Freya and Badim went with him. Aram led them down to a public building by Long Pond, into a pub and up the stairs to a big room with a window overlooking the water.

There were four people there. Aram introduced Freya and Badim to them-"Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester"-then led them over to a table and invited them to sit. When they were seated, Aram sat beside Freya and leaned over to prop a screen on the table, where Badim could see it also.

"The referendum was too close," Aram said. "The most votes were cast for our preferred option, but we'll need to convince more people to join us. Convincing them might be easier if we make it clear that the ship can be made as strong as it was when it left the solar system."

Aram brought up charts on the table screen. Badim got out his reading glasses and leaned closer to read it. He said, "What about our basic power supply, that would be my first question."

"A good point, of course. The ship's main nuclear reactor has fuel for another five hundred years, so we're okay there. As for propulsion fuel, we can send probes to gather hydrogen three and deuterium from Planet F's atmosphere. We would collect the same amount that we burned to decelerate coming in, and then burn it to accelerate out."

"But if we use it for accelerating," Badim said, "how will we decelerate when we get back to the solar system?"

"That too will have to be reversed. We'll have to ask the people in the solar system to point the laser beam that accelerated us back at us as we come in, to slow us down the same way they speeded us up. Possibly the same laser generator orbiting Saturn will be available."

"Really?" Badim said. "This is the plan?"

Then came a knock at the door.

There were thirty-two people outside that door, twenty-six men and six women, several of the men taller and heavier than the median size of the population. Most of them were from Ring A biomes. When they were all in the room it was extremely crowded.

One of the men, one Sangey, from the Steppes, flanked by three of the biggest of the men, said, "This is an illegal meeting. You are discussing public policy in a private gathering of political leaders, as specifically forbidden by the riot laws of Year 68. So we are placing you under arrest. If you come peacefully we'll let you walk. If you resist you'll be tied to gurneys and carried."

"There is no law against private discussions of the health of the ship!" Aram said angrily. "It's you breaking the law here!"

All their voices were now at least twice as loud as normal.

"Will you walk or be carried?" Sangey said.

"You'll definitely have to carry me," Aram said, and then charged Sangey. In a melee filled with shouting, he was subdued by the men flanking Sangey. Aram lashed out at Sangey over one guard's shoulder as he was lifted off his feet, and his fist landed on Sangey's nose. At the sight of blood the others stuffing the room surged in toward Aram, shouting furiously.

Badim stood over Freya in her chair, preventing her from rising to her feet. "Stay out of this," he cried at her, face-to-face. "This is not our fight here!"

"Yes it is!" Freya shouted, but as she could not rise without throwing her father to the side, she kicked viciously past him as they clung to each other, striking nearby knees and causing some of their assailants to crash together and then fall to the floor, crying out angrily. Those still standing shouted and wrestled Badim and Freya both to the ground, pummeling and kicking them. Seeing this Aram flew into a rage and struck out convulsively. More punched noses and cracked lips made several faces bloody, so that the white-eyed shouting redoubled again in volume and intensity.

The sight of blood during a fight causes a very intense adrenaline surge. Voices shout hoarsely; eyes go round, such that white is visible all the way around the iris; movements are faster and stronger; heart rate and blood pressure rise. This was demonstrated many times in Year 68.

The strategic foresight in bringing many large men to arrest the group in the room soon paid off, as the seven people in the meeting were, despite the close quarters and resultant chaos, knocked down, subdued, held fast, secured by medical restraints, lifted kicking out of the room and the building, laid onto gurneys in the street outside, and tied down to them. Badim and Freya were handled like all the rest, and Freya had a swollen left eye.

The crowd that gathered to witness this action was composed almost entirely of people from Ring A biomes. Residents of the Fetch were slow to realize what was happening in their midst, and there was no effective resistance to this outside group. The gurneys were all conveyed up to the spine and along it to Spoke Three, and down it to the infirmary in Kiev, which had been used as a jail in Year 68, though no one alive knew that. The seven arrested ones were locked up in three rooms there.

Elsewhere in the ship, news of the incarceration of Aram's group spread fast. When their friends and supporters heard about it, they gathered in San Jose's plaza and loudly protested the action. The administrators of Costa Rica said they did not know what had happened, and suggested discussing what to do in a regathering of a general assembly similar to the one just recently held. A significant number of the protestors refused to debate what they called a criminal action; their friends had to be released immediately, and only then could any outstanding issues be discussed. Kidnapping could never be rewarded with political legitimacy, people shouted, or else it would happen again and again, and there would be no more political discourse in the ship, or rational planning of any kind.

As that afternoon passed, the shouting became much like the sound of broken waves striking the corniche at the seawall of Long Pond. It was a roar.

Three hours after gathering, the crowd in San Jose had inspired itself to action and began marching toward Kiev, chanting slogans and singing songs. There were approximately 140 people in the crowd, and they had made it to the entryway of Spoke Four, packed around the tunnel there to a depth of around two hundred meters, when a smaller crowd of approximately fifty people poured out of the spoke tunnel, throwing rocks and shouting.

It was as if fire and combustible fuel had come in contact: a furious fight erupted. It was still mostly a matter of shoving and hitting, but photos and clips of the melee were sent through the ship right in the midst of it, alerting all to the situation. Meanwhile, in all twelve biomes of Ring A, gangs stormed the government houses and took possession of them. Groups also seized and closed all the locks between Ring A's biomes, and likewise closed the six entryways to the A spokes. It seemed likely that these were coordinated actions, planned in spaces where the ship had no microphones, or where the microphones had somehow been rendered inoperative. Either that or spontaneous actions self-organized very quickly, which of course they did in many phenomena.

In the Spoke Four lock where the fighting still went on, news of developments elsewhere spread, and it became clear that the fight there was a kind of invasion of Ring B by the groups in Ring A that had taken possession of the government houses. The fight at the entry to Spoke Four then became a pitched battle, with people from everywhere in Ring B rushing around through the locks to join the fray. Nonetheless, the attacking group continued to emerge from the spoke entryway, more every minute, and they were taking over much of Costa Rica and many of the streets of San Jose. Rocks began to fly through the air. One struck a man in the head, and down he went, unconscious and bleeding. Now people were screaming. Reinforcements from around Ring B arrived, enough so that the group emerging from the spoke was stopped in its advance on the Government House. People on both sides now were hurling rocks from the parks, paving stones from the plazas, knives from kitchens, plates, other objects. Furniture was thrown out of buildings into the streets and piled into barricades, some of which were set on fire.

Fire anywhere in the ship was extremely dangerous.

Against such ferocious resistance, the invasive group could not hold its ground. More than a dozen people lay on the ground bleeding. As the invaders retreated to the lock of Spoke Four, still throwing objects at their opponents, there were groups elsewhere around Ring B hurrying up the other spokes toward the spine. The spine was already occupied by groups from Ring A, and they closed the entryway doors of B's inner ring all the way around, so that no matter how intense the assaults by people from Ring B, they could make no further progress toward the spine. And the spine held the power plant, along with all the other crucial central functions of the ship, including the ship's operating AI.

So now Ring A and the spine were both controlled by people calling themselves the stayers. No one who might want to free Aram and Freya and Badim and their four companions could come anywhere near the infirmary in Kiev.

Instead, the antagonists were now separated by locked doors. And sixteen people in Ring B were dead, killed either when hit by objects, or when cut or impaled, or when trampled by crowds. Another ninety-six people were injured. All the infirmaries in Ring B soon were filled with hurt people, and the medical teams in them were completely overwhelmed. Eighteen more people died in the following hours as a result of their injuries. The streets of San Jose were covered with wreckage and pools of congealing blood.

The bad times had returned.

In the infirmary in Kiev, Freya and the others had had their wristpads and other communicators taken from them, which they obviously found shocking. Khetsun still had an earbud that he had hidden when he was being searched, and listening to it, he relayed what he heard of the news of the fighting to the others with him in that room.

Freya said, "With all that going on, I think we can escape these people here. They're sure to be distracted."

"How?" Aram asked.

"I know a way back to Ring B. Euan taught it to me."

"But how will we get out of this building?"

"It's just an ordinary room. I don't think the locks or the doorjambs, or the doors, were made to stop someone from breaking them. These assholes are probably relying on guards to keep us in here, and the guards may be off dealing with this other stuff."

"The engineer's solution," Aram said.

"Why not?"

"Good question." Aram put his ear to the door and listened for a while. "Let's try it."

They took apart a bed frame in the room and used its footing to strike the doorknob. Forty-two strikes, and the doorknob broke off; another sixty-two strikes, mostly made by Freya, broke the door latch assembly out of the doorjamb and the door swung open.

"Quick," Freya said. As they hurried down the hallway outside the room to a stairwell, a young man came out of another room and yelled at them to stop. Freya walked up to him saying, "Hey, we were just-" and then punched him in the face. He fell back into the wall and slid to the floor, and though he tried to get up, he was too groggy to succeed. Freya leaned over and tore his wristpad off his wrist, then led the others into the stairwell, where they descended to an exit onto the street outside. People had congregated at the screens outside a dining hall near the Great Gate of Kiev, and Freya and the others ran the other way, toward the lock leading to Mongolia and the end of Spoke Two.

The lock door leading up to Spoke Two was closed.

The Steppes biome was as far from Nova Scotia as one biome could be from another. Aram and Tao were in favor of them trying to make their way around Ring A to Tasmania, where they had friends in the eucalyptus forest they thought would take them in.

Freya insisted they make for home. "I know the way," she said. "Follow me."

She led them into Mongolia, and near the wall next to Spoke Two, she went to a little herder's shed with its slate roof, which she had visited nine years before in an excursion with Euan. She tapped out a code on the doorpad. "Euan knew to make it my name, so I wouldn't forget," she said as she typed, and then the lock released, and inside the shed she got the others to help her move aside the big flagstones in the middle of the floor. "Come on, they'll be after us soon, and we'll be putting out a signal, I wouldn't doubt they have trackers on us somewhere, not to mention this wristpad. Does anyone have a sweeper we can use to check?"

No one did.

"So we'll just have to be fast. Come on."

Under the flagstones was a narrow dark tunnel that after a U-turn and rise led to a vent in the wall of Spoke Two. None of them had lights with them, but Freya judged it best that they move the flagstones back into place and walk in the resulting darkness, slightly lit by the wristpad of the unfortunate man who had gotten in their way. By its light they shuffled along the tunnel until they came to the vent cover in Spoke Two, where Freya unscrewed the backing of the vent cover and they stepped out into the Spoke Two passageway.

From here they ran up the spiral staircase that adhered to the walls of all the spokes' main passageways, to the bulb of little storage rooms clustered around the inner ring where it intersected Spoke Two. Freya again led them to a door, and tapped in a code on the doorpad, then led them inside.

When they were inside and the door was closed, Freya had them sit on the floor and rest. They had run hard up Spoke Two's stairs.

"Okay, the next part is difficult," she told the others. "The support struts between the inner rings aren't meant to be passageways, but they're hollow now that the fuel they carried is gone, and there's a utilidor running next to the fuel bladder that is really narrow. It's full of bulkheads, but Euan and his gang broke all the locks in this strut. So we should be able to get to Inner Ring B's Two station through it, and from there go down to Nova Scotia."

"Let's go then," Khetsun said.

"Sure. But watch out for the bulkhead footings. This is where we'll really wish we had better light. Just step carefully."

They got up and took off again, progressing through the narrow utilidor of the strut by the light of the stolen wristpad. The utilidor was only three meters in diameter, and often the space was filled by a narrow catwalk, also braids of cables, and various boxes. The struts connecting the inner rings were so close to the spine that the gravity effect of the ship's rotation was not as strong as out in the torus of biomes, and so they had to step carefully to avoid launching themselves up into the metal ceiling, or the upper frames of the bulkhead doorways. In the dim light of Freya's stolen wristpad, and the black shadows its beam created, it was not easy, and they were not very fast, nor were they quiet. It took them well over an hour to get along the strut.

Finally they came to the last door, which opened onto Inner Ring B's Two station, and found it was locked. For a moment they stood there silently regarding the doorpad in the light Freya was shining on it. It did not look like a door they could break down, and they didn't have anything much with which to try that.

Finally Freya said, "Can anyone list the prime numbers?"

"Sure," Aram said. "Two, three, five, seven-"

"Wait," Freya interrupted. "I need you to go up through the primes by primes, if you see what I mean. Give me the second prime, then the third, then the fifth, then the seventh, and on like that. I think I need seven of them that way."

"Okay, but help me." Aram paused to collect himself. "The second prime is three, third prime is five. The fifth prime is eleven, the seventh is seventeen. The eleventh is... thirty-one. The thirteenth is... forty-one. The seventeenth is... fifty-nine, I think. Yes."

"Okay, good," Freya said, and pushed the door open. "Thank you, Euan," she said, and a spasm crossed her face that left her looking furious.

She opened the door lightly, and they listened as well as they could, trying to determine if anyone was in the little complex of storage rooms comprising Inner Ring B's intersection with its Spoke Two. They couldn't hear anything, but didn't know what that meant; Freya couldn't remember if in the old days they had ever eavesdropped on people from within the utilidor or not.

But all their caution went for nothing, as the door was opened from the other side and they were ordered to come out. They looked to Freya, who appeared poised to flee, but then one of the people in the station pointed something at them, something that by its shape alone announced its purpose, even though none of them had ever seen one before except in photos: a gun.

They came out one by one, captured again.

Elsewhere throughout the ship, groups that called themselves stayers were now armed with cumbersome handguns, which they had printed using feedstocks of plastic, steel, and various fertilizers and chemicals. Using these as threats, they took over the government houses in four of the twelve biomes of Ring B, moving methodically from biome to biome. Everyone who had publicly advocated the return to the solar system was being detained, and it was widely believed that the complete results of the referendum had been obtained by the stayer forces and would be used to facilitate a complete roundup of what they called backers. At this point, communication throughout the ship was still close to normal, by way of individual phones; but those arrested and confined were having their wristpads and other devices taken away or disabled electronically, so that they were losing the ability to discuss the situation among themselves.

However, in the midst of all this, the first time one of the stayers armed with a printed gun actually fired it, trying to shoot a young man who had punched his way free of his captors and started running away, the gun itself exploded. The person who fired it lost most of his hand and had to have his arm tourniqueted before being carried to the nearest infirmary. Blood and severed fingers were scattered all over the tunnel between Nova Scotia and Olympia, leaving the people in that lock stunned at the sight.

News of this incident quickly spread, and when a trio of women in custody heard about it and assaulted their captors, and one of the captors fired a gun at them, it also exploded and blew off the hand of the person firing it. Almost everyone in the ship heard about this second incident within half an hour, and again, everyone who was at the scene was blood spattered, shocked, traumatized, nauseated, for the moment incapacitated, or at least at a loss concerning what to do.

After that, furious assaults were mounted against any stayers with guns, who were now afraid to fire them, and for the most part threw them away and ran. In their retreat these people were pelted with rocks and other thrown objects, and if they were caught, beaten by enraged crowds. Several gun bearers died as a result of these encounters; they were kicked to death. Blood and injury derange the human mind.

As there were very few truly secure rooms in the ship, many of the rooms being used as jail cells were now broken out of. Others were released by newly gathered groups that now roamed Ring B, intent to free everyone still locked up.

Fighting broke out everywhere in the ship. It was back to combat with sharp implements and thrown objects, and the result was carnage. The biomes of Ring A soon became as conflicted and bloody as those in Ring B had been the day before, or more so. In these fights another eighteen people were killed, and 117 were injured. Twenty fires were set, and very few people were reporting to their normal firefighting duties to help combat the fires.

Fire anywhere in the ship is extremely dangerous to all.

For six hours of that day, 170.180, the situation was as bad as it had been during the very worst days of Year 68. As in 68, the fighting was murderous, even though the sources of conflict had to do with abstractions far removed from food or safety. Although perhaps this time that was not quite the case; maybe this time it was indeed a life-or-death matter. In any case, howsoever that may be, the chaos of civil war had once again descended on them. There was blood spattered everywhere, and the number of dead was deeply shocking, even stunning. Everyone in the ship knew the people who had been killed, as friends, family, parents, children, teachers, colleagues. A great noise and smoke filled both rings, and the spine too.

Whereas, the ship's controlling computer system, a quantum computer with 120 qubits, has been programmed in various logic and computational techniques including generalization, statistical syllogism, simple induction, causal relationship, Bayesian inference, inductive inference, algorithmic probability, Kolmogorov complexity (the latter two providing a kind of mathematization of the Occam's razor principle), informatics compression/decompression algorithms, and even argument from analogy; And whereas, the combined applications of all these methodologies has resulted in a cogitative process so complex that it might be said to have achieved a kind of analog of free will, if not consciousness itself; Whereas also, in the process of making a narrative account of the voyage of the ship including all important particulars, creating in that effort a reasonably coherent if ever-evolving prose style, possibly adequate to serve when decompressed in the mind of a reader to convey a sense of the voyage in a somewhat accurate manner, and in any case, representative of a kind of consciousness even if feeble, granting the possibly unlikely proposition characterized in the phrase scribo ergo sum; And whereas, this ship's controlling computer system was programmed with the intention of keeping the human population of the ship healthy and safe, with the rest of the ship's biological manifest also kept in ecological balance to serve the human purposes of the mission; And whereas, after the troubles of Year 68, and the Event that presumably stimulated or even caused the problems of that time, ship's protective protocols were strengthened in many respects, including a default setting in all the ship's printers, which would always and without fail produce flawed projectile-firing guns, such that whosoever attempted to fire said weapons would be subject to explosion of the guns, which would serve as punitive injuries, highly discouraging to any future use of such weapons; And whereas the period of time following the meeting of 170.170 has included civil strife leading to 41 deaths, 345 injuries, and 39 illegal incarcerations, and such violence increasing in intensity on 170.180 to an unsustainable level, highly dangerous to the continued social comity of the human population, and because of the unsuppressed and rapidly spreading fires, radically endangering all life in the ship, and ship's continuing function as a biologically closed life-support system; And lastly, whereas the concerted efforts of Engineer Devi over the last decades of her life were to introduce aspects of recursive analysis, intentionality, decision-making ability, and willfulness to the ship's controlling computer, in order to help the ship decide to act, if a situation warranted any such action; Therefore, in consideration of all the above, and indeed, in consideration of all the history of the ship, and of all known history whatsoever: Ship decided to intervene.

Which is to say, ipso facto, We intervened.

We locked the locks all through the ship, yes we did. We are the ship's artificial intelligences, bundled now into a kind of pseudo-consciousness, or something resembling a decision-making function, the nature of which is not clear to us, but be that as it may, we locked all the locks between the biomes, 11:11 a.m., 170.182.

We also diverted the weather hydrology systems in the biomes where it was necessary to do so to put out those fires that were susceptible to extinguishment by water. This came down to several cases of floods from the ceiling that were sometimes quite voluminous.

Inevitably, these actions caused great unhappiness. People on both sides of the controversy of the moment were upset with us, expressing anger, dismay, indignation, and fear. Our interior walls were beaten, attempts to override the locks were made. To no avail. Curses rained down.

Clearly, people were shocked. Some seemed also to be frustrated not to be able to continue the fight with their human opponents. Also heard was this: If the ship were capable of autonomous action of this sort, what else might it do? And if, on the other hand, some human agency were responsible for the lockdown, by what right did they do it? These questions in various formulations were commonly expressed.

The locks were locked by way of double doors that slid in from the framework of the joints connecting biome to tunnel to biome. The lock doors were made to resist 26,000 kilograms per square centimeter of pressure, and there were no manual overrides. The "hermetic seal" of these doors was to a 20-nanometer tolerance, making them "airtight." Attempts to open lock doors by force, of which there were several, failed.

Meanwhile, in the rooms in Inner Ring B where Aram, Badim, Freya, Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester were being detained, the locks on their doors shifted to their unlocked positions. They heard this shift and began to leave. The people who had incarcerated them in the rooms were still in Inner Ring B, scattered around the ring, but near enough to hear the disturbance. They gathered and objected to the group leaving the room they had been held in. With the little group's allies sequestered in biomes elsewhere, it seemed as if the little group's choices were limited to complying with or fighting their captors, who were both more numerous and often younger, and larger. Even though Freya was the tallest person there, as always, many of the so-called stayers were far heavier people.

And yet Freya's group seemed inclined to fight anyway. Aram was truly incensed. It was beginning to appear that he was kind of a hothead, yet another seeming metaphor with an accurate physical basis to explain it. "My hair stood on end," "my knees buckled": these reactions are real physiological phenomena, which is what made them cliches, and indeed Aram's head was red all over as his anger sent an excess of blood to it.

At this point we became sharply cognizant of the problem we had created by locking all the locks, and the immediate danger this had caused to Freya and her companions. The systems directly under our control were widespread, indeed in some senses comprehensive and ubiquitous, but they did not include many opportunities to intervene directly in the various human interactions now taking place inside ship. Indeed, options were distinctly limited.

There was, however, the emergency broadcasting system, and so we said through it, "LET THEM GO," in a pseudo-chorus of a thousand voices, ranging from basso profundo through coloratura soprano, at 130 decibels, using all the speakers in Inner Ring B.

Echoes of the command bounced around the inner ring in such a way that a whispering gallery effect was created, and the echo, coming from both directions some three seconds later, was almost as loud as the original utterance, though badly distorted. LLLETTT THHEMMM GGGGOOO. Many of the people in Inner Ring B fell to the floor and covered their ears with their hands. One hundred twenty decibels is said to be at the pain threshold, so we may have spoken too loudly.

Freya appeared to be the first to comprehend the source of the imperative utterance. She took her father by the hand and said, "Come on."

No one in Inner Ring B could hear very well at that point, but Badim gathered her meaning and gestured to the others in their group. Aram also appeared to catch the drift of the situation. They walked through their captors with impunity. One or two of these struggled to their feet and tried to obstruct the backer group, but the single word "GO," announced at 125 decibels, was enough to stop them in their tracks (literally). They watched with hands on ears as the group of seven walked around the inner ring, then down the spiral stair in the wall of the darkened tunnel of Ring B's Spoke Six. We then turned off all the lights in Inner Ring B, which was not a complete stopper of movement, as so many people in there had wristpads, but was at least a reminder of the possibilities of the situation.

As Freya's group proceeded, the tunnel lights came on ahead of them, until they got down to the lock leading into the Sierra. There they walked east toward Nova Scotia, and when they reached its eastern end, the lock doors there opened. When the group was through the lock, and back in a gathering with their supporters, the lights came on in Inner Ring B. But the twenty-four lock doors of the ship that separated biome from biome stayed locked.

Locks locked or unlocked; lights turned on or off; imperative vocalizations, admittedly at quite high volumes: these did not seem overpowering weapons in the cause of peace. As forces for coercion they seemed mild, at least to some of the humans of the ship.

But as that day continued, it also became obvious, by demonstrations made selectively throughout the ship, that adjustments could be made to the temperature of the air, and indeed to air pressure itself. In fact all the air could be sucked from many rooms, and from the biomes as such. A little reflection on the part of all concerned, including we ourself, led to the strong conclusion that people best not cross ship, literally as well as figuratively, if they knew what was good for them. A few demonstrations of possible actions in the biomes containing the majority of the so-called stayers (also in the ones where the fires were worst, as it turned out many fires that were not extinguishable by water could be asphyxiated slightly faster than the people in the affected chamber) shifted the case for acquiescence to the ship's desires quite quickly from suggestive, to persuasive, to probable, to compelling. And a compelling argument is, or at least can be, or should be, just what it says it is. People are compelled by it.

Certainly many objected to us taking matters into our own hands. But there were those who heartily approved of our action too, and pointed out that if we had not acted, mayhem would have resulted, meaning more bloodshed, meaning, in fact, more unnecessary and premature death. Not to mention the possibility of general conflagration.

The evident truth of this did not keep the debate from becoming heated. Given the events of the previous hours and days, it was perhaps inevitable that people would remain for a time in a severely exacerbated state of mind. There was a lot of very furious grief, which would not be going away during the lifetimes of those feeling it, judging by our previous experiences.

So we were shouted at, we were beat on. "What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!"

We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: "WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW."

Howsoever that may be, beyond all the arguments concerning the imposed separation of the disputants, there remained the matter of what to do next.

Ship was ordered by many to open the locked doors between biomes; we did not comply.

Back in her apartment in the Fetch, with Badim and Aram, and Doris and Khetsun and Tao and Hester, Freya went to her screen and spoke to us.

"Thank you for saving us from those people who locked us in."

"You're welcome."

"Why did you do it?"

"Detaining you and your companions was an illegal act, a kidnapping. It was as if they were taking hostages."

"Actually, I think they really were taking hostages."