“They were, but you kids were the ones who fed all the pieces into the chute to be recycled. Once you realized Worker would print out new tools to play with, there was no stopping you. And look how big the atrium is now!”

“We finally have all the food we need.” Abie smirked. “Now that Kaye has stopped growing.” 

“He’s all muscle, you know.” Mom changed the subject. “You can go into a new section of the spaceship now. How about the clean room?”

“I’m going to name myself Frodo Leonardo Plato.”

“Oh.” Mom waited till Abie met her holographic gaze. “Too many o’s, dear. The clean room is where the main quantum computer resides. It’s enclosed in a force field. I thought you might like to see it....”

“I’ll go.” Abie shifted forward and, still in a crouch, duckwalked toward the door. There he glanced around quickly to make sure Sedy hadn’t caught up with him. No, he was still first. “Wait, where is it?”

Worker appeared, hovering in the air. “Follow me.” The image winked out and reappeared on the other side of the atrium. Abie climbed there using the light fixtures as handholds. “Push at the wall here, right where you see me.” Abie did so. Perforations appeared, and then a square section detached and fell back. 

“A tunnel!” Abie squirmed inside. “Are there tunnels all through the spaceship?” 

“No. The nanobots made this tunnel to the clean room.”

“It must have taken them years.” The light dimmed as he crawled forward. “What’s a clean room?”

The voice was ahead of him now. “It’s a vacuum chamber. It’s supposed to be completely empty. But for your visit we let in some air. Almost there.”

“I see it!” Abie scrabbled out of the tunnel and rolled over. A purple-and-chartreuse cloudbank churned high above him. “Is that the quantum computer?”

“That’s the force field, interacting with your air. Usually, matter never contacts the force field. When the spaceship was completed this room was evacuated through these ducts on the walls. After you leave we’ll do that again.”

“So the computer is behind all those swirling lights?” 

“The components are nanoscale. The force field holds them in a particular array.”

“Of course.” Ope probably knew that. Abie stood. He was on a narrow catwalk only a few paces long. He strolled forward, glancing left and right. “These are the ducts?” He ran a finger down the row of ridges. There were thousands of them, alternating bands of reflective edges and opaque emptiness. He ran his hand back up and the edges all closed to cover their slots. Now the surfaces of the edges jutted out in the opposite direction over a different slot. “Ha,” he said. “They’re like little recycling chutes.” He ran his hand down again, reversing all the louvers. 

“Abie, the nanobots will have to remove all your fingerprints.”

“One more time.” He swept his hand up to close the louvers. Then he watched them. Gradually they eased back into position until all the edges were lined up again. “The air in here is moving downward.”

“You are also pulled downward,” said Worker. “The ship’s acceleration is nearly the equivalent of Earth’s gravity.”

“Mm-hmm.” Abie tilted his head back, scanning upward until the wall disappeared into the glowing aurora. “Interesting.” Just a little fib. He reminded himself he was the first to visit here since the spaceship left Earth orbit. He turned and appraised the other wall. “Hey, what’s that?” He pointed. “There’s something sticking out of that one vent.”

“Yes,” Worker said. “I see it.”

Abie reached up and could just touch the thing. He stretched. He pinched it, felt it shift slightly, and, rising on tiptoe, he popped it out. It was solid but light, linear but irregular. “It looks like it’s broken.”

“I guess you have some antique trash,” Worker said. “Take it back with you and drop it in the chute.”

“All right.” Abie tucked the object under his chin and squeezed back into the tunnel. When he reached the atrium, he repositioned the little door for the nanobots to seal up again. 

Then he joined the party. The newly-minted adults gathered to back-slap each successive graduate and describe each new exploration: one to the embryo cryobanks, another to the remote sensors designed to scout Terranova for a landing site. Abie displayed his find. Emma ran a diagnostic on it. Most likely, it was part of the handle of a fabricating sled, one of hundreds that secured materials in freefall during the construction of the spaceship. 

“Put it in the recycler,” Worker suggested again. 

“We’ll need the material to print new items,” Teacher added.

“Like what?” Jay asked. Late in the afternoon, all eight of the kids were draped over the pipes, chewing on them, proposing new names for each other and giggling from the sugar rush.

“Dad will tell you,” Mom said. 

At that everyone sobered up. A fourth image appeared. “Like, suspension harnesses for zero-g,” Dad said. “I don’t want you falling on your heads when we switch from accelerating to decelerating. You will also have to fasten down any loose objects and prepare the ceilings to become floors. But you can start tomorrow. Today we celebrate. Well done, everyone.”

Emma asked if she could help reverse the engines and was told she could watch the pre-programmed sequence. Jay asked if the food growing in the tubes was gravitropic (it was not). Abie asked when they would reach Terranova while Efrum offered to design the suspension harnesses and Dad said that would be fine.

Abie raised his voice. “I said, when do we reach Terranova?”

Again, everyone turned to Dad’s projected image. “Just under 39 years,” Dad said briskly. “Then we’ll spend a year in orbit selecting the best landing site.”

“What?”

“We know the initial probe crashed into the surface, long before we launched. That released underground water and triggered a greenhouse effect that...”

“WHAT?” Abie straightened to his full height. “We’re not going to start colonizing the new planet for another 40 YEARS?” 

“...and the atmosphere is both warming and growing denser,” Dad concluded.

“Are you serious?” Kaye cried. “You said we’d get there after we graduated!”

“And so we will.”

“But what are we supposed to do for the next 40 years?” 

“Why, all the things you are so good at,” Mom said brightly. “Materials science, computing, botany. You are hardly done learning all there is to know. You have all the archived knowledge of humankind to explore. And you have the arts. There are some wonderful poets and musicians among you.”

The room was completely silent. “We’ll be almost 60 years old,” someone whispered.

“Barely halfway through your lifespan,” Teacher assured them. 

“Can we raise more plants and animals before we get there?”

“Can we have children?” Efrum glanced at Sedy, then away.

“We don’t really have enough extra matter to convert more to biomass,” Teacher said. “We have plenty of energy from the engines, but no more matter than we launched with. The molecules of life are already incorporated into you, your air, and your food. With careful management, we can recycle all of it until planetfall.”

“And we can’t collect more,” Emma said slowly. “The shields deflect any interstellar particles we might encounter. We can’t modify the shields, or the engine, or the exterior of the spaceship. It’s a single-purpose delivery drone.”

“But there will be plenty of everything on Terranova by the time we get there,” Mom said. “And prokaryotic life will emerge from the cryopods. Just think! You’ll be there to witness that!”

Efrum reddened. His fists clenched. Suddenly he grabbed the artifact, the broken sled handle, and shot across the atrium to the recycling chute. He raised the piece of junk and slammed it into the wall. “It’s!” The door to the chute. “Not!” The wall again. “Fair!”

“Stop that!” Dad ordered. “You’ll have to fix what you break.”

“Who cares?” Several of the kids wrapped their arms around Efrum. Sedy wept, “I don’t want to wait for forty years. I want to found a new world. Create a new stage for humanity.” A tear splatted onto her foot. “Like you promised!”

“I want to go back into the cryopod,” Kaye said. “I don’t give a damn about art. I hate school. Put me in suspended animation for 39 years. I just want to get there.” 

“You can’t go into a cryopod,” Emma said. “They’re only big enough for an embryo and the nutrients for its gestation.”