The emergency committee spoke to the Greenlanders by radio, telling them to keep a physical distance from the ship, to remain near it as a kind of small satellite of it. The Greenlanders agreed to that, at first; but when they were running out of food, water, and air, and resupplies did not appear when promised from the ship, due to a technical problem with the ferry being used for the task, as was explained to them, they nevertheless powered their ferry in and approached the main lock in the ferry dock, at the stern end of the spine. From there they proposed to occupy Inner Ring A’s rooms at Spoke One, with the rooms permanently sealed off from the spine and the biomes. They would remain in those rooms and become as self-sufficient as possible, for as long a quarantine period as the people on the ship required. After that the question of reintegration could be reconsidered, and if people on the ship had become comfortable with the idea, the settlers might be able to rejoin the larger life of the ship.

After a brief meeting, permission to pursue this plan was expressly denied by the committee, as representing too much of a danger of infection to all the life on the ship. A small crowd of people, mostly men from Patagonia and Labrador, the two biomes at the end of Spoke One, gathered outside the ferry dock’s lock door and exhorted each other to resist any incursion by what they called the infected party. Others were alarmed when they saw on screens that this group was gathering, and some of them began to get on the trams and head for the spine to intervene in some poorly defined manner. In Labrador and the Prairie the tram stops began to fill with people, many angrily arguing with other groups they ran into. Fights broke out, and some young men levered the tram tracks off their piste in the Prairie, stopping traffic from moving around Ring B.

Hanging just outside the docking port, the settlers in their ferry reported that overcrowding in their little vehicle had caused something in it to malfunction in such a way that they were quickly running out of breathable air, and they were therefore going to enter the ship’s dock as proposed. They warned those in the ship that they were coming in, and the people inside the dock’s main lock door told them not to do it. People on both sides were shouting angrily now. Then lights on the operations console inside the dock showed that the settlers were coming in, and at that point some of the young men inside the operations room rushed the security council members there operating the lock, knocking them down and taking over the console. By now the shouting was such that no one could understand anyone else. The ferry entered the docking port, which automatically secured it in position. The outer door of the dock closed, the dock was aerated, and the dock’s entry walktube extended to connect the ferry hatch to the inner lock door, all automatically. The settlers in the ferry opened their hatch and began to leave the ferry by way of the walktube, but at the same time, the people now in charge of the dock’s operations console locked the inner lock door and opened the outer lock door, which in three seconds catastrophically flushed the dock and the walktube and the opened ferry of their air. All the seventy-two people in the ferry and walktube then died of decompression effects.

Surely the bad times had come again.

4 REVERSION TO THE MEAN

News of the disaster spread through both rings within minutes, and after an initial uproar there fell on most of the biomes a deathly quiet. People didn’t know what to do. Some got on trams to Patagonia and then headed up Spoke One, talking loudly of charging those who had blown the dock with mass murder. Others got on trams, sometimes the same trams, intending to defend the people who they said had handled the incursion as best they could, saving everyone aboard from a fatal infection. Unsurprisingly, several fights broke out, and some trams braked to a halt, after which their occupants spilled onto the streets, fighting and calling around the rings for reinforcements.

“No!” Freya kept shouting through her tears, watching her screen as she hastily dressed to leave their apartment. “No! No! No!” She threw things at the walls as she banged around her bedroom, looking for her shoes.

“What are you going to do?” Badim asked her from the door.

“I don’t know! I’m going to kill them!”

“Freya, don’t. You need to have a plan. Everyone is upset, but look, the people who have died are dead, we can’t get them back. It’s happened. So now we have to think about what to do next.”

Freya was still looking at her wristpad. “No!” she shouted again.

“Please, Freya. Let’s think about what we can do now. You can’t just wade in there and join the fight. That’ll happen without you. We have to think what we can do to help.”

“But what can we do?”

She found her second shoe and jammed her foot into it, then sat there.

“I’m not sure,” Badim confessed. “It’s a mess, no doubt about it. But listen—what about Jochi?”

“What about him? He’s still down there!”

“I know. But he can’t stay there forever. And while everyone is caught up in the disaster here, I’m wondering if we could take advantage of that, and get him up here.”

“But they’ll kill him too!”

“Yes, if he tries to enter the ship. But if he takes a ferry up here, and stays in the ferry, he would be within reach. We could resupply him, talk to him. There’s a good chance he isn’t infected with this pathogen. After a while that will become clear, and we can move on from there.”

Freya had begun to nod. “Okay. Let’s talk to Aram. He’ll want to know about this and help.”

“That’s right.”

Badim began tapping at his wristpad.

Aram was very happy to work on a plan to rescue Jochi, and he agreed with Badim that until the chaotic fighting among the people in the spine came to an end, there was very little they could do to help in the ship. Already the crowds there were massed into groups shouting at each other, with young men occasionally coming to blows. These were ineffective and dangerous in the spine’s microgravity, but that didn’t stop the fighting. Aram and Badim were in touch with many friends on the various councils, and most felt they should close the spine to people, as it was so full of the critical machinery of the ship. But with angry people floating up and down the spine passageways, shouting and getting in fights, it was not obvious how to secure the situation in the first place. Security council members were beginning to occupy the spokes to try to prevent anyone else from getting into the spine, but this was not a complete solution. It was a dangerous situation.

In those fraught hours Aram and Badim and Freya called Jochi, and after repeated entreaties, he replied.

Apparently he was aware of the docking disaster. He sounded unlike himself, voice grim and low. “What.”

Aram explained their plan for him.

“They’ll kill me too,” he said.

Freya assured him that wouldn’t happen. Many aboard were outraged at what had happened and would be intent on protecting him. If he stayed in his ferry, no one aboard would try to destroy it. Her voice shook as she said this.