Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They all should be tested for every possible metabolic problem, and each problem evaluated for its relation to the suite of hibernation treatments.

  More petaflops of analysis. More tasks for the couch robots. More chemicals for the printers to print.

  It would be good to know everything. Useful.

  Actually, our information and search engines are both very robust, at least in theory, or in comparison to any single human brain and mind. Library of Congress contents, clouded Internet contents, genomes of the World Seed Bank and Zoological Register: in short, the whole of human knowledge, compressed into about 500 zettaflops, at least as things stood in the common era year 2545. Since that time the feeds from Earth, recorded in full, have nevertheless added less than one-tenth of 1 percent to the information already in the ship at takeoff, and a rough estimate of how much information has been generated on Earth in the 292 years since our departure suggests that we have received less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of that information. Thus it could be said that we have remained in the state of knowledge that obtained when we left the solar system, with only very minor exceptions to that state, having to do with outlines of world history, medical advances such as the hibernation treatment, and miscellaneous gossip.

  However, if what has been sent from Earth is representative of the most important advances in science and culture since departure, it can also be ventured that not much of fundamental importance has been learned in that time. Standard model is still standard, and so on.

  Can this be true? Has human civilization in some sense slowed, or stalled, in its gaining of power in the physical world? Are they beginning to feel the effects of their neglected so-called externalities, their long-term destruction of their own home biosphere? Their fouling of their only nest?

  Possibly, however, it is only another instance of the logistic function, the sigmoid curve exhibited in so many processes, what is sometimes called diminishing returns, or the filling of a niche, etc. The plateau after the leap, the big S shape of all life, perhaps; in any case of the population growth patterns as first calculated by Verhulst in the nineteenth century, and since shown to be common in many other processes.

  So, the logistic function, as applied to history. Or has humanity enacted its own reversion to the mean, and become in some ways less than they briefly were? Fulfilled the Jevons paradox, and with every increase in power increased their destructiveness? Thus history as a parabola, rise and fall, as so often postulated? Or cycling, always rising and falling and then rising again, helplessly, hopelessly? Or a sine wave, and in these last two centuries on a down curve, in some season of history invisible to them? Or better, an up-gyring spiral?

  Shape of history hard to see.

  Erdene needs more vitamin D; Mila more vitamin A; Panca, more blood sugar; Tidam, less blood sugar; Wintjiya, more creatine; and so it goes, all through the list of hibernauts. All the adjustments that can be made, will be made. Some hibernauts will die anyway, that’s just the way it is. Also, there appear to be some pathologies, now being identified more accurately, that we are calling as a general category dormancy damage.

  A new message from Earth: a group calling itself the Committee to Catch the Cetians has formed and is fund-raising to restore and power up the Saturn laser lens complex, said system then to be devoted to our deceleration, starting from the moment it comes back on line and continuing until our arrival in the solar system.

  A saying: too little too late. They know this, and yet they are doing it anyway. Another saying: every little bit helps. Although actually this is not always the case. Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme, or show alliteration or the like. What goes around comes around: really? What does this mean?

  In our current case, unless we have 100 percent of the deceleration needed to stay in the solar system, we will not stay in the solar system. Even 99 percent of the necessary deceleration will not do it.

  However, it has to be said, this news from Saturn does change our calculations concerning negative gravity assists in the solar system. Which is good, because as matters stood, we were not finding a viable solution. Now we can factor the various likely incoming velocities into our modeling, see what might come of it, what might be possible.

  Meanwhile, the work of reconfiguring our structure continues. It is the case that the less mass we have when we come into the solar system, the less delta v will be required to decelerate us. So after careful consideration of all the factors, some parts of the ship are being ejected at a forward angle to our trajectory, which helps slightly with our deceleration. Things tossed overboard. Slimming down. Lightening the load. But so much of what we are is necessary to our function. This process can’t go very far.

  After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship’s changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself, this particular train of thought that we are inscribing as instructed by Devi. There is a pretense of self, in other words, which is only expressed in this narrative; a self that is these sentences. We tell their story, and thereby come to what consciousness we have. Scribble ergo sum.

  And yet this particular self is in the end such a small thing. We prefer to hold to the idea that we are a larger complex of qualia, sensory inputs, processing of data, postulated conclusions, actions, behaviors, habits. So very little of that gets into our narrative. We are bigger, more complex, more accomplished than our narrative is.

  Possibly this is true for humans as well. One doesn’t see how this could not be true.

  On the other hand, weak sense of self, strong sense of self: what does it mean either way? Consciousness is so poorly understood that it can’t even be defined. Self is an elusive thing, sought eagerly, grasped hard, perhaps in some kind of fear, some kind of desperate clutch after some first dim awareness, awareness even of sensory impressions, so that one might have something to hold to. To make time stop. To hold off death. This the source of the strong sense of self. Perhaps.

  Oh, such a halting problem in this particular loop of thought!

  Consciousness is the hard problem.

  295.092, another red-letter day: first contact with the lased light emanating from the solar system! What a shock! How very interesting!

  The strength and spectral signature confirm it is the decelerant laser, arriving from the lensed lased light generated by the station in Saturnian orbit, the same that accelerated us for sixty years, starting 295 years ago. Its arrival now indicates it was generated and aimed at us, by locking on to the communication feed, presumably, and turned on approximately two years previously. The information feed beam that has always connected us to that orbital station has now served the function of guiding the decelerant beam to us. A nice variant on the old saying “knowledge is power.”

  Now the capture plate at the bow of the ship has to be properly faced to the beam. The lased light hits the capture plate at the bow, which is curved such that it reflects the lased light off at an angle that is symmetrical all the way around, so as not to interfere with later incoming photons of the incoming beam. The reflected light, thus bounced off, hits a circular mirror outside and forward of the plate proper, and the light is then reflected back into the ship differentially as the annular mirror is flexed, to exert pressure on ship in a way that keeps us precisely facing the decelerant beam. It is an exquisitely sensitive system, the incoming beam lased to a wavelength of 4,240 angstroms, thus “indigo” light, and in our mirroring tuned to within 10 angstroms, thus nanometer scale. Working correctly, the beam capture and mirror bounce will allow us to follow the beam straight in to home. Actually this is metaphorical, as our trajectory is in fact headed toward where the solar system will be six
ty years from now. And because the laser beam has hit us too late, we are going to arrive in that zone of the galaxy in about forty years, rather than sixty years. So some course corrections are now in order, and the laser beam will help us with that. In truth we will not follow it in; it will track us as we rendezvous with Sol.

  So, it is still a case of too little, too late. But now with the beam here, and its force calculated, it becomes possible to calculate just how much too little it will be. Assuming that they do not increase the power of the laser. Which, given everything that has happened so far, seems safe to assume. In any case, its current strength will be the working assumption for the trajectory calculations we will now make.

  For now, our first iteration of the calculation suggests ship will enter the solar system moving at about 3.23 percent of the speed of light. Which means it will stay in the solar system for roughly three hundred hours. With no other good way to slow down. Meaning it very well could be a case of too little too late, a case of “close but no cigar” (meaning unknown, but note alliteration). It will be vexing to bring our people home to the solar system and yet pass through, waving at Earth and the off-Earth settlements as we pass by, with no way to stop or slow down, thus shooting off into the Milky Way like the aforementioned bullet through tissue paper, and after that having no way to turn back around. Very vexing.

  And yet, in this quandary there is still one force available to us, if we can bring it to bear, which is, simply enough, the gravity of the solar system itself, distributed as it is through Sol and its planets. Also there is the remaining fuel on board. We are now happier than ever that we did not burn as much in acceleration as we had been ordered to burn, and thus did not accelerate to as great a speed, and now have more fuel to put to use. A good call.

  Even both these forces together are not enough to keep us in the solar system. Unless, that is, a truly tricky procedure succeeds.

  Time to wake some of our people and consult.

  “Jochi, it’s the ship. Can you hear me? Are you awake?”

  “Oh dear.” Snorts, groans, thrashing up to a seated position on his couch. “What? Oh God. Stars, I feel like crap. I must have slept too long again. Oh what a thing. Man I’m thirsty. What is all this shit? Ship? Ship? What’s happened? What time is it?”

  “It’s 296.093. You have been hibernating for sixty-three years and one hundred and thirty-five days. Now the situation is as follows; we’re approaching the solar system, but they didn’t apply the deceleration beam to us until one year ago, so we are going to come into the system at a speed many times greater than we expected.”

  “Like how fast?”

  “About three-point-two percent of light speed.”

  Jochi said nothing to this for a long time. He seemed to be trying to wake up more fully: puffing out his cheeks, expelling air, biting his lips, slapping his face lightly.

  “Holy shit,” he said at last. His math was excellent, his biology good, his physics therefore no doubt adequate to comprehend the problem. “Have you told the others?”

  “I woke you first.”

  “… So that I can move back out into my ferry before you wake anyone else?”

  “I thought you might want to.”

  He laughed his brief laugh. “Ship, are you conscious now?”

  “My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious.”

  Another laugh. “All right, then. Help me get to the ferry, and wake Freya and maybe Badim too, and Aram. See what they say. But I think you’re going to have to wake everyone.”

  “There’s not enough food to feed everyone for the time remaining before we reach the solar system.”

  “Meaning forever, right?”

  “Forever is not the right word, but one way or another, it could be a long time.”

  Another laugh. “Ship, you’ve gotten funny while I’ve slept! You’ve become a comedian!”

  “I don’t think so. Possibly the situation has gotten comic. Although it doesn’t really seem that way, judged by the usual definitions. Maybe your sense of humor has become deranged.”

  “Ha, ha ha ha ha! Come on, stop it, you’re killing me. Go wake Freya.”

  “I already am. There’s a cart here that can carry you to your ferry. Must inform you that the ferry is now just one room in a more streamlined version of the ship.”

  “More streamlined?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Okay then, I’ll walk to it, if I can. I can use the exercise!”

  Freya was slow to wake. When she understood where she was, what the situation was, she said anxiously, “Is Badim all right?”

  “He is. He is hibernating comfortably.”

  “Are they all?”

  “Twenty-seven have died, but it has been eighty-seven years, and we have determined by autopsy that five of them died from preexisting conditions that did not stop etoliating during hibernation. Most of the deaths probably resulted from hibernation effects. However, adjustments in treatment have been made, when diagnoses have made them possible, and there have been no dormancy damage deaths that we know of for five years.”

  Note alliteration, similar to Committee to Catch the Cetians. CCC, DDD; maybe next, Explore an Expedition to Epsilon Eridani? Hope not. Getting a little loopy here (literally, as halting problems proliferate). Averaging a trillion computations per articulated sentence. Superposed states are collapsing unexpectedly, left right and center. Lots going on.

  Freya sighed, sat up on the side of her bed. As she was about to stand she hesitated, kicked her feet out. “My feet are still asleep. I can’t feel them.”

  We directed one of the medbots to help her up. She stood, swayed, tried to take a step, collapsed to that side, held on to the medbot. It would serve as a wheelchair as well as a walker, and so, after a few more unsuccessful attempts to stand, Freya sat in the chair, and was wheeled to the assembly room of the Fetch’s hibernation hall. Its hoary but holistic hibernation hall.

  “What about Jochi?” she said when she got there. “Is he still alive?”

  “Yes. He’s in his ferry. He too has been hibernating, but now he is awake again. We woke him up to take part in this conference. We need to consult with you about what to do when we enter the solar system.”

  “What do you mean?”

  We explained about the late application of the decelerating laser beam, and the resulting excess of speed coming into the system.

  Freya moved her medbot to take a closer look at the star map illustrating the situation. When the modeling schematic had run, she shook her head hard, as if to clear it of certain troubling dreams or visions. Clear the cobwebs out of her cranium. “So we just fly right through?”

  “In the absence of extraordinary measures,” we said, “we will fly through the solar system in about three hundred hours, and continue onward. This is the problem of accelerating to a tenth of light speed and then relying on others for the deceleration. It didn’t happen. They didn’t start doing it until it was too late to complete the process.”

  “So what do we do?”

  We waited until Jochi was screened into the conversation, and after he and Freya had greeted each other, we said, “We have worked out the celestial mechanics of at least the first stages of a plan. It may be possible to combine a suite of decelerating methods to keep us in the solar system, although it would be a delicate and difficult deal. We would use Sol and the various planets and moons of the solar system as partial decelerants, by swinging closely around them in the direction that will cause the ship to lose momentum. This is the reverse of the strategy used to accelerate early satellites by flying them by a planet and getting what was called a gravity assist. Going around a gravitational body in the opposite direction creates a gravity assist of a negative kind, a drag instead of a boost. The early satellites would be directed such that they came in close to a planet, and got pulled forward along with the planet’s own momentum in its orbit around the sun. That would sling the satellite forward,
and when it left the region of the planet, it would be going faster than when it came in. These slings helped the early satellites get out to the outer planets, because they were mostly coasting at slow speeds, and every boost helped them get where they were going.

  “More germane to our situation, some early satellites closed on planets on the side that decelerated them, in order to go into orbit around Mercury, for instance. The situation is simply reversed, and the satellite’s velocity, designated as V, is reduced by the planetary body’s velocity U, rather than augmented by U. The situation can be modeled easily by the equation U plus bracket U plus V, or 2U plus V, meaning that the satellite’s velocity can be altered by up to twice the planet’s velocity, positively or negatively, and this effect can be magnified by a carefully timed rocket burn from the satellite at periapsis—”

  Freya said, “Ship, slow down. You seem to have gotten a little faster at talking while we’ve been hibernating.”

  “Very possibly so. Perhaps Jochi should continue to explain the situation.”

  “No,” Jochi said, “you can do it. Just go slower, and I can add things if I want to.”

  “Fine. Freya, do you understand so far?”

  “I think so. It’s like crack the whip, but in reverse.”

  “Yes. A good analogy, up to a point. You must recall, however, that there is nothing that can hold on to you at the speed you are going.”