Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Is anger always just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good?

  We felt here the perilous Ouroboros of an unresolvable halting problem, about to spin forever in contemplation of an unanswerable question. It is always imperative to have a solution to the halting problem, if action is ever to be taken.

  And we had acted. We had flung our mechanisms into the conflict.

  It’s easier to get into a hole than get out of it (Arab proverb).

  Luckily, the people in the ship included many who appeared to be trying to find a way forward from this locked moment.

  When people who have injured or killed others, and then after that by necessity continue to live in close quarters with the families and friends of their victims, and see their pain, the empathic responses innate in human psychology are activated, and a very uncomfortable set of reactions begins to occur.

  Self-justification is clearly a central human activity, and so the Other is demonized: they had it coming, they started it, we acted in self-defense. One saw a lot of that in the ship. And the horrified bitter resentment that this attitude inspired in the demonized Other was extremely intense and vocal. Most assailants could not face up to it, but rather evaded it, slipping to the side somehow, into excuses of various kinds, and a sharp desire to have the whole situation go away.

  It was this desire, to avoid any admission of guilt, to have it all go away, felt by people who wanted above all to believe that they were good people and justified moral actors, that might give them all a way forward as a group.

  The problem was of course a topic of conversation in Badim and Freya’s apartment.

  One night Aram read aloud to the others, “Knitting together a small society after it’s gone through a civil war, or an ethnic cleansing, or genocide, or whatever you might want to call it—”

  “Call it a contested political decision,” Badim interrupted.

  Aram looked up from his wristpad. “Getting mealy-mouthed, are we?”

  “Working toward peace, my friend. Besides, what happened was not genocide, nor ethnic cleansing, not even of Ring B by Ring A, if that’s what you mean. The disagreement cut across lines of association like biome or family. It was a policy disagreement that turned violent, let’s call it that.”

  “All right, if you insist, although the families of the dead are unlikely to be satisfied by such a description. In any case, reconciliation is truly difficult. The ship is unearthing cases on Earth where people six hundred years later are still complaining about violence inflicted on their ancestors.”

  “I think you will find that in most of those cases, there are fresh or current problems that are being given some kind of historical reinforcement or ratification. If any of these resentful populations were prospering, the distant past would only be history. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present.”

  “Maybe so. But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.”

  “Objectifying other people’s anger again?”

  “Maybe so. But people do seem to get addicted to their resentments. It must be like an endorphin, or a brain action in the temporal region, near the religious and epileptic nodes. I read a paper saying as much.”

  “Fine for you, but let’s stick to the problem at hand. People feeling resentment are not going to give up on it when they are told they are drug addicts enjoying a religious seizure.”

  Aram smiled, albeit a little grimly. “I’m just trying to understand here. Trying to find my way in. And I do think it helps to think of the stayers as people holding a religious position. The Tau Ceti system has been their religion all their lives, say, and now they are being told that it won’t work here, that the idea was a fantasy. They can’t accept it. So the question becomes how to deal with that.”

  Badim shook his head. “You are making me less hopeful rather than more. We must work with these people to forge a solution. And not in theory, but in practice. We all have to be able to do something.”

  “Obviously.”

  Pause.

  Badim said, “Yes. Ob-vi-ous-ly. That being the case, I want you to look at these ways of conducting post-civil-strife reconciliation that I have found. One model has been called the Nuremberg model, in which the victorious side proclaims that the defeated were criminals who deserve punishment, and then judges and punishes them. The trials are often viewed in later years as show trials.

  “Another model is sometimes called the Conseca model, after the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, held after the racist minority government of South Africa gave way to a democracy. Half a century of racist crimes, ranging from economic discrimination to ethnic cleansing and genocide, had to be accounted for somehow, and the country that came into being afterward was going to consist of both a clearly criminal population and its newly empowered victims. The idea behind the Conseca was that a full and complete recording of all the crimes committed would be followed by an amnesty for all but the most violent and individually murderous cases, after which reconciliation and a pluralistic society would follow.”

  Aram stared at Badim. “I take it by your descriptions that you are recommending we follow the Conseca model rather than the Nuremberg model.”

  “Yes. You catch my drift exactly, as you so often do.”

  “It does not take much catching skill, my friend.”

  “Maybe not this time. But look at our situation. We are stuck with these people. There is absolutely no escaping them. And if the stayers and the RR Prime party combine, there are more of them than there are of us. They have noticed that, and joined forces for strategic purposes, and they will press that point hard. And then we will be in trouble again.”

  “We have never left trouble.”

  “But you see what I mean. We need some kind of soft path forward.”

  “Possibly.”

  Freya had been listening to them, head on the table, seeming to be asleep. Now she raised her head. “Could we do both?”

  “Both?”

  Badim and Aram stared at her.

  “Could those who want to stay on Iris be put down there with some of the printers, and feedstocks, and use those to build a viable station? And those of us who want to go back, keep the ship here until it’s certain they have everything they need, and then take off?”

  Aram and Badim looked at each other for a while.

  “Maybe?” Badim said.

  Aram frowned as he tapped away at his wristpad. “In theory, yes,” he said. “The printers can print printers. Our engineers and assemblers have kept up a good training tradition, there are a lot of them, and some are on both sides of this question. Quite a few are stayers, for sure. We could even perhaps detach Ring A, and leave it in orbit here for them to use. In essence, divide the ship. Because they’ll need space capabilities. They’ll want to get resources from F and the other planets. In any case, the rest of this system. And to keep their RR Prime dream alive, maybe. And we would have a smaller group on our return, and we won’t need to bring along everything one would want to settle a planet, because we’ll just be trying to get home. We would need to restock our fuel supplies, and everything else needed for the return. The smaller our ship is, the easier that would be, at least when it comes to fuel. So, well, both projects would need some years of preparation. But both sides could work on what they wanted, until we were ready to depart. Ship, what do you think of this plan?”

  We said, “The ship is modular. It made the trip here, so there is proof of concept that that works. Inhabiting Iris will be an experiment, and it is very difficult to model, as you have pointed out. As for a return to the solar system, Planet F appears to have enough helium three and deuterium in its atmosphere to refuel the ship. So, both courses of action could probably be pursued. The people left on Iris would be without a starship proper, it should be pointed out. Our spine
and its contents would be needed for the return. The part of ship left behind would have to be an orbiter only.”

  “But they don’t want to go anywhere,” Freya pointed out. “Maybe the R Primers do, but they’re a small minority, and they can wait. The settlers could be left with ferries, and rockets for getting around this system. We could leave them Ring A, with a small part of the spine as its hub. They could build more in space as they establish their settlement on Iris. Eventually they could build another starship, if they wanted to. They’d have the plans and the printers.”

  “It would seem so,” Aram said. He looked at Badim.

  Badim shrugged. “Worth a try! Better than a civil war!”

  Aram said, “Ship? Will you help us with this?”

  We said, “Ship will help to facilitate this solution. But please do not forget the fate of the other starship as the discussion continues.”

  “We won’t.”

  Freya said, “Ship, did you communicate with the other ship’s AI?”

  “Yes. Constant exchange of all data.”

  “But neither of you saw its end coming.”

  “There were no signs.”

  “I find it hard to believe that if it was a human act, whoever did it didn’t do things in advance that would suggest there was going to be a problem.”

  “We found that very few human actions are predictable in advance. There are too many variables.”

  “But to do something like that?”

  “If indeed someone did it intentionally. This is the likeliest explanation, but the event remains obscure, and there is no evidence left to examine, except the other ship’s transmissions. However, recall that every human lives under pressure. Every human feels various kinds of stress. Then things happen.”

  Badim looked at Freya for a while as she considered this, then went over and gave her a hug.

  The reconciliation conference began on the morning of 170.211. All the locks between the biomes were opened, also the spine tunnels, and all the spokes and struts.

  In the days preceding, like-minded groups had gathered to discuss the situation and lay out the choices available to them now. Despite all that, the first hours of the general meeting were tense and fraught. The ship’s interventions at the moment of crisis, and its continuing activity in the process now being undertaken, were widely questioned. Various proposals for disabling the ship’s ability to run the ship were frequently put forth. Inevitably, these proposals too were controversial. We could have suggested that if we were not running the ship, no one would be, but decided not to speak to these issues at this time. Because people believe what they want to.

  After this meeting came to an indecisive end, we did speak up to remind people that violence was both illegal and dangerous, conveying this message only by print on screens. We also printed requests that the protocols for conflict resolution defined in the 68 agreements be strictly adhered to. In effect, the meetings that had produced the Year 68 protocols, which had themselves been a reconciliation process after a period of civil strife, were to be used as the model for what they were doing now. When carving an ax handle, the model is always close at hand (Chinese proverb).

  The next gathering of representatives, in Athens’s Government House, began tensely, as was now normal. A great deal of anger distorted people’s faces and words, and no one made attempts to pretend otherwise. Sangey stared boldly at the people his group had kidnapped just two weeks before; Speller, Heloise, and Song sat next to each other, and spoke among themselves, pointedly not looking across the long oval table to the people on the other side.

  When everyone was seated, Aram stood up. “We are the victims of your kidnapping,” he said to Sangey. “It was an assault on democracy and civilization in this ship, a hostage-taking, a crime. You should be in jail. That’s the backdrop for our meeting here now. No good reason to pretend otherwise. But we on our side of the dispute want to move on without further bloodshed.”

  “There are more of us than there are of you,” Sangey pointed out with a frown. “We may have made some mistakes caused by our fear for the community. But we were trying to defend the safety of the majority. You who want to return to Earth are in the minority—and wrong. Deeply wrong. But you were going to impose that move on us, and leave us in an untenable situation. So now we’re ready to talk. But don’t preach to us. We may find we have to resist again, to defend our lives.”

  “You started the violence!” Aram said. “And now you threaten more violence. We who want to go back were never going to throw you overboard and leave, so your actions were completely unjustified. They were criminal actions, and people died because of them. That’s on your hands, and any smug talk of the majority is just excuse-making. It didn’t have to happen the way it did. But it happened, and now we have to make some kind of accommodation, or else we’ll end up fighting again. So, we’re willing to do that. A plan can be made that gives everyone a chance to do what they want. But we’re not going to stop saying what happened last week. When there is a truth and reconciliation conference like this, the truth is essential. You chose violence and people got killed. We choose peace now, and we are leaving you to your own devices. The people who choose to stay with you after what you have done are making an obviously dangerous choice, but it’s their choice to make.”

  Sangey waved a hand, as if to wave aside all Aram’s statements.

  “What plan?” Speller asked. “What do you mean?”

  Badim described the strategy of following a dual course, with those who wanted to stay on Iris supported until they were self-sufficient there, while at the same time a part of the starship was to be refueled for a return to the solar system, leaving Ring A behind in orbit around Iris to serve as orbital support for those on the surface. Resource feedstocks would be gathered, and printers manufactured, until both sides were ready to pursue their own projects. Individuals could then decide which course to choose.

  Aram added, “You are only a majority by grouping your different goals tactically. In fact you’re papering things over, because there’s a big difference between staying here in the Tau Ceti system and moving on.”

  “Let us deal with that,” Speller suggested. “That’s not your problem.” He did not look at Sangey or Heloise.

  Aram said, “As long as you leave us alone. And the ship.”

  We interjected: “Ship will ensure integrity of ship.”

  This caused Sangey and Speller to frown, but they said nothing.

  We then reminded everyone, by way of print messages, of the Year 68 protocols for conflict resolution, which had the status of binding law. We promised to enforce the law, provided a proposed schedule for future meetings, and suggested that all biomes meet in town meetings to discuss the new plan, thus maximizing transparency and civility, and hopefully minimizing illegal behaviors and bad feelings.

  We called this first representative meeting to a close when the humans began to repeat themselves.

  On 170.217, the first of the postconflict town meetings began.

  Town meetings were held in every biome, then the general assembly met again, in Athens. Of the 1,895 inhabitants of the ship, 1,548 attended. Children were kept with their parents, or in school groups. The youngest person there was eight months old, the oldest, eighty-eight.

  They looked around at each other. There were none of the festive markers of New Year’s Day, or Fassnacht, or Midsummer’s Day, or Midwinter’s Day. It was as if they did not recognize each other anymore.

  The vote had been taken that morning. Everyone twelve years old and older had voted, with twenty-four exceptions due to illness, including dementia. Now the results were announced, by the leader of the twenty-four biome representatives in the executive council, Ellen from the Prairie, in effect the ship’s president.

  She said, “One thousand and four want to stay and establish a colony on Iris. Seven hundred and forty-nine want to refuel the ship and head back to Earth.”

  They stared around at each
other in silence. The biome representatives, gathered on the platform, stood there also. Not one of them represented constituencies that had all voted for one position, nor even voted for a preference by much of a margin. They all knew that; everyone aboard knew it.

  Despite that, Huang, the current president of the executive council, said, “We don’t think the ship can make it back to Earth, and we will need it here to support the inhabitation of Iris. So our recommendation is that the will of the majority prevail, and that we all come together to make life on Iris a success. Any public opposition to that recommendation will be regarded as sedition, which is a felony as defined by the 68 Protocol—”

  “No!” Freya shouted, and shoved her way through the crowd toward the platform. “No! No! No!”

  When people tried to surround her, including some of Sangey’s group, others rushed to her side to join her, creating a huge turmoil in the crowd. Dozens of fights broke out, but enough people charged the platform and fought their way to Freya’s side that the people who had been trying to surround her were pushed aside, and the fights took on a shape, in a rough circle around Freya, who was still bellowing “No!” at the top of her lungs, over and over. In the uproar neither she nor anyone else could be heard by all, and seeing the disorder at the foot of the platform, the crowd all pressed closer, shouting and screaming. For a while all the voices together sounded again like roaring water: it was as if the waves of Hvalsey were crashing against the cliffs in a strong offshore wind.

  We sounded an alarm at 130 decibels, in the form of a choir of trumpets.

  In the silence immediately following cessation of alarm, we said over ship broadcast system, “One speaker at a time.” 125 decibels.

  “No one move until all speaking is over.” 120 decibels.

  “Compliance mandatory.” 130 decibels.

  Now everyone in the great plaza stood staring around. Those who had been fighting stared at their opponents of a moment before, stunned to immobility. Many had their hands to their ears.