Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  In most of the biomes she was now expected in advance, on a schedule of sorts, and welcomed and enfolded into the life of whatever settlement she joined. People wanted her. Possibly it could be said that many seemed to feel protective of her. It was as if she were some kind of totemic figure, perhaps even what one might call a child of the ship (this of course a metaphor). That she was the tallest person aboard perhaps somehow added to this impression people had of her.

  Thus over the following year she spent more time in the Himalayas, Yangtze, Siberia, Iran, Mongolia, the Steppes, the Balkans, and Kenya. Then she learned that the biomes she didn’t return to talked about this as a slight, and immediately she revised her plans, and went to every place she had stayed before, missing none of them, and setting up a pattern that was loose in the timing of her moves, but exact in terms of destination, in that she circled first Ring B and then Ring A, a month or two in each, and always westward. Excursions with Euan continued, but much less frequently, as Euan had settled down in Iran and was becoming a lake engineer and what he called an upstanding citizen. All this went on for almost another year.

  During this time it has to be said that ship was aware, in a way no single human could be, that there were also people in the ship who did not like Freya, or did not like the way she was generally popular. This often seemed to be correlated with dislike for the various councils and governing bodies, especially for the birth committee, and it was a dislike that had often preexisted Freya and had to do with Devi, Badim, Badim’s parents (who were still important officials in Bengal), and Aram, among others on the councils. But as Freya was the one out there, she took the brunt of the negativity, which took the form of comments such as:

  “She fools around with anyone who asks, the heartbreaker, the slut.”

  “She can’t even add. She can barely talk.”

  “If she didn’t look the way she did, no one would give her a second glance.”

  “There isn’t a thought in her head, that’s why she keeps asking the same questions.”

  “That’s why she spends all her time with mice. They’re the only ones she can understand.”

  “Them and the sheep and cows. You can see her go cross-eyed.”

  “What a cow she is, big tits, little brain.”

  “And calm like cows.”

  “Just as you would be when there’s not a thought in your head.”

  It was interesting to record and tabulate comments of this kind, and find the correlations between the people who made these remarks and problems they had in other aspects of their lives. There turned out to be much else these people did not like, and in fact, none of them focused their displeasure on Freya for long. She came and went but their discontent endured, and found other people and things to dislike.

  It was also interesting to note that Freya herself seemed to be aware, to some degree or other, of who these people were. She stiffened up in their presence; she did not meet their eye or go out of her way to talk to them; she did not talk as much to them, or laugh around them. Say what they would about her simplemindedness, she seemed to see or otherwise perceive much that no one ever said aloud, much that people even made efforts to conceal; and this without seeming to pay attention, as if out of the corner of her eye.

  Then one day she was on her way from Costa Rica to Amazonia, there in the tunnel between the two. The passageway between two biomes was where one could see most clearly the configuration of the ship; the biomes with their various lands and lakes and streams, their blue sky ceilings by day, the projected or real starscapes at night, were each little worlds in themselves, city-state worlds, angled at fifteen degrees from the tunnels; and from the middle of each tunnel, them being only seventy meters long, it was possible to glimpse that the biomes were tipped upward or inward at a thirty-degree angle to the other biomes. Within the lock passageways, therefore, things were said to be different. Worlds angled and contracted; land met sky in a way that revealed that skies were ceilings, landscapes floors, horizons walls. In fact, one stood in a big, short tunnel, as if in some city gate on old Earth.

  And suddenly, there before her in the tunnel called the Panama Canal, painted blue in the time of the first generation, stood Badim.

  Freya rushed to him and hugged him, then pushed him back, still holding his arms.

  “What’s wrong? You’ve lost weight. Is Devi okay?”

  “She’s okay. She’s been sick. I think it might help her if you were to come home.”

  164.341: she had been wandering for just over three years.

  She already had her clothes and other things in a shoulder bag, so they headed back into Costa Rica and got on the tram headed westward, through Olympia to Nova Scotia. As they rode, Freya peppered her father with questions. How exactly was Devi sick? When had it started? Why had no one told her? She and Badim spoke every Sunday, and often midweek; and Freya talked to Devi whenever she moved to a new home. Nothing had seemed wrong in these calls. Devi, although thin-faced, and with dark circles under her eyes on some days, had been as always. She was never cheerful with Freya anymore, and though Freya did not know it, she was very seldom cheerful with anyone, including Badim, also the ship.

  Now Badim said she had fainted a few days before, and hurt her shoulder in her fall; she was now all right, and clamoring to get back to work, but they hadn’t been able to determine why she had fainted. Badim shook his head as he reported this. “I think she just forgot to eat. You know how she does that. So, you know. She needs us. We’re just over three years out from Planet E. It will soon be time to get into orbit and start exploring the place. So, you know she will be working harder than ever. And she misses you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “No, she does. Even if she doesn’t take the time to know it, she does. I can see it in her. So I think we are both going to have to be there and help her.” He gazed at Freya, face twisted with some kind of distress. “Do you see? I think it’s our job now. It’s what we can do for the ship.”

  Freya heaved a sigh, which seemed to indicate how little she liked this development. No doubt she had been enjoying her life as extended wanderjahr. Many said she had a position in the ship somewhat like her mother’s in the generation before. It was often remarked that she was blossoming. People loved her, many of them anyway; and her mother did not. Or did not seem to. So she did not look happy.

  “All right then,” she said, mouth tight. “I’ll see what’s up.”

  Badim hugged her. “It won’t last forever,” he said. “It won’t even last very long. Things are going to change.”

  So they trudged together down the narrow road through the forest that led from the tram stop in west Nova Scotia to the Fetch. Badim could see Freya was looking nervous, so he suggested they go out to the dock by the corniche, where they could look down the length of Long Pond and see most of their world, so familiar to them, now flush with the mellow light of a late-autumn afternoon. They did that, and Freya exclaimed to see it; now to her it looked dense with forest, with the boreal mix that on Earth wrapped the entire Northern Hemisphere in a dark green band, covering more land than any other ecosystem. And the Fetch looked so big and crowded, a real city, with too many people, too many windows, too many buildings.

  Devi was cooking dinner when they walked in. She saw Freya and eeked with surprise, then shot a glance at Badim.

  Freya said, “I’m here to help,” and wept as they hugged. She had to lean down quite a bit to do this; her mother seemed to have shrunk in the time she had been away. Three years is a long time in human terms.

  Devi pulled back to look up at her. “Good,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Because I can use the help. I’m sure your father told you.”

  “We’ll both help. We’ll make landfall together.”

  “Landfall!” Devi laughed. “What a word! What a thought.”

  Badim said what he always did, in a pirate voice: “Land, ho!”

  And it was true that in the screens showi
ng the view ahead of the ship, there was a very bright star now, quite piercing in the black of space, too bright to look at directly without filtering; and with the filters applied one could see it was a little disk, which made it far bigger than any other star.

  Tau Ceti. Their new sun.

  After that, Freya started going out with Devi on her trips again. Her behaviors were no longer those of a child in tow, but rather those of a personal assistant, student, or apprentice. Badim called it shadow learning, and said it was very common, indeed perhaps the chief method of teaching in the ship, more effective than what they did in the schools and workshops.

  Freya helped Devi in every way she could, and listened to her for as long as she could concentrate, but it was clear she became distracted when Devi went on at length. Devi’s days were long, and she had the ability to pay attention to something for as long as she could stay awake. And she liked to work.

  The physical form of her work mostly consisted of reading screens and then talking to people about what she found. Spreadsheets, graphs, schematics, diagrams, blueprints, flowcharts, these Devi inspected with great intensity, nose sometimes so close it left a mark on the screen. She could spend hours viewing things at nanometer scale, where everything pictured on the screen was gray and translucent, and slightly quivering. This Freya found hard to do for long without getting a headache.

  Only a small proportion of Devi’s time was spent looking at real machines, real crops, real faces. These were moments when Freya could be more helpful; Devi was stiff these days, and Freya could run about and get things, pick things up and carry them. Carry Devi’s bags for her.

  Devi noticed what Freya preferred to do, and said that Freya had been enjoying her life more before she came home. She grimaced as she said this, but as she told Freya, there was nothing she could do about it; if Freya was going to help her, shadow her, then this was her life. This was what Devi’s work consisted of, and she couldn’t change it.

  “I know,” Freya said.

  “Come on, today’s the farm,” Devi said one morning. “You’ll like that.”

  The farm in Nova Scotia referred actually to several farming tracts scattered through the biome’s forest. The largest parcel, where they headed, was devoted to growing wheat and vegetables. Here Devi looked mostly at people’s wristpads as they spoke to her, but she also walked out into the row crops and inspected individual plants and irrigation elements. They met with the same people they always met with here; there was a committee of seven who made this operation’s agricultural decisions. Freya knew each one of them by name, as they had taught her favorite parts of school in her childhood.

  Out in the farm’s greenhouse lab, Ellen, the leader of their soil studies group, showed them the roots of a cabbage. “These have been tweaked to have extra AVpl, but even so, it looks like lazy root to me.”

  “Hmm,” Devi said, handling the plant and eyeing it closely. “At least it’s symmetrical.”

  “Yes, but look how weak.” Ellen snapped the root in two. “And they’re not acidifying the soil like they used to either. I don’t get it.”

  “Well,” Devi said, “it could just be another phosphorus problem.”

  Ellen frowned. “But your fixer should be compensating for that.”

  “It did, at first. But we’re still losing phosphorus somewhere.”

  This was one of Devi’s most frequent complaints. They had to keep their phosphorus from getting bound with the iron, aluminum, or calcium in the soil, because if that happened the plants couldn’t unbind it. Keeping it unbound was hard to do without wrecking the soil in other ways, so the solution in Terran agriculture was to keep applying more of it in fertilizers, until the soil was saturated, at which point some would stay free for roots to take in. In the ship, that meant the need for phosphorus was such that its overall cycle had to be closed in its looping as tightly as possible, so they didn’t lose too much of it. But they did, despite all their efforts; it was what Devi called one of the Four Bad Metabolic Rifts. As a result, it was turning out that the people who had originally stocked the starship had not given them as much of an overstock of phosphorus as they had of many other elements; why they had done that, Devi said, she would never understand.

  So they did everything they could think of to keep the phosphorus cycle looping without losses. Some phosphorus in their waste treatment plant combined with magnesium and ammonium to make struvite crystals, which were a nuisance to the machinery, but which could be scraped off and used as fertilizer, or broken up and combined with other ingredients to make other fertilizers. That put that phosphorus back into the loop. Then the wastewater was passed through a filter containing resin beads embedded with iron oxide nanoparticles; these binded to the phosphorus in the water, in a proportion of one phosphorus atom to four oxygen atoms, and the saturated beads could later be treated with sodium hydroxide, and the phosphorus would be released for reuse in fertilizers. The system had worked well for many years; they filtered the phosphorus at a 99.9 percent capture rate; but that tenth of a percent was beginning to add up. And now their reserve storage of phosphorus was nearly depleted. So they had to find some of the phosphorus that had gotten stuck somewhere, and return it to the cycle.

  “It’s surely bound in the soil,” Ellen said.

  “We may have to process all the soil in all the biomes,” Devi said, “plot by plot. See how much we’re finding after a few plots, and then see if that’s where it is.”

  Ellen looked appalled at this. “That would be so hard! We’d have to pull all the irrigation.”

  “True. We’ll have to take it out and then replace it. We can’t farm without phosphorus.”

  Freya moved her lips in time with her mother’s as Devi concluded, “I don’t know what they were thinking.”

  Ellen had heard this before too, and now she frowned. Whoever they were, whatever they had been thinking, they hadn’t included enough phosphorus. By the way Devi scowled, it seemed it must have been an important error.

  Ellen shrugged. “Well, we’re almost there. So maybe it was enough after all.”

  Devi just shook her head at this. When they were walking back to their apartment she said to Freya, “You’re going to have to take more chemistry.”

  “It won’t do any good,” Freya said flatly. “It doesn’t stick. You know that. I’d rather focus on mechanics, if anything. Things I can see. I like it better when things stay still for me.”

  Devi laughed shortly. “Me too.” She thought about it a while as they walked. “Okay, maybe more logistics. That’s pretty straightforward. The only math is the hundred percent rule, really. And it’s all there in the spreadsheets and flowcharts. There’s structure charts, work breakdowns, Gantt charts, projects management systems. There’s one system called MIMES, multi-scale integrated models of ecosystem services, and another one I like called MIDAS, marine integrated decision analysis system. You only need a little statistics for those; actually it’s mainly arithmetic. You can do that. I think you’ll like the Gantt charts, they look good. But, you know—you need to learn a little of everything, just to understand what kind of problems your colleagues in the other disciplines are facing.”

  “A little, maybe. I’d rather just talk, or let them talk.”

  “We’ll stick to logistics, then. Just go over the principles for the rest.”

  Freya sighed. “But isn’t it true, what Ellen said? We’re almost there, so we won’t have to keep all the cycles so closed.”

  “We hope. Also, we still have to get there. Two years is not nothing. We could get ourselves across eleven-point-eight light-years, and then run out of something crucial in the last tenth of a light-year. An irony that the people back on Earth wouldn’t hear about for twelve more years. Nor would they care when they did.”

  “You really don’t like them.”

  “We’re their experiment,” Devi said. “I don’t like that.”

  “But the first generation were all volunteers, right? They w
on a competition to get to go, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. I think two million people applied. Or maybe it was twenty million.” Devi shook her head. “People will volunteer for any damn thing. But the ones designing the ship should have known better.”

  “But a lot of the designers were in that first generation. They designed it because they wanted to go, right?”

  Devi scowled, but it was her mock scowl; she was admitting Freya was right, even though she didn’t want to; that was what that look always said. She said, “Our ancestors were idiots.”

  Freya said, “But how does that make us different from anyone else?”

  Devi laughed and gave Freya a shove, then hugged her as they walked along. “Everyone in history, descendant of idiots? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what it seems like.”

  “Okay, maybe so. Let’s go home and cook some steaks. I want red meat. I want to chew on my ancestors.”

  “Devi, please.”

  “Well, we do it all the time, right? Everyone gets recycled into the system. There’s a lot of phosphorus in our bones that has to be retrieved. In fact I wonder if the missing phosphorus is in people’s cremation ashes! You’re only allowed to keep a pinch, but maybe it’s adding up.”

  “Devi. You’re not going to take back everyone’s pinches of ancestral ash.”

  “But I think I am! Take them back and eat them!”

  Freya laughed, and for a while they walked arm in arm down the street from the tram stop to Badim and dinner.

  Devi insisted Freya go back to classes again, particularly in math, first refreshing what little she knew, and then moving into statistics. This appeared to be a kind of torture for Freya, but she endured it, perhaps sensing there was no good alternative. She studied in small groups, and they worked almost entirely with an AI instructor called Gauss, who spoke in a deep, slow, male voice, very stiff, but somehow kind, or at least easy to understand. And naturally very patient. Over and over Gauss talked them through the problems they faced, explaining why the equations were constructed the way they were, and what kind of real problems they solved, and how one could best manipulate them. When Freya got a concept, a moment that was often preceded by ten different unsuccessful attempts to convey it on Gauss’s part, she would say “aha!” as if some deep mystery finally made sense. After these experiences, she discussed with Badim how it was now clearer to her that her mother’s world was not just worry and anger, but also a long sequence of ahas. And indeed it was very true that Devi dove daily into the mysteries of the ship’s ecologies, and struggled mightily to solve the myriad problems she encountered there. This was meat and drink to her.