“Let her go!” Badim says, in a tone of voice Freya has never heard before.

Devi lets go. “Do you understand!” she shouts again, face still thrust at Freya, shifting around Badim as if he were a rock. “Do—you—understand?”

“Yes!” Freya cries, collapsing into Badim’s arms, and across Badim into Devi so that she can hug her mother, so much shorter than she is, and at first it’s like hugging a tree. But after a while the tree hugs her back.

Freya gulps back her sobs. “I just wasn’t—I wasn’t—”

“I know.”

Devi strokes Freya’s hair back from her face, looking anguished. “It’s all right. Stop that now.”

Freya feels a wash of relief pour down her, although she is still terrified. She shudders, the vision of her mother’s contorted face still vivid to her. She tries to speak; nothing comes out.

Devi hugs her.

“We don’t even know if that wilderness is important,” she says into Freya’s chest, kissing her between sentences. “We don’t know what keeps things balanced. We just have to watch and see. It makes sense that a wild place might help. So we have to make them and protect them. We have to be careful with them. We have to keep watching them. We have to watch everything as closely as we can.”

“Let’s go home,” Badim says, herding them along with his outstretched arms. “Let’s go home.”

That night they sit quietly around the kitchen table. Even Badim is quiet. None of them eats very much. Devi looks distraught, lost. Freya, still stunned by that look on her mother’s face, understands; her mother is sorry. She has had something burst out of her that she has always before managed to keep in. Now her mother too is afraid; afraid of herself. Maybe that’s the worst kind of fear.

Freya suggests that they assemble her doll tree house. They haven’t done that for a long time. They used to do it a lot. Devi quickly agrees, and Badim goes to get it out of the hall closet.

They sit on the floor and put together all the parts of the house. It was a present from Devi’s parents to Devi, long before, and through every move in her life, Devi has saved it. A big dollhouse that is also a miniature tree house, in that all its rooms fit onto the branches of a very nice-looking plastic bonsai tree. When all the rooms are assembled and fitted onto the branches they are supposed to fit, you can open the roofs and look into each room, and each is furnished and appointed however you like.

“It’s so pretty,” Freya says. “I’d love to live in a house like this.”

“You already do,” Devi says.

Badim looks away, and Devi sees that. Her face spasms. Freya feels a lurch of fear as she watches her mother’s face shift from anger to sadness, then to frustration, then resolve, then fury, then, finally, to some kind of desolation; and after all that, pulling herself together, to some kind of blankness, which is the best she can do at that moment. Which Freya pretends is okay, to help her out.

“I would choose this room,” Badim says, tapping a small bedroom with open windows on all four sides, out on one of the outermost branches of the tree.

“You always choose that one,” Freya points out. “I choose the one by the water wheel.”

“It would be noisy,” Devi says, as she always does. She always chooses the living room itself, so big and airy, where she will sleep on the couch, next to the harmonium. Now she makes that choice again. And so they go on, trying to knit things back together.

Very late that night, however, Freya wakes up and hears her parents talking down the hall. Something in their voices catches at her; this may even be what woke her. Or Badim exclaiming something, louder than usual. She crawls silently to the doorway, and from there on the floor can hear them, even though they are speaking quietly.

“You chipped her?” he is saying now.

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t consult with me about this?”

“No.”

Long silence.

“You shouldn’t have yelled at her like that.”

“I know, I know, I know,” Devi says, as she often does when Badim taxes her with doing something wrong. He does it very infrequently, and when he does he is usually in the right, and Devi knows that. “I lost it. I was so surprised. I didn’t think she would ever do anything like that. I thought that after all we’ve been through, that she would understand how important it is.”

“She’s just a child.”

“But she’s not!” This in her fierce whisper, the undertone she uses when she and Badim argue at night. “She’s fourteen years old, Badim. She’s behind, you have to admit it. She’s behind and she may never catch up.”

“There’s no reason to say that.”

A silence. Finally Devi says, “Come on, Beebee. Quit it. You aren’t doing her any favors when you pretend everything is normal with her. It isn’t. There’s something wrong. She’s slow at things.”

“I’m not so sure. She always comes through. Slow is not the same as deficient. It’s just slow. A glacier is slow too, but it gets there, and nothing stops it. Freya is like that.”

Another silence.

“Beebee. I wish it would be true.” A pause. “But think about those tests. And she’s not the only one. A fair percentage of her cohort has problems. It’s like a regression to the norm.”

“Not at all.”

“How can you say that? It’s clear this ship is damaging us! The first generation were all supposedly exceptional people, although I have my doubts about that, but even if they were, over the six generations we’ve recorded shrinkages of all kinds. Weight, reflex speed, number of brain synapses, test scores. It’s straight out of island biogeography, clear as can be. And some of that involves regression, including regression to the norm. Reversion to the mean. Whatever you want to call it. It’s gotten our Freya too. I don’t understand exactly what it is with her, because the data are inconsistent, but she’s got a problem. She’s slow. And she’s got some memory issues. When you deny that you don’t help the situation. The data are clear.”

“Please, Devi. Quieter. We don’t know what’s going on with her. The test results are ambiguous. She’s a good girl. And slow is not so bad. Speed is not the most important thing. It’s where you get to. Besides, even if she does turn out to have some disabilities, what’s the best approach to take to them? This is what you aren’t factoring in.”

“But I am. I do factor it in. We do everything we would have done with any child. We expect her to be like the other kids, and usually she comes through, eventually. That’s why I was so surprised today. I didn’t think she would do that.”

“But an ordinary kid would do that. The sharpest kids are often the first to rebel.”

“And then they use the slow kids as fodder. As their marks, their shields for when they get in trouble. That’s what happened today. Kids are cruel, Bee. You know that. They’ll throw her under the tram. I’m afraid she’ll get hurt.”

“Life hurts, Devi. Let her live, let her get hurt. Say she has some problems. All we can do is be there for her. We can’t save her. She’s got to live her life. They all do.”

“I know.” Another long pause. “I wonder what will become of them. They aren’t very good. We keep getting worse. The teaching gets worse, the learning gets worse.”

“I’m not so sure. Besides, we’re almost there.”

“Almost where?” Devi said. “Tau Ceti? Is that really going to help?”

“I think it will.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“We’ll find out. And please, don’t jump to any conclusions about Freya. She’s got some problems, granted. But she’s got a lot of growing up left to do.”

“That’s for sure,” Devi said. “But it may not happen. And if it doesn’t happen, you’re going to have to accept that. You can’t keep pretending everything is normal with her. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”