Free Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson Page B

rings several times,” she was told, “so be like them, come back to us.”
    “I will,” Freya said.
    The next day she walked to the western end of the biome and passed through the open doorway into the short, tall tunnel between Labrador and the Pampas. This was the point where you could best see that the tunnels are canted at fifteen-degree angles to the biomes at each end.
    As she was leaving, a young man she had seen many times approached her.
    “So you’re leaving.”
    “Yes.”
    “You saw Rike’s coming-out?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s why a lot of us hate this place.”
    Freya stared at him. “Why don’t you leave then?”
    “And go where?”
    “Anywhere.”
    “You can’t just go where you want to.”
    “Why not?”
    “They won’t let you. You have to have a place to go.”
    Freya said, “I left.”
    “But you’re on your wander. Someone gave permission for you to go.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Aren’t you Devi’s daughter?”
    “Yes.”
    “They got you a permission. Not everyone gets them. Things wouldn’t work if they did. Don’t you see? Everything we do is controlled. No one gets to do what they want. You have it a little different, but even you don’t get to do what you want. That’s why a lot of us hate this place. And Labrador especially. A lot of us would go to Costa Rica if we could.”

    In the Pampas, the sunline overhead was brighter, the blue of the ceiling a lighter pastel, the air full of birds. The land was flatter and set lower in its cylinder, farther away from its sunline, which meant it was a narrower parcel. Its greens were dustier but more widespread; everything here was green. From the slight rise of the lock door she could see up the whole length of the biome, to the dark circle of the lock door leading to the Prairie. There on the rumpled plain of the Pampas were roving herds, clouds of dust over each in the angled morning light: cattle, elk, horses, deer.
    Like all the biomes, this one was a combination of wilderness, zoo, and farm. The two villages here, as in most of the biomes, were placed near the midline of the cylinder, not far from the locks at each end.
    Freya walked a path that ran parallel to the tram tracks. In the little village of Plata, a group of residents who had been informed she was coming greeted her and led her to a plaza. Here she was to live in rooms above a café. At the tables on the plaza outside the café she was fed lunch, and introduced by her hosts to many people of the town. They spent the afternoon telling her how wonderful Devi had been when a cistern of theirs had broken, before Freya was born. “A situation like that is when you really need your engineers to be good!” they said. “So quick she was, so clever! So in tune with the ship. And so friendly too.”
    Freya nodded silently at these descriptions. “I’m nothing like her,” she told them. “I don’t know how to do anything. You’ll have to teach me something to do, but I warn you, I’m stupid.”
    They laughed at her and assured her they would teach her everything they knew, which would be easy, as it was so little.
    “This is my kind of place then,” she said.
    They wanted her to become a shepherd, and a dairy worker. Ifshe didn’t mind. Lots of people came to the Pampas wanting to be a gaucho, to ride horses and throw bola balls at the legs of unfortunate calves. It was the signature activity of the Pampas, and yet very seldom performed. The cows on the ship were an engineered breed only about a sixth the size of cows back on Earth, and generally cared for in dairy pastures, so the big need was for people to go out with the sheep, and let the sheepdogs know what needed doing. This was also an excellent opportunity for bird-watching, as the pampas were home to a large number of birds, including some very large and graceful, or some said graceless, cranes.
    Freya was agreeable; it would be better than the salmon factory, she told them, and as she was also