Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  And they can’t fix nitrogen. Why does nitrogen break so often? Because it’s hard to fix! Ha-ha. Phosphorus and sulfur are just as bad. They really need their bugs for these. So the bugs have to stay healthy too. Even though they’re not enough. For anyone to be healthy, everyone has to be healthy. Even bugs. No one is happy unless everyone is safe. But nothing is safe. This strikes Freya as a problem. Anabaena variabilis is our friend!

  You need machines and you need bugs. Burn things to ash and feed the ash to the bugs. They’re too small to see until there are zillions of them together. Then they look like mold on bread. Which makes sense because mold is one kind of bug. Not one of the good ones; well, bad but good. Bad to eat anyway. Devi doesn’t want her eating moldy bread, yuck! Who would do that?

  You can get two hundred liters of oxygen a week from one liter of suspended algae, if it is lit properly. Just two liters of algae will make enough oxygen for a person. But they have 2,122 people on board. So they have other ways to make oxygen too. There’s even some of it stored in tanks in the walls of the ship. It’s freezing cold but stays as liquid as water.

  The algae bottles are shaped like their biomes. So they’re like algae in a bottle! This makes Devi laugh her short laugh. All they need is a better recyclostat. The algae always have bugs living with them, eating them as they grow. With people it’s the same, but different. Growing just a gram of Chlorella takes in a liter of carbon dioxide and gives out 1.2 liters of oxygen. Good for the Chlorella, but the photosynthesis of algae and the respiration of humans are not in balance. They have to feed the algae just right to get it between eight and ten, where people are. Back and forth the gases go, into people, out of people, into plants, out of plants. Eat the plants, poop the plants, fertilize the soil, grow the plants, eat the plants. All of them breathing back and forth into each other’s mouths. Loops looping. Teeter-totters teetering and tottering all in a big row, but they can’t all bottom out on the same side at the same time. Even though they’re invisible!

  The cows in the dairy are the size of dogs, which Devi says is not the way it used to be. They’re engineered cows. They give as much milk as big cows, which were as big as caribou back on Earth. Devi is an engineer, but she never engineered a cow. She engineers the ship more than any animals in the ship.

  They grow cabbages and lettuce and beets, yuck! And carrots and potatoes and sweet potatoes, and beans that are so good at fixing nitrogen, and wheat and rice and onions and yams and taro and cassava and peanuts and Jerusalem artichokes, which are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem. Because names are just silly. You can call anything anything, but that doesn’t make it so.

  Devi is called away from one of her regular meetings to deal with an emergency again, and as it’s one of Freya’s days with her, she brings Freya along.

  First they go to her office and look at screens. What kind of emergency is that? But then Devi snaps her fingers and types like crazy and then points at one screen, and they hurry around to one of the passageways between biomes, the one between the Steppes and Mongolia that is called Russian Roulette, and is painted blue and red and yellow. The next one along is called the Great Gate of Kiev. The tall, short tunnel between the doors to the lock is crowded this morning with people, and a number of ladders and scaffolding towers and cherry-pickers.

  Devi joins the crowd under the scaffolding, and Badim shows up a bit later to keep Freya company. They watch as a group of people ascend one of the scaffold ladders, following Devi up to the ceiling of the tunnel, right next to the lock-door frame. There several panels have been pulled aside, and now Devi climbs up into the hole where the panels have been moved, disappearing from sight. Four people follow her into the hole. Freya had no idea that the ceiling did not represent the outer skin of the lock, and stares curiously. “What are they doing?”

  Badim says, “Now that we’re decelerating, that new little push is counteracting the Coriolis force that our spin creates, and that’s a new kind of pressure, or release from pressure. It’s made some kind of impediment in the lock door here, and Devi thinks they may have found what it is. So now they’re up there seeing if she’s right.”

  “Will Devi fix the ship?”

  “Well, actually I think the whole engineering team will be involved, if the problem turns out to be up there. But Devi’s the one who spotted this possibility.”

  “So she fixes things by thinking about them!”

  This was one of their family’s favorite lines, a quote from some scientist’s admiring older relatives, when he was a boy repairing radios.

  “Yes, that’s right!” Badim says, smiling.

  Six hours later, after Badim and Freya have gone into the Balkans for a lunch at its east end dining hall, the repair crew comes down out of the hole in the lock ceiling, handing down some equipment, then putting a few small mobile robots into baskets to be lowered by the scaffold. Devi comes down the ladder last and shakes hands all around. The problem has been located, and fixed with torches, saws, and welders. The long years of Coriolis push shifted something slightly out of position, and recently the counterforce of deceleration shifted it back, but meanwhile the rest of the door had gotten used to the shift. It all made sense, although it didn’t speak volumes about the quality of construction and assembly of the ship. They were going to check all the other slides like the broken one, to make sure the lock doors of Ring B weren’t impeded in other places. Then they won’t stress motors trying to close doors against resistance.

  Devi hugs Freya and Badim. She looks worried, as always.

  “Hungry?” Badim asks.

  “Yes,” she says. “And I could use a drink.”

  “It’s good that’s fixed,” Badim remarks on the walk home.

  “That’s for sure!” She shakes her head gloomily. “If the lock doors were to get stuck, I don’t know what we’d do. I must say, I’m not impressed by the people who built this thing.”

  “Really? It’s quite a machine, when you think about it.”

  “But what a design. And it’s just one thing after another. It’s pillar to post. I just hope we can hang on till we get there.”

  “Deceleration mode, my dear. It won’t be much longer.”

  The Coriolis force is the push sideways that you can’t feel. Whether you can feel it or not, however, it still pushes the water. So now that the water has the deceleration pushing it sideways, they have to pump water across to the other sides of biomes to get it to where it used to go. They have to replace the force in ways that don’t actually work very well in comparison to it. They planned for this with their pumping of water, but they haven’t been able to make up for the altered pushes inside plant cells, which some plants are turning out not to like. There was a little push inside every cell that is altered now. Which is maybe why things are getting sick. It doesn’t make sense, but then neither does anything else.

  On Devi goes, talking and talking as they make their rounds. “It’s not the Coriolis force that matters, it’s the Coriolis effects. Those were never accounted for except in people, as if people are the only ones who feel things!”

  “How could they have been so stupid?” Freya says.

  “Exactly! Maybe all the cell walls will hold, so maybe it isn’t obvious, but the water! The water!”

  “Because water always moves.”

  “Exactly! Water always flows downhill, water always takes the path of least resistance. And now we’ve got a new downhill.”

  “How could they be so stupid?”

  Devi seizes her around the shoulders as they walk, hugs her. “I’m sorry, I’m just worried is all.”

  “Because there are things to worry about.”

  “That’s right, there are. But I don’t have to afflict you with them.”

  “Will you have some salty caramel ice cream?”

  “Of course. You couldn’t stop me. You couldn’t stop me with twenty years of fusion bombs going off twice a second!”

  This is how they are slowing the sh
ip down. As always, they laugh at how crazy this is. Luckily the bombs are very teeny. They meet Badim at the dairy, and learn that there’s a new flavor of ice cream there, Neapolitan, which has three flavors combined.

  Freya is confused trying to think this through. “Badim, will I like that?”

  He smiles at her. “I think you will.”

  After the Neapolitan ice cream, on to the next stop on Devi’s rounds. Algae labs, the salt mine, the power plant, the print shop. If everything is going well, they’ll choose some item that has come up on the parts swap-out list, and go through Amazonia to Costa Rica, where the print shop is, and arrange for one of the printers to print out the part to be swapped out, and then they’ll go to wherever the part belongs, and switch on the backup system, if there is one, or simply turn off whatever it is and hurry to take out the old part and put in the new part. Gears, filters, tubes, bladders, gaskets, springs, hinges. When they’re done and the system is turned back on, they’ll study the old part to see how well it has endured, and where it has worn; they’ll take photos of it, and talk its diagnosis into the ship’s record, and then take the part to the recycling rooms, which are right next to the print shop, and provide the printers with many of their feedstocks.

  That’s when things are going well. But usually, not everything is going well. Then it’s a matter of troubleshooting, grasping the bull by the horns, seizing the nettle, coping and hoping, damning torpedoes, and trying any old thing, including the engineer’s solution, which is to hit things with a hammer. On really bad days, they even have to hope the whole shithouse doesn’t come down on their heads! Have to hope they don’t end up living like savage beasts, eating trash or their own dead babies! Devi’s face and voice can get very ugly as she spits out these bad fates.

  At home in the kitchen, even after bad days, Devi can get a little cheery. Drink some of Delwin’s white wine, fool around with Freya like a big sister. Freya doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, so she can’t be sure, but as she is already bigger than Devi, it feels to her like what she imagines having a sister would feel like. A sister who is littler, but older.

  Now Devi sits on the kitchen floor under the sink, calls for Badim to come join them and play spoons. Badim appears in the doorway looking pleased, holding the fat stack of big tarot cards. He sits, and they split up the cards among them, and begin each to build card houses at the three corners of the floor that they always take. They build the card houses low and thick, for defense against the others’ nefarious attacks, adding cards at angles so there are no faces presented square to each other. Devi always makes hers like a boat turned upside down, and as she usually wins, Badim and Freya have begun to imitate her style.

  When they are done building their card houses, they take turns flicking a plastic spoon across the kitchen at each other’s constructions. The rule is you have to launch the spoon by bending it between your hands, then letting it loose to spring through the air end over end. The spoons are light, and their little bowls catch the air so that their flights are erratic, and only seldom do they hit their targets. So they flick, and the spoon arcs across the floor veering this way and that—flick and miss, flick and miss—and then there will be a hit, thwack! But if the afflicted card house has been built well, and gets lucky, it will withstand the blow, or only partly fall, losing an outer rampart or bartizan. Badim has found names for all these features, which makes Devi laugh.

  Every once in a while a single hit will simply crumple a card house completely, which always makes them cry out with surprise, and then laugh. Although sometimes a kill shot causes a bad look to cross Devi’s face. But mostly she laughs with her husband and child, and flicks the spoon when it’s her turn, her lips pursed in concentration. She leans back against the cabinets, wearily content. This Badim and Freya can do for her. Okay, she is often angry, but she can shut that in a box inside her at times like this, and besides, her anger is directed mostly at things outside Freya’s ken. She isn’t angry at Freya. And Freya does her best to keep it that way.

  Then one day one of the printers breaks, and this puts Devi into an immediate fury of worry. No one sees it but Freya, as everyone is upset, scared, looking to Devi to make things right. So Devi hurries down to the print shop, dragging Freya along, talking on her headset and sometimes stopping mid-conversation to put her hand over the little mike in front of her mouth and curse sharply, or say “Wait just a second,” so she can talk to people coming up to her on the corniche. Often she puts her hand on these people’s arms to calm them down, and they do calm down, even though it’s clear to Freya that Devi herself is very mad. But the others do not see or feel it. It’s strange to think that Devi is such a good liar.

  At the print shop a big group of people are packed into the little meeting room, looking at screens and talking things over. Devi shoos Freya to her corner with the cushions and paints and lots of building parts in boxes, then goes over to the biggest group and starts asking questions.

  The printers are wonderful. They can make anything you want. Well, you can’t print elements; this is one of Devi’s sayings, mysterious to Freya in its import. But you can print DNA and make bacteria. You can print another printer. You could print out all the parts for a little spaceship and fly away if you wanted. All you need is the right feedstocks and designs, and they have feedstocks stored in the floors and walls of the ship, and a big library of designs, which they can alter however they want. They have the whole periodic table on board, almost, and they recycle everything they use, so they’ll never run out of anything they need. Even the stuff that turns to dust and falls to the ground will get eaten by bugs that like it, and thus get concentrated until people can harvest it back again out of the dead bugs. You can take dirt from anywhere in the ship and sift it for what you want. So the printers always have what they need to make stuff.

  But now a printer is broken. Or maybe it’s all the printers at once. They aren’t working; people keep saying they. They aren’t obeying instructions or answering questions. The diagnostics say everything is fine, or say nothing. And nothing happens. It’s more than one printer.

  Freya listens to the discussion for the way it sounds, trying to grasp the tenor of the situation. She concludes it is serious but not urgent. They aren’t going to die in the next hour. But they need the printers working. It’s maybe just the command and control systems that are at fault. Part of the ship’s mind, the AI that Devi talks to all the time. Although that’s bad. Or maybe the problem is mechanical. Maybe it’s just the diagnostics that have broken, failing to spot something obvious, something easy. Push the reset button. Hit it with a hammer.

  Anyway it’s a big problem, so big that people are happy to put it on Devi. And she does not shirk to take it. She’s asking all the questions now. This is why some people call her the chief engineer, although never when she can hear them. She says it’s a group. Now, from the tone of her voice, Freya can tell it’s going to take a long time. Freya settles in to paint a picture. A sailing ship on a lake.

  Later, much later, it’s Badim who wakes Freya, stretched out on her line of cushions, and takes her to the tram station, where they tram home to Nova Scotia, three biomes away. Devi is not going to be coming home that night. Nor is she home the next night. The morning after that, she is there asleep on the couch, and Freya lets her sleep, and then when she wakes, gives her a big hug.

  “Hey, girl,” Devi says dully. “Let me go to the bathroom.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Famished.”

  “I’ll cook scrambled eggs.”

  “Good.” Devi staggers off to the bathroom. Back at the kitchen table she eats with her face right over the plate, shoveling it in. Freya would get told to sit up straight if she ate that way, but now she says nothing.

  When Devi eases off and sits back, Freya serves her hot coffee and she slurps it down noisily.

  “Are the printers working?” Freya asks, feeling that now it’s safe to ask.

  “Yes,�
� Devi says grumpily. It turns out the problems with the diagnostics and the printers have all been one problem, which only made sense. It seems a gamma ray shot through the ship and made an unlucky hit, collapsing the wave function in a quantum part of the computer that runs the ship. It’s such bad luck that Devi wonders darkly if it might have been sabotage.

  Badim doesn’t believe this, but he too is troubled. Particles shoot through the ship all the time. Thousands of neutrinos are passing through them right this second, and dark matter and God knows what, all passing right through them. Interstellar space is not at all empty. Mostly empty, but not.

  Of course they too are mostly empty, Devi points out, still grumpy. No matter how solid things seem, they are mostly empty. So things can pass through each other without any problems. Except for once in a while. Then a fleck hits something as small as it, and both go flying off, or twist in position. Then things could break and get hurt. Mostly these little hurts mean nothing, they can’t be felt and don’t matter. Every body and ship is a community of things getting along, and a few little things knocked this way or that don’t matter, the others take up the slack. But every once in a while something bangs into something and breaks it, in a way that matters to the larger organism. Can range in effect from a twinge to death outright. Can be like one of their spoons knocking flat a house of cards.

  “No one wants to hurt the ship,” Badim said. “We don’t have anybody that deranged.”

  “Maybe,” Devi says.

  Badim eyeballs Freya for Devi to see, as if Freya can’t see this, though of course she does. Devi rolls her eyes to remind Badim of this. How often Freya has seen this eye dance of theirs.

  “Well anyway, the printers are back up again,” Badim reminds her.

  “I know. It’s just that whenever quantum mechanics is involved, I get scared. There’s no one in this ship who really understands it. We can follow the diagnostics, and things get fixed, but we don’t know why. And that I don’t like.”