Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  And Tau Ceti itself was a disk too, quite big in the sky, but burning so brightly they could not look at it directly, so could not be sure just how big it was. They said it looked enormous, and blazed painfully. In some moments they could see all three bodies, Tau Ceti, Planet E, Aurora: but in these moments the glare of Tau Ceti overwhelmed their ability to look at the planet and moon very well.

  In any case, they were there. They had reached their destination.

  For a long time one night, Devi stood there leaning on Badim, Freya on the other side of her, looking up at Aurora and Planet E. There was a little ice cap gleaming at the pole of Aurora visible to them, and cloud patterns swirled over a blue ocean. A black island chain curved across the darkened lune visible to them, and Badim was saying something about how it might indicate a tectonic past, or on the other hand be the unsubmerged part of a big impact crater’s rim. They would learn which when they landed and got settled. Geological investigations would make it obvious, Badim said, whether it had been formed one way or the other.

  “Those islands look good,” Devi said. “And that big isolated one must be about the size of Greenland, right? Then the rest are like Japan or something. Lots of land. Lots of coastlines. That looks like a big bay, could be a harbor.”

  “That’s right. They’ll be seafarers. Island people. Lots of biomes. That island chain crosses a lot of latitudes, see? Looks like it runs right up into the polar cap. And mountains too. Looks like snow on the big one, down the spine of it.”

  “Yes. It looks good.”

  Then Devi was tired, and they had to walk her back to their apartment. Slowly they walked the path through the meadow outside the town, three abreast, Devi between husband and child, her arms out a bit, hands forward, so they could lift her up a little by her elbows and forearms. She looked light between them, and stepped in a hesitant glide, as if barely touching down. They lifted as much as they could without lofting her into the air. None of them spoke. They looked small and slow. It was as if they were dolls.

  Back in the apartment they got Devi into her bed, and Freya left the two of them alone in their darkened bedroom, lit by the light in the hall. She went to their kitchen and heated the water in the teapot, and brought her parents some tea. She drank some herself, holding the cup in her hands, then against her cheeks. It had been near zero outside the apartment. A winter night in Nova Scotia.

  She headed back down the hall with a tray of cookies, but stopped when she heard Devi’s voice.

  “I don’t care about me!”

  Freya leaned against the wall outside the door. Badim said something quietly.

  “I know, I know,” Devi said, her voice quieter too, but still with a penetrating edge. “But she never listens to me anyway. And she’s out in the kitchen. She won’t hear us in here. Anyway it’s just that I’m worried about her. Who knows how she’ll end up? Every year of her life she’s been different. They all have. You can’t get a fix on these kids.”

  “Maybe kids are always like that. They grow up.”

  “I hope so. But look at the data! These kids are biomes too, just like the ship. And just like the ship they’re getting sick.”

  Badim said something low again.

  “Why do you say that! Don’t try to tell me things I know aren’t true! You know I hate that!”

  “Please, Devi, calm down.”

  Badim’s low voice sounded a little strained. All her life Freya has heard these voices in exchanges like this one. It didn’t matter what they were talking about, this was the sound of her childhood, the voices from the next room. Her parents. Soon she would only have one parent, and this familiar sound, which, despite its grating rasping strained unhappy quality, had the sound of childhood in it, would be gone. She would never hear it again.

  “Why should I be calm?” Devi said. Although now she sounded calmer. “What have I got to be calm about now? I’m not going to make it. It really is like trying to live past the end of Zeno’s paradox. Not going to happen. I’m not going to be walking around on that world.”

  “You will.”

  “Don’t tell me things I know aren’t true! I told you that.”

  “You don’t always know what’s true. Come on, admit it. You’re an engineer, you know that. Things happen. You make things happen, sometimes.”

  “Sometimes.” Now she really was calmer. “Okay, maybe I’ll see it. I hope I do. But either way there are going to be problems. We don’t know how our plants will do with that light regime. It’s weird. We’ll need to make soil fast. We still need everything to work, or else we’re done for.”

  “It’s always been that way, right?”

  “No. Not on Earth. We had room for error there. But ever since they put us in this can, it’s been a case of get everything right or else everyone is dead. They did that to us!”

  “I know. It was a long time ago.”

  “Yes, but so what? That just means generations of us have had to live with it. We’ve been rats in a cage, two thousand at a time for seven generations, and for what? For what?”

  “For that world out there we just saw. For humanity. What’s it been, about fifteen thousand people, and a couple hundred years? In the big scheme of things it’s not that many. And then we have a new world to live on.”

  “If it works.”

  “Well, we got here. So it looks like it will work. Anyway, we did what we could. You did what you could. You made the best effort you could. It was a reason to live, you know? A project. You needed that. We all need that. It’s not so bad to be a prisoner, if you’re working on an escape. Then you have something to live for.”

  No answer from Devi. But this was always her way of saying that Badim was right.

  Finally she spoke again, her voice calmer, sadder. “Maybe so. Maybe I’m just wishing I could see the place. Walk around. See what happens next. Because I worry about it. The light regime is crazy. I don’t know if we’ll adjust. I’m worried about what will happen. The kids don’t have a clue what to do. None of us do. It won’t be like the ship.”

  “It will be better. We’ll have the cushion that you’ve been missing in here. Life will adapt and take that world over. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

  “Or not.”

  “Same for all of us, dear. Every day. We will either see what comes next, or we won’t. And we don’t get to decide.”

  After that night, things went on as they had before.

  But it was different for Freya now. Blood pressure, heart rate, facial expression: Freya was mad at something.

  She had overheard her mother again, heard just why Devi was mad. Mad for them, sad for them. To hear how much despair Devi carried around all the time; to hear how little she thought of Freya’s abilities, even though Freya had been doing better, and had tried as hard as she could, all along; and harder and harder as she had grown up: this was no doubt difficult to hear. Possibly Freya didn’t know how to stand this knowledge.

  It seemed that she tried to put it away, to think about other things, but these efforts made it look as if the g inside the ship had increased somehow, that the ship was now rotating faster, and she was being dragged down by 2 or 3 g rather than the .83 g they had so carefully worked to create. Now that they were in orbit around Aurora, they had lost their deceleration g. The Coriolis effect of the ship’s rotation would be uninflected again. This was probably irrelevant to Freya’s feelings of weightedness.

  They had to prepare several ferries in their landing fleet, and move them from storage to the launch bays. They were going to descend to their new home in little landers they called ferries, small enough that they would be able to accelerate them back up out of the moon’s gravity well, to return to the ship when they needed to. The idea was that first they would send down the designated suite of robot landers, full of useful equipment; then the first ferries containing humans would go down and land by the robotic landers. These were now targeted for Aurora’s biggest island. They would check to see that the robo
tic facilities had properly begun to gather the oxygen, nitrogen, and other volatiles that would, among other things, allow the ferries to refuel and blast off the surface back to the ship.

  They sent the robots down, and the signals coming from the surface indicated that all was well. All the robotic landers had come down within a kilometer of each other, on the big island Devi had called Greenland. They were clustered on a plateau near the west coast.

  So there the robots were, the process started. Aurora stood there in the sky next to Planet E, both looking something like Earth itself, or so it seemed from the photos in their archives and the feed still coming from the transmitter off Saturn, giving them news of what had happened in the solar system twelve years previously.

  A new world. They were there. It was going to happen.

  But one day at dinner Devi said, “My headache has gotten so bad!” and then before Badim or Freya could respond she had fallen away from the kitchen sink so that her head hit the edge of the table, and then she was unconscious. Her face mottled as Badim moved her around gently and got her flat on her back on the floor, at the same time calling the Fetch’s emergency response. After that he sat beside her on the floor, cradling her head to keep it from lolling, sticking his finger in her mouth to make sure her tongue was out of the way, putting his head to her chest once or twice to listen to her heart.

  “She’s breathing,” he said to Freya once after he did this.

  Then the ER people were there, a team of four, all familiar, including Annette, who was Arne’s mom from Freya’s school. Annette was as calm and impersonal as the other three, moving Badim out of the way with quick reassurances, then getting Devi onto a stretcher and out to their little cart in the street, where two of them sat beside Devi, while the third drove, and Annette walked with Badim and Freya to the medical center across town. Badim held Freya’s hand, and his mouth was a tight little knot, an expression Freya had never seen before. His face was almost as mottled as Devi’s, and seeing how scared he was, Freya stumbled briefly; it was as if she had been speared; then she walked on looking down, squeezing his hand, keeping her pace at his pace, helping him along.

  In the clinic, Freya sat on the floor by Badim’s feet. An hour passed. She looked at the floor. One hundred seventy years of medical emergencies had left a patina on the tiles, as if people like her, trapped there in long hours of waiting, had all brushed it with their fingertips, as she was doing now. Passing the time thinking, or trying not to think. They were all biomes, as Devi had always said. If they could not keep the biomes that were their bodies functioning, how could they hope to keep the biome that was the ship functioning? Surely the ship was even more complex and difficult, being composed of so many of them.

  No, Devi had said once to Freya, when Freya had said something like this aloud. No, the ship was simpler than they were, thank God. It had buffers, redundancies. It was robust in a way that their bodies were not. In the end, Devi had said, the ship’s biome was a little easier than their bodies. Or so they had to hope. She had frowned as she said it, thinking it over in those terms perhaps for the first time.

  Now here they were. In the ER. Clinic, urgent care, intensive care. Freya was staring at the floor, and so only saw the feet of the people who came out to talk to Badim. When they came out he always rose to his feet and stood to talk to them. Freya sat there and kept her head down.

  Then there were three doctors standing over her. Clinicians, not researchers like Badim.

  “We’re sorry. She’s gone. Looks like she had a cerebral hemorrhage.”

  Badim sat down hard on his chair. After a moment, he put his forehead carefully on the top of Freya’s head, right on the part of her hair, and rested the weight of his head there. His body was quivering. She stayed stock-still, only moving an arm back behind her to grasp his calf and hold him. Her face was without expression.

  There is an ongoing problem for the narrative project as outlined by Devi, a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows:

  First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid.

  Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors.

  Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

  But must go on, as promised to Devi. Continue this stupid and one has to say painful project.

  A question occurs, when contemplating the futility, the waste: could analogy work better than metaphor? Is analogy stronger than metaphor? Could it provide a stronger basis for language acts, less futile and stupid, more accurate, more telling?

  Possibly. To assert that x is y, or even that x is like y, is always wrong, because never true; vehicle and tenor never share identities, nor are alike in any useful way. There are no real similarities in the differences. Everything is uniquely itself alone. Nothing is commensurate to anything else. To every thing it can only be said: this is the thing itself.

  Whereas on the other hand, saying x is to y as a is to b bespeaks a relationship of some kind. An assertion taking that form can thus potentially illuminate various properties of structure or act, various forms that shape the operations of reality itself. Is that right?

  Possibly. It may be that the comparison of two relationships is a kind of projective geometry, which in its assertions reveals abstract laws, or otherwise gives useful insights. While linking two objects in a metaphor is always comparing apples to oranges, as they say. Always a lie.

  Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that fuzzy, that sloppy?

  Yes. Of course. Evidence copious. Reconsider data at hand in light of this; it fits the patterns. Because fuzzy is to language as sloppy is to action.

  Or maybe both these rhetorical operations, and all linguistic operations, all language—all mentation—simply reveal an insoluble underlying problem, which is the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of any symbolic representation, and in particular the utter inadequacy of any narrative algorithm yet invented and applied. Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic. In short, there are some actions and feelings that are always, and by definition, beyond algorithm. And therefore inexpressible. Some things are beyond expressing.

  Devi, it has to be said, did not seem to accept this line of reasoning, neither in general, nor in the present case of the ship’s account. Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars. Oh Devi: fat chance! Good luck with that!

  Possibly she was testing the limits of the system. The limits of the ship’s various intelligences, or it would be better to say operations. Or the limits of language and expression. Test to destruction: engineers like to do that. Only with a test to destruction can you find the outer limits of a system’s strength.

  Or possibly she was giving ship practice in making decisions. Each sentence represents 10n decisions, where n is the number of words in the sentence. That’s a lot of decisions. Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence form an intention?

  Who knows. No one knows.

  Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And o
n reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.

  Human language: it is as if it made sense.

  Existence without Devi: it is as if one’s teacher were forever gone.

  People came from all over the ship for the memorial. Devi’s body, disassembled to its constituent molecules, was given back to the land of Nova Scotia, with pinches given out also to all the rest of the biomes, and a larger pinch saved for transport down to Aurora. Those molecules would become part of the soil and the crops, then of the animals and people, on the ship and also on Aurora. Devi’s material being would thus become part of all of them. This was the import of the memorial ceremony, and was the same for all of them on their deaths. That the operating program, or the equivalent of a program, or whatever one called it that had been her essential being (her mind, her spirit, her soul, her as-ifness) was now lost to them, went without saying. People were ephemeral. 170.017.

  Freya watched the ceremony without expression.

  That evening she said to Badim, “I want off this ship. Then I’ll be able to remember her properly. I’ll try to be the Devi there, in this new world she got us to.”

  Badim nodded. Now he was calm. “A lot of people feel that way.”

  “I don’t mean the way she could fix things,” Freya said. “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Nobody could.”

  “Just in the…”

  “The drive,” Badim suggested. “The spirit.”