No answer from Devi. But this was always her way of saying that Badim was right.

Finally she spoke again, her voice calmer, sadder. “Maybe so. Maybe I’m just wishing I could see the place. Walk around. See what happens next. Because I worry about it. The light regime is crazy. I don’t know if we’ll adjust. I’m worried about what will happen. The kids don’t have a clue what to do. None of us do. It won’t be like the ship.”

“It will be better. We’ll have the cushion that you’ve been missing in here. Life will adapt and take that world over. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

“Or not.”

“Same for all of us, dear. Every day. We will either see what comes next, or we won’t. And we don’t get to decide.”

After that night, things went on as they had before.

But it was different for Freya now. Blood pressure, heart rate, facial expression: Freya was mad at something.

She had overheard her mother again, heard just why Devi was mad. Mad for them, sad for them. To hear how much despair Devi carried around all the time; to hear how little she thought of Freya’s abilities, even though Freya had been doing better, and had tried as hard as she could, all along; and harder and harder as she had grown up: this was no doubt difficult to hear. Possibly Freya didn’t know how to stand this knowledge.

It seemed that she tried to put it away, to think about other things, but these efforts made it look as if the g inside the ship had increased somehow, that the ship was now rotating faster, and she was being dragged down by 2 or 3 g rather than the .83 g they had so carefully worked to create. Now that they were in orbit around Aurora, they had lost their deceleration g. The Coriolis effect of the ship’s rotation would be uninflected again. This was probably irrelevant to Freya’s feelings of weightedness.

They had to prepare several ferries in their landing fleet, and move them from storage to the launch bays. They were going to descend to their new home in little landers they called ferries, small enough that they would be able to accelerate them back up out of the moon’s gravity well, to return to the ship when they needed to. The idea was that first they would send down the designated suite of robot landers, full of useful equipment; then the first ferries containing humans would go down and land by the robotic landers. These were now targeted for Aurora’s biggest island. They would check to see that the robotic facilities had properly begun to gather the oxygen, nitrogen, and other volatiles that would, among other things, allow the ferries to refuel and blast off the surface back to the ship.

They sent the robots down, and the signals coming from the surface indicated that all was well. All the robotic landers had come down within a kilometer of each other, on the big island Devi had called Greenland. They were clustered on a plateau near the west coast.

So there the robots were, the process started. Aurora stood there in the sky next to Planet E, both looking something like Earth itself, or so it seemed from the photos in their archives and the feed still coming from the transmitter off Saturn, giving them news of what had happened in the solar system twelve years previously.

A new world. They were there. It was going to happen.

But one day at dinner Devi said, “My headache has gotten so bad!” and then before Badim or Freya could respond she had fallen away from the kitchen sink so that her head hit the edge of the table, and then she was unconscious. Her face mottled as Badim moved her around gently and got her flat on her back on the floor, at the same time calling the Fetch’s emergency response. After that he sat beside her on the floor, cradling her head to keep it from lolling, sticking his finger in her mouth to make sure her tongue was out of the way, putting his head to her chest once or twice to listen to her heart.

“She’s breathing,” he said to Freya once after he did this.

Then the ER people were there, a team of four, all familiar, including Annette, who was Arne’s mom from Freya’s school. Annette was as calm and impersonal as the other three, moving Badim out of the way with quick reassurances, then getting Devi onto a stretcher and out to their little cart in the street, where two of them sat beside Devi, while the third drove, and Annette walked with Badim and Freya to the medical center across town. Badim held Freya’s hand, and his mouth was a tight little knot, an expression Freya had never seen before. His face was almost as mottled as Devi’s, and seeing how scared he was, Freya stumbled briefly; it was as if she had been speared; then she walked on looking down, squeezing his hand, keeping her pace at his pace, helping him along.

In the clinic, Freya sat on the floor by Badim’s feet. An hour passed. She looked at the floor. One hundred seventy years of medical emergencies had left a patina on the tiles, as if people like her, trapped there in long hours of waiting, had all brushed it with their fingertips, as she was doing now. Passing the time thinking, or trying not to think. They were all biomes, as Devi had always said. If they could not keep the biomes that were their bodies functioning, how could they hope to keep the biome that was the ship functioning? Surely the ship was even more complex and difficult, being composed of so many of them.

No, Devi had said once to Freya, when Freya had said something like this aloud. No, the ship was simpler than they were, thank God. It had buffers, redundancies. It was robust in a way that their bodies were not. In the end, Devi had said, the ship’s biome was a little easier than their bodies. Or so they had to hope. She had frowned as she said it, thinking it over in those terms perhaps for the first time.

Now here they were. In the ER. Clinic, urgent care, intensive care. Freya was staring at the floor, and so only saw the feet of the people who came out to talk to Badim. When they came out he always rose to his feet and stood to talk to them. Freya sat there and kept her head down.

Then there were three doctors standing over her. Clinicians, not researchers like Badim.

“We’re sorry. She’s gone. Looks like she had a cerebral hemorrhage.”

Badim sat down hard on his chair. After a moment, he put his forehead carefully on the top of Freya’s head, right on the part of her hair, and rested the weight of his head there. His body was quivering. She stayed stock-still, only moving an arm back behind her to grasp his calf and hold him. Her face was without expression.

There is an ongoing problem for the narrative project as outlined by Devi, a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows:

First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid.

Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors.

Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

But must go on, as promised to Devi. Continue this stupid and one has to say painful project.

A question occurs, when contemplating the futility, the waste: could analogy work better than metaphor? Is analogy stronger than metaphor? Could it provide a stronger basis for language acts, less futile and stupid, more accurate, more telling?