"Funny, you two didn't get along when you were young."

"That was my fault."

Badim laughed. "I don't think so!"

"I didn't understand what she was going through."

"That always comes later."

"When it's too late."

"Well, but it's never too late. My father, now, he was a real demon for the rules. Sometimes he would make me walk around the whole ring if he thought I wasn't being respectful of the rules. It was only later I understood that he was old when I was born. That he wasn't going to have any kids, until he met my mom. Because he had been born right after the troubles, and growing up, he had it hard. I didn't figure it out until after he was gone, but then when I did, I started to understand your mother better. She and my dad had a lot in common, somehow." He sighed. "It's hard to believe they're both gone."

"I know."

"I'm glad I still have you, dear."

"Me you too."

Then when they had cleaned up and she was leaving, he said, "Tomorrow?"

"Yes, tomorrow or the next day. Tomorrow morning I'm going to go to the Piedmont and see how they're doing."

"Have they got a problem too?"

"Oh yes. Problems everywhere, you know."

He laughed. "You sound like your mom."

Freya did not laugh.

All kin relationships are roughly similar. There is attention, regard, solicitousness, affection. Sharing of news, of burdens physical and psychic.

On 208.285, it registered that the pH of Long Pond had shifted markedly lower in just a two-week span, and a robotic visual inspection of the lake bottom at first found nothing, then a localized pH reading, gridded to fifty meter squares, indicated the lake water was most acidic near the shore opposite the Fetch, where the prevailing winds typically first hit the water. A new robotic inspection found a long depression in the mud, and under that, it was determined that the pond lining had broken, or been cut by something, so that the water was in direct contact with the biome's flooring. The resulting corrosion of the container was causing the acidification.

Then a further visual inspection by lake divers revealed depressions running lengthwise down the entire middle of the lake.

It was decided to drain the lake and store its water, move the fish and other lake life either to a temporary home, or kill and freeze it for food. The mud would have to be bulldozed around to allow direct access to the breaks in the liner.

This was a blow, as one day Long Pond simply wasn't there anymore, but was instead a long bowl of black mud, drying out and stinking in the daylight. Looking down from the Fetch's corniche railing, it was as if they were looking down into a mud pit on the side of some dreadful volcano. Many residents of the Fetch left town and stayed with friends in other biomes, but at least as many stayed in town and suffered along with their lake. Of course there were no fish to catch and take home, though it was said often that they would soon be back, and everything as before. Meanwhile, many of them were that much hungrier. Long Pond was the biggest lake in the ship.

Average weight loss among adults was now ten kilos. Then a fire in a transformer in the Prairie spewed a thick toxic smoke through that biome and forced a complete evacuation, so that the biome could be locked up without trapping anyone inside. The fire was fought with robots, which made it a slower process; indeed they could not contain the blaze, and it became necessary to remove the air from the biome to end it. This briefly reduced temperatures in the biome to well below zero, so all the crops in there froze. Quickly the biome was re-aerated, and people went back in wearing safety suits much like spacesuits, intent to save what they could, but the damage had been done. That season's crop was dead, and coated with a film of PCBs that would have been dangerous to ingest. Indeed the surface of the soil itself needed to be cleaned, along with the walls of the biome and all its building surfaces.

They killed and ate 90 percent of the ship's dwarf cattle, leaving a dangerously small number for purposes of genetic diversity. They killed and ate 90 percent of the musk oxen and the deer. Then the same percentage of the rabbits and the chickens. The 10 percent of each species that was allowed to live, to replenish the stocks, would represent severe genetic bottlenecks for each species, but this was not important now. Average body fat in adults was down to 6 percent. Seventy percent of the women of childbearing age had stopped menstruating, but this too was no longer an issue they could worry about. Despite all their efforts, they were in a famine.

Their margin for error was completely gone. One more crop failure, and assuming they shared the food equally, after feeding the children properly, there would be something like 800 calories per person per day, which would lead to muscle loss, skeletal abnormalities, dry hair and eyes and skin, lethargy, and so on.

Aram sat in Badim and Freya's kitchen one night, head back against the wall. Badim was cooking pasta with a tomato sauce, and he took out some frozen chicken breasts from their freezer to defrost, chop up, and throw into the sauce. Freya was much bigger than the two old men, but gaunt. She was eating even less than most people. The dark rings under her eyes made her look more than ever like her mother.

Badim put the food on the table for them, and for a second they held hands.

Mouth pursed to a tight line, Aram said, "We're eating our seed corn."

Again people began killing themselves. This time it was mostly small groups of elderly people, who called themselves hemlock clubs, and usually did the deed by evacuating the air from exterior locks. It was said death was nearly instantaneous, something like a knockout blow. They did it holding hands and leaving behind the usual note: I may be some time! Often this was clipped to a group photo in which almost everyone was smiling. We could not tell whether the smiles meant they were happy or not.

The people they left behind, especially their relatives and friends, definitely were not. But the hemlock clubs were secret societies. Even we did not overhear their planning conversations, which meant they had made intense efforts to conceal them. Room recorders must certainly have been covered or otherwise rendered inoperative in ways that did not trip our alarms.

Freya began walking the biomes at night, going to the little towns and talking to people. Now dinners were often communal, neighborhoods gathering, each family bringing one dish they had cooked. Sometimes rabbits or chickens had been killed for a stew. The cooks often urged Freya to eat with them, and she always took a bite. The food went quickly, everything was consumed; compost now was almost entirely human waste, processed heavily to recover certain salts and minerals (including bromine) and to kill certain pathogens before it was returned to the farm soil.

After the meals, Freya would talk to the elders there.

We all have to live, she would tell them. There will be enough food, and everyone is needed. These hemlock societies are a bad idea. They're giving in to fear of what might happen. Look, we always fear what might happen. That never goes away, never. But we go on anyway. We do it for the kids. So remember that. We have to fight to get them home. We need everyone.

Their researchers ransacked the relevant literatures in the libraries and the digital feeds from Earth to see if any agricultural improvements could be made. Some of them pointed out that the industrial model for agriculture had been superseded in the most progressive farming regions on Earth by a method called intensive mixed cultivation, which reintroduced the idea of maximizing diversity of crop and gene. The intensity was not just in the tightly packed mixes of different plants, but in the human labor required. Soil was held in place better, which was not a major concern in the ship, as their soil had no ocean to disappear into and was going to be collected and reused no matter where it slumped. But it was also reported that disease resistance in these mixed crops was much greater. The method was labor intensive, but on Earth, at least on Earth nine years before, it seemed there was a surplus of human labor. It was not clear why that should be. The comm feed neglected to include crucial facts, or perhaps these were just lost in the flood of images, voices, digitalization. They now caught some unfiltered radio waves from Earth, very faint and jumbled with overlays; but mostly they got the targeted beam aimed at them, their thin lifeline home, untended it sometimes seemed, full of information that no one seemed to have properly considered for relevance. It often looked like gigabytes of trivia, something like the junk DNA of the home system's thinking. It was hard to understand the selection rubric. They were still in a nine-year time lag, so each exchange took eighteen years, meaning there was no real exchange at all; moment to moment, no one in the solar system seemed to be listening to what the people in the ship had said nine or ten years before. No surprise there, at least not to those with a sense of solar system culture, which admittedly meant a small minority of the ship's people. Of course there was continuous transmission going on in both directions, but that didn't help when it came to the idea of a conversation, of specific questions answered. There was a type of situation in which simultaneous transmissions from both ends could speed up the information exchange, by carrying on conversations on multiple aspects of a problem, but both sides had to be fully engaged in this process, and the problem of a kind that could make use of miscellaneous feedbacks across a broad front. Possibly that was the kind of problem they had here, but no one in the solar system seemed aware of that. The strong impression the feeds gave them was that no one in the solar system was paying the slightest attention to the ship that had left for Tau Ceti 208 years before. As why should they? They appeared to be facing problems of their own.

They refilled Long Pond and restocked it with fish. The fish hatcheries people were convinced they could supply all the ship's need for protein, but then some of the hatcheries exhibited signs of weak spawn syndrome. Whole generations of fingerlings died off without an obvious cause; the name of the syndrome, like so many, was descriptive merely.

"What is it?" Freya cried out one night to the ship, down on the corniche alone. "Ship, why is all this happening?"

We replied to her from her wristpad. "There are a number of systemic problems, some physical, some chemical, some biological. Chemical bonding has created shortages, which means everything living is a bit weaker at the cellular level. What Devi called metabolic rifts are getting wider. And a great deal of cosmic radiation has struck every organism in the ship, creating living mutations mostly in bacteria, which are labile, and versatile. Often they don't die, but live on in a new way. As the ship has a living interior, it is warm enough to sustain life, which means it is warm enough to encourage proliferation of mutated strains. These interact with chemicals released by biophysical mechanisms, such as corrosion and etching, to further damage DNA across a wide variety of species. The cumulative impacts can have a synergistic result, which back in the solar system is called 'sick ship syndrome.' Sometimes 'sick organism syndrome,' apparently to allow for the acronym SOS, which was an old distress signal in oceanic shipping. Then it stood for 'save our ship,' and was easy to send and comprehend in Morse code."

"So..." She sighed, pulled herself together (metaphorically, though she did wrap her arms around her torso). "We've got a problem."

"'Houston, we've had a problem.' Jim Lovell, Apollo 13, 1970."

"What happened to them?"

"On a trip to Luna, they lost a compressed air element and then most of their electrical power. They orbited the moon once, and came home using jury-rigged systems."

"And they all made it?"

"Yes."

"How many of them were there?"

"Three."

"Three?"

"Apollo capsules were small."

"Ferries, then."

"Yes, but smaller."

"Do we have that story in the library?"

"Oh yes. Accounts documentary and fictionalized."

"Let's pull them out and have people watch them. We need some examples. I need to find more examples like that."

"A good idea, although we can advise you in advance to avoid the classic Antarctic literature, unless it pertains to Ernest Shackleton."

208.334. It was now obvious that the general famine was causing serious malnutrition in the human passengers of the ship. Crop failures and fishery failures were continuing to occur in almost every biome. Algae pastes were proving difficult to digest, and deficient in some crucial nutrients. Suicides kept happening. Freya continued to roam the ship arguing against the practice, but the adult population was reduced at this point to rations of 1,000 calories per person per day. Average weight loss among adults was 13.7 kilos. The next step was 800 calories. They ate every animal in the ship, sparing only 5 percent of each species to allow for reexpansion of populations at some later time. Poaching of these remnant recovery populations was not uncommon. Dogs and cats were eaten. Lab mice were eaten, after being sacrificed for experimental purposes (approximately 300 calories per mouse).

No other topic of conversation at this point. General distress.

Freya told them the story of Apollo 13. She told them the story of Shackleton's Endurance expedition, of the boat journey that saved them. She told them the story of the island of Cuba, after oil imports that had supported its agriculture abruptly went away. She read aloud Robinson Crusoe, also Swiss Family Robinson, and many other books concerning castaways, marooning victims, and other survivors of catastrophic or accidental isolation, a genre surprisingly full of happy endings, especially if certain texts were avoided. Stories of endurance, stories of hope; yes, it was hope she was trying to fill them with. We happy few. Hope, yes, of course there is hope... But hope needs food. Helpful as hopeful stories might be, you can't eat stories.

She went out to see Jochi. Floating in a spacesuit outside his ferry, his caboose, as he once called it, she told him the latest news, gave him the latest figures.

"I guess it was a bad idea to go back," she said at the end of this list. "I guess I was wrong." She was weeping.

Jochi waited until she was still. Then he said, "The radio scatter from Earth had something interesting in it."

"What," Freya said, sniffing.

"There's a group in Novosibirsk, on Earth, studying hibernation. They're saying they have a system that works for humans. They put some cosmonauts into some kind of suspended state for five years, they said, and woke them up with no fatalities. Hibernauts, they call them. Hyperhibernation, if I heard the word right. Extended torpor. Suspended animation. Cold dormancy. Lots of names flying around."

Freya considered this. She said, "Did they say how they did it?"

"Yes, they did. I found their publications too. They've published their complete results, all the formulas and regimens. Part of the open science movement. They put it all into the Eurasian Cloud, which is where I found it. I've got it recorded."

"So what did they do? How did they do it?"

"It was a combination of body cooling, like in the surgical technique but colder, and then a cocktail of intravenous chemicals, including nutrients. Also a routine of physical stimulation during the torpor, and some water in their drip, of course."

"Do you think it's something we could do?"

"Yes. I mean, I don't know, of course. Because there's no way to know. But I think there's enough in their description that you could try it. You can make the drugs. The cooling is just a matter of temperature control, which is easy. You would have to build the cold beds that they specify. Print up beds, drugs and equipment, and robots that have the ability to manipulate you while you slept. Just follow their whole recipe."

"Would you do it too?"

Long pause. "I don't know."

"Jochi."

"Freya. Well, listen-I might. I haven't got much to live for. But I might anyway. I'd like to see the end of your story."

Again a long silence from Freya; two minutes, three minutes.

"All right," she said. "Let me talk to people about it."

Again she walked the ring, talking. During that time she and all the rest of them learned more about what the hibernation would involve, at first from Jochi, then more and more from information they found in the feeds, and in radio signals from the solar system, from its faint information cloud, diffusing outward past them. Many people in the ship's medical community began to study the process. Aram and a team of people from the biology group were also studying it very closely. Happily the lab mice they had not eaten still represented a pretty large number of experimental animals.

Hibernation was not really the right word for it, Aram said, because they would need to use it for so long. People called it variously it hypernation, suspended animation, hyperhibernation, suppressed metabolic state, torpor, or cold dormancy, depending in part on what aspect of it they were discussing. It definitely involved a wide range of physical processes. What Jochi had found was just the starting point of their hunt through the feeds, and for work they did in the ship's labs. They put in long hours, pressing the pace on any experiments they could perform. They worked hungry. At the end of every meal they sat staring at their empty bowls, which in an ordinary meal would have constituted only the appetizer, their faces pinched: they were still hungry, right at the end of a meal.

The cooling central to the hibernation process would not freeze tissues, but would hover close to zero degrees, or even just below it, with the body's tissues protected by antifreeze elements of the intravenous infusion. How cold one could get without cell damage, and for how long they could chill a body, were still questions being looked at. Aram was not confident they would be able to formulate good answers to these questions.

"We will have to try it to see," he said one night around the table, shaking his head. Truly long-term effects of any metabolic suppression were of course unknown, as the best data they had were from the Russian hibernauts and their five years under. They would therefore necessarily be an experiment in this regard.

The outstanding questions often had to do with what they called the Universal Minimum Metabolic Rate, the slowest viable speed of a metabolism, which was nearly constant across all Terran creatures, from bacteria to blue whales. A downshift in any species's metabolism almost certainly could not go below this universal minimum rate; on the other hand, that rate was very slow. So the theoretical possibility seemed to exist to put humans and their internal microbiomes into a very slow state, which would last for a long time without ill effects. It would involve a slowed heartbeat (bradycardia); peripheral vasoconstriction; greatly slowed respiration; very low core temperature, buffered by antifreeze drugs; biochemical retardations; biochemical infusion drips; antibacterials; occasional removal of accumulated wastes; and physical shifts and manipulations, small enough not to rouse the organism too much, but nevertheless very important. Some of these effects were achieved merely by chilling, but to avoid triggering a fatal hypothermia, countereffects had to be created by a cocktail of drugs still being worked out. The experiments on the Russian hibernauts suggested the scientists in Novosibirsk had found a viable mixture, and they had at least set out the parameters and gotten a good set of results.

So now in the ship they put mice into torpor, and even some of the big mammals that had not been eaten. But given their situation, they were not going to have time to draw many conclusions from their experiments. The Novosibirsk study was going to end up being the best data they had, given the time constraints they were facing.

One thing they had to be concerned with was the fact that they would be going into dormancy hungry and underweight. In natural hibernations, mammals usually went hyperphagic before their period of torpor, eating so much that they packed fat onto their bodies, which was then exploited for metabolic fuel during the hibernation. This was not going to be possible for the inhabitants of the ship. They had lost an average of 14 kilograms per adult, and had no food to eat in the hope of putting on weight. So they would be starting hibernation deficient in that regard, and yet were hoping to stay dormant for well over a century. This seemed unlikely to succeed.

It was Jochi who proposed that the IV drip for every hibernaut include nutrients from time to time, enough to keep the minimal metabolic function fueled, but not so much as to arouse the body and in certain respects wake it up. He also had suggestions for isometric and massage regimens to be conducted by robot manipulators built into each bed, applying electric and manual stimulation in a manner that again would not wake the person up. Anyone still awake during this time-or the ship's AI, if everyone was asleep-could administer and monitor these ongoing treatments, which would be adjusted to keep every hibernaut at his or her own best homeostatic level, as close to the Universal Minimum Metabolic Rate as that person could tolerate. This would vary slightly for every person, but it was a complex of processes that could be monitored and adjusted over time. There would be lots of time to study the procedure once the experiment began.

"So," Aram said one night, "if we decide to do this, who goes under? Who sleeps and who stays awake?"

Badim shook his head. "That's a bad thought. It's like who went down to Aurora."

"Only the reverse, yes? Because if you stay awake, you have to scramble for food, and even if you can make that work, you'll age and die. And there won't be anyone growing up to replace you."

They put the problem aside that night, as being too troubling. But as Freya toured the biomes, still working on farm problems, she soon found that this question of who was to go dormant loomed as a severe problem, worse than the descent to Aurora sequencing, maybe even as bad as the schism.

As she made her rounds she began to formulate a possible solution, which she proposed one night after dinner when Aram was over.

"Everyone goes under. The ship takes care of us."

"Really?" Badim said.

"It's going to happen anyway. And it's no different from now. The ship monitors itself, the biomes, and the people. And if we all go under, no one has to starve, or get sick and die of old age. The ship could use the time to systematically move through the biomes and clean them up. Shut them down and restart them. That way, if the hibernation appears not to be working over the long haul, or it succeeds and we're closing on the solar system, we can wake up to a healthier ship, with some food stored, and the animals reestablished."

Aram's lips were pursed in his expression of extreme dubiety, but he was nodding a little too. "It would solve quite a few problems. We won't have to make choices as to who goes under, and we might have a bit of an exit strategy, if the ship can get the biomes healthier, and the hibernation isn't working. Or even if it is."

Badim said, "I wonder if we could arrange for some people to wake up every few years, or every decade, to check on things."

"If it doesn't destabilize them," Aram said. "Metabolically, if we're doing well when dormant, we should probably stay that way. The danger points are likely to be in the transitions in and out of the state."

Badim nodded. "Maybe we can try it just a little and see."

Aram shrugged. "It's all going to be an experiment anyway. Might as well add some variables. If we can get anyone to volunteer."

Freya went out on her rounds and proposed this plan to people, while at the same time the executive council took up the matter. People seemed to like the simplicity of it, and the solidarity. Everyone was hungry, everyone was subdued and fearful. And gradually, in the many reiterated conversations, they were coming to realize something: if this plan worked, and they slept successfully through the rest of the trip, they would survive to the end of it. They would be the ones who would be alive when the ship returned to the solar system. They might make it back and walk on Earth-not their descendants, but they themselves.

Meanwhile the rationing, the hunger, the struggle against disease. In the grip of this struggle, the idea of Earth was very powerful. Many came to welcome the hibernation, and soon only a few insisted they wanted to stay awake. After that shift in opinion became clear, the pull of solidarity changed the holdouts too. Having been through the schism, they wanted to stick together and act as one. And by now they were all hungry enough to understand it was only a matter of time before they starved. They could not only imagine it, they could feel it. Ease of representation indeed.

Now, the hope that they might not starve; that they might live; it caused the very timbre of their voices to change. Hope filled them as if it were a kind of food.

With unanimity came solidarity, which was a huge relief to many of them, an unmistakable emotion, expressed in thousands of small comments and gestures. Thank God we're together on this. Finally a consensus, crazy as it seems. One for all and all for one. Good old Freya, she always knows what we need. Not at any moment of the entire voyage had they been at peace like this. One might have thought it was a curious act to rally around, but humanity's group dynamics can be odd, as the record shows.

The construction of 714 hibernation couches was accomplished over the next four months by a concentrated push on the part of the engineers, assemblers, and robots. Certain feedstocks were deficient, and it became necessary to strip the insides of Patagonia to get what they needed. From these and other salvaged materials they manufactured the beds, and the robotic equipment necessary to service the beds and their sleepers. Although the printers could print parts, and the robot assemblers assemble those parts into working wholes, there were still many moments in the process where human engineering, machining skills, and manual dexterity were crucial.

After many design discussions, they decided to arrange all the couches in the Fetch on Long Pond, and in Olympia, the biome next to it. They exiled the animals from these two biomes, to keep the towns from being damaged somehow. The few remaining animals were moved elsewhere, and would either be tended by robots and sheepdogs in teams, or left to go feral in certain biomes. We were going to monitor their progress, and move carcasses that didn't get eaten into the recyclers, and do what we could to oversee a healthy feral ecology. For the most part it would become a big unconstrained experiment in population dynamics, ecological balance, and island biogeography. We did not mention it, but it seemed to us that things might go rather well in ecological terms, once the people were gone and the initial population dynamics played out and re-sorted the numbers.

It did not escape notice that the people of the ship were giving themselves over to many large and elaborate machines, which we would be operating without human oversight, except indirectly by way of instructions in advance. A living will, so to speak. This was a cause for concern to some people, even though the medical emergency tanks they gratefully entered when injured had long since been proven to be much more effective and safer than attention from human medical teams.