Divergence

She looked around the freshly made corridor with its black carpet, the black-and-white tiled pattern on the walls and the pearly balls of light set in the ceiling that receded in a line into the distance.

“You’re a black-and-white woman,” Saskia noted astutely. “And our ship has only just adopted this color scheme.”

“And then there is the name,” said Judy.

“Eva Rye?” said Saskia. “But she’s just a story. Anyway, she would have died nearly two hundred years ago.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” replied Judy, and the edge of bitterness in her voice was absorbed by the soft comfort of the corridor.

“You’ve got something on your neck,” said Edward suddenly.

“I know,” said Judy. “The Free Enterprise put it there. Please don’t mention it again.”

Edward looked crestfallen, but at that moment Judy didn’t care.

“Would it be so bad to go to Earth?” asked Saskia hopefully. “I know you hear stories, but—”

“It’s worse than you can possibly imagine,” Judy replied. “Imagine everyone acting completely selflessly. Each person only doing what is best for their fellow humans.”

“That sounds quite nice to me,” Maurice said.

“Oh, it’s not,” Judy said. “Trust me, it’s not.”

“Do the Dark Seeds really exist?” Saskia asked. “I wondered if maybe they were just a story.”

“They exist. I’ve seen them.”

“Oh.”

“Hold on,” Maurice said, fiddling with his console again, “you said you haven’t had real food for five weeks. When were you taken on board the Free Enterprise ?”

“On the thirty-first of July.”

Maurice and Saskia looked at each other.

“This ship was born on the first of August.”

“Like I said, call me Jonah. Someone is doing whatever it takes to get me to Earth, and they don’t give a damn about the consequences of that for anyone else.”

Saskia spoke, not quite concealing her nervousness. “Judy, what are you doing here?”

Judy lay sobbing in bed. She was forty-one years old and a virgin, but that wasn’t why she was crying.

—You spend all your days wearing your face like a mask. You should cry more often, Judy.

“Oh, go away and leave me alone. You’re not even real.”

—Don’t take it out on me, Judy. Come on, what is the matter? What did you see that has you so upset?

Judy was hugging her knees, her whole body shaking as she cried.

“That little girl…that ugly little girl…”

Judy sat on a dining chair in the Eva Rye ’s living area. Edward was in the small kitchen, preparing a meal with a clack of pans and a bubbling of water. Saskia and Maurice sat opposite, looking rumpled and confused within the clean newness of the ship. Judy was doing what she had always done, separating her emotions from her memories. She was very good at it. It was only recently that she had begun to suspect that this wasn’t necessarily always something to be proud of.