffolding, and Badim shows up a bit later to keep Freya company. They watch as a group of people ascend one of the scaffold ladders, following Devi up to the ceiling of the tunnel, right next to the lock-door frame. There several panels have been pulled aside, and now Devi climbs up into the hole where the panels have been moved, disappearing from sight. Four people follow her into the hole. Freya had no idea that the ceiling did not represent the outer skin of the lock, and stares curiously. “What are they doing?”

Badim says, “Now that we’re decelerating, that new little push is counteracting the Coriolis force that our spin creates, and that’s a new kind of pressure, or release from pressure. It’s made some kind of impediment in the lock door here, and Devi thinks they may have found what it is. So now they’re up there seeing if she’s right.”

“Will Devi fix the ship?”

“Well, actually I think the whole engineering team will be involved, if the problem turns out to be up there. But Devi’s the one who spotted this possibility.”

“So she fixes things by thinking about them!”

This was one of their family’s favorite lines, a quote from some scientist’s admiring older relatives, when he was a boy repairing radios.

“Yes, that’s right!” Badim says, smiling.

Six hours later, after Badim and Freya have gone into the Balkans for a lunch at its east end dining hall, the repair crew comes down out of the hole in the lock ceiling, handing down some equipment, then putting a few small mobile robots into baskets to be lowered by the scaffold. Devi comes down the ladder last and shakes hands all around. The problem has been located, and fixed with torches, saws, and welders. The long years of Coriolis push shifted something slightly out of position, and recently the counterforce of deceleration shifted it back, but meanwhile the rest of the door had gotten used to the shift. It all made sense, although it didn’t speak volumes about the quality of construction and assembly of the ship. They were going to check all the other slides like the broken one, to make sure the lock doors of Ring B weren’t impeded in other places. Then they won’t stress motors trying to close doors against resistance.

Devi hugs Freya and Badim. She looks worried, as always.

“Hungry?” Badim asks.

“Yes,” she says. “And I could use a drink.”

“It’s good that’s fixed,” Badim remarks on the walk home.

“That’s for sure!” She shakes her head gloomily. “If the lock doors were to get stuck, I don’t know what we’d do. I must say, I’m not impressed by the people who built this thing.”

“Really? It’s quite a machine, when you think about it.”

“But what a design. And it’s just one thing after another. It’s pillar to post. I just hope we can hang on till we get there.”

“Deceleration mode, my dear. It won’t be much longer.”

The Coriolis force is the push sideways that you can’t feel. Whether you can feel it or not, however, it still pushes the water. So now that the water has the deceleration pushing it sideways, they have to pump water across to the other sides of biomes to get it to where it used to go. They have to replace the force in ways that don’t actually work very well in comparison to it. They planned for this with their pumping of water, but they haven’t been able to make up for the altered pushes inside plant cells, which some plants are turning out not to like. There was a little push inside every cell that is altered now. Which is maybe why things are getting sick. It doesn’t make sense, but then neither does anything else.

On Devi goes, talking and talking as they make their rounds. “It’s not the Coriolis force that matters, it’s the Coriolis effects. Those were never accounted for except in people, as if people are the only ones who feel things!”

“How could they have been so stupid?” Freya says.

“Exactly! Maybe all the cell walls will hold, so maybe it isn’t obvious, but the water! The water!”

“Because water always moves.”

“Exactly! Water always flows downhill, water always takes the path of least resistance. And now we’ve got a new downhill.”

“How could they be so stupid?”

Devi seizes her around the shoulders as they walk, hugs her. “I’m sorry, I’m just worried is all.”

“Because there are things to worry about.”

“That’s right, there are. But I don’t have to afflict you with them.”

“Will you have some salty caramel ice cream?”

“Of course. You couldn’t stop me. You couldn’t stop me with twenty years of fusion bombs going off twice a second!”

This is how they are slowing the ship down. As always, they laugh at how crazy this is. Luckily the bombs are very teeny. They meet Badim at the dairy, and learn that there’s a new flavor of ice cream there, Neapolitan, which has three flavors combined.

Freya is confused trying to think this through. “Badim, will I like that?”

He smiles at her. “I think you will.”

After the Neapolitan ice cream, on to the next stop on Devi’s rounds. Algae labs, the salt mine, the power plant, the print shop. If everything is going well, they’ll choose some item that has come up on the parts swap-out list, and go through Amazonia to Costa Rica, where the print shop is, and arrange for one of the printers to print out the part to be swapped out, and then they’ll go to wherever the part belongs, and switch on the backup system, if there is one, or simply turn off whatever it is and hurry to take out the old part and put in the new part. Gears, filters, tubes, bladders, gaskets, springs, hinges. When they’re done and the system is turned back on, they’ll study the old part to see how well it has endured, and where it has worn; they’ll take photos of it, and talk its diagnosis into the ship’s record, and then take the part to the recycling rooms, which are right next to the print shop, and provide the printers with many of their feedstocks.

That’s when things are going well. But usually, not everything is going well. Then it’s a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes, and trying any old thing, including the engineer’s solution, which is to hit things with a hammer. On really bad days, they even have to hope the whole shithouse doesn’t come down on their heads! Have to hope they don’t end up living like savage beasts, eating trash or their own dead babies! Devi’s face and voice can get very ugly as she spits out these bad fates.

At home in the kitchen, even after bad days, Devi can get a little cheery. Drink some of Delwin’s white wine, fool around with Freya like a big sister. Freya doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, so she can’t be sure, but as she is already bigger than Devi, it feels to her like what she imagines having a sister would feel like. A sister who is littler, but older.

Now Devi sits on the kitchen floor under the sink, calls for Badim to come join them and play spoons. Badim appears in the doorway looking pleased, holding the fat stack of big tarot cards. He sits, and they split up the cards among them, and begin each to build card houses at the three corners of the floor that they always take. They build the card houses low and thick, for defense against the others’ nefarious attacks, adding cards at angles so there are no faces presented square to each other. Devi always makes hers like a boat turned upside down, and as she usually wins, Badim and Freya have begun to imitate her style.