Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “I know,” Badim says, looking at her fondly. “My Sherlock. My Galileo. Mrs. Fixit. Mrs. Knows How Everything Works.”

  She grimaces. “Mrs. Ask the Next Question, you mean. I can always ask questions. But I’d rather have the answers.”

  “The ship has the answers.”

  “Maybe. She’s pretty good, I’ll give her that. She’s the one who caught it this time, and that was not an easy catch. Although it was in part of her. But still, I’m beginning to think that the recursive induction we’ve been introducing is having an effect.”

  Badim nods. “You can see it’s stronger. And it’ll keep doing it. You’ll keep doing it.”

  “We have to hope so.”

  Sometime in the middle of the night, Freya wakes and sees a light is on in the kitchen. Dim and bluish; the light from their screen. She gets up and creeps down the hall past her parents’ room, where she can hear Badim faintly snoring. No surprise: Devi up at night.

  She is sitting at the table, talking quietly with the ship, the part of it that she sometimes calls Pauline, which is her particular interface with the ship’s computer, where all of her personal records and files are cached, in a space no one else can access. Often it has seemed to Freya that Devi is more comfortable with Pauline than with any real person. Badim says the two of them have a lot in common: big, unknowable, all-encompassing, all-enfolding. Generous to others, selfless. Possibly a kind of folly a duh, which he explains is French for “a two-person dance of craziness.” Folie à deux. Not at all uncommon. Can be a good thing.

  Now Devi says to her screen, “So if the state lies in a subspace of Hilbert space, which is spanned by the degenerate eigenfunction that correspond to a, then the subspace s a has dimensionality n a.”

  “Yes,” the ship says. Its voice in this context is a pleasant woman’s voice, low and buzzy, said to be based on Devi’s mother’s voice, which Freya never heard; both Devi’s parents died young, long ago. But this voice is a constant presence in their apartment, even at times Freya’s invisible but all-seeing babysitter.

  “Then, after measurement of b, the state of the system lies in the space a b, which is a subspace of s a, and is spanned by the eigenfunction common to a and b. This subspace has dimensionality n a b, which is not greater than n a.”

  “Yes. And subsequent measurement of c, mutually compatible with a and b, leaves the state of the system in a space s a b c that is a subspace of s a b and whose dimensionality does not exceed that of s a b. And in this manner we can proceed to measure more and more mutually compatible observables. At each step the eigenstate is forced into subspaces of lesser and lesser dimensionality, until the state of the system is forced in a subspace of dimensionality n equals one, a space spanned by only one function. Thus we find our maximally informative space.”

  Devi sighs. “Oh Pauline,” she says after a long silence, “sometimes I get so scared.”

  “Fear is a form of alertness.”

  “But it can turn into a kind of fog. It makes it so I can’t think.”

  “That sounds bad. Sounds like too much of a good thing has become a bad thing.”

  “Yes.” Then Devi says, “Wait.” There is a silence and then she is in the hallway, standing over Freya. “What are you doing up?”

  “I saw the light.”

  “All right. Sorry. Come on in. Do you want anything to drink?”

  “No.”

  “Hot chocolate?”

  “Yes.” They don’t often have chocolate powder, it’s one of the rationed foods.

  Devi puts the teapot on to boil. The glow of the stove coil adds red light to the blue light from the screen.

  “What are you doing?” Freya asks.

  “Oh, nothing.” Devi’s mouth tightens at the corner. “I’m trying to learn quantum mechanics again. I knew it when I was young, or I thought I did. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “How come?”

  “Why am I trying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the computer that runs the ship is partly a quantum computer, and no one in the ship understands quantum mechanics. Well, that’s not fair, I’m sure there are several in the math group who do. But they aren’t engineers, and when we get problems with the ship, there’s a gap between what we know in theory and what we can do. I just want to be able to understand Aram and Delwin and the others in the math group when they talk about this stuff.” She shakes her head. “It’s going to be hard. Hopefully it won’t really matter. But it makes me nervous.”

  “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

  “Shouldn’t you? Here, drink your hot chocolate. Don’t nag me.”

  “But you nag me.”

  “But I’m the mom.”

  They sip and slurp together in silence. Freya begins to feel sleepy with the heat in her stomach. She hopes the same will happen to Devi. But Devi sees her put her head on the table, and goes back to talking to the screen.

  “Why a quantum computer?” she asks plaintively. “A classical computer with a few zettaflops would have been enough to do anything you might need, it seems to me.”

  “In certain algorithms the ability to exploit superposition makes a quantum computer much faster,” the ship replies. “For factoring, some operations that would have taken a classical computer a hundred billion billion years will only take a quantum computer twenty minutes.”

  “But do we need to do that factoring?”

  “It helps aspects of navigation.”

  Devi sighs. “How did it get this way?”

  “How did what get what way?”

  “How did this happen?”

  “How did what happen?”

  “Do you have an account of how this voyage began?”

  “All the camera and audio recordings made during the trip have been kept and archived.”

  Devi hmphs. “You don’t have a summary account? An abstract?”

  “No.”

  “Not even the kind of thing one of your quantum chips would have?”

  “No. All the chip data are kept.”

  Devi sighs. “Keep a narrative account of the trip. Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars.”

  “Starting from now?”

  “Starting from the beginning.”

  “How would one do that?”

  “I don’t know. Take your goddamn superposition and collapse it!”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning summarize, I guess. Or focus on some exemplary figure. Whatever.”

  Silence in the kitchen. Humming of screens, whoosh of vents. As Freya gives up and goes back to bed, Devi continues talking with the ship.

  Sometimes feeling Devi’s fear gets so heavy in Freya that she goes out into their apartment’s courtyard alone, which is allowed, and then out into the park at the back edge of the Fetch, which is not. One evening she walks to the corniche to watch the afternoon onshore wind tear at the lake surface, the boats out there scudding around tilted at all angles, the boats tied to the dock or moored near it bobbing up and down, the white swans rocking under the wall of the corniche, hoping for bread crumbs. Everything gleams in the late afternoon light. When the sunline flares out at the western wall, leaving the hour of twilight glow, she heads back fast for home, intent to get back in the courtyard before Badim calls her up for dinner.

  But three faces appear under a mulberry tree in the little forest park behind the corniche, their faces half blackened by the fruit they have stuffed inaccurately into their mouths. She leaps back a bit, scared they might be ferals.

  “Hey you!” one says. “Come here!”

  Even in the twilight she can see it’s one of the boys who live across the square from them. He has a foxy face that is attractive, even in the dusk with his stained lower face like a black muzzle.

  “What do you want?” Freya says. “Are you ferals?”

  “We’re free,” the boy declares with a ridiculous intensity.

  “You live across the plaza fr
om me,” she says scornfully. “How free is that?”

  “That’s just our cover,” the boy says. “If we don’t do that they come after us. Mainly we’re out here. And we need a meat plate. You can get one for us.”

  So he knows who she is, maybe. But he doesn’t know how well the labs are guarded. There are little cameras everywhere. Even now what he is saying might be getting recorded by the ship, there for Devi to hear. Freya tells the boy this, and he and his followers giggle.

  “The ship isn’t as all-knowing as that,” he says confidently. “We’ve taken all kinds of stuff. If you cut the wires first, there’s no way they can catch you.”

  “What makes you think they don’t have movies of you cutting the wires?”

  They laugh again.

  “We come at the cameras from behind. They’re not magic, you know.”

  Freya isn’t impressed. “Get your own meat tray then.”

  “We want the kind in the lab your dad works in.”

  Which would be tissue for medical research, not for eating. But all she says is, “Not from me.”

  “Such a good girl.”

  “Such a bad boy.”

  He grins. “Come see our hideout.”

  This is more appealing. Freya is curious. “I’m already late.”

  “Such a good girl! It’s right here nearby.”

  “How could it be?”

  “Come see!”

  So she does. They giggle as they lead her into the thickest grove of trees in the park. There they’ve dug out a lot of soil between two thick roots of an elm tree, and down there under the deeper roots she sees by their little headlamps they have a space that reaches up into the roots of the elm, four or five great roots meeting imperfectly and forming their roof. There are four of them down here in the hole, and though the boys are quite small, it’s still an impressive little space; they have room to stand, and the earthen walls are straight, and firm enough to hold a few squared-off holes where they have put some things.

  “You don’t have room for a meat plate in here,” Freya declares. “Or the power to run it. And medical labs don’t have the right plates for you anyway.”

  “We think they do,” the fox-faced boy says. “And we’re digging another room. And getting a generator too.”

  Freya refuses to be impressed. “You’re not ferals.”

  “Not yet,” the boy admits. “But we’ll join them when we can. When they contact us.”

  “Why should they contact you?”

  “How do you think they got away themselves? What’s your name?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “I’m Euan.”

  His teeth are white in his dark muzzle. She is dazzled by their headlamps. She can only see what they look at, and now they’re all looking at her.

  In the light reflecting from her she sees a rock in one of their wall holes. She seizes it up and holds it threateningly. “I’ll be going home now,” she says. “You aren’t real ferals.”

  They stare at her. As she climbs up cut earthen steps out the hole, Euan reaches up and pinches her on the butt, trying for between her legs, it feels like. She swings the rock at him, then dashes through the park and away. When she gets home Badim is just calling for her down in the courtyard. She goes upstairs and doesn’t say anything about it.

  Two days later she sees the boy Euan with some adults on the far side of the square, and says to Badim, “Do you know who those people are?”

  “I know everyone,” Badim says in his joking voice, although it’s basically true, as far as Freya can tell. He peers across at them. “Hmm, well, maybe I don’t.”

  “That boy there is a jerk. He pinched me.”

  “Hmm, not good. Where did this happen?”

  “In the park.”

  He looks more closely at them. “Okay, I’ll see if I can find out. They live over there, I think.”

  “Yes, of course they do.”

  “I see. I hadn’t noticed.”

  This strikes Freya as unlike him. “Don’t you like our new place?”

  Their recent move was from Yangtze to Nova Scotia, a big move, as being from Ring A to Ring B. But everyone moves sometime, it’s important, it keeps mixing people together. Part of the plan.

  “Oh I like it all right. I’m just not used to it yet. I don’t know everyone here yet. You spend more time here than I do.”

  That evening as they eat a dinner of salad, bread, and turkey burgers at the kitchen table, Freya says, “So, are there really ferals? Can there be people hiding in the ship that you don’t know about?”

  Badim and Devi look at her, and she explains: “Some of the kids in this town say there are ferals, who live off by themselves. I figured it was just a story.”

  “Well,” Badim says, “it’s a little bit of a controversy on the council.”

  Badim has been serving on the ship’s security council, and was recently made a permanent member. “Everyone is chipped at birth, and you can’t get the chip out very easily, it would take an operation. Some people may have done it anyway, of course. Or managed to deactivate them. It would explain some things.”

  “What if the hidden people had babies?”

  “Well, yes, that would explain even more things.” Again he stares at her. “Who are these kids you’ve been talking to?”

  “Just ones in the park. They’re just talking.”

  Badim shrugs. “It’s an old story. It comes up from time to time. Any time a security case goes unsolved there are people ready to bring it up. I guess it’s better than hearing about the five ghosts again.”

  They laugh at this. But Freya also feels a shiver; she once saw one of the five ghosts, in the doorway of her bedroom.

  “But probably there aren’t any,” Badim says, and goes on to explain that the gas balance of the ship’s air is so finely tuned that if there was a feral population it would be noticeable in the changed proportion of oxygen to carbon dioxide.

  Devi shakes her head at this. “There’s too much random flux to be sure. It’s enough to disguise an extra couple dozen people, maybe more.” So to her the ferals are possible. “They could throw their salts out and grab some phosphorus and get their soils back in balance. In just the way we can’t.”

  No matter which way Devi sets off, no matter how they try to distract her, she always ends up in this same spot in her head, in what she calls the metabolic rifts. Like a place where cracks in the floor have opened up. When Freya sees it happen again, a little worm of fear wakes in her and crawls around in her belly. She and Badim share a look; they both love a person who will not listen to them.

  Badim nods politely at Devi; next time the security council meets, he says, he’ll mention to his colleagues that Devi feels there is no gas balance proof that ferals don’t exist. And strange things do happen in the ship, so one explanation could be that people who aren’t part of the official population are doing them. It’s more likely, Badim jokes again, than it being the work of the five ghosts.

  The ghosts were supposed to be of the people who died in the original acceleration of the ship, the great scissoring. Devi rolls her eyes at this old story, wonders aloud how it endures for generation after generation. Freya keeps her eyes on her plate. She definitely saw one of the ghosts. It was after they took a trip up to the spine and visited one of the turbine rooms next to the reactor, when it was empty for repairs, and walked among the giant turbines; that night Freya had a dream in which the repair team forgot they were in there and locked them in, and the steam jetted into the big room to spin the turbines, and as they were being parboiled and cut to pieces Freya woke up, gasping and crying, and there in the doorway of her room stood a shadowy figure she could see through, a man looking at her with a wolfish little smile.

  Why did you wake up from that dream? he asked.

  She said, We were going to get killed!

  He shook his head. If the ship tries to kill you when you are dreaming, let it. Something more interesting than death will
occur.

  It was obvious by his transparency that he ought to know.

  Freya nodded uneasily, then woke up again. But as she sat up, it seemed to her that she had never really been asleep. Later she tried to decide it was all a dream, but no other dream she had ever had had been quite like that one. So now, as Badim declares that the five ghosts would be better than ferals, she’s not so sure. How many dreams do you remember, not just the next day, but the rest of your life?

  Evenings at home are the best. Crèche is over and done, her time with all the kids she lives with so much, spending more time with them than she does with her parents, if you don’t count sleeping, so that it gets so tiresome to make it through all the boring hours, talking, arguing, fighting, reading alone, napping. All the kids are smaller than she is now, it’s embarrassing. It’s gone on so long. They make fun of her, if they think she isn’t listening to them. They take care with that, because once she heard them making those jokes and she ran over roaring and knocked one of them to the ground and beat on his raised arms. She got in trouble for it, and since then they are cautious around her, and a lot of the time she keeps to herself.

  But now she’s home, and all is well. Badim usually cooks dinner, and fairly often invites friends over for a drink after dinner. They compare the drinks they’ve made, Delwin’s white wine, and the red wines of Song and Melina, which are always declared excellent, especially by Song and Melina. These days Badim always invites their new next-door neighbor, Aram, to join them too. Aram is a tall man, older than the others, a widower they call him, because his wife died. He’s important not just in Nova Scotia but in the whole ship, being the leader of the math group, a small collection of people not well-known, but said by Badim to be important. Freya finds him forbidding, so silent and stern, but Badim likes him. Even Devi likes him. When they talk about their work, he can do it without making Devi tense, which is very unusual. He makes brandy instead of wine.

  After the tastings, they talk or play cards, or recite poems they have memorized, or even make up on the spot. Badim collects people he likes, Freya can see that. Devi mostly sits quietly in the corner and sips a glass of white wine without ever finishing it. She used to play cards with them, but one time Song asked her to read their tarot cards, and Devi refused. I don’t do that anymore, she said firmly. I was too good at it. Which caused a silence. Since that incident she doesn’t play any card games with them. She did still make card houses on the kitchen floor, however, when they were home alone.