In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.
Anna savored the moment, then closed the text window and made the same, small sound that she always did when she finished the book. Anna loved the Bible and felt comforted and lifted up by what she found in it, but Tolstoy was uncontested for second place.
The accepted etymology of the word religion was that it came from religere, meaning “to bind together,” but Cicero had said its true root was relegere, “to reread.” The truth was, she liked both answers. What brought people together in a sense of love and community and the impulse to go back to beloved books weren’t that different for her. Both of them left her feeling calmer and renewed. Nono said it meant she was an introvert and an extrovert at the same time. Anna couldn’t really argue against that.
Officially the ship was the Abdel Rahman Badawi operated by Trachtman Corporation out of Luna, but everyone on board called her the Abbey. The complex history of the ship was written in her bones. The hallways were different shapes, depending on the style when they’d been added in or what salvaged ship they’d been taken from. The air always smelled like new plastic from the recyclers. The thrust gravity was kept at a thin tenth of a g to conserve reaction mass. The cargo decks far below Anna now were cathedral-high and piled with all the things that the new colony on Eudoxia—shelters, food recyclers, two small fusion reactors, and a wealth of biological and agricultural materials—would need. There were already two other settlements on Eudoxia. It was one of the most populous of the colony worlds with almost a thousand people on it.
When the Abbey arrived, that population would triple, and Anna and Nono and Nami would be part of it. Would live out the rest of their lives, chances were, finding ways to raise food they could eat, learning about their new, broad, and problematic Eden. And hopefully, building the spaces and institutions that would shape humanity’s presence on that world forever.
The first university, the first hospital, the first cathedral. All the things perched just outside reality, waiting for Anna and her fellow colonists to bring them into being.
It wasn’t the retirement Anna had expected or hoped for. Some nights she dreaded it. Not for herself so much as for her daughter. She’d always thought of Nami growing up in Abuja with her cousins, going off to university in Saint Petersburg or Moscow. She felt wistful now, knowing that Nami would likely never have the experience of living in a huge, sprawling urban environment. That she and Nono wouldn’t grow old together in the little house near Zuma Rock. That her own ashes, when she passed, would be scattered on unfamiliar water. But Abuja also had a few thousand less mouths to feed. Out of the remaining billions on Earth, it was nothing, except that enough nothings together might add up to something after all.
Her cabin was smaller than the house with two tiny bedrooms, a little sitting area with a scruffy wall screen, and just enough storage for their personal items. There were twenty like it in their hall, with a shared lavatory at one end and a cafeteria at the other. Four halls like hers on the deck. Ten decks on the ship. Right now, Nono was at the galley on deck three singing with a bluegrass quartet. The youngest of the musicians—a rail-thin, red-haired man named Jacques Harbinger—had used almost his whole personal space allotment on a real hammer dulcimer. Nami would be coming back from school on deck eight, where Kerr Ackerman was using the ship tutorials to teach the two hundred or so children about biology and survival techniques tailored for Eudoxia. After they both came home and they’d all had dinner in their own galley, Anna was going to the Humanist Society meeting on deck two, where she’d already won the role of the loyal opposition to George and Tanja Li, the young atheist couple who ran it. She didn’t fool herself into believing anyone would change anyone else’s mind. But the trip was long, and a good philosophical discussion passed the hours pleasantly. Then home to work on her sermon for next week.
She remembered something she’d read, she didn’t know where, about the life of ancient Greece. The private space had been thin there too, most of people’s hours spent in the streets and courtyards of Athens and Corinth and Thebes. A world where everyone’s home was not their castle but their dorm room. It was exhausting, but exhilarating too. She could already see the early shapes of the community they would eventually become. And the efforts she made now would have an effect on what happened when they reached their new home planet. The decisions they made in building their township would be the seed crystal for the city that might one day rise up from it. A few hundred years, and the work Anna did now to make this group a kind, thoughtful, centered one might be able to shape a whole world.
And wasn’t that worth a little extra effort?
She heard Nami’s voice before the door opened, serious and percussive the way she got when she was focused on something. She didn’t talk to herself often, so Anna assumed she had someone from school with her. When the door opened, she was proven right.
Nami walked into the little common room, practically dragging a sullen Arab boy behind her. He started a little when he saw Anna. She smiled without showing her teeth, didn’t quite make eye contact, didn’t move. She’d learned more about how to be with traumatized people in the last year than she’d ever hoped to know, and much of what she came to understand was that humans were domestic animals like dogs and cats. They responded poorly to threats and well to a gentle building of trust. Not rocket science, but easy to forget.
“This is Saladin,” Nami said. “We have a group project.”
“Good to meet you, Saladin,” Anna said. “I’m glad you could be here.”
The boy nodded once, looked away. Anna had to resist the urge to try to draw him out, ask him where he lived, who his parents were, how he liked his classes. She was always impatient to help people, even when they weren’t ready to be helped. Maybe especially then.
Nami, nattering about the great-man theory and technological ratchets and railroading time as if to fill the conversation for both of them, went to her bedroom and came out with her school tablet. Anna hoisted an eyebrow. “That’s been here all day?”
“I forgot it,” Nami said lightly. Then, “Bye, Mom,” as she marched out the door.
Saladin hesitated like he was surprised to have been left alone with a grown-up. Anna looked close to him, but not straight on. He nodded and ducked out the door after her daughter. She waited for one breath, and then another, and then—knowing it was a bad idea—crept to the closed door and peeked out. Nami and Saladin were walking down the narrow ship corridor, squeezing close to be side by side. His right hand was in her left, and as far as Anna could see, Nami was still talking animatedly about whatever she was talking about while Saladin, rapt, listened.
“So what’s your group project?” Anna asked.
Dinner that night was spiced beans and rice that very nearly mimicked the real thing. Nono was tired after her rehearsal, and Anna was expecting the Humanist meeting to be intense and a little taxing, so they’d taken the food back to their rooms instead of staying in the galley. Nami sat cross-legged with her back against the door while Anna and Nono took two of the chairs that folded down out of the wall. The walls were close enough that even though they were on opposite sides of the room, their knees almost touched. It would be almost a year living in the Abbey. By the time they reached Eudoxia, they might not remember what open space felt like anymore.
“History,” Nami said.
“Big subject,” Anna said. “Any particular part of history?”
Nono looked up at her from under her eyebrows, so maybe Anna wasn’t being quite as casual and nonchalant as she thought. Nami didn’t seem to notice anything, though.
“No. All of it. We’re not talking about what happened in history, we’re talking about what history is. So, you know”—she gestured in a circle with her spoon—“is the important thing about history the people who actually did things, or if they hadn’t been alive, would the same basic things have happened, just with other people doing them? Like with math.”
“Math?” Anna said.
“Sure,” Nami said. “Two different people came up with calculus right at the same time. So maybe everything’s like that. Maybe it doesn’t matter who leads a war because the things that made the war happen weren’t leaders. They were how much money people had or how good their land was for making food or something. That’s the section I’m writing. Saladin’s writing about the great-man theory, but it’s old because they only talk about men.”
“Ah,” Anna said, cringing at how obvious she felt. “Saladin’s doing that?”
“It’s about the idea that without Caesar, there wouldn’t have been a Roman Empire. Or without a Jesus, there wouldn’t have been Christianity.”
“Hard to argue against that,” Nono said.
“It’s a history class. We’re not talking about the religious part. And then Liliana’s doing the section on the technological ratchet, where the thing that changes is how well we understand how to make things like medicines and nuclear bombs and Epstein drives, and that everything else about history is cyclic. The same things happen over and over again, but it just seems different because we have different tools.” Nami frowned. “I don’t understand that one yet. But it’s not my section.”