Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Freya and Badim spent much of their time in their apartment, waiting for the assembly’s executive group to call for a referendum. Aram was again part of the executive group, and so they were hopeful that things would go well and get resolved soon, one way or the other. The security council had been suspended when all its functions were returned to the immediate business of the executive council.

  Freya sat looking at her father, his round, brown face, the drooping bags under his eyes. He looked much older than he had just two years before. None of them looked the same now. Ever since the death of the Aurora settlers, or even since Devi’s death, they had changed, and now appeared to be aging faster than they had during the voyage out. A certain look was gone from them: possibly a sense of hope. Possibly a feeling that things made sense, had meaning.

  Two weeks after the assembly in San Jose, the executive group called for the referendum to be held the following day. Voting was mandatory, and any who refused to vote would be fined by punitive work penalties. In fact this did not look like it was going to be a problem; it seemed as if everyone was anxious to cast a vote.

  The ballot had been arranged into three possible choices, with all the possibilities that kept them in the Tau Ceti system bunched as one choice. So the three were

  Tau Ceti

  Onward to RR Prime

  Back to Earth

  Voting closed at midnight. At 12:02 a.m. the results were posted:

  Tau Ceti: 44%

  Onward to RR Prime: 7%

  Back to Earth: 49%

  The roar of voices filled the biomes for many hours after that. Comments ranged as widely as could be imagined. In the following day, anything that could be said about the situation was said. It was a pluripotent response, an incoherence.

  The next morning Aram dropped by Badim and Freya’s apartment and said, “Come with me to a meeting. We’ve been invited, and I think Freya is the one they really want.”

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “Of people trying to avoid trouble. The referendum has by no means given anyone a mandate. So there could be trouble.”

  Freya and Badim went with him. Aram led them down to a public building by Long Pond, into a pub and up the stairs to a big room with a window overlooking the water.

  There were four people there. Aram introduced Freya and Badim to them—“Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester”—then led them over to a table and invited them to sit. When they were seated, Aram sat beside Freya and leaned over to prop a screen on the table, where Badim could see it also.

  “The referendum was too close,” Aram said. “The most votes were cast for our preferred option, but we’ll need to convince more people to join us. Convincing them might be easier if we make it clear that the ship can be made as strong as it was when it left the solar system.”

  Aram brought up charts on the table screen. Badim got out his reading glasses and leaned closer to read it. He said, “What about our basic power supply, that would be my first question.”

  “A good point, of course. The ship’s main nuclear reactor has fuel for another five hundred years, so we’re okay there. As for propulsion fuel, we can send probes to gather hydrogen three and deuterium from Planet F’s atmosphere. We would collect the same amount that we burned to decelerate coming in, and then burn it to accelerate out.”

  “But if we use it for accelerating,” Badim said, “how will we decelerate when we get back to the solar system?”

  “That too will have to be reversed. We’ll have to ask the people in the solar system to point the laser beam that accelerated us back at us as we come in, to slow us down the same way they speeded us up. Possibly the same laser generator orbiting Saturn will be available.”

  “Really?” Badim said. “This is the plan?”

  Then came a knock at the door.

  There were thirty-two people outside that door, twenty-six men and six women, several of the men taller and heavier than the median size of the population. Most of them were from Ring A biomes. When they were all in the room it was extremely crowded.

  One of the men, one Sangey, from the Steppes, flanked by three of the biggest of the men, said, “This is an illegal meeting. You are discussing public policy in a private gathering of political leaders, as specifically forbidden by the riot laws of Year 68. So we are placing you under arrest. If you come peacefully we’ll let you walk. If you resist you’ll be tied to gurneys and carried.”

  “There is no law against private discussions of the health of the ship!” Aram said angrily. “It’s you breaking the law here!”

  All their voices were now at least twice as loud as normal.

  “Will you walk or be carried?” Sangey said.

  “You’ll definitely have to carry me,” Aram said, and then charged Sangey. In a melee filled with shouting, he was subdued by the men flanking Sangey. Aram lashed out at Sangey over one guard’s shoulder as he was lifted off his feet, and his fist landed on Sangey’s nose. At the sight of blood the others stuffing the room surged in toward Aram, shouting furiously.

  Badim stood over Freya in her chair, preventing her from rising to her feet. “Stay out of this,” he cried at her, face-to-face. “This is not our fight here!”

  “Yes it is!” Freya shouted, but as she could not rise without throwing her father to the side, she kicked viciously past him as they clung to each other, striking nearby knees and causing some of their assailants to crash together and then fall to the floor, crying out angrily. Those still standing shouted and wrestled Badim and Freya both to the ground, pummeling and kicking them. Seeing this Aram flew into a rage and struck out convulsively. More punched noses and cracked lips made several faces bloody, so that the white-eyed shouting redoubled again in volume and intensity.

  The sight of blood during a fight causes a very intense adrenaline surge. Voices shout hoarsely; eyes go round, such that white is visible all the way around the iris; movements are faster and stronger; heart rate and blood pressure rise. This was demonstrated many times in Year 68.

  The strategic foresight in bringing many large men to arrest the group in the room soon paid off, as the seven people in the meeting were, despite the close quarters and resultant chaos, knocked down, subdued, held fast, secured by medical restraints, lifted kicking out of the room and the building, laid onto gurneys in the street outside, and tied down to them. Badim and Freya were handled like all the rest, and Freya had a swollen left eye.

  The crowd that gathered to witness this action was composed almost entirely of people from Ring A biomes. Residents of the Fetch were slow to realize what was happening in their midst, and there was no effective resistance to this outside group. The gurneys were all conveyed up to the spine and along it to Spoke Three, and down it to the infirmary in Kiev, which had been used as a jail in Year 68, though no one alive knew that. The seven arrested ones were locked up in three rooms there.

  Elsewhere in the ship, news of the incarceration of Aram’s group spread fast. When their friends and supporters heard about it, they gathered in San Jose’s plaza and loudly protested the action. The administrators of Costa Rica said they did not know what had happened, and suggested discussing what to do in a regathering of a general assembly similar to the one just recently held. A significant number of the protestors refused to debate what they called a criminal action; their friends had to be released immediately, and only then could any outstanding issues be discussed. Kidnapping could never be rewarded with political legitimacy, people shouted, or else it would happen again and again, and there would be no more political discourse in the ship, or rational planning of any kind.

  As that afternoon passed, the shouting became much like the sound of broken waves striking the corniche at the seawall of Long Pond. It was a roar.

  Three hours after gathering, the crowd in San Jose had inspired itself to action and began marching toward Kiev, chanting slogans and singing songs. There were approximately 140 people in the crowd, and they had made it to the entryway of S
poke Four, packed around the tunnel there to a depth of around two hundred meters, when a smaller crowd of approximately fifty people poured out of the spoke tunnel, throwing rocks and shouting.

  It was as if fire and combustible fuel had come in contact: a furious fight erupted. It was still mostly a matter of shoving and hitting, but photos and clips of the melee were sent through the ship right in the midst of it, alerting all to the situation. Meanwhile, in all twelve biomes of Ring A, gangs stormed the government houses and took possession of them. Groups also seized and closed all the locks between Ring A’s biomes, and likewise closed the six entryways to the A spokes. It seemed likely that these were coordinated actions, planned in spaces where the ship had no microphones, or where the microphones had somehow been rendered inoperative. Either that or spontaneous actions self-organized very quickly, which of course they did in many phenomena.

  In the Spoke Four lock where the fighting still went on, news of developments elsewhere spread, and it became clear that the fight there was a kind of invasion of Ring B by the groups in Ring A that had taken possession of the government houses. The fight at the entry to Spoke Four then became a pitched battle, with people from everywhere in Ring B rushing around through the locks to join the fray. Nonetheless, the attacking group continued to emerge from the spoke entryway, more every minute, and they were taking over much of Costa Rica and many of the streets of San Jose. Rocks began to fly through the air. One struck a man in the head, and down he went, unconscious and bleeding. Now people were screaming. Reinforcements from around Ring B arrived, enough so that the group emerging from the spoke was stopped in its advance on the Government House. People on both sides now were hurling rocks from the parks, paving stones from the plazas, knives from kitchens, plates, other objects. Furniture was thrown out of buildings into the streets and piled into barricades, some of which were set on fire.

  Fire anywhere in the ship was extremely dangerous.

  Against such ferocious resistance, the invasive group could not hold its ground. More than a dozen people lay on the ground bleeding. As the invaders retreated to the lock of Spoke Four, still throwing objects at their opponents, there were groups elsewhere around Ring B hurrying up the other spokes toward the spine. The spine was already occupied by groups from Ring A, and they closed the entryway doors of B’s inner ring all the way around, so that no matter how intense the assaults by people from Ring B, they could make no further progress toward the spine. And the spine held the power plant, along with all the other crucial central functions of the ship, including the ship’s operating AI.

  So now Ring A and the spine were both controlled by people calling themselves the stayers. No one who might want to free Aram and Freya and Badim and their four companions could come anywhere near the infirmary in Kiev.

  Instead, the antagonists were now separated by locked doors. And sixteen people in Ring B were dead, killed either when hit by objects, or when cut or impaled, or when trampled by crowds. Another ninety-six people were injured. All the infirmaries in Ring B soon were filled with hurt people, and the medical teams in them were completely overwhelmed. Eighteen more people died in the following hours as a result of their injuries. The streets of San Jose were covered with wreckage and pools of congealing blood.

  The bad times had returned.

  In the infirmary in Kiev, Freya and the others had had their wristpads and other communicators taken from them, which they obviously found shocking. Khetsun still had an earbud that he had hidden when he was being searched, and listening to it, he relayed what he heard of the news of the fighting to the others with him in that room.

  Freya said, “With all that going on, I think we can escape these people here. They’re sure to be distracted.”

  “How?” Aram asked.

  “I know a way back to Ring B. Euan taught it to me.”

  “But how will we get out of this building?”

  “It’s just an ordinary room. I don’t think the locks or the doorjambs, or the doors, were made to stop someone from breaking them. These assholes are probably relying on guards to keep us in here, and the guards may be off dealing with this other stuff.”

  “The engineer’s solution,” Aram said.

  “Why not?”

  “Good question.” Aram put his ear to the door and listened for a while. “Let’s try it.”

  They took apart a bed frame in the room and used its footing to strike the doorknob. Forty-two strikes, and the doorknob broke off; another sixty-two strikes, mostly made by Freya, broke the door latch assembly out of the doorjamb and the door swung open.

  “Quick,” Freya said. As they hurried down the hallway outside the room to a stairwell, a young man came out of another room and yelled at them to stop. Freya walked up to him saying, “Hey, we were just—” and then punched him in the face. He fell back into the wall and slid to the floor, and though he tried to get up, he was too groggy to succeed. Freya leaned over and tore his wristpad off his wrist, then led the others into the stairwell, where they descended to an exit onto the street outside. People had congregated at the screens outside a dining hall near the Great Gate of Kiev, and Freya and the others ran the other way, toward the lock leading to Mongolia and the end of Spoke Two.

  The lock door leading up to Spoke Two was closed.

  The Steppes biome was as far from Nova Scotia as one biome could be from another. Aram and Tao were in favor of them trying to make their way around Ring A to Tasmania, where they had friends in the eucalyptus forest they thought would take them in.

  Freya insisted they make for home. “I know the way,” she said. “Follow me.”

  She led them into Mongolia, and near the wall next to Spoke Two, she went to a little herder’s shed with its slate roof, which she had visited nine years before in an excursion with Euan. She tapped out a code on the doorpad. “Euan knew to make it my name, so I wouldn’t forget,” she said as she typed, and then the lock released, and inside the shed she got the others to help her move aside the big flagstones in the middle of the floor. “Come on, they’ll be after us soon, and we’ll be putting out a signal, I wouldn’t doubt they have trackers on us somewhere, not to mention this wristpad. Does anyone have a sweeper we can use to check?”

  No one did.

  “So we’ll just have to be fast. Come on.”

  Under the flagstones was a narrow dark tunnel that after a U-turn and rise led to a vent in the wall of Spoke Two. None of them had lights with them, but Freya judged it best that they move the flagstones back into place and walk in the resulting darkness, slightly lit by the wristpad of the unfortunate man who had gotten in their way. By its light they shuffled along the tunnel until they came to the vent cover in Spoke Two, where Freya unscrewed the backing of the vent cover and they stepped out into the Spoke Two passageway.

  From here they ran up the spiral staircase that adhered to the walls of all the spokes’ main passageways, to the bulb of little storage rooms clustered around the inner ring where it intersected Spoke Two. Freya again led them to a door, and tapped in a code on the doorpad, then led them inside.

  When they were inside and the door was closed, Freya had them sit on the floor and rest. They had run hard up Spoke Two’s stairs.

  “Okay, the next part is difficult,” she told the others. “The support struts between the inner rings aren’t meant to be passageways, but they’re hollow now that the fuel they carried is gone, and there’s a utilidor running next to the fuel bladder that is really narrow. It’s full of bulkheads, but Euan and his gang broke all the locks in this strut. So we should be able to get to Inner Ring B’s Two station through it, and from there go down to Nova Scotia.”

  “Let’s go then,” Khetsun said.

  “Sure. But watch out for the bulkhead footings. This is where we’ll really wish we had better light. Just step carefully.”

  They got up and took off again, progressing through the narrow utilidor of the strut by the light of the stolen wristpad. The utilidor was o
nly three meters in diameter, and often the space was filled by a narrow catwalk, also braids of cables, and various boxes. The struts connecting the inner rings were so close to the spine that the gravity effect of the ship’s rotation was not as strong as out in the torus of biomes, and so they had to step carefully to avoid launching themselves up into the metal ceiling, or the upper frames of the bulkhead doorways. In the dim light of Freya’s stolen wristpad, and the black shadows its beam created, it was not easy, and they were not very fast, nor were they quiet. It took them well over an hour to get along the strut.

  Finally they came to the last door, which opened onto Inner Ring B’s Two station, and found it was locked. For a moment they stood there silently regarding the doorpad in the light Freya was shining on it. It did not look like a door they could break down, and they didn’t have anything much with which to try that.

  Finally Freya said, “Can anyone list the prime numbers?”

  “Sure,” Aram said. “Two, three, five, seven—”

  “Wait,” Freya interrupted. “I need you to go up through the primes by primes, if you see what I mean. Give me the second prime, then the third, then the fifth, then the seventh, and on like that. I think I need seven of them that way.”

  “Okay, but help me.” Aram paused to collect himself. “The second prime is three, third prime is five. The fifth prime is eleven, the seventh is seventeen. The eleventh is… thirty-one. The thirteenth is… forty-one. The seventeenth is… fifty-nine, I think. Yes.”

  “Okay, good,” Freya said, and pushed the door open. “Thank you, Euan,” she said, and a spasm crossed her face that left her looking furious.

  She opened the door lightly, and they listened as well as they could, trying to determine if anyone was in the little complex of storage rooms comprising Inner Ring B’s intersection with its Spoke Two. They couldn’t hear anything, but didn’t know what that meant; Freya couldn’t remember if in the old days they had ever eavesdropped on people from within the utilidor or not.