Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “What is that?” Freya asked.

  Devi shrugged. “Hong Kong? Honolulu? Lisbon? Jakarta? I really don’t know. And it wouldn’t matter if I did.”

  Secondly, Freya kept going to the park around sunset. Sometimes she tracked the youth named Euan and his friends as they headed off into the twilit wilderness. She hid herself from them by acrobatic movement and extreme stillness in cover. It was as if she were a wild cat on the hunt. In fact her genome was nearly identical to that of her ancestors when they were hunting on the African savannah, a hundred thousand years before.

  In Nova Scotia, the wild cats were bobcat, lynx, and puma. The puma was potentially a predator of solitary humans. Therefore, people had to keep an eye out for them, even though they inhabited mostly the deepest depths of the park. Nevertheless, it was advisable to go into Nova Scotia’s park in groups. The wilderness sections, however, were off-limits to people. Efforts were made to keep big predators provided with enough deer and other prey that they would never get too hungry, but population dynamics were always fluctuating. So in these dark dashes through the forest, often following ridgelines between steep-sided ravines that increased the land surface of the wilderness region, Freya wore night goggles, and ran tree to tree, keeping the trunks between her and the group she followed.

  Perhaps predictably, there came a time when the people she was tracking caught her. They doubled back and surrounded her. Euan stepped up and slapped her face.

  She slapped him back instantly, and harder.

  Euan laughed at this, and asked her if she wanted to join their gang. She said she did.

  After that she joined them more often. They wandered the wilderness together as a gang. Early in these days, Euan passed his wristpad across her bottom and told her he had deactivated her ID chip with an electromagnetic pulse. This was not true, but ship did not inform her of this, being uncertain of the situation’s proper protocol. Ship records all human and animal movements in the ship, but very seldom mentioned this to people.

  Euan and Huang and Jalil together were particularly bold in their reconnaissances. In the alpine biome next to Nova Scotia, they found doors leading down into the chambers and passageways underneath the granite-faced flooring. They also had the passcode to a maintenance door leading to Spoke Six, where a spiral staircase on the inner wall of the spoke took them up to Inner Ring B. The inner rings are structural-support rings connecting the six spokes near the spine. B’s inner ring was locked to them, and the spine too, but they roamed up and down Spoke Six as often as they could.

  In these furtive jaunts Euan took the lead, but Freya soon pressed them to try new routes. As she was bigger than the boys, and faster, she could initiate explorations that they then had to follow. Euan appeared to delight in these adventures, even though they often almost got caught. They ran hard to evade anyone who yelled at them, or even saw them, laughing when they got back to the park behind the Fetch.

  Huang and Jalil would take off then, and Euan would walk Freya across the town, and hold her against alley walls and kiss her, and she would embrace him and pull him up and against her, until his feet hung off the ground as they kissed. This made him laugh even more. Released, he would butt her in the chest with his forehead, caress her breasts, and say, “I love you, Freya, you’re wild!”

  “Good,” Freya would say, while patting him on the top of the head, or rubbing him between the legs. “Let’s meet tomorrow and do it again.”

  But then Devi checked the chip records and saw where her daughter was going in the evenings. The next evening she went to the edge of the park and caught Freya returning from a run with her gang, just after Freya had said good-bye to the others.

  Devi grabbed her hard by the upper arm. She was quivering, and Freya’s arm went white under her grip. “I told you not to go in there!”

  “Leave me alone!” Freya cried, and yanked her arm free. Then with a shove she knocked her mother sprawling to the ground.

  Awkwardly Devi got back on her feet, keeping her head down. “You can’t go in the wilderness!” she hissed. “You can wander every part of this ship if you want, circle both rings if you want, but not the parts that are out of bounds. Those you have to stay out of!”

  “Leave me alone.”

  Devi flicked the back of her hand at her daughter. “I will if I can! I’ve got other problems I have to deal with right now!”

  “Of course you do.”

  Devi’s glare went cross-eyed. “Time for you to do your wander.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I can’t have you here embarrassing me, making things worse in exactly the areas where we have the most problems.”

  “What problems?”

  Devi convulsed and bunched her fists. Seeing that, Freya raised a threatening hand.

  “We’re in trouble,” Devi said in a low choked voice. “So I don’t want you around right now, I can’t have it. I need to deal. Besides you’re at the age. You’ll grow up and get over this shit, so you might as well do it somewhere where I don’t have to suffer it.”

  “That’s so mean,” Freya said. “You’re just mean. Enough of having a kid! Fine when she’s little, but now that you’ve decided she’s not good enough, off she goes! ‘Come back in a year and tell me about it!’ But you know what? I will never tell you. I will never come back.”

  And Freya stormed off.

  Thirdly, Badim asked her to wait for a while before leaving on her wanderjahr. “No matter where you go, it’s still you that gets there. So it doesn’t really matter where you are. You can’t get away from yourself.”

  “You can get away from other people,” Freya said.

  Badim had not heard a full account of the argument in the park, but he had noticed the estrangement between his wife and his daughter.

  Eventually he agreed to the idea that Freya now start her wanderjahr. She would love it, he said, once he had agreed. She would be able to visit home anytime she wanted. Ring B was only fifty-four kilometers around, so she would never be far away.

  Freya nodded. “I’ll manage.”

  “Fine. We’ll arrange housing and work for you, if you want.”

  They hugged, and when Devi joined the discussion, Devi hugged her too. Under Badim’s eye, Freya was cooperative in hugging her mother. Perhaps also she saw the distress on Devi’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” Devi said.

  “Me too.”

  “It will be good for you to get away. If you stayed here and weren’t careful, you might end up like me.”

  “But I wanted to end up like you,” Freya said. She looked as if she were tasting something bitter.

  Devi only squished the corners of her mouth and looked away.

  On 161.176, Freya left on her wanderjahr, traveling west in Ring B. The ring tram circumnavigated the biomes, but she walked, as was traditional for wanderers. First through the granite highland of the Sierra, then the wheat fields of the Prairie.

  Her first extended stay was in Labrador, with its taiga, glacier, estuary, and cold salt lake. It was often said that your first move away from home should be to a warmer place, unless you came from the tropics, when you couldn’t. But Freya went to Labrador. The cold did her good, she said.

  The salt sea was mostly iced over, and she learned to ice-skate. She worked in the dining hall and the distribution center, and quickly met many people. She worked as a manual laborer and general field assistant, or GFA, or Good For Anything, as they were often called. She put in long hours all over the biome.

  Out there next to Labrador’s glacier, people told her, there was one yurt community that brought up their children as if they were Inuit or Sami, or for that matter Neanderthals. They followed caribou and lived off the land, and no mention of the ship was made to their children. The world to these children was simply four kilometers long, a place mostly very cold, with a big seasonal shift between darkness and light, ice and melt, caribou and salmon. Then, during their initiation ceremony around the time of
puberty, these children were blindfolded and taken outside the ship in individual spacesuits, and there exposed to the starry blackness of interstellar space, with the starship hanging there, dim and silvery with reflected starlight. Children were said to return from this initiation never the same.

  “I should think not!” Freya said. “That’s crazy.”

  “Quite a few of these children move away from Labrador after that,” her informant, a young woman who worked in the dining hall, told her. “But more than you’d think come back around as adults, and do the same to their own kids.”

  “Did you grow up like that?” Freya asked.

  “No, but we heard about it, and we saw them when they came into town. They’re strange. But they think they’ve got the best way, so…”

  “I want to see them,” Freya declared.

  Soon she was introduced to one of the adults who came in for supplies, and after a time she was invited out to the circle of yurts next to the glacier, having promised to keep her distance from the yurt where the children of the settlement lived. From a distance they seemed like any other kids to Freya. They reminded her of herself, she said to her hosts. “Whether that’s good or bad I don’t know,” she added.

  The adults in the yurt village defended the upbringing. “When you’ve grown up like we do it,” one of them told Freya, “then you know what’s real. You know what we are as animals, and how we became human. That’s important, because this ship can drive you mad. We think most of the people around the rings are mad. They’re always confused. They have no way to judge anything. But we know. We have a basis for judging what’s right from wrong. Or at least what works for us. Or what to believe, or how to be happy. There are different ways of putting it. So, if we get sick of the way things work, or the way people are, we can always go back to the glacier, either in our head or actually in Labrador. Help bring up the new kids. Live with them, and get back into the real real. You can return to that space in your head, if you’re lucky. But if you didn’t grow up there, you can’t. So, some of us always keep it going.”

  “But isn’t it a shock, when you learn?” Freya asked.

  “Oh yes! That moment when they cleared my spacesuit’s faceplate, and I saw the stars, and then the ship—I almost died. I could feel my heart beating inside me like an animal trying to get out. I didn’t say a word for about a month. My mom worried that I had lost my mind. Some kids do. But later on, I started to think, you know, a big surprise—it’s not such a bad thing. It’s better than never being surprised at all. Some people on this ship, the only big surprise in their life comes when they die without ever knowing anything real. They get an inkling of that right at the very end. Their first real surprise.”

  “I don’t want that!” Freya said.

  “Right. Because then it’s too late. Too late to do you much good, anyway. Unless one of the five ghosts greets you after you’ve died, and shows you an even bigger universe!”

  Freya said, “I want to see one of your initiations.”

  “Work with us some more first.”

  After that, Freya worked on the taiga with the yurt people. She carried loads; farmed potatoes in fields mostly cleared of stones; herded caribou; watched children. On her off days she went with people up onto the glacier, which loomed over the taiga. They clambered up the loose rocks of the moraine, which were stacked at the angle of repose, and usually stable. From the top of the moraine they could look back down the whole stretch of the taiga, which was treeless, rocky, frosted, green with moss, and crossed by a long gravel-braided estuary running to their salt lake, which was flanked by some hills. The ceiling overhead was shaded a dark blue that was seldom brushed by high clouds. Herds of caribou could be seen down on the flats by the river, along with smaller herds of elk and moose. In the flanking hills sometimes a wolf pack was glimpsed, or bears.

  In the other direction the glacier rose gently to the biome’s east wall. Here, Freya was told, you used to be able to see the effect of the Coriolis force on the ice; now that their deceleration was pushing across the Coriolis force, the ice had cracked extensively, creating new crevasse fields, which were blue shatter zones the size of entire villages. The creamy blue revealed in the depths of these new cracks was a new color to Freya. It looked as if turquoise had been mixed with lapis lazuli.

  These were not cracks one could fall into without suffering grave injury or death. But they appeared static in any given moment, and most of the surface of the glacier was pitted, bubbled, and knobbed, so that it was not at all slippery. Thus it was possible to walk around on the ice, and approach, sometimes holding hands, a crevasse field’s edge, and look down into the blue depths. They said to each other that it looked something like a ruined street, with jagged blue buildings canted away to each side.

  Down below, the only town in Labrador nestled in a little knot of hills, on the shore of the cold salt lake that lay at the western end of the estuary. The lake and estuary were home to salmon and sea trout. The town was made of cubical buildings with steep roofs, each one painted a bright primary color that through the long winters was said to be cheering. Freya helped with building repairs, stocking, and canning salmon taken from the lake and estuary. Later she helped to take inventory in the goods dispensary. When she was out in the yurt settlement, she always helped take care of the cohort of children, sixteen of them, ranging from toddlers to twelve-year-olds. She had sworn to say nothing to them of the ship, and the adults of the village believed her and trusted her not to.

  At the end of autumn, when it was getting cold and dark, Freya was invited to join one of the children’s initiations. It was for a twelve-year-old girl named Rike, a bold and fierce child. Freya said she would be honored to take part.

  For the event Freya was dressed as Vuk, one of the five ghosts, and at midnight of the day of the ceremony, after everything else they did to celebrate, Rike was helped into a spacesuit, and the faceplate of her helmet was blocked with a black cloth glued to it. They walked together to Spoke One, holding her by the arms. Up at the inner ring lock they led her into the exterior lock, where they were all clipped into tethers. The air in the lock was sucked out, the outer lock door opened. They walked up a set of stairs and pushed off into the void of interstellar space, hanging there just sternward of the inner ring. The seven adults arranged themselves around Rike, and one of them pulled off the black cloth covering her faceplate. And there she was, in space.

  Humans in interstellar space can see approximately a hundred thousand stars. The Milky Way appears as a broad white smear across this starry black. The starship has a silvery exterior that gleams faintly but distinctly with reflected starlight. It is lit by the Milky Way more than by the other stars, so that the parts of the ship facing the Milky Way are distinctly lighter than parts facing away from it. People say that under the faint spangle of reflected starlight, the ship itself seems also to glow. Despite its great speed relative to the local backdrop, the only motion is of the entire starscape appearing to rotate around the ship, which is how the rotation of the ship is usually apprehended, the ship appearing still to the human observers as they move with it. At the time of Rike’s initiation, Tau Ceti was by far the brightest star around them, serving as their polestar ahead of the bow of the spine.

  As she saw all this Rike cried out, and then had to be held as she began flailing and screaming. Freya, dressed as Vuk, the wolf man, held her right arm in both hands and felt her tremble. Her parents and the other adults from the yurt village explained to her what she was seeing, where they were, where they were going, what was happening. They chanted a chant they traditionally used to tell it all. Rike groaned continuously through this chant. Freya was weeping, they all were weeping. After a while they pulled themselves back in the lock; then when the outer doors closed and air hissed back in, they got out of the spacesuits and clomped down the stairs back into the spoke, and helped the traumatized girl walk home.

  Soon after this, Freya arranged to move on.

&n
bsp; The whole town came out for her farewell party, and many urged her to come back in the spring. “Lots of young people circle the rings several times,” she was told, “so be like them, come back to us.”

  “I will,” Freya said.

  The next day she walked to the western end of the biome and passed through the open doorway into the short, tall tunnel between Labrador and the Pampas. This was the point where you could best see that the tunnels are canted at fifteen-degree angles to the biomes at each end.

  As she was leaving, a young man she had seen many times approached her.

  “So you’re leaving.”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw Rike’s coming-out?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why a lot of us hate this place.”

  Freya stared at him. “Why don’t you leave then?”

  “And go where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “You can’t just go where you want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “They won’t let you. You have to have a place to go.”

  Freya said, “I left.”

  “But you’re on your wander. Someone gave permission for you to go.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Aren’t you Devi’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “They got you a permission. Not everyone gets them. Things wouldn’t work if they did. Don’t you see? Everything we do is controlled. No one gets to do what they want. You have it a little different, but even you don’t get to do what you want. That’s why a lot of us hate this place. And Labrador especially. A lot of us would go to Costa Rica if we could.”

  In the Pampas, the sunline overhead was brighter, the blue of the ceiling a lighter pastel, the air full of birds. The land was flatter and set lower in its cylinder, farther away from its sunline, which meant it was a narrower parcel. Its greens were dustier but more widespread; everything here was green. From the slight rise of the lock door she could see up the whole length of the biome, to the dark circle of the lock door leading to the Prairie. There on the rumpled plain of the Pampas were roving herds, clouds of dust over each in the angled morning light: cattle, elk, horses, deer.