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.”
“And what do you think?” Anna asked.
Nami shook her head and scooped up a last spoonful of almost-beans. “It’s dumb to break it up like that,” she said around her food. “Like it’s one thing or it’s something else. That’s not how it ever is. It’s always that there’s somebody who does whatever it is. You know, conquers Europe or decides that it’s a great idea to line aqueducts with lead or figures out how to coordinate radio frequencies. You never have one without the other. It’s like nature versus nurture. When do you ever see one without the other?”
“That’s a good point,” Anna said. “So how does the project work?”
Nami rolled her eyes. Oh God, they were in eye-rolling ages now. It seemed so recent that her little girl had been free of contempt. “It isn’t like that.”
“What isn’t like what?”
“Mother. Saladin isn’t my boyfriend. His parents died in Cairo, and he’s here with his aunt and uncle. He really needs friends, and anyway Liliana likes him, so even if I did, I wouldn’t. We have to be careful. We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle. If we mess it up, it’s not like we can just change schools.”
“Oh,” Anna said. “Is that something you talk about at school?”
The eye-roll again. Two eye-rolls in one night. “That was you, Mom. You’re always saying that.”
“I guess I am,” Anna agreed.
After they were done, Nami took their bowls and spoons and drinking bulbs back to the galley for them, an echo of the way she used to clean up after dinner back at home. When that had been home. Then she was off to study with Liliana and, for all Anna knew, Saladin as well. Nono took her turn being alone in the room. Anna made her way toward the lift and deck two for the Humanist Society, her hands touching the walls at either side of the corridor as if to steady her. It is necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, she thought, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious. And it was true, as far as it went.
But it was also a mistake to lose sight of all the individual lives and choices and flashes of pure dumb luck that brought humanity as far as they’d come. History, she thought, was perhaps better considered as a great improvisation. A thinking-through of some immense, generations-long thought. Or daydream.
The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms. That was something Nami seemed to grasp almost instinctively, but Anna had to remind herself of it. Maybe history was the same way. Theories of how things had to have happened the way they did only because, looking back, they’d happened that way.
Tomás Myers, a short, thick-set man in a formal white shirt, held the lift for her, and she trotted to it so as not to seem ungrateful. It lurched a little as it rose.
“Going to the Humanist meeting?” he said.
“Once more into the breach.” She smiled back.
As they rose, she felt the first inklings of the week’s sermon starting to fall into place. It revolved, she thought, around Tolstoy’s idea of an invisible dependence and the choice they’d all made to come to the Abbey, and Nami saying, We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.
Because that was always true. The Abbey and Eudoxia were small enough it became impossible to ignore it, but even among the teeming billions of Earth, they were spending their lives together. They needed to be gentle. And understanding. And careful. It had been true in the depths of history, and at the height of Earth’s power, and it would still be true now that they were scattering to the more than a thousand new suns.
Maybe, if they could find a way to be gentle, the stars would be better off with them.