So they reprogrammed Labrador's climate, warming it up quite significantly, and adding a rainy season that was similar to that of a prairie. On Earth, this new weather regime would have been more appropriate some twenty degrees of latitude farther south than Labrador, but this was neither here nor there (literally), as they were now intent to maximize agriculture. They drained the swamps that resulted when the glacier and permafrost melted, and used the water elsewhere, or stored it. Then they went in with bulldozers and plowed the land flat, after which they added soil inoculants from nearby biomes, also compost and other augmentations, and when all these changes had been made, planted wheat, corn, and vegetables. Labrador's reindeer, musk oxen, and wolves were sedated and removed to enclosures in the alpine biome. A certain percentage of the ungulates were killed and eaten, and their bones rendered for their phosphorus, as with all the ship's animals after death.

The human population of Labrador dispersed into the other biomes. There was some disaffection and bitterness in that. It was in Labrador where several generations of children had been brought up as if living in the ancient ice ages of Earth, then at puberty taken out of the ship to have the ship revealed to them: a memorable event for the youngsters. To many people from the other biomes this had seemed like an unnecessary life trauma, but most of the people subjected to it brought their own children up in the same way (62 percent), so that fact had to be conceded, and possibly it was as these Labradorans said: their childhood upbringing helped them as adults. Other Labradorans contested this, sometimes heatedly. Whether they exhibited a higher incidence of mental difficulties in later life was also contested. The way they put it was, "The dream of Earth will drive you mad, unless you live the dream. In which case that too will drive you mad."

Howsoever that may be, now that lifeway was over.

The tropical forest biomes were cooled a bit and considerably dried out, and many of their trees cut down. Clearings in the tropical forest were terraced for rice and vegetables, the terraces reinforced by lines of old trees left behind, which supported a rather small fraction of the previous rain forests' bird and animal populations. Again many animals were killed and eaten, or frozen for later consumption.

Whether the reduction of the tropical forests had caused certain pathogens to move into nearby biomes was a question often asked, as the incidence of certain diseases rose in the adjacent biomes.

Early blight, a fungal problem that agriculturalists had always found very hard to counter, struck the orchards in Nova Scotia. Meanwhile late blight, a phytophthora, was harming the vegetables in the Pampas. Bacterial blights devastated the legumes of Persia, the leaves oozing slime. Don't touch the leaves, the ecologists warned, or you may spread it elsewhere.

Quarantines and pesticide baths at every biome lock were made routine.

Cytospora cankers killed the stone fruit orchards of Nova Scotia. Badim was very sad at this loss of his favorite fruits.

Citrus in the Balkans gave way to the green disease, then the quick decline.

Root rots became more and more common, and could only be countered by beneficial fungi and bacteria outcompeting the pathogens. The mutation rate of the pathogens appeared to be faster than the genetic engineers' so-called ripostifers.

Wilting resulted when fungi or bacteria clogged a plant's water circulation. Club root was caused by a fungus that could reside in the soil for years without manifesting. They began to adjust soil pHs to at least 6.8 before planting cruxiform vegetables.

Mildews also persisted in the soil for several years, and were dispersed by the wind.

They kept the locks between biomes closed all the time now. Each biome had its own set of problems and diseases, its own suite of solutions. All these plant diseases they were seeing had been with them from the start of the voyage, carried on board in the soil and on the first plants. That so many were manifesting now was of course much remarked, and many regarded the phenomena as a mystery, even some kind of curse. People spoke of the seven plagues of Egypt, or the book of Job. But the pathologists on the farms and in the labs said it was simply a matter of soil imbalances and genetic inbreeding, all aspects of island biogeography, or zoo devolution, or whatever one called the isolation they had been living in for 200 years. In the privacy of Badim and Freya's apartment, Aram was unsparing in his judgment of the situation. "We're drowning in our own shit."

Badim tried to help him see it in a more positive light, using their old game: One will only do one's best When forced to live in one's own fouled nest.

Slowly but surely as the seasons passed, plant pathology became their principal area of study.

Leaf spots were the result of a vast array of fungi species. Molds resulted from wet conditions. Smut was fungal. Nematode invasions caused reduced growth, wilting, loss of vigor, and excessive branching of roots. They tried to reduce the nematode populations by solarizing the soil, and this worked to a certain extent, but the process took the soil involved out of the crop rotation for at least one season.

Identification of viral infections in plant tissues was often accomplished, if that was the word, only by the elimination of all other possible causes of a problem. Leaf distortions, mottling, streaking: these were usually viral diseases.

"Why did they bring along so many diseases?" Freya asked Jochi once when she was out visiting him.

He laughed at her. "They didn't! There are hundreds of plant diseases they managed to keep out of the ship. Thousands, even."

"But why bring any at all?"

"Some were part of cycles they wanted. Most they didn't even know they had."

Long silence from Freya. "Why are they all hitting us now?"

"They aren't. Only a few are hitting you. It just seems like a lot because your margin for error is so small. Because your ship is so small."

Freya never commented on the way Jochi always referred to everything on the ship as yours, and never ours. As if he had no involvement at all with them.

"I'm getting scared," she said. "What if going back was a bad idea? What if the ship is too old to make it?"

"It was a bad idea!" Jochi replied, and laughed again at her expression. "It's just that all the other ideas were worse. And listen, the ship is not too old to make it. You just have to deal. Keep all the balls in the air for another hundred and thirty years or so. That's not impossible."

She did not reply.

After a minute Jochi said, "Hey, do you want to go out and take a look at the stars?"

"I guess so. Do you?"

"Yes, I do."

Jochi got into one of the ferry's spacesuits, and left by way of the ferry's smallest lock. Freya got into one of the spacesuits left in the lock at the inner ring's Spoke Three complex. They met in the space between the spine and the inner ring, just ahead of the ferry, and floated tethered in that space.

They hung there, suspended, floating in the interstellar medium, tethered each to their own little refuge. Exposure to cosmic radiation was much higher out there than in most of the interior spaces of the ship, or even in Jochi's ferry; but an hour or two per year, or even an hour or two per month, did not change the epidemiological situation very much. We too were of course perpetually exposed to cosmic rays, and in fact damage occurred to us, but we were, for the most part, more robust under the impact of this perpetual deluge, which remained invisible and intangible to humans, and thus something they seldom thought about.

For most of their EVA the two friends floated in silence, looking around. The city and the stars.

"What if things fall apart?" Freya asked at one point.

"Things always fall apart. I don't know."

After that they floated in silence for the rest of their time out there, holding gloved hands, looking away from the ship and Sol, off in the direction of the constellation Orion. When it was time to go back in they hugged, at least to the extent this was possible in their spacesuits. It looked as if two gingerbread cookies were trying to merge.

At 10:34 a.m. on 198.088, the lights went out in Labrador, and the backup generators came on, but Labrador's sunline stayed off. Big portable lights were set up to illuminate the dark biome, and fans were set up in the lock doors at either end to shove air from the Pampas into Labrador and thence out into Patagonia, to keep the air warm. The new wheat could live without light for a few days, but would react badly to the cold that would result from the lack of light. Adjustments were made to the heating in the Pampas to help mitigate the chill now flowing into Patagonia, which was also being turned into farmland, and the newly bolstered Labradoran population walked over to Plata, so that the repair crews could work without fear of injuring anyone.

Running through the standard troubleshooting protocols did not succeed in locating the source of the problem, which was cause for alarm. A more fine-grained test rubric that we found and applied determined that the gases and salts in the arc tubes that made up the sunline, particularly the metal halide and high-pressure sodium, but also the xenon and the mercury vapor, had diminished to the point of failure, either by diffusion through nanometer-sized holes in the alumina arc tubes, or by contact with the electrodes in the ballasts, or by bonding to the quartz and ceramic arc tubes. Many of the sunlines also used krypton 85 to supplement the argon in some tubes, and thorium in the electrodes, and these being radioactive were over time losing their effectiveness in boosting the arc discharge.

All these incremental losses meant that the best solution was for new lamps to be manufactured in the printers, lofted into position by the big cherry-pickers that had already rolled around Ring B from Sonora, installed and turned on. When they did those things, light returned to Labrador, then its people. The old lamps were recycled, their recoverable materials returned to the various feedstock storage units. Eventually some of the lamps' escaped argon and sodium could be filtered out of the ambient air, but not all; some atoms of these elements had bonded with other elements in the ship. Those were effectively lost to them.

In the end the Labrador Blackout was just a little crisis. And yet it brought on many instances of higher blood pressure, insomnia, talk of nightmares. Indeed some said that life in the ship these days was like living in a nightmare.

In 199, there were crop failures in Labrador, Patagonia, and the Prairie. Food reserves at that point were stockpiled to an amount that would feed the population of the ship, now 953 people, for only six months. This was not at all unusual in human history; in fact it was very near the average food reserve, as far as historians had been able to determine. But that was neither here nor there; now, with shortages caused by the bad harvest, they were forced to draw down on this reserve.

"What else can we do?" Badim said when Aram complained about this. "That's what a reserve is for."

"Yes, but what happens when it runs out?" Aram replied.

The plant pathologists worked hard to understand the failures fast enough to invent new integrated pest management strategies, and they tried an array of new chemical and biological pesticides, discovered either in the ship's labs, or by way of studying the feeds from Earth. They introduced genetically modified plants that would better withstand whatever pathogens were found to be infecting the plants. They converted all the land in all the biomes to farmland. They gave up on winters, creating speeded-up spring-summer-fall cycles.

With all these actions performed together, they had created a multivariant experiment. They were not going to be able to tell which actions caused whatever results they got.

As new crops were planted in the newly scheduled springtimes, it began to seem that fear could be thought of as one of the infectious diseases striking them. People were now hoarding, a tendency that badly disrupts throughput in a system. Loss of social trust could easily lead to a general panic, then to chaos and oblivion. Everyone knew this, which added to the level of fear.

At the same time, in spite of the growing danger, there were still no security officers on the ship, nor any authority but what the populace exerted over itself through the executive council, which was now in effect the security council as well. Despite Badim's earlier insistence on governance over anarchism, they still had no sheriff. In that sense they were always on the edge of anarchy. And the perception of this reality of course also added to their fear.

One day Aram came into their apartment with a new study by the plant pathologists. "It looks like we may have started this voyage a bit short on bromine," he said. "Of the ninety-two naturally occuring elements, twenty-nine are essential for animal life, and one of those is bromine. As bromide ions it stabilizes the connective tissues called basement membranes, which are in everything living. It's part of the collagen that holds things together. But the whole ship appears to have been a bit short of it, right from the start. Delwin is guessing they tried to lower the total salt load on board, and this was an accidental result."

"Can we print some of it?" Freya asked.

Aram gave her a startled look. "You can't print an element, my dear."

"No?"

"No. That only happens inside exploding stars and the like. The printers can only shape whatever feedstock materials we give them."

"Ah yes," Freya said. "I guess I knew that."

"That's all right."

"I don't recall hearing much about bromine," Badim said.

"It's not an element one hears about much. But it turns out to be important. So, that could explain some things we haven't been understanding."

People began to go hungry. Food rationing was instituted, by a democratic vote taken on the recommendations of a committee formed to make suggestions concerning the emergency. The vote was 615 to 102.

One day Freya was called to Sonora, asked to address some kind of undefined emergency. "Don't go," Badim called by phone to ask her.

This was truly a strange request, coming from him, but by that time she was already there; and when she saw the situation, she sat on the nearest bench and hunched over miserably. A group of five young people had put plastic bags over their heads and suffocated themselves. One had scrawled a note: Because we are too many.

"This has to stop," she said when she managed to stand back up.

But the next week, a pair of teenagers broke the lock code and launched themselves out of the bow dock of the spine, without tethers or even spacesuits. They too had left a note behind: I am just going out for a while, and may be some time.

Appeal to tradition. Roman virtue. Sacrifice of the one for the many. A very human thing.

They called a general assembly, and met on the great plaza of San Jose, where so much had already happened. On the other hand, by now only about half of them were old enough to have been alive during the crisis on Aurora, and the schism that followed. The older people present therefore looked at the younger people with spooked expressions. You don't know what happened here, the old people said. The younger people tended to look quizzical. Don't we? Are you sure? Is that bad?

When everyone who was going to come was there, a complete account of their food situation was made. Silence fell in the plaza.

Freya then got up to speak. "We can make it through this," she said. "There are not too many of us, it's wrong to say that. We only have to hold together. In fact we need all of us here, to do the things we need to do. So there can't be any more of these suicides. We need all of us. There's food enough. We only have to take care, and regulate what we eat, and match it to what we grow. It will be all right. But only if we take care of each other. You've all heard the figures now. You can see that it will work. So let's do that. We have an obligation to all the others who made it work in this ship, and to those yet to come. Two hundred and six years so far, one hundred thirty years to go. We can't let the generations down-our parents, our children. We have to show courage in the hard time. I wouldn't want ours to be the generation that let all the others down."

Faces flushed, eyes bright, people stood up and faced her, their hands raised overhead, palms facing her, like sunflowers, or eyes on stalks, or yes votes, or something we could not find an analogy to.

The ship is sick, people said. It's too complex a machine, and it's been running nonstop for over two hundred years. Things are going wrong. It's partly alive, and so it's getting old, maybe even dying. It's a cyborg, and the living parts are getting diseased, and the diseases are attacking the nonliving parts. We can't replace the parts, because we're inside them, and we need them working at all times. So things are going wrong.

"Maintenance and repair," Freya would say to these sentiments. "Maintenance and repair and recycling, that's all. It's the house we live in, it's the ship we sail in. There's always been maintenance and repair and recycling. So hold it together. Don't get melodramatic. Let's just keep doing it. We've got nothing else to do with our time anyway, right?"

But the missing bromine was seldom discussed, and their attempts to recapture some of it by recycling the soil, and then the plastic surfaces inside the ship, were only partly successful. And there were other elements that were bonding to the ship in difficult ways as well, creating new metabolic rifts, important shortages. This was not something they could ration their way out of. And though it was seldom discussed, almost everyone in the ship was aware of it.

When they ran out of stored food, and a nematode infestation killed most of the new crop in the Prairie, they called another assembly. Rationing was established in full, as per the advice of the working committee, and new rules and practices outlined.

Rabbit hutches were expanded, and tilapia ponds. But as it was pointed out, even the rabbits and tilapia needed food. They could eat these creatures the very moment they got to a certain size, but they wouldn't get to that size unless they were fed. So despite their amazing reproductive capacity, these creatures were not the way out of the problem.

It was a systemic agricultural problem, of feedstocks, inputs, growth, outputs, and recycling. Controlling their diseases was a matter of integrated pest management, successfully designed and applied. There was an entire giant field of knowledge and past experiences to help them. They had to adjust, adapt, move into a new and tighter food regimen. Cope with the missing elements as best they could.

One aspect of integrated pest management was chemical pesticides. They still had supplies of these, and their chemical factories had the feedstocks to make more. Howbeit they were harmful to humans, which they were, they still had to be used. Time to be a bit brutal, if they had to be, and take some risks they wouldn't ordinarily take, at least in certain biomes. Run some quick experiments and quickly find out what worked best. If more food now was paid for by more cancers later, that was the price they had to pay.

Risk assessment and risk management came to the fore as subjects of discussion. People had to sort out their sense of the probabilities here, make judgments based on values they hadn't really had to examine, that they had taken for granted. No one was getting pregnant now. Eventually that too would become a problem. But they had to deal with the problem at hand.

Soybeans needed to be protected at all costs from soil pathogens, as they desperately needed the protein that soy could best provide. Biome by biome, they dug up all the soil in the entire starship, cleaned it of pathogens as best they could, while leaving the helpful bacteria alive as much as possible. Then they put it back into cultivation and tried again.

There were still crop failures.

People now ate 1,500 calories a day, and stopped expending energy recreationally. Everyone lost weight. They kept the children's rations at levels that would keep them developmentally normal.

"No fat-bellied, stick-legged little kids."

"Not yet."

Despite this precaution, the new children were exhibiting a lot of abnormalities. Balance problems, growth issues, learning disabilities. It was hard to tell why, indeed impossible. There were a multitude of symptoms or disorders. Statistically it was not greatly different than it had been for previous generations, but anecdotally it had become so prominent that every problem was noticed and remarked. The cognitive error called ease of representation thrust them into a space where every problem they witnessed convinced them they were in an unprecedented collapse. They were getting depressed. Throughout history people had sickened and died; but now when these things happened, it looked like it was because of the ship. Which we considered a problem. But it was only one of many.

Most days in the last hours before sunset, Badim would walk down to the corniche running up the west side of the Fetch, and settle at the railing over the water and fish for a while. There was a limit of one fish per day per fisher, and the railing was lined with people trying to make that catch to add to the evening's meal. It was not exactly a crowd, because luck was generally not very good at this end of Long Pond. Still, there were a number of regulars who were there almost every day, most of them elderly, but a few of them young parents with their kids. Badim liked seeing them, and did pretty well at remembering their names from one day to the next.

Sometimes Freya would come by in the dusk and walk him home. Sometimes he could show her a little perch or tilapia or trout. "Let's make a fish stew."

"Sounds good, Beebee."

"Did we ever use to do this in the old days?"

"No, I don't think so. You and Devi were too busy then."

"Too bad."

"Remember the time we went sailing?"

"Oh yes! I crashed us into the dock."

"Only that one time."

"Ah good. Good for us. I couldn't be sure if we did it a lot, or if I just keep remembering that one time."

"I know what you mean, but I think it happened just the once. Then we figured out how to do it."

"That's nice. Like cooking our stew."

"Yes."

"You'll help me eat it?"

"Oh yes. Won't say no to that."

They turned on the lights in their apartment's kitchen, and he got out the frying pan while she took out a cutting board and filleting knife, and gutted the fish. Its steaks when they were ready were about fifteen centimeters long. When she was sure she had gotten all the bones out of the meat, she chopped the steaks into chunks while Badim chopped potatoes. He left the skins on. Chicken stock, a little water, a little milk, salt and pepper, some chopped carrots. They worked together in silence.

As they ate, Badim said, "How is it going at work?"

"Ah, well... Better if Devi were there."

He nodded. "I often think that."

"Me too."