They hugged, and when Devi joined the discussion, Devi hugged her too. Under Badim's eye, Freya was cooperative in hugging her mother. Perhaps also she saw the distress on Devi's face.

"I'm sorry," Devi said.

"Me too."

"It will be good for you to get away. If you stayed here and weren't careful, you might end up like me."

"But I wanted to end up like you," Freya said. She looked as if she were tasting something bitter.

Devi only squished the corners of her mouth and looked away.

On 161.176, Freya left on her wanderjahr, traveling west in Ring B. The ring tram circumnavigated the biomes, but she walked, as was traditional for wanderers. First through the granite highland of the Sierra, then the wheat fields of the Prairie.

Her first extended stay was in Labrador, with its taiga, glacier, estuary, and cold salt lake. It was often said that your first move away from home should be to a warmer place, unless you came from the tropics, when you couldn't. But Freya went to Labrador. The cold did her good, she said.

The salt sea was mostly iced over, and she learned to ice-skate. She worked in the dining hall and the distribution center, and quickly met many people. She worked as a manual laborer and general field assistant, or GFA, or Good For Anything, as they were often called. She put in long hours all over the biome.

Out there next to Labrador's glacier, people told her, there was one yurt community that brought up their children as if they were Inuit or Sami, or for that matter Neanderthals. They followed caribou and lived off the land, and no mention of the ship was made to their children. The world to these children was simply four kilometers long, a place mostly very cold, with a big seasonal shift between darkness and light, ice and melt, caribou and salmon. Then, during their initiation ceremony around the time of puberty, these children were blindfolded and taken outside the ship in individual spacesuits, and there exposed to the starry blackness of interstellar space, with the starship hanging there, dim and silvery with reflected starlight. Children were said to return from this initiation never the same.

"I should think not!" Freya said. "That's crazy."

"Quite a few of these children move away from Labrador after that," her informant, a young woman who worked in the dining hall, told her. "But more than you'd think come back around as adults, and do the same to their own kids."

"Did you grow up like that?" Freya asked.

"No, but we heard about it, and we saw them when they came into town. They're strange. But they think they've got the best way, so..."

"I want to see them," Freya declared.

Soon she was introduced to one of the adults who came in for supplies, and after a time she was invited out to the circle of yurts next to the glacier, having promised to keep her distance from the yurt where the children of the settlement lived. From a distance they seemed like any other kids to Freya. They reminded her of herself, she said to her hosts. "Whether that's good or bad I don't know," she added.

The adults in the yurt village defended the upbringing. "When you've grown up like we do it," one of them told Freya, "then you know what's real. You know what we are as animals, and how we became human. That's important, because this ship can drive you mad. We think most of the people around the rings are mad. They're always confused. They have no way to judge anything. But we know. We have a basis for judging what's right from wrong. Or at least what works for us. Or what to believe, or how to be happy. There are different ways of putting it. So, if we get sick of the way things work, or the way people are, we can always go back to the glacier, either in our head or actually in Labrador. Help bring up the new kids. Live with them, and get back into the real real. You can return to that space in your head, if you're lucky. But if you didn't grow up there, you can't. So, some of us always keep it going."

"But isn't it a shock, when you learn?" Freya asked.

"Oh yes! That moment when they cleared my spacesuit's faceplate, and I saw the stars, and then the ship-I almost died. I could feel my heart beating inside me like an animal trying to get out. I didn't say a word for about a month. My mom worried that I had lost my mind. Some kids do. But later on, I started to think, you know, a big surprise-it's not such a bad thing. It's better than never being surprised at all. Some people on this ship, the only big surprise in their life comes when they die without ever knowing anything real. They get an inkling of that right at the very end. Their first real surprise."

"I don't want that!" Freya said.

"Right. Because then it's too late. Too late to do you much good, anyway. Unless one of the five ghosts greets you after you've died, and shows you an even bigger universe!"

Freya said, "I want to see one of your initiations."

"Work with us some more first."

After that, Freya worked on the taiga with the yurt people. She carried loads; farmed potatoes in fields mostly cleared of stones; herded caribou; watched children. On her off days she went with people up onto the glacier, which loomed over the taiga. They clambered up the loose rocks of the moraine, which were stacked at the angle of repose, and usually stable. From the top of the moraine they could look back down the whole stretch of the taiga, which was treeless, rocky, frosted, green with moss, and crossed by a long gravel-braided estuary running to their salt lake, which was flanked by some hills. The ceiling overhead was shaded a dark blue that was seldom brushed by high clouds. Herds of caribou could be seen down on the flats by the river, along with smaller herds of elk and moose. In the flanking hills sometimes a wolf pack was glimpsed, or bears.

In the other direction the glacier rose gently to the biome's east wall. Here, Freya was told, you used to be able to see the effect of the Coriolis force on the ice; now that their deceleration was pushing across the Coriolis force, the ice had cracked extensively, creating new crevasse fields, which were blue shatter zones the size of entire villages. The creamy blue revealed in the depths of these new cracks was a new color to Freya. It looked as if turquoise had been mixed with lapis lazuli.

These were not cracks one could fall into without suffering grave injury or death. But they appeared static in any given moment, and most of the surface of the glacier was pitted, bubbled, and knobbed, so that it was not at all slippery. Thus it was possible to walk around on the ice, and approach, sometimes holding hands, a crevasse field's edge, and look down into the blue depths. They said to each other that it looked something like a ruined street, with jagged blue buildings canted away to each side.

Down below, the only town in Labrador nestled in a little knot of hills, on the shore of the cold salt lake that lay at the western end of the estuary. The lake and estuary were home to salmon and sea trout. The town was made of cubical buildings with steep roofs, each one painted a bright primary color that through the long winters was said to be cheering. Freya helped with building repairs, stocking, and canning salmon taken from the lake and estuary. Later she helped to take inventory in the goods dispensary. When she was out in the yurt settlement, she always helped take care of the cohort of children, sixteen of them, ranging from toddlers to twelve-year-olds. She had sworn to say nothing to them of the ship, and the adults of the village believed her and trusted her not to.

At the end of autumn, when it was getting cold and dark, Freya was invited to join one of the children's initiations. It was for a twelve-year-old girl named Rike, a bold and fierce child. Freya said she would be honored to take part.

For the event Freya was dressed as Vuk, one of the five ghosts, and at midnight of the day of the ceremony, after everything else they did to celebrate, Rike was helped into a spacesuit, and the faceplate of her helmet was blocked with a black cloth glued to it. They walked together to Spoke One, holding her by the arms. Up at the inner ring lock they led her into the exterior lock, where they were all clipped into tethers. The air in the lock was sucked out, the outer lock door opened. They walked up a set of stairs and pushed off into the void of interstellar space, hanging there just sternward of the inner ring. The seven adults arranged themselves around Rike, and one of them pulled off the black cloth covering her faceplate. And there she was, in space.

Humans in interstellar space can see approximately a hundred thousand stars. The Milky Way appears as a broad white smear across this starry black. The starship has a silvery exterior that gleams faintly but distinctly with reflected starlight. It is lit by the Milky Way more than by the other stars, so that the parts of the ship facing the Milky Way are distinctly lighter than parts facing away from it. People say that under the faint spangle of reflected starlight, the ship itself seems also to glow. Despite its great speed relative to the local backdrop, the only motion is of the entire starscape appearing to rotate around the ship, which is how the rotation of the ship is usually apprehended, the ship appearing still to the human observers as they move with it. At the time of Rike's initiation, Tau Ceti was by far the brightest star around them, serving as their polestar ahead of the bow of the spine.

As she saw all this Rike cried out, and then had to be held as she began flailing and screaming. Freya, dressed as Vuk, the wolf man, held her right arm in both hands and felt her tremble. Her parents and the other adults from the yurt village explained to her what she was seeing, where they were, where they were going, what was happening. They chanted a chant they traditionally used to tell it all. Rike groaned continuously through this chant. Freya was weeping, they all were weeping. After a while they pulled themselves back in the lock; then when the outer doors closed and air hissed back in, they got out of the spacesuits and clomped down the stairs back into the spoke, and helped the traumatized girl walk home.

Soon after this, Freya arranged to move on.

The whole town came out for her farewell party, and many urged her to come back in the spring. "Lots of young people circle the rings several times," she was told, "so be like them, come back to us."

"I will," Freya said.

The next day she walked to the western end of the biome and passed through the open doorway into the short, tall tunnel between Labrador and the Pampas. This was the point where you could best see that the tunnels are canted at fifteen-degree angles to the biomes at each end.

As she was leaving, a young man she had seen many times approached her.

"So you're leaving."

"Yes."

"You saw Rike's coming-out?"

"Yes."

"That's why a lot of us hate this place."

Freya stared at him. "Why don't you leave then?"

"And go where?"

"Anywhere."

"You can't just go where you want to."

"Why not?"

"They won't let you. You have to have a place to go."

Freya said, "I left."

"But you're on your wander. Someone gave permission for you to go."

"I don't think so."

"Aren't you Devi's daughter?"

"Yes."

"They got you a permission. Not everyone gets them. Things wouldn't work if they did. Don't you see? Everything we do is controlled. No one gets to do what they want. You have it a little different, but even you don't get to do what you want. That's why a lot of us hate this place. And Labrador especially. A lot of us would go to Costa Rica if we could."

In the Pampas, the sunline overhead was brighter, the blue of the ceiling a lighter pastel, the air full of birds. The land was flatter and set lower in its cylinder, farther away from its sunline, which meant it was a narrower parcel. Its greens were dustier but more widespread; everything here was green. From the slight rise of the lock door she could see up the whole length of the biome, to the dark circle of the lock door leading to the Prairie. There on the rumpled plain of the Pampas were roving herds, clouds of dust over each in the angled morning light: cattle, elk, horses, deer.

Like all the biomes, this one was a combination of wilderness, zoo, and farm. The two villages here, as in most of the biomes, were placed near the midline of the cylinder, not far from the locks at each end.

Freya walked a path that ran parallel to the tram tracks. In the little village of Plata, a group of residents who had been informed she was coming greeted her and led her to a plaza. Here she was to live in rooms above a cafe. At the tables on the plaza outside the cafe she was fed lunch, and introduced by her hosts to many people of the town. They spent the afternoon telling her how wonderful Devi had been when a cistern of theirs had broken, before Freya was born. "A situation like that is when you really need your engineers to be good!" they said. "So quick she was, so clever! So in tune with the ship. And so friendly too."

Freya nodded silently at these descriptions. "I'm nothing like her," she told them. "I don't know how to do anything. You'll have to teach me something to do, but I warn you, I'm stupid."

They laughed at her and assured her they would teach her everything they knew, which would be easy, as it was so little.

"This is my kind of place then," she said.

They wanted her to become a shepherd, and a dairy worker. If she didn't mind. Lots of people came to the Pampas wanting to be a gaucho, to ride horses and throw bola balls at the legs of unfortunate calves. It was the signature activity of the Pampas, and yet very seldom performed. The cows on the ship were an engineered breed only about a sixth the size of cows back on Earth, and generally cared for in dairy pastures, so the big need was for people to go out with the sheep, and let the sheepdogs know what needed doing. This was also an excellent opportunity for bird-watching, as the pampas were home to a large number of birds, including some very large and graceful, or some said graceless, cranes.

Freya was agreeable; it would be better than the salmon factory, she told them, and as she was also to help in the cafe at night, she would get to see people and talk, as well as go out on the low green hills.

So she settled in. She paid attention to the people in the cafe at night. It was noticeable that they tended not to disagree with her, and usually took a kind tone with her. They talked around her pretty often, but when she said something, the silences that followed were a bit longer than would be typical in a conversation. She was somehow irrefutable. Possibly it came from a feeling that she was in some way different; possibly it was a form of respect for her mother. Possibly it was a result of her being taller than anyone else, a big young woman, said by many to be attractive. People looked at her.

Eventually Freya herself noticed this. Soon afterward, she began a project that occupied much of her free time. At the end of the evening's work in the cafe, she sat down with people and asked them questions. She would start by declaring it was a formal thing: "I'm doing a research project during my wander, it's for the sociology institute in the Fetch." This institute, she would sometimes admit, was her name for Badim and Aram and Delwin. Typically, she asked people two things: what they wanted to do when they got to Tau Ceti; and what they didn't like about life in the ship, what bothered them the most. What you don't like, what you hope for: people often talk about these things. And so they did, and Freya tapped at her wristpad that was recording part of what they said, taking notes and asking more questions.

One of the things she found people didn't like surprised her, because she had never thought about it much herself: they didn't like being told whether or not they could have children, and when, and how many. All of them had had birth control devices implanted in them before puberty, and would remain sterile until they were approved for childbearing by the ship's population council; this council was one of the main organizations that the biome councils contributed to, adding members to the committee. This process, Freya came to understand, was a source for a great deal of discord over the years of the voyage, including most of its actual violence-meaning mostly assaults, but also some murders. Many people would not serve on any council, because of this one function that councils had. In some biomes council members had to be drafted to the work, either because people didn't want to tell others what to do in reproductive matters, or they were afraid of what might happen to them when they did. Many a biome had tried in the past to shift responsibility for this function over to an algorithm of the ship's AI, but this had never been successful.

"What I hope for when we reach Tau Ceti," one handsome young man said with drunken earnestness to Freya, "is that we'll get out of this fascist state we live in now."

"Fascist?"

"We're not free! We're told what to do!"

"I thought that was totalitarian. Like a dictatorship. You know."

"Same thing! Council control over personal lives! That's what it means in the end, no matter what words you use. They tell us what we have to learn, what we can do, where we can live, who we can be with, when we can have kids."

"I know."

"Well, that's what I'm hoping we'll get out of! Not just out of the ship, but out of the system."

"I'm recording this," Freya said, "and taking notes," tapping on her pad. "You aren't the first to say this."

"Of course not! It's obvious stuff. This place is a prison."

"Seems a little nicer than that."

"It can be nice and still be a prison."

"I guess that's right."

Every night she sat with different people who came into the cafe, and asked her questions. Then, if the night had not flown past, she sat with the people she already knew, and when the place closed down, helped with the final cleanup. Prep and cleanup were her specialties in the cafe, taking up morning and night. By day she went with a herd of sheep, or sometimes the little cows, out to a pasturage west of town. Soon she claimed to know almost everyone in that biome, although she was wrong about this, committing a common human cognitive error called ease of representation. In fact, some people avoided her, as if they did not approve of wanderers generally, or her personally. But certainly everyone in the town knew who she was.

She was by this point the tallest person in the ship, two meters and two centimeters tall, a strong young woman, black-haired, good-looking; quick on her feet, and graceful for her size. She had Badim's smoothness of speech, Devi's quickness. Men and boys stared at her, women cosseted her, girls clung to her. She was attractive, it was clear from the behavior of others; also unpretentious and unassuming. I don't know! she would say. Tell me about that. I don't get that kind of stuff, I'm stupid about things like that. Tell me. Tell me more.

She wanted to help. She worked all day every day. She looked people in the eye. She remembered what they said to her. There were indeed things she did not appear to understand, and people saw that too. Her eyes would slightly cross as if she were looking inward, searching for something. There was perhaps some kind of simplicity there, people said about her. But possibly this was part of why they loved her. In any case, she was much beloved. This is what people said, when she was not there. At least most of them. Others felt otherwise.

One day when she was out on the pampas, just her and two sheepdogs and a herd of sheep, Euan appeared before her, emerging from the tall bunch grasses down by the marshy river that ran sluggishly through the biome.

She hugged him (he was still only chin high to her) and then tossed him away from her. "What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"I could ask the same of you!" His smile was almost a smirk, but perhaps too cheerful to be a smirk. "I was passing by, and I thought you might like to see some parts of the ship that your wander won't show you."

"What do you mean?"

"We can get into Spoke Two from the west lock," he explained. "If you come with me and we go up it, I can show you all kinds of interesting places. I've gotten past the locks in the inner ring. I could even take you down Spoke Three into Sonora, so you could skip the Prairie. That would be a blessing. And I can get you out from under the eyes a little."

"I like these people. And we're always chipped," Freya said. "So I don't know why you keep saying you can get away."

"You're always chipped," Euan replied. "I'm never chipped."

"I don't believe you."

"It doesn't matter if you do or don't, I can still show you things no one else can."

This was true, as he had proved before.

"When I'm ready to leave," Freya said.

Euan waved at the pampas around them. "You mean you aren't?"

"No!"

"All right, I'll come back in a while. You'll be ready by then, I bet."

Actually Freya loved Plata and its people, gathering in the plaza every dusk to eat out in the open air and then stay there into the night, at tables under strings of white and colored lights. A little band played in the far corner of the plaza, five old ones sawing their fiddles and squeezing their squeezeboxes in spritely mournful tunes, which some couples danced to, intricate in their footwork, lost to everything.

But she was curious to see more, she admitted to her hosts, and when Euan showed up again during one of her excursions into the hills, she agreed to go with him, but only after making a proper good-bye in the village, which proved much more sentimental and wrenching than it had been in the taiga. Freya wept as they closed the doors of the cafe, and she said to her boss and her boss's husband, "I don't like this! Things keep happening, and people, you get to know them and love them, they're everything to you and then you're supposed to move on, I don't like it! I want things to stay the same!"

The two elderly people nodded. They had each other, and their village, and they knew what Freya meant, she could tell; they had everything, so they understood her. Nevertheless she had to go, they told her; this was youth. Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. "Just keep learning," the old woman said.

"This gets you into parts of the ship where no one can track you," Euan said as he tapped away at the keypad next to a small door in the end of the spoke.

Not actually true. It was not clear if Euan believed this or was just saying it. Possibly the ship's extensive camera and microphone systems, which had been designed from the start to keep a very full record of what occurred in the ship, and then been extensively expanded after the Year 68 events, were hidden from view well enough to escape the attention even of those people who might be looking for them. Certainly from generation to generation people forgot things that some of them had learned. So it was difficult to assess the nature of Euan's assertion: mistaken? Lying?

Be that as it may, he had the code to open the spoke door, and was able to lead Freya up into Spoke Two.

They ascended the big spiral stairs running up the inner walls of the spoke. The open space was four meters across, with occasional windows giving them views of black starry space. Freya stopped before all of these to have a look out, exclaiming at the stars crowding the blackness, and the faintly gleaming curves of the ship where it was visible. It made for a slow ascent, but Euan did not rush her. Indeed he too peered out the windows to see what could be seen.