“But I think I am! Take them back and eat them!”
Freya laughed, and for a while they walked arm in arm down the street from the tram stop to Badim and dinner.
“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.
“That’s probably true on Earth too.”
“Do you really think so? Why wouldn’t it be worse in here? Fifty thousand times smaller surface area? It isn’t an island, it’s a rat’s cage.”
“A hundred square kilometers, dear. It’s a good-sized island. In twenty-four semiautonomous biomes. An ark, a true world ship.”
No reply from Devi.
Finally Badim said, “Look, Devi. We’re going to make it. We’re almost there. We’re on track and on schedule, and almost every biome is extant and doing pretty well, or at least hanging in there. There’s been a little regression and a little diminution, but pretty soon we’ll be on E’s moon, and flourishing.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t we?”
“Oh come on, Beebee. Any number of factors could impact us once we get there. The probes only had a couple of days each to collect data, so we don’t really know what we’re coming into.”
“We’re coming into a water world in the habitable zone.”
Again no reply from Devi.
“Come on, gal,” Badim said quietly. “You should get to bed. You need more sleep.”
“I know.” Devi’s voice was ragged. “I can’t sleep anymore.” She had lost 11 kilograms.
“Yes you can. Everyone can. You can’t not sleep.”
“You would think.”
“Just stop looking at these screens for a while. They’re waking you up, not just the content, but the light in your eyes. Close your eyes and listen to music. Number every worry, and let them go with their numbers. You’ll fall asleep well before you run out of numbers. Come on, let me get you into bed. Sometimes you have to let me help you.”
“I know.”
They began to move, and Freya slipped back toward her bedroom.
Before she got there she heard Devi say, “I feel so bad for them, Bee. There aren’t enough of them. Not everyone is born to be a scientist, but to survive they’re all going to have to do it, even the ones who aren’t good at it, who can’t. What are they supposed to do? On Earth they could find something else to do, but here they’ll just be failures.”
“They’ll have E’s moon,” Badim said quietly. “Don’t feel bad for them. Feel bad for us, if you like. But we’ll make it too. And meanwhile, we have each other.”
“Thank God for that,” Devi said. “Oh Beebee, I hope I make it! Just to see! But we keep slowing down.”
“As we have to.”
“Yes. But it’s like trying to live past the end of Zeno’s paradox.”
The brief tug of H’s gravity, combined with a planned rocket deceleration, created enough delta v to slosh the water in the storage tanks, and thus cause some alarms in ship to go off, which then caused various systems to shut down; and some of these systems did not come back on line when they were instructed to.
The most important of the systems that did not come back was the cooling system for the ship’s nuclear reactor, which should not have gone off in the first place, unless an explosion in it was imminent. At the same time, the backup cooling system did not start up to replace its function.
More ship alarms immediately informed the operations staff of this problem, and quickly (sixty-seven seconds) identified the sources of the problem in both cooling systems. In the primary system, there had been a signal from the on-off switch directing it to turn off, caused either by computer malfunction or a surge in the power line to the switch; in the backup system, it was a stuck valve in a pipe joint near the outer wall of the reactor.
Devi and Freya joined the repair crew hurrying up to the spine, where the reactor was continuing to operate, but in a rapidly warming supply of coolant.
“Help me go fast,” Devi said to Freya.
So Freya held her by the arm and hurried by her side, lifting her outright and running with her when they had steps or bulkheads to get through. When they got to the spine they took an elevator, and Freya simply held Devi in her arms and then lifted her around when the elevator car stopped and g-forces pushed them across the car; after that she carried her mother like a dog or a small child, hauling her around the spine’s microgravity. Devi said nothing, did not curse as she did sometimes in their kitchen; but the look on her face was the same as in those moments. She looked as if she wanted to kill something.
But she kept her mouth clamped shut, and when they got to the power plant offices she grasped a wall cleat and a desk, and let Aram and Delwin do the talking with the team there while she scanned the screens. The backup cooling system was controlled from the room next door, and the monitors indicated the problem was inside the pipes that passed through the room beyond; it still looked like it was just a stuck valve, as far as the monitor in the joint could tell. But that was enough.