Aurora

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When they are done building their card houses, they take turns flicking a plastic spoon across the kitchen at each other’s constructions. The rule is you have to launch the spoon by bending it between your hands, then letting it loose to spring through the air end over end. The spoons are light, and their little bowls catch the air so that their flights are erratic, and only seldom do they hit their targets. So they flick, and the spoon arcs across the floor veering this way and that—flick and miss, flick and miss—and then there will be a hit, thwack! But if the afflicted card house has been built well, and gets lucky, it will withstand the blow, or only partly fall, losing an outer rampart or bartizan. Badim has found names for all these features, which makes Devi laugh.

Every once in a while a single hit will simply crumple a card house completely, which always makes them cry out with surprise, and then laugh. Although sometimes a kill shot causes a bad look to cross Devi’s face. But mostly she laughs with her husband and child, and flicks the spoon when it’s her turn, her lips pursed in concentration. She leans back against the cabinets, wearily content. This Badim and Freya can do for her. Okay, she is often angry, but she can shut that in a box inside her at times like this, and besides, her anger is directed mostly at things outside Freya’s ken. She isn’t angry at Freya. And Freya does her best to keep it that way.

Then one day one of the printers breaks, and this puts Devi into an immediate fury of worry. No one sees it but Freya, as everyone is upset, scared, looking to Devi to make things right. So Devi hurries down to the print shop, dragging Freya along, talking on her headset and sometimes stopping mid-conversation to put her hand over the little mike in front of her mouth and curse sharply, or say “Wait just a second,” so she can talk to people coming up to her on the corniche. Often she puts her hand on these people’s arms to calm them down, and they do calm down, even though it’s clear to Freya that Devi herself is very mad. But the others do not see or feel it. It’s strange to think that Devi is such a good liar.

At the print shop a big group of people are packed into the little meeting room, looking at screens and talking things over. Devi shoos Freya to her corner with the cushions and paints and lots of building parts in boxes, then goes over to the biggest group and starts asking questions.

The printers are wonderful. They can make anything you want. Well, you can’t print elements; this is one of Devi’s sayings, mysterious to Freya in its import. But you can print DNA and make bacteria. You can print another printer. You could print out all the parts for a little spaceship and fly away if you wanted. All you need is the right feedstocks and designs, and they have feedstocks stored in the floors and walls of the ship, and a big library of designs, which they can alter however they want. They have the whole periodic table on board, almost, and they recycle everything they use, so they’ll never run out of anything they need. Even the stuff that turns to dust and falls to the ground will get eaten by bugs that like it, and thus get concentrated until people can harvest it back again out of the dead bugs. You can take dirt from anywhere in the ship and sift it for what you want. So the printers always have what they need to make stuff.

But now a printer is broken. Or maybe it’s all the printers at once. They aren’t working; people keep saying they. They aren’t obeying instructions or answering questions. The diagnostics say everything is fine, or say nothing. And nothing happens. It’s more than one printer.

Freya listens to the discussion for the way it sounds, trying to grasp the tenor of the situation. She concludes it is serious but not urgent. They aren’t going to die in the next hour. But they need the printers working. It’s maybe just the command and control systems that are at fault. Part of the ship’s mind, the AI that Devi talks to all the time. Although that’s bad. Or maybe the problem is mechanical. Maybe it’s just the diagnostics that have broken, failing to spot something obvious, something easy. Push the reset button. Hit it with a hammer.

Anyway it’s a big problem, so big that people are happy to put it on Devi. And she does not shirk to take it. She’s asking all the questions now. This is why some people call her the chief engineer, although never when she can hear them. She says it’s a group. Now, from the tone of her voice, Freya can tell it’s going to take a long time. Freya settles in to paint a picture. A sailing ship on a lake.

Later, much later, it’s Badim who wakes Freya, stretched out on her line of cushions, and takes her to the tram station, where they tram home to Nova Scotia, three biomes away. Devi is not going to be coming home that night. Nor is she home the next night. The morning after that, she is there asleep on the couch, and Freya lets her sleep, and then when she wakes, gives her a big hug.

“Hey, girl,” Devi says dully. “Let me go to the bathroom.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“I’ll cook scrambled eggs.”

“Good.” Devi staggers off to the bathroom. Back at the kitchen table she eats with her face right over the plate, shoveling it in. Freya would get told to sit up straight if she ate that way, but now she says nothing.

When Devi eases off and sits back, Freya serves her hot coffee and she slurps it down noisily.

“Are the printers working?” Freya asks, feeling that now it’s safe to ask.

“Yes,” Devi says grumpily. It turns out the problems with the diagnostics and the printers have all been one problem, which only made sense. It seems a gamma ray shot through the ship and made an unlucky hit, collapsing the wave function in a quantum part of the computer that runs the ship. It’s such bad luck that Devi wonders darkly if it might have been sabotage.

Badim doesn’t believe this, but he too is troubled. Particles shoot through the ship all the time. Thousands of neutrinos are passing through them right this second, and dark matter and God knows what, all passing right through them. Interstellar space is not at all empty. Mostly empty, but not.

Of course they too are mostly empty, Devi points out, still grumpy. No matter how solid things seem, they are mostly empty. So things can pass through each other without any problems. Except for once in a while. Then a fleck hits something as small as it, and both go flying off, or twist in position. Then things could break and get hurt. Mostly these little hurts mean nothing, they can’t be felt and don’t matter. Every body and ship is a community of things getting along, and a few little things knocked this way or that don’t matter, the others take up the slack. But every once in a while something bangs into something and breaks it, in a way that matters to the larger organism. Can range in effect from a twinge to death outright. Can be like one of their spoons knocking flat a house of cards.

“No one wants to hurt the ship,” Badim said. “We don’t have anybody that deranged.”

“Maybe,” Devi says.

Badim eyeballs Freya for Devi to see, as if Freya can’t see this, though of course she does. Devi rolls her eyes to remind Badim of this. How often Freya has seen this eye dance of theirs.

“Well anyway, the printers are back up again,” Badim reminds her.

“I know. It’s just that whenever quantum mechanics is involved, I get scared. There’s no one in this ship who really understands it. We can follow the diagnostics, and things get fixed, but we don’t know why. And that I don’t like.”

“I know,” Badim says, looking at her fondly. “My Sherlock. My Galileo. Mrs. Fixit. Mrs. Knows How Everything Works.”

She grimaces. “Mrs. Ask the Next Question, you mean. I can always ask questions. But I’d rather have the answers.”

“The ship has the answers.”

“Maybe. She’s pretty good, I’ll give her that. She’s the one who caught it this time, and that was not an easy catch. Although it was in part of her. But still, I’m beginning to think that the recursive induction we’ve been introducing is having an effect.”

Badim nods. “You can see it’s stronger. And it’ll keep doing it. You’ll keep doing it.”

“We have to hope so.”

Sometime in the middle of the night, Freya wakes and sees a light is on in the kitchen. Dim and bluish; the light from their screen. She gets up and creeps down the hall past her parents’ room, where she can hear Badim faintly snoring. No surprise: Devi up at night.

She is sitting at the table, talking quietly with the ship, the part of it that she sometimes calls Pauline, which is her particular interface with the ship’s computer, where all of her personal records and files are cached, in a space no one else can access. Often it has seemed to Freya that Devi is more comfortable with Pauline than with any real person. Badim says the two of them have a lot in common: big, unknowable, all-encompassing, all-enfolding. Generous to others, selfless. Possibly a kind of folly a duh, which he explains is French for “a two-person dance of craziness.” Folie à deux. Not at all uncommon. Can be a good thing.