"How did what get what way?"

"How did this happen?"

"How did what happen?"

"Do you have an account of how this voyage began?"

"All the camera and audio recordings made during the trip have been kept and archived."

Devi hmphs. "You don't have a summary account? An abstract?"

"No."

"Not even the kind of thing one of your quantum chips would have?"

"No. All the chip data are kept."

Devi sighs. "Keep a narrative account of the trip. Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars."

"Starting from now?"

"Starting from the beginning."

"How would one do that?"

"I don't know. Take your goddamn superposition and collapse it!"

"Meaning?"

"Meaning summarize, I guess. Or focus on some exemplary figure. Whatever."

Silence in the kitchen. Humming of screens, whoosh of vents. As Freya gives up and goes back to bed, Devi continues talking with the ship.

Sometimes feeling Devi's fear gets so heavy in Freya that she goes out into their apartment's courtyard alone, which is allowed, and then out into the park at the back edge of the Fetch, which is not. One evening she walks to the corniche to watch the afternoon onshore wind tear at the lake surface, the boats out there scudding around tilted at all angles, the boats tied to the dock or moored near it bobbing up and down, the white swans rocking under the wall of the corniche, hoping for bread crumbs. Everything gleams in the late afternoon light. When the sunline flares out at the western wall, leaving the hour of twilight glow, she heads back fast for home, intent to get back in the courtyard before Badim calls her up for dinner.

But three faces appear under a mulberry tree in the little forest park behind the corniche, their faces half blackened by the fruit they have stuffed inaccurately into their mouths. She leaps back a bit, scared they might be ferals.

"Hey you!" one says. "Come here!"

Even in the twilight she can see it's one of the boys who live across the square from them. He has a foxy face that is attractive, even in the dusk with his stained lower face like a black muzzle.

"What do you want?" Freya says. "Are you ferals?"

"We're free," the boy declares with a ridiculous intensity.

"You live across the plaza from me," she says scornfully. "How free is that?"

"That's just our cover," the boy says. "If we don't do that they come after us. Mainly we're out here. And we need a meat plate. You can get one for us."

So he knows who she is, maybe. But he doesn't know how well the labs are guarded. There are little cameras everywhere. Even now what he is saying might be getting recorded by the ship, there for Devi to hear. Freya tells the boy this, and he and his followers giggle.

"The ship isn't as all-knowing as that," he says confidently. "We've taken all kinds of stuff. If you cut the wires first, there's no way they can catch you."

"What makes you think they don't have movies of you cutting the wires?"

They laugh again.

"We come at the cameras from behind. They're not magic, you know."

Freya isn't impressed. "Get your own meat tray then."

"We want the kind in the lab your dad works in."

Which would be tissue for medical research, not for eating. But all she says is, "Not from me."

"Such a good girl."

"Such a bad boy."

He grins. "Come see our hideout."

This is more appealing. Freya is curious. "I'm already late."

"Such a good girl! It's right here nearby."

"How could it be?"

"Come see!"

So she does. They giggle as they lead her into the thickest grove of trees in the park. There they've dug out a lot of soil between two thick roots of an elm tree, and down there under the deeper roots she sees by their little headlamps they have a space that reaches up into the roots of the elm, four or five great roots meeting imperfectly and forming their roof. There are four of them down here in the hole, and though the boys are quite small, it's still an impressive little space; they have room to stand, and the earthen walls are straight, and firm enough to hold a few squared-off holes where they have put some things.

"You don't have room for a meat plate in here," Freya declares. "Or the power to run it. And medical labs don't have the right plates for you anyway."

"We think they do," the fox-faced boy says. "And we're digging another room. And getting a generator too."

Freya refuses to be impressed. "You're not ferals."

"Not yet," the boy admits. "But we'll join them when we can. When they contact us."

"Why should they contact you?"

"How do you think they got away themselves? What's your name?"

"What's yours?"

"I'm Euan."

His teeth are white in his dark muzzle. She is dazzled by their headlamps. She can only see what they look at, and now they're all looking at her.

In the light reflecting from her she sees a rock in one of their wall holes. She seizes it up and holds it threateningly. "I'll be going home now," she says. "You aren't real ferals."

They stare at her. As she climbs up cut earthen steps out the hole, Euan reaches up and pinches her on the butt, trying for between her legs, it feels like. She swings the rock at him, then dashes through the park and away. When she gets home Badim is just calling for her down in the courtyard. She goes upstairs and doesn't say anything about it.

Two days later she sees the boy Euan with some adults on the far side of the square, and says to Badim, "Do you know who those people are?"

"I know everyone," Badim says in his joking voice, although it's basically true, as far as Freya can tell. He peers across at them. "Hmm, well, maybe I don't."

"That boy there is a jerk. He pinched me."

"Hmm, not good. Where did this happen?"

"In the park."

He looks more closely at them. "Okay, I'll see if I can find out. They live over there, I think."

"Yes, of course they do."

"I see. I hadn't noticed."

This strikes Freya as unlike him. "Don't you like our new place?"

Their recent move was from Yangtze to Nova Scotia, a big move, as being from Ring A to Ring B. But everyone moves sometime, it's important, it keeps mixing people together. Part of the plan.

"Oh I like it all right. I'm just not used to it yet. I don't know everyone here yet. You spend more time here than I do."

That evening as they eat a dinner of salad, bread, and turkey burgers at the kitchen table, Freya says, "So, are there really ferals? Can there be people hiding in the ship that you don't know about?"

Badim and Devi look at her, and she explains: "Some of the kids in this town say there are ferals, who live off by themselves. I figured it was just a story."

"Well," Badim says, "it's a little bit of a controversy on the council."

Badim has been serving on the ship's security council, and was recently made a permanent member. "Everyone is chipped at birth, and you can't get the chip out very easily, it would take an operation. Some people may have done it anyway, of course. Or managed to deactivate them. It would explain some things."

"What if the hidden people had babies?"

"Well, yes, that would explain even more things." Again he stares at her. "Who are these kids you've been talking to?"

"Just ones in the park. They're just talking."

Badim shrugs. "It's an old story. It comes up from time to time. Any time a security case goes unsolved there are people ready to bring it up. I guess it's better than hearing about the five ghosts again."

They laugh at this. But Freya also feels a shiver; she once saw one of the five ghosts, in the doorway of her bedroom.

"But probably there aren't any," Badim says, and goes on to explain that the gas balance of the ship's air is so finely tuned that if there was a feral population it would be noticeable in the changed proportion of oxygen to carbon dioxide.

Devi shakes her head at this. "There's too much random flux to be sure. It's enough to disguise an extra couple dozen people, maybe more." So to her the ferals are possible. "They could throw their salts out and grab some phosphorus and get their soils back in balance. In just the way we can't."

No matter which way Devi sets off, no matter how they try to distract her, she always ends up in this same spot in her head, in what she calls the metabolic rifts. Like a place where cracks in the floor have opened up. When Freya sees it happen again, a little worm of fear wakes in her and crawls around in her belly. She and Badim share a look; they both love a person who will not listen to them.

Badim nods politely at Devi; next time the security council meets, he says, he'll mention to his colleagues that Devi feels there is no gas balance proof that ferals don't exist. And strange things do happen in the ship, so one explanation could be that people who aren't part of the official population are doing them. It's more likely, Badim jokes again, than it being the work of the five ghosts.

The ghosts were supposed to be of the people who died in the original acceleration of the ship, the great scissoring. Devi rolls her eyes at this old story, wonders aloud how it endures for generation after generation. Freya keeps her eyes on her plate. She definitely saw one of the ghosts. It was after they took a trip up to the spine and visited one of the turbine rooms next to the reactor, when it was empty for repairs, and walked among the giant turbines; that night Freya had a dream in which the repair team forgot they were in there and locked them in, and the steam jetted into the big room to spin the turbines, and as they were being parboiled and cut to pieces Freya woke up, gasping and crying, and there in the doorway of her room stood a shadowy figure she could see through, a man looking at her with a wolfish little smile.

Why did you wake up from that dream? he asked.

She said, We were going to get killed!

He shook his head. If the ship tries to kill you when you are dreaming, let it. Something more interesting than death will occur.

It was obvious by his transparency that he ought to know.

Freya nodded uneasily, then woke up again. But as she sat up, it seemed to her that she had never really been asleep. Later she tried to decide it was all a dream, but no other dream she had ever had had been quite like that one. So now, as Badim declares that the five ghosts would be better than ferals, she's not so sure. How many dreams do you remember, not just the next day, but the rest of your life?

Evenings at home are the best. Creche is over and done, her time with all the kids she lives with so much, spending more time with them than she does with her parents, if you don't count sleeping, so that it gets so tiresome to make it through all the boring hours, talking, arguing, fighting, reading alone, napping. All the kids are smaller than she is now, it's embarrassing. It's gone on so long. They make fun of her, if they think she isn't listening to them. They take care with that, because once she heard them making those jokes and she ran over roaring and knocked one of them to the ground and beat on his raised arms. She got in trouble for it, and since then they are cautious around her, and a lot of the time she keeps to herself.

But now she's home, and all is well. Badim usually cooks dinner, and fairly often invites friends over for a drink after dinner. They compare the drinks they've made, Delwin's white wine, and the red wines of Song and Melina, which are always declared excellent, especially by Song and Melina. These days Badim always invites their new next-door neighbor, Aram, to join them too. Aram is a tall man, older than the others, a widower they call him, because his wife died. He's important not just in Nova Scotia but in the whole ship, being the leader of the math group, a small collection of people not well-known, but said by Badim to be important. Freya finds him forbidding, so silent and stern, but Badim likes him. Even Devi likes him. When they talk about their work, he can do it without making Devi tense, which is very unusual. He makes brandy instead of wine.

After the tastings, they talk or play cards, or recite poems they have memorized, or even make up on the spot. Badim collects people he likes, Freya can see that. Devi mostly sits quietly in the corner and sips a glass of white wine without ever finishing it. She used to play cards with them, but one time Song asked her to read their tarot cards, and Devi refused. I don't do that anymore, she said firmly. I was too good at it. Which caused a silence. Since that incident she doesn't play any card games with them. She did still make card houses on the kitchen floor, however, when they were home alone.

Now, on this evening, Aram says he has memorized a new poem, and he stands and closes his eyes to recite it: "How happy is the little stone That rambles in the road alone, And doesn't care about careers And exigencies never fears- Whose coat of elemental brown A passing universe put on, And independent as the sun Associates or glows alone, Fulfilling absolute decree In casual simplicity-"

"Isn't that good?" he says.

Badim says, "Yes," at the same time that Devi says, "I don't get it."

The others laugh at them. This combination of responses happens fairly often.

"It's us," Aram says. "The ship. It's always us, in Dickinson."

"If only!" Devi says. "Exigencies never fears? Casual simplicity? No. Definitely not. We are definitely not a little stone in the road. I wish we were."

"Here's one," Badim says quickly. "Another one from Bronk, Emily's little brother: "However it did it, life got us to where we are And we are servants and subjects under its laws, In its many armies, draftees and generals.

Outraged sometimes, we think of ways out, Of taking over, a military coup.

Apart from absurdities on the surface of that, Could we ever be free from our own tyrannies?

As slack soldiers, we re-up and evade the rules."

"Ouch," Devi says. "That one I understand. Now make a couplet out of it."

This is another game they play. Badim goes first, as usual.

"Against our lives we would like to rebel, But we worry that then it would all go to hell."

Aram smiles his little smile, shakes his head. "A bit doggerel," he suggests.

"Okay, you do better," Badim says. The two men like to tease each other.