Aurora Read Free Page A

on Earth. Devi is an engineer, but she never engineered a cow. She engineers the ship more than any animals in the ship.
    They grow cabbages and lettuce and beets, yuck! And carrots and potatoes and sweet potatoes, and beans that are so good at fixing nitrogen, and wheat and rice and onions and yams and taro and cassava and peanuts and Jerusalem artichokes, which are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem. Because names are just silly. You can call anything anything, but that doesn’t make it so.

    Devi is called away from one of her regular meetings to deal with an emergency again, and as it’s one of Freya’s days with her, she brings Freya along.
    First they go to her office and look at screens. What kind of emergency is that? But then Devi snaps her fingers and types like crazy and then points at one screen, and they hurry around to one of the passageways between biomes, the one between the Steppes and Mongolia that is called Russian Roulette, and is painted blue and red and yellow. The next one along is called the Great Gate of Kiev. The tall, short tunnel between the doors to the lock is crowded this morning with people, and a number of ladders and scaffolding towers and cherry-pickers.
    Devi joins the crowd under the scaffolding, and Badim shows up a bit later to keep Freya company. They watch as a group of people ascend one of the scaffold ladders, following Devi up to the ceiling of the tunnel, right next to the lock-door frame. There several panels have been pulled aside, and now Devi climbs up into the hole where the panels have been moved, disappearing from sight. Four people follow her into the hole. Freya had no idea that the ceiling did not represent the outer skin of the lock, and stares curiously. “What are they doing?”
    Badim says, “Now that we’re decelerating, that new little push is counteracting the Coriolis force that our spin creates, and that’s a new kind of pressure, or release from pressure. It’s made some kind of impediment in the lock door here, and Devi thinks they may have found what it is. So now they’re up there seeing if she’s right.”
    “Will Devi fix the ship?”
    “Well, actually I think the whole engineering team will be involved, if the problem turns out to be up there. But Devi’s the one who spotted this possibility.”
    “So she fixes things by thinking about them!”
    This was one of their family’s favorite lines, a quote from some scientist’s admiring older relatives, when he was a boy repairing radios.
    “Yes, that’s right!” Badim says, smiling.
    Six hours later, after Badim and Freya have gone into the Balkans for a lunch at its east end dining hall, the repair crew comes down out of the hole in the lock ceiling, handing down some equipment, then putting a few small mobile robots into baskets to be lowered by the scaffold. Devi comes down the ladder last and shakes hands all around. The problem has been located, and fixed with torches, saws, and welders. The long years of Coriolis push shifted something slightly out of position, and recently the counterforce of deceleration shifted it back, but meanwhile the rest of the door had gotten used to the shift. It all made sense, although it didn’t speak volumes about the quality of construction and assembly of the ship. They were going to check all the other slides like the broken one, to make sure the lock doors of Ring B weren’t impeded in other places. Then they won’t stress motors trying to close doors against resistance.
    Devi hugs Freya and Badim. She looks worried, as always.
    “Hungry?” Badim asks.
    “Yes,” she says. “And I could use a drink.”
    “It’s good that’s fixed,” Badim remarks on the walk home.
    “That’s for sure!” She shakes her head gloomily. “If the lock doors were to get stuck, I don’t know what we’d do. I must say, I’m not impressed by the people who built this thing.”
    “Really? It’s quite a machine, when you think about it.”
    “But what a