“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 café, 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 café, 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 café, 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.

Above them, the spine extended forward toward Tau Ceti. The fusion explosions slowing them down were not visible, which was no doubt lucky for their retinas. They came to another lock door above them, like the one by which they had entered the spoke, and again Euan had the code.

“Now this is interesting,” he said to Freya as the door unlocked and he pushed it up like a trapdoor, and they ascended into a small cubical room. “This is where the inner ring intersects this spoke, before you get to the spine proper. The inner ring was mostly used for storing fuel, it looks like. So the chambers have emptied as we slowed down, and there are more routes opening up for us than there were when we used to come up here. So we’ve been exploring the inner rings, and we found ways to get into the struts connecting the inner rings directly to each other. They don’t have recording devices in them—”