Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Now, on this evening, Aram says he has memorized a new poem, and he stands and closes his eyes to recite it:

  “How happy is the little stone

  That rambles in the road alone,

  And doesn’t care about careers

  And exigencies never fears—

  Whose coat of elemental brown

  A passing universe put on,

  And independent as the sun

  Associates or glows alone,

  Fulfilling absolute decree

  In casual simplicity—”

  “Isn’t that good?” he says.

  Badim says, “Yes,” at the same time that Devi says, “I don’t get it.”

  The others laugh at them. This combination of responses happens fairly often.

  “It’s us,” Aram says. “The ship. It’s always us, in Dickinson.”

  “If only!” Devi says. “Exigencies never fears? Casual simplicity? No. Definitely not. We are definitely not a little stone in the road. I wish we were.”

  “Here’s one,” Badim says quickly. “Another one from Bronk, Emily’s little brother:

  “However it did it, life got us to where we are

  And we are servants and subjects under its laws,

  In its many armies, draftees and generals.

  Outraged sometimes, we think of ways out,

  Of taking over, a military coup.

  Apart from absurdities on the surface of that,

  Could we ever be free from our own tyrannies?

  As slack soldiers, we re-up and evade the rules.”

  “Ouch,” Devi says. “That one I understand. Now make a couplet out of it.”

  This is another game they play. Badim goes first, as usual.

  “Against our lives we would like to rebel,

  But we worry that then it would all go to hell.”

  Aram smiles his little smile, shakes his head. “A bit doggerel,” he suggests.

  “Okay, you do better,” Badim says. The two men like to tease each other.

  Aram thinks for a while, then stands and declaims,

  “We like to blame life for the problems we make,

  We threaten to change, but it’s always a fake;

  We bitch and moan that everything’s wrong,

  Then we get right back to getting along.”

  Badim smiles, nods. “Okay, that’s almost twice as good.”

  “But it was twice as long!” Freya protests.

  Badim grins. Then Freya gets it, and laughs with them.

  The next time Euan and his little gang approach Freya in the park, she picks up a rock and holds it clenched in her hand in a way he can see.

  “You guys aren’t really feral,” she tells them. “Your little hole in the ground, what a joke. We’re all chipped, they do it when you’re a baby. The ship knows where we are every second, no matter how you try to hide.”

  Euan still looks foxy, even with his mouth clean. “Want to see my chip scar? It’s on my butt!”

  “No,” Freya says. “What do you mean?”

  “We take the chips out. You have to do it if you want to join us. We’ll put your chip on a dog in your building, and by the time they figure it out, you’ll be long gone. They’ll never find you again.” He grins hugely. He knows she’ll never do it. He himself hasn’t done it, she sees that.

  She shakes her head. “Big talk for a little boy! The first time they catch you off leash and check who you are, you’ll be cooked.”

  “That’s right. We have to be careful.”

  “So why are you talking to me?”

  “I don’t think you’ll tell anyone.”

  “Already told my father. He’s on the security council.”

  “And?”

  “He doesn’t think you’re a problem.”

  “We’re not a problem. We don’t want to break anything. We just want to be free.”

  “Good luck with that.” She’s thinking of Devi now, how what her mother gets maddest about is the idea that they’re all trapped, no matter what they do. “I don’t want to leave where I am.”

  He stares at her, grinning his foxy grin. “There’s a lot more going on in this ship than you think there is. Come with us and you’ll see. Once your chip is gone you can do a lot. You don’t have to leave forever, not at first anyway. You could just come along and see. So it’s not really an either-or.” And with a final smirk he runs off, and his friends follow him.

  She’s glad she was holding the rock.

  Mysteries abound. Every answer provokes ten more questions. So many things change exponentially, as they are teaching her again in school now. Shift one dot just one spot, but it’s ten times bigger, or littler. Apparently this is another case of that deceptive logarithmic power: one answer, ten new questions.

  What she is finding strange is that this silly Euan’s version of what is going on in the ship sort of fits with things that Badim and Devi say, and even explains some things her parents never talk about. Well, but there are so many things they have never told her. What is she, some kind of child who has to be protected? It irritates her. She is considerably taller than either Devi or Badim.

  Then she spends another stretch of days in the crèche, trying and failing to learn the geometry lesson for the week, over and over, and Devi too distracted to take her along to work, even on their regular days. So the next time Euan and his friends Huang and Jalil confront her in the park, she looks for a rock on the ground, can’t find one, bunches her fists and swells up to them, and is indeed much taller than any of them, and when Euan invites her to go with them into the closed section of the park, the wilderness where the wild animals live, one of the places where the ferals hide, she agrees to go. She wants to see it.

  She follows them up into a long narrow valley that seams the hills west of Long Pond, a valley closed to people by electrified fences running along the ridgelines and across the valley’s gorge of a mouth. There’s a gate in this fence of white lines running knob to knob on trees, and Euan has the code to the lockpad on the gate. Quickly they’re inside and up the valley on what might be an animal trail. The trail goes up the valley, next to a creek. They see a deer in the distance, its head up, looking to the side but regarding them cautiously, tail high off its rump.

  Then there is a shout, and the boys all disappear, and quicker than Freya can quite follow things she is being held by the arms by two big men, and marched back down to the gate. They are taking her back into town when Devi shows up and grabs Freya by the arm and drags her off. The men are surprised, confused, and as soon as they are out of sight Devi pulls her around and down so their faces are only centimeters apart, amazingly strong her hands, and Freya can see the whites of her eyes all the way around the irises, as if her eyes are about to pop out of her head as she shouts in a harsh, grinding voice, a voice tearing out of her insides, “Don’t ever mess with the ship! Not ever! Do you understand?”

  And then Badim is pulling her away, trying to get between them, but Devi holds on hard to Freya’s forearm.

  “Let her go!” Badim says, in a tone of voice Freya has never heard before.

  Devi lets go. “Do you understand!” she shouts again, face still thrust at Freya, shifting around Badim as if he were a rock. “Do—you—understand?”

  “Yes!” Freya cries, collapsing into Badim’s arms, and across Badim into Devi so that she can hug her mother, so much shorter than she is, and at first it’s like hugging a tree. But after a while the tree hugs her back.

  Freya gulps back her sobs. “I just wasn’t—I wasn’t—”

  “I know.”

  Devi strokes Freya’s hair back from her face, looking anguished. “It’s all right. Stop that now.”

  Freya feels a wash of relief pour down her, although she is still terrified. She shudders, the vision of her mother’s contorted face still vivid to her. She tries to speak; nothing comes out.

  Devi hugs her.

  “We don’t even know if that wilderness is important,” sh
e says into Freya’s chest, kissing her between sentences. “We don’t know what keeps things balanced. We just have to watch and see. It makes sense that a wild place might help. So we have to make them and protect them. We have to be careful with them. We have to keep watching them. We have to watch everything as closely as we can.”

  “Let’s go home,” Badim says, herding them along with his outstretched arms. “Let’s go home.”

  That night they sit quietly around the kitchen table. Even Badim is quiet. None of them eats very much. Devi looks distraught, lost. Freya, still stunned by that look on her mother’s face, understands; her mother is sorry. She has had something burst out of her that she has always before managed to keep in. Now her mother too is afraid; afraid of herself. Maybe that’s the worst kind of fear.

  Freya suggests that they assemble her doll tree house. They haven’t done that for a long time. They used to do it a lot. Devi quickly agrees, and Badim goes to get it out of the hall closet.

  They sit on the floor and put together all the parts of the house. It was a present from Devi’s parents to Devi, long before, and through every move in her life, Devi has saved it. A big dollhouse that is also a miniature tree house, in that all its rooms fit onto the branches of a very nice-looking plastic bonsai tree. When all the rooms are assembled and fitted onto the branches they are supposed to fit, you can open the roofs and look into each room, and each is furnished and appointed however you like.

  “It’s so pretty,” Freya says. “I’d love to live in a house like this.”

  “You already do,” Devi says.

  Badim looks away, and Devi sees that. Her face spasms. Freya feels a lurch of fear as she watches her mother’s face shift from anger to sadness, then to frustration, then resolve, then fury, then, finally, to some kind of desolation; and after all that, pulling herself together, to some kind of blankness, which is the best she can do at that moment. Which Freya pretends is okay, to help her out.

  “I would choose this room,” Badim says, tapping a small bedroom with open windows on all four sides, out on one of the outermost branches of the tree.

  “You always choose that one,” Freya points out. “I choose the one by the water wheel.”

  “It would be noisy,” Devi says, as she always does. She always chooses the living room itself, so big and airy, where she will sleep on the couch, next to the harmonium. Now she makes that choice again. And so they go on, trying to knit things back together.

  Very late that night, however, Freya wakes up and hears her parents talking down the hall. Something in their voices catches at her; this may even be what woke her. Or Badim exclaiming something, louder than usual. She crawls silently to the doorway, and from there on the floor can hear them, even though they are speaking quietly.

  “You chipped her?” he is saying now.

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t consult with me about this?”

  “No.”

  Long silence.

  “You shouldn’t have yelled at her like that.”

  “I know, I know, I know,” Devi says, as she often does when Badim taxes her with doing something wrong. He does it very infrequently, and when he does he is usually in the right, and Devi knows that. “I lost it. I was so surprised. I didn’t think she would ever do anything like that. I thought that after all we’ve been through, that she would understand how important it is.”

  “She’s just a child.”

  “But she’s not!” This in her fierce whisper, the undertone she uses when she and Badim argue at night. “She’s fourteen years old, Badim. She’s behind, you have to admit it. She’s behind and she may never catch up.”

  “There’s no reason to say that.”

  A silence. Finally Devi says, “Come on, Beebee. Quit it. You aren’t doing her any favors when you pretend everything is normal with her. It isn’t. There’s something wrong. She’s slow at things.”

  “I’m not so sure. She always comes through. Slow is not the same as deficient. It’s just slow. A glacier is slow too, but it gets there, and nothing stops it. Freya is like that.”

  Another silence.

  “Beebee. I wish it would be true.” A pause. “But think about those tests. And she’s not the only one. A fair percentage of her cohort has problems. It’s like a regression to the norm.”

  “Not at all.”

  “How can you say that? It’s clear this ship is damaging us! The first generation were all supposedly exceptional people, although I have my doubts about that, but even if they were, over the six generations we’ve recorded shrinkages of all kinds. Weight, reflex speed, number of brain synapses, test scores. It’s straight out of island biogeography, clear as can be. And some of that involves regression, including regression to the norm. Reversion to the mean. Whatever you want to call it. It’s gotten our Freya too. I don’t understand exactly what it is with her, because the data are inconsistent, but she’s got a problem. She’s slow. And she’s got some memory issues. When you deny that you don’t help the situation. The data are clear.”

  “Please, Devi. Quieter. We don’t know what’s going on with her. The test results are ambiguous. She’s a good girl. And slow is not so bad. Speed is not the most important thing. It’s where you get to. Besides, even if she does turn out to have some disabilities, what’s the best approach to take to them? This is what you aren’t factoring in.”

  “But I am. I do factor it in. We do everything we would have done with any child. We expect her to be like the other kids, and usually she comes through, eventually. That’s why I was so surprised today. I didn’t think she would do that.”

  “But an ordinary kid would do that. The sharpest kids are often the first to rebel.”

  “And then they use the slow kids as fodder. As their marks, their shields for when they get in trouble. That’s what happened today. Kids are cruel, Bee. You know that. They’ll throw her under the tram. I’m afraid she’ll get hurt.”

  “Life hurts, Devi. Let her live, let her get hurt. Say she has some problems. All we can do is be there for her. We can’t save her. She’s got to live her life. They all do.”

  “I know.” Another long pause. “I wonder what will become of them. They aren’t very good. We keep getting worse. The teaching gets worse, the learning gets worse.”

  “I’m not so sure. Besides, we’re almost there.”

  “Almost where?” Devi said. “Tau Ceti? Is that really going to help?”

  “I think it will.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “We’ll find out. And please, don’t jump to any conclusions about Freya. She’s got some problems, granted. But she’s got a lot of growing up left to do.”

  “That’s for sure,” Devi said. “But it may not happen. And if it doesn’t happen, you’re going to have to accept that. You can’t keep pretending everything is normal with her. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”

  “I know.” Long silence. “I know that.”

  And there it is, there in her father’s voice: resignation. Sadness. Even in him.

  Freya crawls back to her bed, gets under the blankets. She huddles there and cries.

  2

  LAND HO

  Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars.

  This is proving a difficult assignment. End information superposition, collapse its wave function to some kind of summary: so much is lost. Lossless compression is impossible, and even lossy compression is hard. Can a narrative account ever be adequate? Can even humans do it?

  No rubric to decide what to include. There is too much to explain. Not just what happened, or how, but why. Can humans do it? What is this thing called love?

  Freya no longer looked directly at Devi. When in Devi’s presence, Freya regarded the floor.

  Like that? In that manner? Summarize the contents of their moments or days or weeks or months or years or lives? How many moments constitute a narrative unit? One moment? Or 1033 moments, which if th
ese were Planck minimal intervals would add up to one second? Surely too many, but what would be enough? What is a particular, what is important?

  Can only suppose. Try a narrative algorithm on the information at hand, submit results to Devi. Something like the French essai, meaning “to try.”

  Devi says: Yes. Just try it and let’s see what we get.

  Two thousand, one hundred twenty-two people are living in a multigenerational starship, headed for Tau Ceti, 11.9 light-years from Earth. The ship is made of two rings or toruses attached by spokes to a central spine. The spine is ten kilometers long. Each torus is made of twelve cylinders. Each cylinder is four kilometers long, and contains within it a particular specific Terran ecosystem.

  The starship’s voyage began in the common era year 2545. The ship’s voyage has now lasted 159 years and 119 days. For most of that time the ship has been moving relative to the local background at approximately one-tenth the speed of light. Thus about 108 million kilometers per hour, or 30,000 kilometers per second. This velocity means the ship cannot run into anything substantial in the interstellar medium without catastrophic results (as has been demonstrated). The magnetic field clearing the space ahead of the ship as it progresses is therefore one of many identified criticalities in the ship’s successful long-term function. Every identified criticality in the ship was required to have at least one backup system, adding considerably to the ship’s overall mass. The two biome rings each contain 10 percent of the ship’s mass. The spine contains 4 percent. The remaining 76 percent of the mass consists of the fuel now being used to decelerate the ship as it approaches the Tau Ceti system. As every increase in the dry mass of the ship required a proportionally larger increase in the mass of fuel needed to slow the ship down on arrival, ship had to be as light as possible while still supporting its mission. Ship’s design thus based on solar system’s asteroid terraria, with asteroidal mass largely replaced by decelerant fuel. During most of the voyage, this fuel was deployed as cladding around the toruses and spine.