Chapter 3

9YAL

After a decade of daily travel Zuri and I were intimate with every bank and island of the river. Our bare feet had trod its thirty-kilometer circumference multiple times, leaving both of us aching to adventure farther.

Finally yielding to our demands, Mother led us along an antispinward stream feeding the ringriver, heading towards the bow. The air was cool, carried on a low headwind that pushed constantly against my face, pebbling my skin with gooseflesh. Crisp, dry brown foliage snapped quietly as we walked.

Mother had taught us that Longshot’s climate mimiced that of our target planet, at least to the best that Ship understood it. Gaia’s wobbling axial tilt and racetrack orbit made seasons short and their transition sudden: winter, now gripping the entire habitat, usually lasted only a few tendays. The ringriver remained mild and pleasant year-round, but changes became more extreme the farther we walked away from it. After an hour’s journey my nose was tinging with every inhaled breath of cold air, and we avoided wading in the increasingly frigid waters of the stream, fed from its headwaters high in the bow’s distant mountains. Emptying into the ringriver, the water would be circulated and returned to the bow by massive pumps deep in the asteroid, completing the habitat’s main hydrological cycle. Zuri swore that she would scale the mountains and climb all the way to the hub someday.

Leaving the river meadow, the air cooled further as we passed into the shadow of a forest that grew thicker and darker as we continued to climb. Rays from the sunline, reduced through a polarising filter, stood in vertical pillars of light through limbs of tall oak and lodgepole pine.

After a few hours journey we rested at a moss-draped pool, eating the woodland strawberries we had picked on the way. Mother returned to her silent commune with Ship while Zuri and I leaned out over the rocks, watching steel-grey salmon and golden koi swirl in the water beneath us as a single white factotum stood guard over us. We were both shivering with cold, but knew better than to complain.

Unwilling to break the sounds of nature, and deeply attuned to each other, we rarely speak aloud during our journey. Anything of interest could be communicated silently, like the sight of the gray-green giant salamander Zuri spotted disappearing into the water with a splash.

After another hour of walking we emerged from the moraine forest into grassed foothills dotted with bright spots of winter alpine flowers. A meter-wide polished track of silver, its centerline marked with a groove as deep and wide as a fist, cut through the grass in the middle of the meadow, curving up and away on both sides of the habitat in a perfect circle. This was the border mother had fiercely defended, and the farthest forward we’d ever been permitted to travel aside from our single visit to the Cupola. Hidden from our view somewhere far along this track was Longshot’s gnomon, a tracked bronze triangle taller than Zuri standing on my shoulders. We had seen it once when we were very young, from far away, glinting in the sunline. It had appeared to be frozen, locked in place, but Mother had told us that it moved in a constant, infinitesimal creep along the track at a rate that we could not perceive. The gnomon indicated Longshot’s progress between Old Earth and Gaia, our target planet in 82 Eridani. In some 500 years, when the trip was complete, it would be back where it started, having swept through the entire circumference of our home.

Across the border, at the far end of the alpine meadow, a herd of red deer grazed, nestled in a treeline delta. A massive thorny rack of white-tipped antlers tangled with flowers lifted above the grasses as a long-necked stag looked at us curiously, tongue flickering.

We all froze at the same moment. Air in the habitat circulated in a helix, flowing down, cool and dense with moisture, from the bow mountains to the stern, where, warmed from the engines, it rose again, spiralling back up the cylinder. We were downwind of the herd.

I felt a tickle at the back of my head. Do you know why there is only one male? Mother’s voice spoke in my ear.

She had taught us to evoc the year before. Even when our lips were held silent, the vocal cords in our throats vibrated in minute sympathy with every word we thought of speaking. The neural lace threaded through our bodies read those tiny motions and transmitted them to the tympanic membrane of the recipient, replicating the thinker’s voice. The result was a kind of telepathic communication, and, also, a means of control: all of Ship’s systems could be commanded through evoc, although, as children, we didn’t yet have access to most of those.

He’s in control of the herd, Zuri replied, her words soft in my head.

But why only ever one?

I frowned. It was such a common feature of the vessel’s fauna that I hadn’t really considered it before. For every mammalian species we encountered, I’d only ever seen one male.

Follow me.

She broke to the left, moving back into the forest and rejoining the stream, continuing to climb antispinwards, upwards into the hills and crossing the silver ring with a long stride. Zuri and I began to shiver as it became steadily colder. We were starting to brush up against the taiga biome, a place that became an icebox during winter.