Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  People began to go hungry. Food rationing was instituted, by a democratic vote taken on the recommendations of a committee formed to make suggestions concerning the emergency. The vote was 615 to 102.

  One day Freya was called to Sonora, asked to address some kind of undefined emergency. “Don’t go,” Badim called by phone to ask her.

  This was truly a strange request, coming from him, but by that time she was already there; and when she saw the situation, she sat on the nearest bench and hunched over miserably. A group of five young people had put plastic bags over their heads and suffocated themselves. One had scrawled a note: Because we are too many.

  “This has to stop,” she said when she managed to stand back up.

  But the next week, a pair of teenagers broke the lock code and launched themselves out of the bow dock of the spine, without tethers or even spacesuits. They too had left a note behind: I am just going out for a while, and may be some time.

  Appeal to tradition. Roman virtue. Sacrifice of the one for the many. A very human thing.

  They called a general assembly, and met on the great plaza of San Jose, where so much had already happened. On the other hand, by now only about half of them were old enough to have been alive during the crisis on Aurora, and the schism that followed. The older people present therefore looked at the younger people with spooked expressions. You don’t know what happened here, the old people said. The younger people tended to look quizzical. Don’t we? Are you sure? Is that bad?

  When everyone who was going to come was there, a complete account of their food situation was made. Silence fell in the plaza.

  Freya then got up to speak. “We can make it through this,” she said. “There are not too many of us, it’s wrong to say that. We only have to hold together. In fact we need all of us here, to do the things we need to do. So there can’t be any more of these suicides. We need all of us. There’s food enough. We only have to take care, and regulate what we eat, and match it to what we grow. It will be all right. But only if we take care of each other. You’ve all heard the figures now. You can see that it will work. So let’s do that. We have an obligation to all the others who made it work in this ship, and to those yet to come. Two hundred and six years so far, one hundred thirty years to go. We can’t let the generations down—our parents, our children. We have to show courage in the hard time. I wouldn’t want ours to be the generation that let all the others down.”

  Faces flushed, eyes bright, people stood up and faced her, their hands raised overhead, palms facing her, like sunflowers, or eyes on stalks, or yes votes, or something we could not find an analogy to.

  The ship is sick, people said. It’s too complex a machine, and it’s been running nonstop for over two hundred years. Things are going wrong. It’s partly alive, and so it’s getting old, maybe even dying. It’s a cyborg, and the living parts are getting diseased, and the diseases are attacking the nonliving parts. We can’t replace the parts, because we’re inside them, and we need them working at all times. So things are going wrong.

  “Maintenance and repair,” Freya would say to these sentiments. “Maintenance and repair and recycling, that’s all. It’s the house we live in, it’s the ship we sail in. There’s always been maintenance and repair and recycling. So hold it together. Don’t get melodramatic. Let’s just keep doing it. We’ve got nothing else to do with our time anyway, right?”

  But the missing bromine was seldom discussed, and their attempts to recapture some of it by recycling the soil, and then the plastic surfaces inside the ship, were only partly successful. And there were other elements that were bonding to the ship in difficult ways as well, creating new metabolic rifts, important shortages. This was not something they could ration their way out of. And though it was seldom discussed, almost everyone in the ship was aware of it.

  When they ran out of stored food, and a nematode infestation killed most of the new crop in the Prairie, they called another assembly. Rationing was established in full, as per the advice of the working committee, and new rules and practices outlined.

  Rabbit hutches were expanded, and tilapia ponds. But as it was pointed out, even the rabbits and tilapia needed food. They could eat these creatures the very moment they got to a certain size, but they wouldn’t get to that size unless they were fed. So despite their amazing reproductive capacity, these creatures were not the way out of the problem.

  It was a systemic agricultural problem, of feedstocks, inputs, growth, outputs, and recycling. Controlling their diseases was a matter of integrated pest management, successfully designed and applied. There was an entire giant field of knowledge and past experiences to help them. They had to adjust, adapt, move into a new and tighter food regimen. Cope with the missing elements as best they could.

  One aspect of integrated pest management was chemical pesticides. They still had supplies of these, and their chemical factories had the feedstocks to make more. Howbeit they were harmful to humans, which they were, they still had to be used. Time to be a bit brutal, if they had to be, and take some risks they wouldn’t ordinarily take, at least in certain biomes. Run some quick experiments and quickly find out what worked best. If more food now was paid for by more cancers later, that was the price they had to pay.

  Risk assessment and risk management came to the fore as subjects of discussion. People had to sort out their sense of the probabilities here, make judgments based on values they hadn’t really had to examine, that they had taken for granted. No one was getting pregnant now. Eventually that too would become a problem. But they had to deal with the problem at hand.

  Soybeans needed to be protected at all costs from soil pathogens, as they desperately needed the protein that soy could best provide. Biome by biome, they dug up all the soil in the entire starship, cleaned it of pathogens as best they could, while leaving the helpful bacteria alive as much as possible. Then they put it back into cultivation and tried again.

  There were still crop failures.

  People now ate 1,500 calories a day, and stopped expending energy recreationally. Everyone lost weight. They kept the children’s rations at levels that would keep them developmentally normal.

  “No fat-bellied, stick-legged little kids.”

  “Not yet.”

  Despite this precaution, the new children were exhibiting a lot of abnormalities. Balance problems, growth issues, learning disabilities. It was hard to tell why, indeed impossible. There were a multitude of symptoms or disorders. Statistically it was not greatly different than it had been for previous generations, but anecdotally it had become so prominent that every problem was noticed and remarked. The cognitive error called ease of representation thrust them into a space where every problem they witnessed convinced them they were in an unprecedented collapse. They were getting depressed. Throughout history people had sickened and died; but now when these things happened, it looked like it was because of the ship. Which we considered a problem. But it was only one of many.

  Most days in the last hours before sunset, Badim would walk down to the corniche running up the west side of the Fetch, and settle at the railing over the water and fish for a while. There was a limit of one fish per day per fisher, and the railing was lined with people trying to make that catch to add to the evening’s meal. It was not exactly a crowd, because luck was generally not very good at this end of Long Pond. Still, there were a number of regulars who were there almost every day, most of them elderly, but a few of them young parents with their kids. Badim liked seeing them, and did pretty well at remembering their names from one day to the next.

  Sometimes Freya would come by in the dusk and walk him home. Sometimes he could show her a little perch or tilapia or trout. “Let’s make a fish stew.”

  “Sounds good, Beebee.”

  “Did we ever use to do this in the old days?”

  “No, I don’t think so. You and Devi were too busy then.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Remember the time we went sailing?
”

  “Oh yes! I crashed us into the dock.”

  “Only that one time.”

  “Ah good. Good for us. I couldn’t be sure if we did it a lot, or if I just keep remembering that one time.”

  “I know what you mean, but I think it happened just the once. Then we figured out how to do it.”

  “That’s nice. Like cooking our stew.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll help me eat it?”

  “Oh yes. Won’t say no to that.”

  They turned on the lights in their apartment’s kitchen, and he got out the frying pan while she took out a cutting board and filleting knife, and gutted the fish. Its steaks when they were ready were about fifteen centimeters long. When she was sure she had gotten all the bones out of the meat, she chopped the steaks into chunks while Badim chopped potatoes. He left the skins on. Chicken stock, a little water, a little milk, salt and pepper, some chopped carrots. They worked together in silence.

  As they ate, Badim said, “How is it going at work?”

  “Ah, well… Better if Devi were there.”

  He nodded. “I often think that.”

  “Me too.”

  “Funny, you two didn’t get along when you were young.”

  “That was my fault.”

  Badim laughed. “I don’t think so!”

  “I didn’t understand what she was going through.”

  “That always comes later.”

  “When it’s too late.”

  “Well, but it’s never too late. My father, now, he was a real demon for the rules. Sometimes he would make me walk around the whole ring if he thought I wasn’t being respectful of the rules. It was only later I understood that he was old when I was born. That he wasn’t going to have any kids, until he met my mom. Because he had been born right after the troubles, and growing up, he had it hard. I didn’t figure it out until after he was gone, but then when I did, I started to understand your mother better. She and my dad had a lot in common, somehow.” He sighed. “It’s hard to believe they’re both gone.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m glad I still have you, dear.”

  “Me you too.”

  Then when they had cleaned up and she was leaving, he said, “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, tomorrow or the next day. Tomorrow morning I’m going to go to the Piedmont and see how they’re doing.”

  “Have they got a problem too?”

  “Oh yes. Problems everywhere, you know.”

  He laughed. “You sound like your mom.”

  Freya did not laugh.

  All kin relationships are roughly similar. There is attention, regard, solicitousness, affection. Sharing of news, of burdens physical and psychic.

  On 208.285, it registered that the pH of Long Pond had shifted markedly lower in just a two-week span, and a robotic visual inspection of the lake bottom at first found nothing, then a localized pH reading, gridded to fifty meter squares, indicated the lake water was most acidic near the shore opposite the Fetch, where the prevailing winds typically first hit the water. A new robotic inspection found a long depression in the mud, and under that, it was determined that the pond lining had broken, or been cut by something, so that the water was in direct contact with the biome’s flooring. The resulting corrosion of the container was causing the acidification.

  Then a further visual inspection by lake divers revealed depressions running lengthwise down the entire middle of the lake.

  It was decided to drain the lake and store its water, move the fish and other lake life either to a temporary home, or kill and freeze it for food. The mud would have to be bulldozed around to allow direct access to the breaks in the liner.

  This was a blow, as one day Long Pond simply wasn’t there anymore, but was instead a long bowl of black mud, drying out and stinking in the daylight. Looking down from the Fetch’s corniche railing, it was as if they were looking down into a mud pit on the side of some dreadful volcano. Many residents of the Fetch left town and stayed with friends in other biomes, but at least as many stayed in town and suffered along with their lake. Of course there were no fish to catch and take home, though it was said often that they would soon be back, and everything as before. Meanwhile, many of them were that much hungrier. Long Pond was the biggest lake in the ship.

  Average weight loss among adults was now ten kilos. Then a fire in a transformer in the Prairie spewed a thick toxic smoke through that biome and forced a complete evacuation, so that the biome could be locked up without trapping anyone inside. The fire was fought with robots, which made it a slower process; indeed they could not contain the blaze, and it became necessary to remove the air from the biome to end it. This briefly reduced temperatures in the biome to well below zero, so all the crops in there froze. Quickly the biome was re-aerated, and people went back in wearing safety suits much like spacesuits, intent to save what they could, but the damage had been done. That season’s crop was dead, and coated with a film of PCBs that would have been dangerous to ingest. Indeed the surface of the soil itself needed to be cleaned, along with the walls of the biome and all its building surfaces.

  They killed and ate 90 percent of the ship’s dwarf cattle, leaving a dangerously small number for purposes of genetic diversity. They killed and ate 90 percent of the musk oxen and the deer. Then the same percentage of the rabbits and the chickens. The 10 percent of each species that was allowed to live, to replenish the stocks, would represent severe genetic bottlenecks for each species, but this was not important now. Average body fat in adults was down to 6 percent. Seventy percent of the women of childbearing age had stopped menstruating, but this too was no longer an issue they could worry about. Despite all their efforts, they were in a famine.

  Their margin for error was completely gone. One more crop failure, and assuming they shared the food equally, after feeding the children properly, there would be something like 800 calories per person per day, which would lead to muscle loss, skeletal abnormalities, dry hair and eyes and skin, lethargy, and so on.

  Aram sat in Badim and Freya’s kitchen one night, head back against the wall. Badim was cooking pasta with a tomato sauce, and he took out some frozen chicken breasts from their freezer to defrost, chop up, and throw into the sauce. Freya was much bigger than the two old men, but gaunt. She was eating even less than most people. The dark rings under her eyes made her look more than ever like her mother.

  Badim put the food on the table for them, and for a second they held hands.

  Mouth pursed to a tight line, Aram said, “We’re eating our seed corn.”

  Again people began killing themselves. This time it was mostly small groups of elderly people, who called themselves hemlock clubs, and usually did the deed by evacuating the air from exterior locks. It was said death was nearly instantaneous, something like a knockout blow. They did it holding hands and leaving behind the usual note: I may be some time! Often this was clipped to a group photo in which almost everyone was smiling. We could not tell whether the smiles meant they were happy or not.

  The people they left behind, especially their relatives and friends, definitely were not. But the hemlock clubs were secret societies. Even we did not overhear their planning conversations, which meant they had made intense efforts to conceal them. Room recorders must certainly have been covered or otherwise rendered inoperative in ways that did not trip our alarms.

  Freya began walking the biomes at night, going to the little towns and talking to people. Now dinners were often communal, neighborhoods gathering, each family bringing one dish they had cooked. Sometimes rabbits or chickens had been killed for a stew. The cooks often urged Freya to eat with them, and she always took a bite. The food went quickly, everything was consumed; compost now was almost entirely human waste, processed heavily to recover certain salts and minerals (including bromine) and to kill certain pathogens before it was returned to the farm soil.

  After the meals, Freya would talk to the elders there.

  We al
l have to live, she would tell them. There will be enough food, and everyone is needed. These hemlock societies are a bad idea. They’re giving in to fear of what might happen. Look, we always fear what might happen. That never goes away, never. But we go on anyway. We do it for the kids. So remember that. We have to fight to get them home. We need everyone.

  Their researchers ransacked the relevant literatures in the libraries and the digital feeds from Earth to see if any agricultural improvements could be made. Some of them pointed out that the industrial model for agriculture had been superseded in the most progressive farming regions on Earth by a method called intensive mixed cultivation, which reintroduced the idea of maximizing diversity of crop and gene. The intensity was not just in the tightly packed mixes of different plants, but in the human labor required. Soil was held in place better, which was not a major concern in the ship, as their soil had no ocean to disappear into and was going to be collected and reused no matter where it slumped. But it was also reported that disease resistance in these mixed crops was much greater. The method was labor intensive, but on Earth, at least on Earth nine years before, it seemed there was a surplus of human labor. It was not clear why that should be. The comm feed neglected to include crucial facts, or perhaps these were just lost in the flood of images, voices, digitalization. They now caught some unfiltered radio waves from Earth, very faint and jumbled with overlays; but mostly they got the targeted beam aimed at them, their thin lifeline home, untended it sometimes seemed, full of information that no one seemed to have properly considered for relevance. It often looked like gigabytes of trivia, something like the junk DNA of the home system’s thinking. It was hard to understand the selection rubric. They were still in a nine-year time lag, so each exchange took eighteen years, meaning there was no real exchange at all; moment to moment, no one in the solar system seemed to be listening to what the people in the ship had said nine or ten years before. No surprise there, at least not to those with a sense of solar system culture, which admittedly meant a small minority of the ship’s people. Of course there was continuous transmission going on in both directions, but that didn’t help when it came to the idea of a conversation, of specific questions answered. There was a type of situation in which simultaneous transmissions from both ends could speed up the information exchange, by carrying on conversations on multiple aspects of a problem, but both sides had to be fully engaged in this process, and the problem of a kind that could make use of miscellaneous feedbacks across a broad front. Possibly that was the kind of problem they had here, but no one in the solar system seemed aware of that. The strong impression the feeds gave them was that no one in the solar system was paying the slightest attention to the ship that had left for Tau Ceti 208 years before. As why should they? They appeared to be facing problems of their own.