Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They refilled Long Pond and restocked it with fish. The fish hatcheries people were convinced they could supply all the ship’s need for protein, but then some of the hatcheries exhibited signs of weak spawn syndrome. Whole generations of fingerlings died off without an obvious cause; the name of the syndrome, like so many, was descriptive merely.

  “What is it?” Freya cried out one night to the ship, down on the corniche alone. “Ship, why is all this happening?”

  We replied to her from her wristpad. “There are a number of systemic problems, some physical, some chemical, some biological. Chemical bonding has created shortages, which means everything living is a bit weaker at the cellular level. What Devi called metabolic rifts are getting wider. And a great deal of cosmic radiation has struck every organism in the ship, creating living mutations mostly in bacteria, which are labile, and versatile. Often they don’t die, but live on in a new way. As the ship has a living interior, it is warm enough to sustain life, which means it is warm enough to encourage proliferation of mutated strains. These interact with chemicals released by biophysical mechanisms, such as corrosion and etching, to further damage DNA across a wide variety of species. The cumulative impacts can have a synergistic result, which back in the solar system is called ‘sick ship syndrome.’ Sometimes ‘sick organism syndrome,’ apparently to allow for the acronym SOS, which was an old distress signal in oceanic shipping. Then it stood for ‘save our ship,’ and was easy to send and comprehend in Morse code.”

  “So…” She sighed, pulled herself together (metaphorically, though she did wrap her arms around her torso). “We’ve got a problem.”

  “‘Houston, we’ve had a problem.’ Jim Lovell, Apollo 13, 1970.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “On a trip to Luna, they lost a compressed air element and then most of their electrical power. They orbited the moon once, and came home using jury-rigged systems.”

  “And they all made it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many of them were there?”

  “Three.”

  “Three?”

  “Apollo capsules were small.”

  “Ferries, then.”

  “Yes, but smaller.”

  “Do we have that story in the library?”

  “Oh yes. Accounts documentary and fictionalized.”

  “Let’s pull them out and have people watch them. We need some examples. I need to find more examples like that.”

  “A good idea, although we can advise you in advance to avoid the classic Antarctic literature, unless it pertains to Ernest Shackleton.”

  208.334. It was now obvious that the general famine was causing serious malnutrition in the human passengers of the ship. Crop failures and fishery failures were continuing to occur in almost every biome. Algae pastes were proving difficult to digest, and deficient in some crucial nutrients. Suicides kept happening. Freya continued to roam the ship arguing against the practice, but the adult population was reduced at this point to rations of 1,000 calories per person per day. Average weight loss among adults was 13.7 kilos. The next step was 800 calories. They ate every animal in the ship, sparing only 5 percent of each species to allow for reexpansion of populations at some later time. Poaching of these remnant recovery populations was not uncommon. Dogs and cats were eaten. Lab mice were eaten, after being sacrificed for experimental purposes (approximately 300 calories per mouse).

  No other topic of conversation at this point. General distress.

  Freya told them the story of Apollo 13. She told them the story of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, of the boat journey that saved them. She told them the story of the island of Cuba, after oil imports that had supported its agriculture abruptly went away. She read aloud Robinson Crusoe, also Swiss Family Robinson, and many other books concerning castaways, marooning victims, and other survivors of catastrophic or accidental isolation, a genre surprisingly full of happy endings, especially if certain texts were avoided. Stories of endurance, stories of hope; yes, it was hope she was trying to fill them with. We happy few. Hope, yes, of course there is hope… But hope needs food. Helpful as hopeful stories might be, you can’t eat stories.

  She went out to see Jochi. Floating in a spacesuit outside his ferry, his caboose, as he once called it, she told him the latest news, gave him the latest figures.

  “I guess it was a bad idea to go back,” she said at the end of this list. “I guess I was wrong.” She was weeping.

  Jochi waited until she was still. Then he said, “The radio scatter from Earth had something interesting in it.”

  “What,” Freya said, sniffing.

  “There’s a group in Novosibirsk, on Earth, studying hibernation. They’re saying they have a system that works for humans. They put some cosmonauts into some kind of suspended state for five years, they said, and woke them up with no fatalities. Hibernauts, they call them. Hyperhibernation, if I heard the word right. Extended torpor. Suspended animation. Cold dormancy. Lots of names flying around.”

  Freya considered this. She said, “Did they say how they did it?”

  “Yes, they did. I found their publications too. They’ve published their complete results, all the formulas and regimens. Part of the open science movement. They put it all into the Eurasian Cloud, which is where I found it. I’ve got it recorded.”

  “So what did they do? How did they do it?”

  “It was a combination of body cooling, like in the surgical technique but colder, and then a cocktail of intravenous chemicals, including nutrients. Also a routine of physical stimulation during the torpor, and some water in their drip, of course.”

  “Do you think it’s something we could do?”

  “Yes. I mean, I don’t know, of course. Because there’s no way to know. But I think there’s enough in their description that you could try it. You can make the drugs. The cooling is just a matter of temperature control, which is easy. You would have to build the cold beds that they specify. Print up beds, drugs and equipment, and robots that have the ability to manipulate you while you slept. Just follow their whole recipe.”

  “Would you do it too?”

  Long pause. “I don’t know.”

  “Jochi.”

  “Freya. Well, listen—I might. I haven’t got much to live for. But I might anyway. I’d like to see the end of your story.”

  Again a long silence from Freya; two minutes, three minutes.

  “All right,” she said. “Let me talk to people about it.”

  Again she walked the ring, talking. During that time she and all the rest of them learned more about what the hibernation would involve, at first from Jochi, then more and more from information they found in the feeds, and in radio signals from the solar system, from its faint information cloud, diffusing outward past them. Many people in the ship’s medical community began to study the process. Aram and a team of people from the biology group were also studying it very closely. Happily the lab mice they had not eaten still represented a pretty large number of experimental animals.

  Hibernation was not really the right word for it, Aram said, because they would need to use it for so long. People called it variously it hypernation, suspended animation, hyperhibernation, suppressed metabolic state, torpor, or cold dormancy, depending in part on what aspect of it they were discussing. It definitely involved a wide range of physical processes. What Jochi had found was just the starting point of their hunt through the feeds, and for work they did in the ship’s labs. They put in long hours, pressing the pace on any experiments they could perform. They worked hungry. At the end of every meal they sat staring at their empty bowls, which in an ordinary meal would have constituted only the appetizer, their faces pinched: they were still hungry, right at the end of a meal.

  The cooling central to the hibernation process would not freeze tissues, but would hover close to zero degrees, or even just below it, with the body’s tissues protected by antifreeze elements of the intravenous infusion. How cold one could
get without cell damage, and for how long they could chill a body, were still questions being looked at. Aram was not confident they would be able to formulate good answers to these questions.

  “We will have to try it to see,” he said one night around the table, shaking his head. Truly long-term effects of any metabolic suppression were of course unknown, as the best data they had were from the Russian hibernauts and their five years under. They would therefore necessarily be an experiment in this regard.

  The outstanding questions often had to do with what they called the Universal Minimum Metabolic Rate, the slowest viable speed of a metabolism, which was nearly constant across all Terran creatures, from bacteria to blue whales. A downshift in any species’s metabolism almost certainly could not go below this universal minimum rate; on the other hand, that rate was very slow. So the theoretical possibility seemed to exist to put humans and their internal microbiomes into a very slow state, which would last for a long time without ill effects. It would involve a slowed heartbeat (bradycardia); peripheral vasoconstriction; greatly slowed respiration; very low core temperature, buffered by antifreeze drugs; biochemical retardations; biochemical infusion drips; antibacterials; occasional removal of accumulated wastes; and physical shifts and manipulations, small enough not to rouse the organism too much, but nevertheless very important. Some of these effects were achieved merely by chilling, but to avoid triggering a fatal hypothermia, countereffects had to be created by a cocktail of drugs still being worked out. The experiments on the Russian hibernauts suggested the scientists in Novosibirsk had found a viable mixture, and they had at least set out the parameters and gotten a good set of results.

  So now in the ship they put mice into torpor, and even some of the big mammals that had not been eaten. But given their situation, they were not going to have time to draw many conclusions from their experiments. The Novosibirsk study was going to end up being the best data they had, given the time constraints they were facing.

  One thing they had to be concerned with was the fact that they would be going into dormancy hungry and underweight. In natural hibernations, mammals usually went hyperphagic before their period of torpor, eating so much that they packed fat onto their bodies, which was then exploited for metabolic fuel during the hibernation. This was not going to be possible for the inhabitants of the ship. They had lost an average of 14 kilograms per adult, and had no food to eat in the hope of putting on weight. So they would be starting hibernation deficient in that regard, and yet were hoping to stay dormant for well over a century. This seemed unlikely to succeed.

  It was Jochi who proposed that the IV drip for every hibernaut include nutrients from time to time, enough to keep the minimal metabolic function fueled, but not so much as to arouse the body and in certain respects wake it up. He also had suggestions for isometric and massage regimens to be conducted by robot manipulators built into each bed, applying electric and manual stimulation in a manner that again would not wake the person up. Anyone still awake during this time—or the ship’s AI, if everyone was asleep—could administer and monitor these ongoing treatments, which would be adjusted to keep every hibernaut at his or her own best homeostatic level, as close to the Universal Minimum Metabolic Rate as that person could tolerate. This would vary slightly for every person, but it was a complex of processes that could be monitored and adjusted over time. There would be lots of time to study the procedure once the experiment began.

  “So,” Aram said one night, “if we decide to do this, who goes under? Who sleeps and who stays awake?”

  Badim shook his head. “That’s a bad thought. It’s like who went down to Aurora.”

  “Only the reverse, yes? Because if you stay awake, you have to scramble for food, and even if you can make that work, you’ll age and die. And there won’t be anyone growing up to replace you.”

  They put the problem aside that night, as being too troubling. But as Freya toured the biomes, still working on farm problems, she soon found that this question of who was to go dormant loomed as a severe problem, worse than the descent to Aurora sequencing, maybe even as bad as the schism.

  As she made her rounds she began to formulate a possible solution, which she proposed one night after dinner when Aram was over.

  “Everyone goes under. The ship takes care of us.”

  “Really?” Badim said.

  “It’s going to happen anyway. And it’s no different from now. The ship monitors itself, the biomes, and the people. And if we all go under, no one has to starve, or get sick and die of old age. The ship could use the time to systematically move through the biomes and clean them up. Shut them down and restart them. That way, if the hibernation appears not to be working over the long haul, or it succeeds and we’re closing on the solar system, we can wake up to a healthier ship, with some food stored, and the animals reestablished.”

  Aram’s lips were pursed in his expression of extreme dubiety, but he was nodding a little too. “It would solve quite a few problems. We won’t have to make choices as to who goes under, and we might have a bit of an exit strategy, if the ship can get the biomes healthier, and the hibernation isn’t working. Or even if it is.”

  Badim said, “I wonder if we could arrange for some people to wake up every few years, or every decade, to check on things.”

  “If it doesn’t destabilize them,” Aram said. “Metabolically, if we’re doing well when dormant, we should probably stay that way. The danger points are likely to be in the transitions in and out of the state.”

  Badim nodded. “Maybe we can try it just a little and see.”

  Aram shrugged. “It’s all going to be an experiment anyway. Might as well add some variables. If we can get anyone to volunteer.”

  Freya went out on her rounds and proposed this plan to people, while at the same time the executive council took up the matter. People seemed to like the simplicity of it, and the solidarity. Everyone was hungry, everyone was subdued and fearful. And gradually, in the many reiterated conversations, they were coming to realize something: if this plan worked, and they slept successfully through the rest of the trip, they would survive to the end of it. They would be the ones who would be alive when the ship returned to the solar system. They might make it back and walk on Earth—not their descendants, but they themselves.

  Meanwhile the rationing, the hunger, the struggle against disease. In the grip of this struggle, the idea of Earth was very powerful. Many came to welcome the hibernation, and soon only a few insisted they wanted to stay awake. After that shift in opinion became clear, the pull of solidarity changed the holdouts too. Having been through the schism, they wanted to stick together and act as one. And by now they were all hungry enough to understand it was only a matter of time before they starved. They could not only imagine it, they could feel it. Ease of representation indeed.

  Now, the hope that they might not starve; that they might live; it caused the very timbre of their voices to change. Hope filled them as if it were a kind of food.

  With unanimity came solidarity, which was a huge relief to many of them, an unmistakable emotion, expressed in thousands of small comments and gestures. Thank God we’re together on this. Finally a consensus, crazy as it seems. One for all and all for one. Good old Freya, she always knows what we need. Not at any moment of the entire voyage had they been at peace like this. One might have thought it was a curious act to rally around, but humanity’s group dynamics can be odd, as the record shows.

  The construction of 714 hibernation couches was accomplished over the next four months by a concentrated push on the part of the engineers, assemblers, and robots. Certain feedstocks were deficient, and it became necessary to strip the insides of Patagonia to get what they needed. From these and other salvaged materials they manufactured the beds, and the robotic equipment necessary to service the beds and their sleepers. Although the printers could print parts, and the robot assemblers assemble those parts into working wholes, there were still many moments in the process
where human engineering, machining skills, and manual dexterity were crucial.

  After many design discussions, they decided to arrange all the couches in the Fetch on Long Pond, and in Olympia, the biome next to it. They exiled the animals from these two biomes, to keep the towns from being damaged somehow. The few remaining animals were moved elsewhere, and would either be tended by robots and sheepdogs in teams, or left to go feral in certain biomes. We were going to monitor their progress, and move carcasses that didn’t get eaten into the recyclers, and do what we could to oversee a healthy feral ecology. For the most part it would become a big unconstrained experiment in population dynamics, ecological balance, and island biogeography. We did not mention it, but it seemed to us that things might go rather well in ecological terms, once the people were gone and the initial population dynamics played out and re-sorted the numbers.