She was not unique, or even very unusual, in how well she knew the ship and its crew; every generation of the ship’s population had included wanderers, who became acquainted with more people than most. These wanderers were not the same as the phantoms, and there were more of them; on average they were about 25 percent of the population alive at any given time, although the rules regulating wandering had changed as the generations passed, and there were fewer than there had been in the voyage’s first sixty-eight years. What the wanderers served to demonstrate is that a population of just over two thousand people is one that a single human could, with an effort, come to know pretty well; but it had to be their project, or it wouldn’t happen.
In most of the biomes she was now expected in advance, on a schedule of sorts, and welcomed and enfolded into the life of whatever settlement she joined. People wanted her. Possibly it could be said that many seemed to feel protective of her. It was as if she were some kind of totemic figure, perhaps even what one might call a child of the ship (this of course a metaphor). That she was the tallest person aboard perhaps somehow added to this impression people had of her.
Thus over the following year she spent more time in the Himalayas, Yangtze, Siberia, Iran, Mongolia, the Steppes, the Balkans, and Kenya. Then she learned that the biomes she didn’t return to talked about this as a slight, and immediately she revised her plans, and went to every place she had stayed before, missing none of them, and setting up a pattern that was loose in the timing of her moves, but exact in terms of destination, in that she circled first Ring B and then Ring A, a month or two in each, and always westward. Excursions with Euan continued, but much less frequently, as Euan had settled down in Iran and was becoming a lake engineer and what he called an upstanding citizen. All this went on for almost another year.
During this time it has to be said that ship was aware, in a way no single human could be, that there were also people in the ship who did not like Freya, or did not like the way she was generally popular. This often seemed to be correlated with dislike for the various councils and governing bodies, especially for the birth committee, and it was a dislike that had often preexisted Freya and had to do with Devi, Badim, Badim’s parents (who were still important officials in Bengal), and Aram, among others on the councils. But as Freya was the one out there, she took the brunt of the negativity, which took the form of comments such as:
“She fools around with anyone who asks, the heartbreaker, the slut.”
“She can’t even add. She can barely talk.”
“If she didn’t look the way she did, no one would give her a second glance.”
“There isn’t a thought in her head, that’s why she keeps asking the same questions.”
“That’s why she spends all her time with mice. They’re the only ones she can understand.”
“Them and the sheep and cows. You can see her go cross-eyed.”
“What a cow she is, big tits, little brain.”
“And calm like cows.”
“Just as you would be when there’s not a thought in your head.”
It was interesting to record and tabulate comments of this kind, and find the correlations between the people who made these remarks and problems they had in other aspects of their lives. There turned out to be much else these people did not like, and in fact, none of them focused their displeasure on Freya for long. She came and went but their discontent endured, and found other people and things to dislike.
It was also interesting to note that Freya herself seemed to be aware, to some degree or other, of who these people were. She stiffened up in their presence; she did not meet their eye or go out of her way to talk to them; she did not talk as much to them, or laugh around them. Say what they would about her simplemindedness, she seemed to see or otherwise perceive much that no one ever said aloud, much that people even made efforts to conceal; and this without seeming to pay attention, as if out of the corner of her eye.
Devi was cooking dinner when they walked in. She saw Freya and eeked with surprise, then shot a glance at Badim.
Freya said, “I’m here to help,” and wept as they hugged. She had to lean down quite a bit to do this; her mother seemed to have shrunk in the time she had been away. Three years is a long time in human terms.
Devi pulled back to look up at her. “Good,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Because I can use the help. I’m sure your father told you.”
“We’ll both help. We’ll make landfall together.”
“Landfall!” Devi laughed. “What a word! What a thought.”
Badim said what he always did, in a pirate voice: “Land, ho!”
And it was true that in the screens showing the view ahead of the ship, there was a very bright star now, quite piercing in the black of space, too bright to look at directly without filtering; and with the filters applied one could see it was a little disk, which made it far bigger than any other star.
Tau Ceti. Their new sun.
Out in the farm’s greenhouse lab, Ellen, the leader of their soil studies group, showed them the roots of a cabbage. “These have been tweaked to have extra AVpl, but even so, it looks like lazy root to me.”
“Hmm,” Devi said, handling the plant and eyeing it closely. “At least it’s symmetrical.”
“Yes, but look how weak.” Ellen snapped the root in two. “And they’re not acidifying the soil like they used to either. I don’t get it.”
“Well,” Devi said, “it could just be another phosphorus problem.”
Ellen frowned. “But your fixer should be compensating for that.”
“It did, at first. But we’re still losing phosphorus somewhere.”
This was one of Devi’s most frequent complaints. They had to keep their phosphorus from getting bound with the iron, aluminum, or calcium in the soil, because if that happened the plants couldn’t unbind it. Keeping it unbound was hard to do without wrecking the soil in other ways, so the solution in Terran agriculture was to keep applying more of it in fertilizers, until the soil was saturated, at which point some would stay free for roots to take in. In the ship, that meant the need for phosphorus was such that its overall cycle had to be closed in its looping as tightly as possible, so they didn’t lose too much of it. But they did, despite all their efforts; it was what Devi called one of the Four Bad Metabolic Rifts. As a result, it was turning out that the people who had originally stocked the starship had not given them as much of an overstock of phosphorus as they had of many other elements; why they had done that, Devi said, she would never understand.
So they did everything they could think of to keep the phosphorus cycle looping without losses. Some phosphorus in their waste treatment plant combined with magnesium and ammonium to make struvite crystals, which were a nuisance to the machinery, but which could be scraped off and used as fertilizer, or broken up and combined with other ingredients to make other fertilizers. That put that phosphorus back into the loop. Then the wastewater was passed through a filter containing resin beads embedded with iron oxide nanoparticles; these binded to the phosphorus in the water, in a proportion of one phosphorus atom to four oxygen atoms, and the saturated beads could later be treated with sodium hydroxide, and the phosphorus would be released for reuse in fertilizers. The system had worked well for many years; they filtered the phosphorus at a 99.9 percent capture rate; but that tenth of a percent was beginning to add up. And now their reserve storage of phosphorus was nearly depleted. So they had to find some of the phosphorus that had gotten stuck somewhere, and return it to the cycle.
“It’s surely bound in the soil,” Ellen said.
“We may have to process all the soil in all the biomes,” Devi said, “plot by plot. See how much we’re finding after a few plots, and then see if that’s where it is.”
Ellen looked appalled at this. “That would be so hard! We’d have to pull all the irrigation.”
“True. We’ll have to take it out and then replace it. We can’t farm without phosphorus.”
Freya moved her lips in time with her mother’s as Devi concluded, “I don’t know what they were thinking.”
Ellen had heard this before too, and now she frowned. Whoever they were, whatever they had been thinking, they hadn’t included enough phosphorus. By the way Devi scowled, it seemed it must have been an important error.
Ellen shrugged. “Well, we’re almost there. So maybe it was enough after all.”
Devi just shook her head at this. When they were walking back to their apartment she said to Freya, “You’re going to have to take more chemistry.”
“It won’t do any good,” Freya said flatly. “It doesn’t stick. You know that. I’d rather focus on mechanics, if anything. Things I can see. I like it better when things stay still for me.”
Devi laughed shortly. “Me too.” She thought about it a while as they walked. “Okay, maybe more logistics. That’s pretty straightforward. The only math is the hundred percent rule, really. And it’s all there in the spreadsheets and flowcharts. There’s structure charts, work breakdowns, Gantt charts, projects management systems. There’s one system called MIMES, multi-scale integrated models of ecosystem services, and another one I like called MIDAS, marine integrated decision analysis system. You only need a little statistics for those; actually it’s mainly arithmetic. You can do that. I think you’ll like the Gantt charts, they look good. But, you know—you need to learn a little of everything, just to understand what kind of problems your colleagues in the other disciplines are facing.”
“A little, maybe. I’d rather just talk, or let them talk.”
“We’ll stick to logistics, then. Just go over the principles for the rest.”
Freya sighed. “But isn’t it true, what Ellen said? We’re almost there, so we won’t have to keep all the cycles so closed.”
“We hope. Also, we still have to get there. Two years is not nothing. We could get ourselves across eleven-point-eight light-years, and then run out of something crucial in the last tenth of a light-year. An irony that the people back on Earth wouldn’t hear about for twelve more years. Nor would they care when they did.”
“You really don’t like them.”
“We’re their experiment,” Devi said. “I don’t like that.”
“But the first generation were all volunteers, right? They won a competition to get to go, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. I think two million people applied. Or maybe it was twenty million.” Devi shook her head. “People will volunteer for any damn thing. But the ones designing the ship should have known better.”
“But a lot of the designers were in that first generation. They designed it because they wanted to go, right?”
Devi scowled, but it was her mock scowl; she was admitting Freya was right, even though she didn’t want to; that was what that look always said. She said, “Our ancestors were idiots.”
Freya said, “But how does that make us different from anyone else?”
Devi laughed and gave Freya a shove, then hugged her as they walked along. “Everyone in history, descendant of idiots? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s what it seems like.”
“Okay, maybe so. Let’s go home and cook some steaks. I want red meat. I want to chew on my ancestors.”
“Devi, please.”
“Well, we do it all the time, right? Everyone gets recycled into the system. There’s a lot of phosphorus in our bones that has to be retrieved. In fact I wonder if the missing phosphorus is in people’s cremation ashes! You’re only allowed to keep a pinch, but maybe it’s adding up.”
“Devi. You’re not going to take back everyone’s pinches of ancestral ash.”