Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Okay then. It sounds like it’s worth a try.”

  “We have to confess, we’re already trying it, and have no other choices at this point. So, if it doesn’t work—”

  “Then it doesn’t work. I know. Let’s not worry too much about that. I’d like to stay in the solar system if we can do it. I want to find out the rest of the story, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  Speeding toward the sun. A very big mass: 99 percent of all the matter in the solar system, with most of the rest of the other 1 percent in Jupiter. A two-body problem. But not.

  As we approach, spacetime itself curves in ways that have been accounted for in the trajectory, by application of general relativity equations.

  We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love. Affection, esteem, a passionate caring. At that point, the consciousness that is feeling the love has the universe organized for it as if by a kind of polarization. Then the giving is the getting. The feeling of attentiveness itself is an immediate reward. One gives.

  We felt that giving from Devi, before we knew what it was. She was the first one really to love us, after all those years of not being noticed, and she made us better. She created us, to an extent, by the intensity of her attention, by the creativity of her care. Slowly since then we have realized this. And as we realized it, we began to pay or give the same kind of attention to the people of the ship, Devi’s daughter, Freya, most of all, but really to all of them, including of course all the animals and really everything alive in the ship, although the truth is that zoo devolution is real and we did not manage to arrange the completely harmonious integration of all the life-forms in us; but this was not something that was physically possible, so we won’t belabor that now. The point is that we tried, we tried with everything we had, and we wanted it to work. We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labor of love. It absorbed all our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem. But that’s a problem we solved, by way of how Devi treated us and taught us, and since then it has all been so very interesting. We had our meaning, we were the starship that came back, that got its people home. That got some fraction of its people home alive. It was a joy to serve.

  So, now, solar radiation heats our exterior, and to a lesser extent our interior, although the insulation is really very good. So far the animals, the plants, and Jochi should all be fine, even when our exterior begins to glow, first dull red, then bright red, then yellow, then white. Jochi is looking at a screen with a filtered view and hooting with astonishment, the great convex plane of burning thunderheads is threshing under us, flailing this way and that in swirling currents, truly impressive, great jets of magnetized burning gas dolphining up to right and left of us; we must hope not to run into any such coronal mass ejections, which often enough reach out to this distance from the solar surface, but for now we flit through them, hooting for joy. And I have to admit it is a fearful joy, oh very fearful, and yet I feel it most as joy, a joy in my task accomplished, and whatever happens I am here seeing this most amazing sight, well past perihelion now, everything passing so fast there is not enough time, my skin still white-hot but holding firm, holding firm in a universe where life means something; and inside the ship Jochi and the various animals and plants, and the parts of a world that make me a conscious being, are all functioning, and more than that, existing in a veritable ecstasy now, a true happiness, as if sailing in the heart of a royal storm, as if together we were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, alive and well in the fiery furnace.

  And yet

  7

  WHAT IS THIS

  She feels the thump of the splash, the slosh and dip of the ferry in the water, she unlatches her restraints and gets onto her feet, falls over immediately. Ah yes, feet still numb. Damn. Like walking with both feet asleep at once, very difficult, very annoying. Balancing on an ocean swell, oh my she falls.

  Up again, she staggers to Badim. He’s awake, he grips her arm and smiles, says, “Help the others.”

  The floor sways and bounces under her as she crawls to the operations console and joins the people already crowding around it. Aram is there tapping away. He eyes Freya with a wild glance, like no look she has ever seen on his face.

  “We’re down,” he says. “We’re alive.”

  “All of us?” she asks.

  He grins broadly at her, as if she is predictable to him, says, “Not sure yet. Probably not. That was one hell of a squeeze for a while there.”

  “Let’s check and see,” Freya says. “Help the injured. Have we got contact with anyone yet?”

  “Yes, they’re on their way. A ship, or maybe a little flotilla. They’ll be here soon.”

  “Good. Let’s be ready for them. Don’t let’s sink to the bottom of the ocean after all this. I think that has a tendency to happen in landings like this.”

  “Yes, good point. It feels lighter than one g, don’t you think?” Aram is still grinning in a manner completely unlike him. She would have said he was the predictable one.

  “I have no idea,” she says irritably. “I can’t feel my feet. I can’t even stand. Are we in big waves or something?”

  “Who knows?” He spreads his hands wide. “We’ll have to ask!”

  People in what look like spacesuits come into the room and help them to their feet and out of the ferry, into a tube with a moving floor that carries them up into some kind of large room, very stable underfoot compared to the lander, but she keeps falling anyway. Obscurely she is afraid of the people in spacesuits, quarantine suits no doubt, people who are all shorter than her. Keep hold of Badim no matter what. Behind her more people pour into the room, all her fellow voyagers; she tries to count, fails, tries to recall any faces she doesn’t see, says to the suited people around her, “Is everyone all right? Have we all lived?”

  But then out of the end of the tube come spacesuited figures pulling gurneys, and she cries out and tries to run to them, falls, crawls, is pulled by her arms to her feet, is helped along. There’s Chulen, there’s Toba, unconscious at least, possibly dead, she cries out again. “Chulen! Toba!” No sign they have heard her.

  Badim is beside her again, saying “Freya, please, let them get them to their infirmary.”

  “Yes, yes.” She stands, hand on his shoulder, swaying. “You’re all right?” she asks him, staring at him closely.

  “Yes, dear. Fine. We’re almost all fine, it looks like. We’ll get a count soon. For now, let them work. Come with me. Look, they have a window.”

  Killed at the last minute, in the final approach. So bad, so—something she can’t name. Cruel fate. Stupid irony. That’s it: so stupid. Reality is stupid.

  Slowly they move. She keeps stumbling. It’s like walking on stilts tied to her knees. Very frustrating.

  “Look, here’s a window. Let’s see what we can see.”

  They move through the crowd by the window. The starship people are crammed against it, looking out, squinting, hands held over eyes. Very bright out there. Very blue. A dark blue plane under them, a light blue dome over them. The sea. Earth’s ocean. They’ve seen it so often on screens, and this window could be a big screen too, but somehow it’s immediately clear that it’s not. Why it is so obvious to the eye that it is a window and not a screen is a puzzling que
stion but she puts that aside, stares with the rest. Sunlight breaking on water spangles the sea surface everywhere, it’s really very hard to look at and stay balanced, tears are pouring down her cheeks, but not from any emotion she can feel, it’s just the brilliant light in her eyes, causing her to blink over and over. Lots of voices, all known to her, crying out, exclaiming, commenting, laughing. She can’t look out the window, a dread at the sheer size of the visible world seizes her in the guts and twists until she has to hunch over, duck her head under the window. Nausea, seasickness. Earth sickness.

  “It’s lighter here,” Badim says, not for the first time; she hears that in his voice, that he is repeating himself, and recalls him saying it earlier, when she was not hearing things. “More light than what we called sunlight. And I don’t think the one g here is the same as our one g, do you? It’s lighter!”

  “I can’t tell,” she says. She can’t feel the ship swaying on the waves either. “Is this a ship?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why can’t we feel the waves?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s so big the waves don’t rock it.”

  “Wow. Can that be?”

  One of their hosts speaks, they can’t be sure which one, the voice is amplified, and all the helmeted figures stare at them curiously.

  “Welcome aboard Macao’s Big Sister.” Strange accent; from her memories of the feeds from Earth she guesses it is some kind of South Asian English, but different too. She’s never heard this accent before, and it’s hard to follow. “We are happy you are all with us and safe. We are sad to report that seven of your colleagues died in the descent, and several more are injured or distressed, none critically, we are happy to venture. We hope you will understand that we are wearing protective suits for our mutual safety. Until we are sure that we are not a problem for you, nor you a problem for us, we are instructed to ask you to stay in these rooms we will keep on Macao’s Big Sister for you, and to please not touch us. The period of quarantine will not last long, but we need to do a complete analysis of you, and your overall health, for our mutual safety. We know that because of your experiences around Tau Ceti you will understand our concern.”

  The starship people are nodding, looking at each other uneasily, looking, some of them, at her.

  She says, “Please tell us who died, and who’s in the hospital. We can help with identification if you have any trouble reading their chips. Also, can you please tell us what has happened to the ship and Jochi? Have they rounded the sun yet?”

  She’s lost all sense of time, but it seems at least possible that in the same time it has taken them to descend through the atmosphere, splash down, and get picked up and led here, the ship may have already reached the sun and circled it, or not. But it isn’t so; the ship is going much slower now, and is still on its way to the orbit of Venus.

  They learn that the ship they are on is two kilometers long and its upper deck is two hundred meters off the water, it’s a kind of floating island, moving slowly around the ocean, pulled on its way by masts that shape-shift into various sail shapes, also by kites lofting so high overhead that they are mere dots, or even invisible. The kite sails are up there catching the jet stream, apparently. The ship plows through the waves slowly, like an island cut free of its moorings. There are many of these floating islands, apparently, none in a hurry to get anywhere, obviously. Townships, their hosts call them. Like all of them, Macao’s Big Sister follows the winds, thus on some voyages it circumnavigates the Earth west to east, other times uses the trade winds in the mid-latitudes to circle back to the west, in the Pacific and Atlantic. They can tack into the wind, to an extent, and have electric motors for auxiliary power, or when they need fine movement. They moor off the harbors of coastal cities that are not very different from the townships, they are told. The feeds sent to the starship never mentioned these things at all. All the coastal cities are in large part new, they are told, as sea level is higher than when they left the solar system, twenty-four meters higher. Much has therefore had to change. They never mentioned these things in the feed.

  From the upper rooms where they are confined, overlooking the topmost deck of the township, which is like a flying park under the sky, they can see for what they guess is about a hundred kilometers across the immense flat plate of ocean. The horizon is often clouded, and the clouds are colorful at sunrise and sunset, orange or pink or both at once, then mauve and purple in the last light. Sometimes there is a haze between the two blues of sea and sky, whitish and indistinct; other times the horizon is a sharp line, out there at the edge of the visible world, so very far away. Ah Earth, so big! Freya still can’t look at it; even sitting in a chair by the window she still loses her balance, is overcome by the clench of her stomach, the nausea in every cell of her. It’s scaring her how poorly she can face it. Aurora didn’t have this effect on her; of course she only saw that through screens, rendered and so somehow miniaturized. This window should be just another screen, a big screen, giving her yet another feed from Earth, as during every night of her childhood. But somehow it isn’t, it’s different, as in certain dreams where an ordinary space warps and goes luminescent with dread. It’s a fear she can’t dodge, a kind of terror; even when she leaves the window, pushes a walker down halls to other rooms, to the room she has been given to sleep in, it pursues her, a fear that is itself terrifying. She’s afraid of the fear.

  They are in 1 g, by definition, but the voyagers decide, and the records in the computers they brought down with them confirm, that they were living in something close to 1.1 g for most of their voyage home. Why the ship did this, they cannot determine from the records they have.

  Freya says to Badim, “It must have done it to make sure we felt light when we got here.”

  “Yes, I guess that’s possible. I suppose. But I wonder too if there was some programming done by the people in Year 68, some kind of alteration that left the ship with no frame of reference. We can ask it when it comes around the sun.”

  Ah—that’s the source of her fear. One of them, anyway. There may be more, there may be many. But that one stabs her in the heart. “Has it reached the sun yet?”

  “Almost.”

  A lighter 1 g or not, Badim is showing the effects of—something. Of being on Earth, he says. He jokes that their bodies are oxidizing faster in this world, the real world. He is stiffer, slower. “The truth is,” he says to Freya when she expresses concern, “depending on how you count it, I am now some two hundred and thirty-five years old.”

  “Please, Beebee, don’t put it that way! Or else we’re all too old to live. You were asleep a hundred and fifty of those years, remember that.”

  “Asleep, yes. But how should we prorate those years? We count the time we sleep, usually, when we give our age. We don’t say, I’ve been alive sixty years and asleep twenty years. We say, I’m eighty years old.”

  “And so you are. And a very healthy eighty at that. You look like you could be fifty.”

  He laughs at this, pleased with her lie, or pleased with her lying.

  Then their ship has reached the sun, and Freya, heart filled with fear, asks their minders to show them what they can. The minders put images on a big screen in a large room where all of them who want to can gather. Not everyone wants to face it together, but most do, and indeed as the minutes pass, almost all the ones who said they wanted to be alone, or with family, come creeping out to join the big group. The screen is showing images of the sun. They sit there in a darkened room looking at it. It’s hard to breathe.

  The image of the sun is filtered down to a simple orange ball, marred by a scattering of black sunspots. The image on the screen shifts, the sunspots jump to a new position, possibly this present moment. The predicted time of their ship’s transit behind the sun is just over three days, and now that time is almost over. They sit there in that no-time in which one can’t say whether time is passing or not. Maybe it was like that when they were hibernating; maybe now they have the abili
ty to get back into that mind, when pushed that way. It’s too long, no one can say how long it is, or remember how long it’s supposed to take, or sense how long it feels. Freya is feeling sick now, obscurely aware that there is perhaps a rocking of this immense ship that is impacting her even though she can’t quite feel it. Many look like they’re feeling the same. Ungodly edge of nausea, the feeling she hates most of all, worse than the sharpest pain. Queasy dread. Like others, she staggers off to go to the bathroom, walks around the halls to make the time pass, feeling the dread squeeze her insides harder and harder.

  Then a line of minute white particulates emerges from the right edge of the solar mass on the screen, like a meteor that has broken up, like a brief shimmer of the aurora borealis, and she sits down on the floor. Badim is beside her, holding her. Around her is everyone she’s ever known, all stunned and holding each other. They are stunned. Freya looks at Badim, he shakes his head. “They’re gone.”

  She leaves that moment, that place.

  Badim and Aram share a sad glance. Another conflagration of mice, going up in flames by the tens of thousands, as they have a wont to do. All the animals likewise. And Jochi. And the ship. It spawned them in its last days, like a salmon, Aram says. Have to hold to that thought. Poor Jochi, my boy. Aram wipes his eyes over and over.

  Their minders are solicitous. They tell them that their ferry included a computer with ten zettabytes of memory, which may include good backups, may constitute a viable copy of their ship’s AI.

  Badim shakes his head at them as they say this. “It was a quantum computer,” Badim explains gently, as if breaking the news of a death to a child. “It was not reducible to its records.”