Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Aram nods. “Ah yes, that’s good.”

  They tap around for a while longer, reading silently. Then Aram says, “Look, I’ve found another version, a Martian one it seems, listen to this end:

  “Ah! Don’t you see

  Since your mind is the prison

  You’ll live behind bars

  Everywhere now—over all of Mars?”

  “Very nice,” Badim says. “That’s us, all right. We are trapped in a prison of our own devise.”

  “Horrible!” Freya protests. “What do you mean nice? It’s horrible! And we didn’t trap ourselves! We were born in prison.”

  “But we’re not there now,” Badim says, eyeing her closely. She is sitting at his feet, as she has so often before. “And we are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That’s what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in.”

  “I know that,” Freya says. “I’m fine with that. No problem at all. Just don’t be blaming us. Devi was right. We lived our lives in a fucking closet. It’s like we were kidnapped as children and locked away by some madman. Now that we’re out, I plan to enjoy it!”

  Badim nods, eyes shining as he regards her. “Good girl! You do that. You’ll teach us again.”

  “I will.”

  Although her stomach knots as she says it. The unbearable sun, the vertigo sky, reeling around sick with fear, how to face it? How to walk at all in such a sky, with such bad legs, such a fearful heart? Badim puts an arm around her shoulders as he sees her face, she presses her face against his knees and weeps, he is so old, he is aging fast, oxidizing before her eyes, she can’t bear to lose him, she fears she will lose him, she has lost so much; she fears her huge uncontrollable fear.

  The Chinese get her fitted with new knee-high boots that act according to her wishes, taking signals from her nervous system and translating them into walking that is not unlike what she would have done if she could feel her feet. It’s almost as if her own sensations have been transferred out into her shoes, while her actual feet remain as numb as shoes used to be. It’s a switch that takes some getting used to, but is much preferable to staggering around and falling, or pushing a walker, or swinging over crutches. She strides around in these new boots, trying to get used to them. Already she’s become accustomed to the strangely lighter 1 g of Terran gravity, almost.

  They get invited to send a delegation to some kind of conference about starships, and Aram and Badim ask Freya if she would like to join them; they look concerned, they don’t seem to be sure she can handle it, but here, as so often in the ship, she sees that they want to use her as some kind of Devi surrogate or ceremonial figurehead, some kind of public face for their group. And she also understands suddenly that Badim feels he has to ask her, whether or not he thinks it’s a good idea for her to join them. “Yes,” she says, annoyed, and soon they are flying to North America, a group of twenty-two of them, chosen awkwardly, in a subdued, distracted manner, not their usual town hall style, they’re confused, it isn’t obvious how to decide things anymore, they’re not in their world, they don’t know what to do. Possibly the ship used to run their meetings more than they realized, who knows, but now they are in disarray.

  Looking down occasionally from the rocket plane’s little window, she sees the great blue world rolling below them, in this case the Arctic Ocean, they are told. Earth is a water world, no doubt about it; not unlike Aurora in that respect. Perhaps it’s that which adds to the feeling of dread welling up in her; perhaps it’s dread of the topic of the meeting they are headed toward, given what the faces on the screens keep saying about them, given everything that has happened. Their Chinese hosts have promised to fly them back to their fellow starfarers anytime they want to go, promised that no one will ever keep them apart, assuming they want to stay together. They are world citizens now, the Chinese say, thus Chinese citizens, among all their other citizenships, and they have carte blanche to go where they want, do what they want. The Chinese offer a permanent home, and whatever work the starfarers care to do. The Chinese are hard to understand, it isn’t clear why they are doing what they are for the starfarers, but given the vituperation on the screens, the people of the ship can’t help but feel relieved. Even if they are somehow pawns in a game they don’t understand, or even see, it’s better than the dripping scorn, the spray of contempt.

  Badim looks tired, Freya wishes he had stayed in Beijing, but he refused, he wants to be there for this, to help her. The cobalt sheen of the Arctic winkles with a curving pattern of white lines, waves extending horizon to horizon under them. They seem to be flying very slowly, though they are informed the plane is moving at least six times faster than the train from Hong Kong to Beijing; of course now they’re twenty kilometers above the Earth instead of twenty meters. They can see so far that the horizon is faintly curved, they can see again that this world is a sphere. Coming south they can see the real Greenland on their left, not at all green, just as they had heard, but rather a waste of black mountains, with a central sea of white ice largely covered by melt pools of sky blue, a mélange hard to grasp as a landscape. South again over the drowned coastline of eastern North America, deeply embayed by long blue arms of ocean, looking empty until just before they land, when buildings reappear under them in a profusion, in a doll city bright and geometrical, and they land on a point next to another forest of silver skyscrapers.

  Rooms and vehicles, vehicles and rooms. Crowded narrow streets and canals, buildings tall on both sides. Faces in the street staring at their cars, some of them shouting things. Nothing like Beijing, more like the screens. Here people speak English, and despite the accents it’s easy to understand what is being said. It’s the starfarers’ own language, seems like it should be their world too, but obviously not. Here the sky seems taller than ever. Badim and Aram discuss this phenomenon, consulting their old book and its equations as they stare up between the buildings, ignoring the clear fact that the sky is shocking not for its height as a dome but precisely because it is not a dome, this is what is so frightening about it, but they persist in their conversation, perhaps to hold off that fact. Now as they tram through the city the sky overhead is a ceiling of patterned clouds that Aram says is to be called a herringbone sky, beautiful in the slant of afternoon light, low over them, although not as low as the rain clouds that amazed them in Hong Kong.

  “Is a herringbone sky the same as a mackerel sky?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They punch around on their wristpads trying to find out.

  Into a building as big as a biome. The Terrans themselves don’t actually spend much time outside, Freya thinks. Maybe they too are terrified. Maybe the proper response to standing on the side of a planet, in the open air of its atmosphere, very near to the local star, is always terror. Maybe everything humans ever did or planned to do was designed to dodge that terror. Maybe their plan to go to the stars was just one more expression of that terror. As she is still clutched over that terror, which continues to collapse her stomach whenever she is so close to being outdoors, this idea makes a lot of sense to her.

  Then she is back in a building, moving through room after hallway after room, talking to stranger after stranger, there are so many of them. Some have devices they aim at her as they shout questions, she ignores these and tries to focus on faces that look nice, that will make eye contact with her rather than look at their devices.

  They sit in a room that is some kind of waiting room, with tables covered with food and drink. They are soon to make a public appearance of some kind.

  Word comes through their wristpads, from their Chinese hosts, that four more of their group back in Beijing have died, causes of death unknown. Among the four is Delwin.

  Before she fully understands what Aram and Badim and the others are saying about this, and about the meeting’s purpose, all mixing up in her now, she is led up onstage before a crowd and a ban
k of cameras. There are a dozen people on stage, a moderator is asking questions, Badim and Aram flank her, along with Hester and Tao, and they sit and listen to what she slowly gathers is a discussion of the latest starship proposals.

  She leans against Badim to whisper in his ear. “More starships?”

  He nods, keeping his eyes on the speakers.

  The current plan, with prototypes being built in the asteroid belt, is to send out many small starships carrying hibernating passengers, who will sleep while the ships make their way out to all the hundred closest stars that have been identified to have Earthlike planets in their habitable zone, not just Earth twins but Earth analogs. These stars range from 27 to 300 light-years away. Probes have already passed through several of these systems, or will in the near future, and are sending back their data, and everything looks very promising.

  The people describing this plan get up one at a time from a bank of chairs on the other side of the speaker’s podium, go to the podium, and tell their part of the story, with big images on a screen behind them always changing, after which they then sit back down. They are all men, all Caucasian, most bearded, all wearing jackets. One speaker among them introduces the others, and he then stands to the side and listens to their presentations, quizzically, his head tilted to one side, tugging at his beard, a small smile playing under his mustache. He nods at everything the others say, as if he has already thought their thought and now approves its articulation. He is very satisfied with the way this event is going. He stands after another speaker has finished, says to the crowd, “You see, we’ll keep trying until it works. It’s a kind of evolutionary pressure. We’ve known for a long time that Earth is humanity’s cradle, but you’re not supposed to stay in your cradle forever.” He is obviously very pleased with the cleverness of this aphorism.

  He invites Aram to speak, the curious smirk twisting his face as he makes a magnanimous gesture: he is allowing Aram to speak.

  Aram stands at the podium, looks around at the audience.

  “No starship voyage will work,” he says abruptly. “This is an idea some of you have, which ignores the biological realities of the situation. We from Tau Ceti know this better than anyone. There are ecological, biological, sociological, and psychological problems that can never be solved to make this idea work. The physical problems of propulsion have captured your fancy, and perhaps these problems can be solved, but they are the easy ones. The biological problems cannot be solved. And no matter how much you want to ignore them, they will exist for the people you send out inside these vehicles.

  “The bottom line is the biomes you can propel at the speeds needed to cross such great distances are too small to hold viable ecologies. The distances between here and any truly habitable planets are too great. And the differences between other planets and Earth are too great. Other planets are either alive or dead. Living planets are alive with their own indigenous life, and dead planets can’t be terraformed quickly enough for the colonizing population to survive the time in enclosure. Only a true Earth twin not yet occupied by life would allow this plan to work, and these may exist somewhere, the galaxy after all is big, but they are too far away from us. Viable planets, if they exist, are simply too—far—away.”

  Aram pauses for a moment to collect himself. Then he waves a hand and says more calmly, “That’s why you aren’t hearing from anyone out there. That’s why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can’t leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet.”

  “But why do you say that?” the moderator interrupts to ask, head cocked to the side. “You’re arguing a general law from your own particular case. That’s a logical error. There are really no physical impediments to moving out into the cosmos. So eventually it will happen, because we are going to keep trying. It’s an evolutionary urge, a biological imperative, something like reproduction itself. Possibly it may resemble something like a dandelion or a thistle releasing its seeds to the winds, so that most of the seeds will float away and die. But a certain percentage will take hold and grow. Even if it’s only one percent, that’s success! And that’s how it will be with us—”

  Freya finds herself standing up, and briefly she has to attend to her balance, to keep from falling on her face in front of them all. Then she is striding across the stage, then she strikes the moderator in the face and down he goes, she falls on him and smashes through his raised arms with both fists, trying to get another good blow in, pummeling furiously, shouting something in a painful roar, she doesn’t even know what she’s trying to say, doesn’t know she’s roaring. She catches him hard right on the nose, yes! And then Badim has her by one arm and Aram by the other, and others are there too, holding her, shouting, and she can’t struggle too much without hurting Badim, who is shouting, “Freya, quit it! Freya, stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  Uproar, bedlam, Badim wrapping her, not letting go, they are escorting her off the stage, she staggering, Aram ahead of them, one person standing in a doorway as if to block them, and Aram removing him by rushing at the man and shouting ferociously in the man’s face, which causes the man to leap to the side; the sight of this shocks Freya, lagging so far behind the moment she is still wishing she could get one more good blow in, hit the smirk itself, kill that idiot smirk, but it’s bizarre to see Aram shout like that. She twists in Badim’s grasp and shouts something back at the meeting room, but again she doesn’t know what she’s saying, it’s just something bursting out of her, like a scream.

  After that they’re in trouble, she’s in trouble. Their group locks her in with them and claims diplomatic immunity, whatever that is in this case, no one can be sure, but it appears that it buys them some time, the authorities are a little unsure how to proceed, unsure enough for arguments to be made. Apparently the man she assaulted does not wish to press charges, is assuring everyone he understands post-traumatic stress disorder, and besides only slipped and fell. But in cases of assault and battery the wishes of the victim are not the main consideration, they are told, so diplomatic immunity may be their best defense, that or just the sheer uncertainty of their legal status at any time. They are aliens or something, Freya is too upset to follow the arguing. Anyway, for now no one is allowed into their rooms. Discussions go on out in the hallways outside.

  Freya manages to sleep through a lot of it, but her right hand hurts, and in a dull way she feels a little ashamed, a little crazy. Though she also still wants one more poke.

  They are now persona non grata, Aram says to Badim after one of the hallway sessions, almost everywhere.

  Badim, looking older than ever, holds his head in his hands, when he is not holding her hand. She sits there staring at a window she dare not approach.

  “Why did you do it?” he asks her. “Oh never mind, I know why you did it. He was a fool. Annoying, as fools are. But there are always fools, Freya. People like him will always exist, and they don’t matter. Don’t you see? They just don’t matter. Fools will always be with us. You have to leave them to it, and find your own way.”

  “But they hurt people,” Freya protests. She hasn’t stopped feeling sick from the moment they pulled her off the poor man. She still wants that last punch, at the same time that she is doubled over with remorse. “It isn’t just foolish, it’s sick. Did you hear what he said? Dandelion seeds? Ninety-nine percent sent out to die, as part of the plan? Die a miserable death they can’t prevent, children and animals and ship and all, and all for a stupid idea someone has, a dream? Why? Why have that dream? Why are they that way?”

  “People live in ideas,” Badim says again. “You can’t stop it. We all live in ideas. You have to let these people have their ideas.”

  “But they kill people with them.”

  “I know. I know. It’s always been that way. But look, people volunteer to get on these ships. There are waiting lists.”

  “Their kids
don’t volunteer!”

  “No. But it’s still not our job to stop them.”

  “Isn’t it? Are you sure?”

  At this he looks uncertain. He takes her point, unhappily; that they might be obliged to witness. That they are the survivors of one of these mad plans.

  She shakes her head, snares him with her look, as she so often has before. “Were the people who believed in eugenics just fools? I think we have to try to stop them!”

  Badim looks at her for a long time. He is really looking ancient now. She can’t remember how he looked when she was a child.

  He pats her shoulder, and several times he almost speaks, then stops himself.

  “Well,” he says finally, “your mother would be proud of you.”

  After that he can’t speak for a while.

  Then: “You—you are reminding me of her. It’s almost nice to see. But not. Because I don’t want you to die too, from trying to do the impossible. Because look—you can’t stop other people from pursuing their projects, their dreams. Even if they are crazy dreams, even if they won’t work. If people want to do it, they will. Then later their children will suffer, sure. We can point that out, and we will. But it’s everyone who has to stop these people, all of us together. It has to be an idea that fails, that no one will act on because no one believes it anymore. That may take a while. And meanwhile, listen to me: kick the world, break your foot. And your feet, my girl, are already broken.”

  They have to get out of town. Aram arranges that somehow, a flight back to Beijing, where the Chinese are apparently not interested in extraditing Freya and Badim for a crime of this sort. Some are calling it free speech, decrying the sort of state that would prosecute free speech. Let people defend themselves from unarmed assaults, please. Why is it anyone else’s business?

  Badim shakes his head at this line of reasoning, but says nothing.