Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  A coldness comes over Freya, a kind of calm. So much has died. They made it back, they are home for the first time: but this place is not their home, she sees that now. They will always be exiles here, on a world too big to believe. Indeed it seems best to stick to disbelief for a while, stay in that disconnect. The intermittences of the heart being what they are, the feel of things will come back, eventually. And that will be soon enough.

  They are taken to Hong Kong, and a couple of weeks later their township anchors offshore from it—a harbor city as big as a dozen or twenty of their biomes stitched together, and filled with many skyscrapers quite a bit taller than any biome, taller than a spoke, possibly taller than the spine. It’s hard to keep any sense of perspective against the sky. The day before it was cloudy, and the flat gray cloud looked like an immense roof over the visible world. Aram says those clouds were three kilometers high, and now he and Badim are arguing about how high the clear blue sky appears to be.

  “You mean if it was a dome,” Badim points out.

  “Of course, but it looks like one,” Aram says. “At least to me. I know it’s a scattering of sunlight, but doesn’t it look like a solid dome? I think it does. Just look at it. It’s much like a biome ceiling.”

  He and Badim have taken to consulting a book they’ve found on their wristpads, an ancient text called The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air, and now they pore over a section called “Apparent Flattening of the Vault of Heaven,” which confirms Aram’s contention that the sky can be perceived as a dome. “See,” Aram says, pointing at his wristpad, “the top of the sky looks lower to the viewer than the horizon is distant to him, by a factor ranging from two to four, it says, depending on the observer and the viewing conditions. Does that seem right to you?”

  Badim peers up and out the open doorway to the upper deck. He and Aram walk out on this upper deck all the time, unconcerned by the exposure. “It does.”

  “And this explains why these skyscrapers look so tall, perhaps, as the writer goes on to say that we tend to think the midway point of the arc between horizon and zenith is at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, as it would be if the dome were a hemisphere. But with the dome being lower than the horizon is far away, the midway point of the arc is angled much lower, say around twelve to twenty-five degrees. So we consistently think things are higher than they are.”

  “Well, but I think also that these skyscrapers are just stupendously tall.”

  “No doubt, but we’re seeing them even taller than they are.”

  “Show me what you mean.”

  They put on sunscreen, hats, and sunglasses, and go out on the open upper deck of the great township and turn in circles, putting their hands out at the sky and chattering as they peer at their wristpads. They seem to be adjusting very well to the new world, and to the death of their lifelong home, of Jochi their lost guest. Freya still feels stunned, and she cannot yet even stand before the windows, nor do more than glance out the big open doorway between her and them; and the idea of going outside onto the deck with them is enough to knock her into a chair. A black emptiness fills her right to the skin.

  Many of Hong Kong’s buildings emerge from the water of the city’s bay, a result no doubt of the big sea level rise, which some of her shipmates now claim to have read about or seen in the feed, but now it’s here below them, in the canals that thread between all the buildings closest to water, and the long, narrow boats grumbling airily past them, leaving in their wakes a slosh of waves and smell of salt and burnt cooking oil. Cry of wheeling gulls. Hot, humid, reeking. If any of their tropical biomes had felt as hot and humid as this, had smelled like this, they would have been sure something had gone wrong.

  Behind all the skyscrapers are green hills, dotted everywhere with buildings. They’re still looking around at all this tremendous landscape when they are taken off their township, led into a long low ferry. It’s kind of like moving in a tram from one biome to another. No need to go outside the long cabin of the ferry, but Freya’s in a panic at the thought that she may have to. She’s been provided with boots that come up to just above her knees, and these seem to give her more support and balance than she’s been used to. She still can’t feel her feet, but as she walks the boots seem to know what she is trying for, and with some care she can walk pretty well.

  Then up a tubular walkway, somewhat like one of their spoke interiors; then into an elevator car; then out into a room that opens out all along one wall to another open deck, located apparently some hundreds of meters above the bay. Up there in the sky, just under an inrush of low clouds, the marine layer, as Badim calls it. Whose idea was this?

  Now the people of the ship are going out onto the open deck and very often falling down, many weeping or crying out, many going back inside the room to seek shelter. Freya huddles by the elevator. The starship’s people see her there and come over and hug her, and some of their hosts are laughing, others crying, all presumably moved to see people who have never been outdoors try to come to terms with it.

  They’re like the winter lambs, some translation box says, let out of the barn in the spring.

  A lot of their legs are messed up. Come on, get them back inside, the same box and voice says. You’re going to kill them with this stuff.

  The box’s voice has a Terran accent, speaks English harshly and with a lot of tonal bounce. As if, Badim says, English were Chinese. Hard to understand.

  Crying with embarrassment and frustration, feeling her face burn red, Freya breaks from her crowd and staggers on her new boots right out the open doorway wall, out onto the open deck, keeping her eyes squeezed nearly shut. Feeling faint, she walks to a chest-high wall with a railing on its top, something she can grasp like a lifeline.

  She stands there in the wind and opens her eyes and looks around, her stomach like a black hole inside her, pulling her in. Sun incandescing through the clouds low overhead.

  That’s a mackerel sky, says the translation box. Nice pattern. Warp and weft. Might rain tomorrow.

  Oh my God, someone is saying over and over, and then she feels in her mouth that it’s her saying it. She stops herself with a fist in her mouth. Hangs on to the railing with her other hand. She can see so far she can’t focus on it. She closes her eyes, clenches the railing hard with both hands. Keeps her eyes closed so she won’t throw up. She needs to get back into the room, but is afraid to walk. She will fall, crawl back desperately afraid, everyone will see it. She’s stuck there, and so puts her forehead down on the railing. Tries to relax her stomach.

  She feels Badim’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

  “Not really.”

  After a while she says, “I wish Devi could have seen this. She would have liked it more than me.”

  “Yes.”

  Badim sits on the deck beside her, his back against the retaining wall. His face is tilted to the sky. “Yes, she would have liked this.”

  “It’s so big!”

  “I know.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”

  “Do you want to move back from the edge?”

  “I don’t think I can move yet. What we can see from here”—waving briefly at the bay and ocean, the hills, the skyscraper city springing up around them, the glare of the sun slanting through the clouds—“just what we can see from here, right now, is bigger than our whole ship!”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Believe.”

  “But we were in a toy!”

  “Yes. Well. It had to be as small as they thought would work, so they could push it to a good interstellar speed. It was a case of conflicting priorities. So they did what they could.”

  “I can’t believe they thought it would be okay.”

  “Well. Do you remember that time you told Devi that you wanted to live in your dollhouse, and she said you already did?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, she did. She got rea
lly mad.”

  “Oh that brings it back! That time she got mad!”

  Badim laughs. Freya slides down beside him and laughs too.

  Badim puts his hands under his sunglasses, wipes tears from his eyes. “Yes,” he says. “She got mad a lot.”

  “She did. But I guess I never really knew why, until now.”

  Badim nods. He keeps his hands under his glasses, over his eyes. “She didn’t either, not really. She never saw this, so she didn’t really know. But now we know. I’m glad. She would be glad too.”

  Freya tries to see her mother’s face, hear her voice. She can still do it; Devi is still there, especially her voice. Her voice, the ship’s voice. Euan’s voice, Jochi’s voice. All the voices of her dead. Euan on Aurora, loving the wind as it knocked him around. She reaches up and grabs the railing, pulls herself up and stares down at the great city. She holds on for dear life. She’s never felt sicker.

  They’re put on a train to Beijing. They ride in broad plush seats, on the upper story of two long cars, linked like two biomes by a passageway. They constitute a moving party, with windows and skylight domes and the land flowing past them, flat and green, hilly and brown, on and on and on and on.

  “Never have we moved so fast!” someone exclaims. It is indeed astounding how quickly the train moves over the landscape. It’s going 500 kilometers per hour, one of their hosts tells them. Aram and Badim confer, Aram smiles briefly and shakes his head, Badim laughs and says to the others, “For most of our lives we were moving one million times faster than this.”

  They cheer themselves. They laugh at the craziness of it.

  As the train glides with its startling rapidity over this impossibly big world, day turns to night, by way of the most lurid sunset they have yet seen, fuschia clouds blazing in a pale sky that is lemon over the black horizon, bending into green above that, then higher still a blue some say is called cyan blue, and over that an indigo that spreads all the way over their skylight to the east. All these intense transparent colors are there at once, and yet none of their Terran hosts are taking the slightest notice; they are all watching the screens on their wrists, screens that sometimes exhibit tiny images of the voyagers.

  They can scroll for themselves on their wristpads and see what people are saying about them. But it’s disturbing to do so, because then they see and hear how much resentment, contempt, anger, and violent hatred is directed at them. Apparently to many people they are cowards and traitors. They have betrayed history, betrayed the human race, betrayed evolution, betrayed the universe itself. How will the universe know itself? How will consciousness expand? They have let down not just humanity, but the universe!

  Freya turns off her wristpad. “Why?” she asks Badim. “Why do they hate us so?”

  He shrugs. He too is troubled. “People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.”

  “But there’s more than ideas,” she protests. “This world.” She gestures at the fading sunset. “It’s not just our ideas.”

  “For some people it is. They don’t have anything else, maybe, so they give everything they have to ideas.”

  She shakes her head, still upset. “I would hate that. I would hate to be that way.” She gestures at the tiny angry faces on the other screens, faces still there on the wrists around them, imp faces, literally spitting in the intensity of their bitterness. “I hope they’ll leave us alone.”

  “They’ll forget us soon enough. For now we’re the new thing, but another new thing will come. And people like that need fresh fuel for their fire.”

  Aram frowns as he overhears this. It isn’t clear he agrees.

  In Beijing they are guided to a rectangular building the size of a couple of biomes, a compound they call it, surrounding a central courtyard that is mostly paved but holds also a few short trees. The whole ship’s population can be fitted into rooms clustered at one corner of this compound, which must therefore house four or five thousand people; and it is only one building, in a city that goes to the horizon in all directions, a city in which the train, slowing down as it approached, took four hours to get to this central area.

  Next day many of them are taken to Tiananmen Square. Freya does not go. The day after, they are taken on a tour of the Forbidden City, home of the ancient Chinese emperors. Again, Freya cannot face going out. Many are like her. When the others come back, they say the buildings appeared both ancient and shining as if new, so that it was hard to understand them as objects. Freya wishes she had seen that.

  Their Chinese hosts speak to them in English, and seem happy to be hosting them, which is reassuring after all the venomous little faces on the screens. The Chinese want the starfarers to like their city, they are proud of their city. Meanwhile clouds and a yellow haze thicken the air, and keep the sky from being too overwhelming to Freya. She stays in rooms and pretends the world outside is a larger room, or that she is in some kind of projection. Possibly she can hold to this feeling all the time. She feels she has faced the worst, perhaps, although she still stays indoors, and away from windows too.

  Several of the starfarers (this is what the Chinese call them) nevertheless collapse in the next few days, overwhelmed either physically or mentally, if there is any difference. Their tours are abruptly canceled, and they are all moved to some kind of medical facility, one as big as their compound, either emptied for their arrival or unused, hard to say, not much is ever explained to them, and some of them suspect they are now pawns in a game they don’t understand, but others are not worried about anything but themselves and their shipmates; because people are falling apart. The Chinese want to run tests on all of them, as they are worried for their guests. Four have died since they landed; many are disabled either from their hibernation or the descent from space; many more are not coping with Earth very well, one way or another. Miserable faces, scared faces, all these faces she has known all her life, the only faces she has ever known; her people. It isn’t how Freya imagined it. She herself is miserable.

  “What is this?” she says to Badim. “What’s happening to us? We made it.”

  He shrugs. “We’re exiles. The ship is gone, and this is not our world. So all we have is each other, and that, we know already, never made us particularly happy or secure. And being outdoors is scary.”

  “I know it. I’m the worst of all.” She has to admit it. “But I don’t want to be! I’m going to get used to it!”

  “You will,” Badim says. “You will if you want to. I know you will.”

  But when she approaches a window, when she nears a door, her heart slams in her chest like a child trying to escape. That vault of sky, those distant clouds! The unbearable sun! She grinds her teeth; she gnashes her teeth! And strides to the windows, and smashes her nose into the glass and looks out, hands on her chest, sweating and gnashing her teeth, to look out at the visible world until her pulse slows. And her pulse never slows.

  Days pass, they huddle miserably together.

  Aram and Badim, worried though they are about things outside Freya’s ken, continue to sit next to each other and watch the screens, and chat about what they see, and observe their comrades curiously. If it were up to them alone, all would be well; they are having an adventure, their old faces say. They are having the time of their lives. Above all, they remain deeply surprised. Freya takes heart from seeing their faces; she sits at Badim’s feet pressed against his bony shins, looking up at him, trying to relax.

  The two old friends often read to each other, as of old during the evenings in the Fetch, that lovely little town. And one day Aram, reading his wrist silently, chuckles and says to Badim, “Here, listen to this; a poem by a Greek who lived in Alexandria, one Cavafy:

  “You said, ‘I shall go to another land to another sea

  Another city will be found better than this.

  My every effort is a written indictment

  And my heart—like the dead—is buried. />
  How long will my mind be in this decay,’

  “and so on like that, it’s the same old song we know so well—if only I were somewhere else, I would be happy. Until the poet replies to his poor friend,

  “New lands you will not find, you won’t find other seas.

  The city will follow you. The streets you roam will be the same.

  There is no boat for you, there is no street.

  In the same way your life you destroyed here

  In this petty corner, you have spoiled it in the entire universe.”

  Badim smiles, nods. “I remember this poem! I read it to Devi one time, to remind her not to pin all her hopes on Aurora, not to wait for our arrival before she started to live. We were young at the time, and she was most seriously annoyed with me, I can tell you. But that translation doesn’t sound right to me. I think there is a better one.” And he taps on one of the tablets left for them to use.

  “Here it is,” he says. “I remembered right. I ran across the poem in the Quartet. Listen, this is Durrell’s translation:

  “You tell yourself: ‘I’ll be gone

  To some other land, some other sea,

  To a city lovelier far than this

  Could ever have been or hoped to be—

  Where every step now tightens the noose:

  A heart in a body, buried and out of use…’

  “See, he rhymes it.”

  “I’m not sure I like that,” Aram says.

  “No, but the meaning is the same, and the payoff is here at the end:

  “There’s no new land, my friend, no

  New sea, no other places, always this

  Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists

  To take you from yourself. Ah! Don’t you see

  Just as you’ve ruined your life in this

  One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth

  Everywhere now—over the whole Earth?”