Aurora Read Free Page B

design. And it’s just one thing after another. It’s pillar to post. I just hope we can hang on till we get there.”
    “Deceleration mode, my dear. It won’t be much longer.”

    The Coriolis force is the push sideways that you can’t feel. Whether you can feel it or not, however, it still pushes the water. So now that the water has the deceleration pushing it sideways, they have to pump water across to the other sides of biomes to get it to where it used to go. They have to replace the force inways that don’t actually work very well in comparison to it. They planned for this with their pumping of water, but they haven’t been able to make up for the altered pushes inside plant cells, which some plants are turning out not to like. There was a little push inside every cell that is altered now. Which is maybe why things are getting sick. It doesn’t make sense, but then neither does anything else.
    On Devi goes, talking and talking as they make their rounds. “It’s not the Coriolis force that matters, it’s the Coriolis effects. Those were never accounted for except in people, as if people are the only ones who feel things!”
    “How could they have been so stupid?” Freya says.
    “Exactly! Maybe all the cell walls will hold, so maybe it isn’t obvious, but the water! The water!”
    “Because water always moves.”
    “Exactly! Water always flows downhill, water always takes the path of least resistance. And now we’ve got a new downhill.”
    “How could they be so stupid?”
    Devi seizes her around the shoulders as they walk, hugs her. “I’m sorry, I’m just worried is all.”
    “Because there are things to worry about.”
    “That’s right, there are. But I don’t have to afflict you with them.”
    “Will you have some salty caramel ice cream?”
    “Of course. You couldn’t stop me. You couldn’t stop me with twenty years of fusion bombs going off twice a second!”
    This is how they are slowing the ship down. As always, they laugh at how crazy this is. Luckily the bombs are very teeny. They meet Badim at the dairy, and learn that there’s a new flavor of ice cream there, Neapolitan, which has three flavors combined.
    Freya is confused trying to think this through. “Badim, will I like that?”
    He smiles at her. “I think you will.”

    After the Neapolitan ice cream, on to the next stop on Devi’s rounds. Algae labs, the salt mine, the power plant, the print shop. If everything is going well, they’ll choose some item that has come up on the parts swap-out list, and go through Amazonia to Costa Rica, where the print shop is, and arrange for one of the printers to print out the part to be swapped out, and then they’ll go to wherever the part belongs, and switch on the backup system, if there is one, or simply turn off whatever it is and hurry to take out the old part and put in the new part. Gears, filters, tubes, bladders, gaskets, springs, hinges. When they’re done and the system is turned back on, they’ll study the old part to see how well it has endured, and where it has worn; they’ll take photos of it, and talk its diagnosis into the ship’s record, and then take the part to the recycling rooms, which are right next to the print shop, and provide the printers with many of their feedstocks.
    That’s when things are going well. But usually, not everything is going well. Then it’s a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes, and trying any old thing, including the engineer’s solution, which is to hit things with a hammer. On really bad days, they even have to hope the whole shithouse doesn’t come down on their heads! Have to hope they don’t end up living like savage beasts, eating trash or their own dead babies! Devi’s face and voice can get very ugly as she spits out these bad fates.

    At home in the kitchen, even after bad days, Devi can get a little cheery. Drink some of Delwin’s white