Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Then there begins to appear on the screens, and in the messages coming to them, support for Freya’s rash act. Not just one or two messages, but many. A little flood of them in fact. There are a lot of people on Earth who call themselves Earthfirsters, apparently. The emigration of people, often rich people, off Earth and out into the solar system, and then even out of the solar system, has left behind a great deal of resentment, it seems. Only now are these people paying any attention to a crew of lost starfarers.

  “So now I’m popular?” Freya says. “They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?”

  “Not the same people,” Badim points out, frowning. “Or maybe so. I can’t tell. But yes. That’s Earth for you. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. That’s how it works here.”

  “I don’t like this place.”

  Badim shakes his head. “You don’t like these people. It’s not the same thing. And it’s not everybody, either.”

  Aram, listening to them, says to Freya, “‘Ah don’t you see, since your mind is the prison, you’ll live behind bars everywhere now?’”

  “So fuck it, let’s move to Mars then,” Freya grumbles, remembering the poem, which had pierced her like a sliver.

  “Definitely not,” Badim says, waving a finger. “They’re stuck in their rooms up there almost as much as we were on the ship. That place is not much different from Aurora. The problem is chemical rather than biological, and they may amend the soil there over time, but not soon. Centuries at the least! No. We’re just going to have to get used to it here.”

  But during the brief disaster of their trip away, six more of them have died. One, a youth, Raul, was killed in a fight with some person who did not like the idea of them coming back to Earth. After the memorial services for these six truly sad affairs, Aram tells Badim a story about Shackleton, who got his entire crew safely home from one of his Antarctic misadventures, only to see several get sent to the trenches of the First World War, where they were promptly killed.

  Freya is already feeling like she wants to hit someone again, and something in this dismal story makes her furious. “What are we going to do?” she shouts at them. “I can’t stand this! Just hanging around, getting picked off one by one—no! No! No! No! We have to do something. I don’t know what, but something. Something to change this place—something! So—what are we going to do?”

  Badim nods uneasily. His ancient face is creased with an ancient look, a look Freya recognizes from her childhood: the pursed-lipped frown that always came over his face when he was trying to figure out what to do about Devi. This look had always held tucked within it several things: amusement, love, worry, annoyance, pride that he had such a problem to solve. His wife the warrior, on a rampage. Now maybe it’s a bit the same, maybe not. And anyway Freya is too angry to feel reassured by this. Now it’s her he is looking at, and to her there’s nothing amusing about the idea of having in your life a crazy idealistic person you love and must help. Not when she’s the person. Anyway it’s everybody, lots of the starfarers are like her, it’s nothing special. No, fuck it: they need a way to live, something to do, or else they’ll never be anything but freaks from space, dying one by one from earthshock. The people from the stations out around Jupiter and Saturn have made up that name for it: they come back from space to Earth to get a dose of bacteria or whatnot, their sabbatical they call it, come back to get sick in order to stay well, but it’s a tough thing for them, and they often come down with what they call earthshock, and sometimes die of it. Actually some Saturnine people are offering to help them adjust to their new situation. Along with the Earthfirsters. There’s a combination for you, Aram remarks. No, they’re freaks! And so only freaks want to help them!

  Aram begins to study this sabbatical that the space people take. Everyone living out there in the solar system comes back to Earth for a bit of time every several years, if they are concerned to live a full life span, which of course almost everyone is. This association between returning to Earth and living longer in space is an unexplained correlation, a statistical phenomenon that no one can test out in their own body, as no one can live both ways, and it isn’t necessarily true for every individual that staying in space all the time makes them sick. It’s just that on average, space people who don’t return to Earth every five to ten years, for several months to a couple of years, tend to die quite a bit younger than those who do return. The numbers are contested, but the studies, which Aram thinks are mostly pretty well designed, generally agree that the added life span for off-planet residents taking Earth sabbaticals is something like twenty years, or thirty years. Even now that they are sometimes living up to two centuries, that is a long time. It’s such a huge discrepancy that most people adhere to what the data suggest, and go home to Earth on a personal schedule of some kind. Best to pay attention to the data, and not take chances.

  Studying all this, Aram points out that the true artificial intelligence is the actuarial long-term study; no human could ever see these things. This particular AI has made a compelling case. Suggestive, plausible, persuasive, probable, compelling: scientists’ linguistic scale for evaluating evidence is still the same, Aram says, and it tops out with quite a strong word, really: to compel. People do it because they are compelled to. Reality makes them do it. The urge to live makes them do it.

  But there is another effect, almost the opposite of the sabbatical, and just as strong, if not stronger: earthshock. People come back to Earth, perfectly healthy on arrival, and die of something without warning. Sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what exactly did it, which adds to the fear of the syndrome, of course. Quick decline, earthshock, terrallergenic; these names contain within themselves the terrible news that the phenomenon they refer to is not well understood, an effect with unknown causes. Names like this reveal the ignorance in the name itself: the Big Bang. Cancer. Quick decline. Any disease ending with the suffix -itis or -penia. Et cetera. So many ignorant names.

  So, the returned starfarers, having missed their own sabbaticals by some two hundred and fifty years, are now dying of earthshock, it seems. Even when causes can be found for any individual case, it’s suspicious that the causes have cropped up so soon after their return. Hard to believe they would have happened in the ship, in hibernation or not. No, something is going on. Something they will either survive or they won’t.

  Meanwhile, living on this big crazy planet that still scares Freya out of her wits, what to do? What to do? At this point she could not be more miserable.

  A week or more of this misery drags on before Badim comes to her and answers her question So what are we going to do? as if only a second has passed since it burst out of her.

  “We go to the beach!” he announces cheerily.

  “What do you mean?” Freya demands.

  For of course there are no beaches. Sea level rose twenty-four meters in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries of the common era, because of processes they began in the twenty-first century that they couldn’t later reverse; and in that rise, all of Earth’s beaches drowned. Nothing they have done since to chill Earth’s climate has done much to bring sea level back down; that will take a few thousand more years. Yes, they are terraforming Earth now. There’s no avoiding it, given the damage that’s been done. In this the common era year 2910, they are calling it a five-thousand-year project. Some say longer. It’ll be a bit of a race with the Martians, they joke.

  But for now it’s good-bye to the beaches, and indeed many a celebrated island of yore now lies deep under the waves. An entire world and way of life has disappeared with these fabled places, a lifeway that went right back to the beginning of the species in south and east Africa, where the earliest humans were often intimately involved with the sea. That wet, sandy, tidal, salty, sun-flecked, beautiful beach life: all gone, along with so much else, of course; animals, plants, fish. It’s part of the mass extinction event they are still struggling to end, to escape. So much has been lost that will never
come back again, that the loss of the joy of the relatively few humans who were lucky enough to live on the strand, who combed the beaches, and fished, and rode the waves, and lay in the sun—that’s nothing much to grieve for, given everything else that has been lost, all the suffering, all the hunger, all the death, all the extinctions. Most of the mammal species are gone.

  Still, it was a way of life much beloved, and still remembered in art and song, image and story—still legendary, still a lost golden age, vibrating at some level below thought, there in their salty blood and tears, in the long, curled waves of DNA that still break inside them all.

  So there are people bringing that back. They are bringing the beaches back.

  These people are one wing or element of the Earthfirsters. Tree huggers, space haters, they’re a mixed bag. Many of them renounce not just space, but also the many virtual, simulated, and indoor spaces that so many Terrans seem happy to inhabit. To the Earthfirsters these people are in effect occupying spaceships on the land, or have moved inside their screens or their heads. So many people stay indoors all the time, it seems crazy to Freya, even though she herself still cowers in the shelter of built spaces every waking moment. But she has an excuse, she thinks, having been locked in all her life, while the Terrans have no excuse: this place is their home. Their disregard for their natural inheritance, their waste of the gift given them, is part of what causes her to gnash her teeth, and drive herself to windows, even into open doorways, there to stand trembling on the threshold, terrified, willing her body to stop clenching, to step out. Willing herself to change. Finding in that moment of liminal panic that sometimes you can’t make yourself do even the things you most want to do, when fear seizes you by the throat.

  So, but these beach lovers are apparently like her in this opinion or belief about how to regard Earth. They are kindred souls, perhaps. And they are expressing their love of that lost world of the seashore, by rebuilding it.

  Freya listens amazed as Badim and Aram bring into their compound a short old woman, brown-skinned, silver-haired, who describes her people and their project.

  “We do a form of landscape restoration called beach return. It’s a kind of landscape art, a game, a religion—” She grins and shrugs. “It’s whatever. To do it, we’ve adapted or developed several technologies and practices, starting with mines, rock grinders, barges, pumps, tubing, scoops, bulldozers, earthmovers, all that kind of thing. It’s heavy industry at first. A lot of landscape restoration is. We’ve used this technology all over the world. It involves making arrangements with governments or other landholders, to get the rights to do it. It works best in certain stretches of the new coastlines. They’re mostly wastelands now, intertidal zones without being suited for that. Being amphibious”—she grins—“is weird.”

  They nod. Freya says, “So what do you do, exactly?”

  In these new tidal zones, the woman explains, they proceed to make beaches that are as similar to those that went away as can be arranged. “We bring them back, that’s all. And we love it. We devote our lives to it. It takes a couple of decades to get a new beach started, so any given beach person usually works on only three or four in a lifetime, depending on how things go. But it’s work you can believe in.”

  “Ah,” Freya says.

  It’s labor intensive, the woman continues. There is more work to do than there are workers. And now, even though the starfarers are controversial and in trouble—or rather, precisely because they are controversial and in trouble—the beach makers are offering to take them on. Meaning the entire complement of them.

  “We can all go?” Freya says. “We can stay together?”

  “Of course,” the woman says. “There are about a hundred thousand of us, and we send out working teams to various stretches of coastline. Each project needs about three or four thousand people during the most intensive phases. Some people move on when their part of a project is done, so the life can be a bit nomadic. Although some of them stick to the beaches they’ve made.”

  “So you would take us in,” Badim says.

  “Yes. I’m here to make that offer. We keep our whole thing a bit under the radar, you have to understand. It’s best to avoid political complications as much as possible. So we don’t go out of our way to publicize our projects. Our deals are discreet. We try to stay out of the news. I bet you can see why!”

  She laughs as Aram and Badim and Freya all nod.

  “Look,” she says, “there’s a political element to all this, which you need to understand. We don’t like the space cadets. In fact a lot of us hate them. This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity’s cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place. Now there are many people on Earth who feel like it’s our job to make that right. It’ll be our job for generations to come. And now we’ve seen that you’re part of the damage they’ve done. It took us a while to get that, but when you punched that guy it became very obvious.” She laughs at the look on Freya’s face. “But look, it’s all right! We’ve taken in quite a few people who got in trouble by resisting that kind of shit one way or another. So, adding five hundred lost souls to one of our teams won’t be any big deal. You’ll blend in, and you can keep your heads down, do your work, and make your contribution. We can use the help, and you’ll have a way to go forward.”

  Freya tries to take all this in and comprehend it. Beach building? Landscape restoration? Can it be? Would they like it?

  Freya says, “Badim, will I like this?”

  Badim smiles his little smile. “Yes, I think you will.”

  The others are not so sure. After the woman leaves, there is a long discussion, and at a certain point Freya is asked to go out with an exploratory group and take a look at one of these projects and see what she thinks.

  This will of course mean going outdoors.

  Freya gulps.

  “Yes,” she says. “Of course.”

  Again they fly. This time it seems their Chinese hosts might be happy to see them go. More rooms and tunnels, planes and trams, trains and cars. Travel on Earth is not dissimilar to moving around in the spokes, although the g stays constant. They keep a low profile. Herded from one room to the next. Somewhere on Earth you go indoors, and move around in differently shaped rooms, which either move or don’t, and the next time you go outdoors (if you do!) you are on the other side of the planet. This is so strange. Looking out of a plane window at the ocean planet below, under its layer of clouds, Freya resolves to master her fear, to make her body obey her will. She is tired of being afraid. Sometimes, you get sick of yourself, you change.

  A west-facing coast somewhere. They tell her where and she promptly forgets. She hasn’t heard of it before. Temperate latitude, Mediterranean climate. Yellow sandstone bluffs jump right out of the white-edged sea. Used to be beaches at the foot of these bluffs, they are told, beaches so wide they held car races on the flat wet sand, back when cars were first invented. It was a morning’s walk from bluff to water, their guide says, and all flat sand. Laying it on a bit thick. Point of stories however being that there is a lot of sand still out there in the shallows. Some of it has been swept south by currents into a giant underwater canyon that runs from just offshore to the edge of the continental shelf, but even that canyon bottom is a now a kind of underwater river of sand flowing down toward the abyssal plain, a river of sand that can be vacuumed up in tubes onto barges, barged over to the land, brought into the estuaries of the little rivers that break the long curving line of bluffs, and put there. Old sand for new beaches, located right at the new tideline, up in the estuaries. They’re also trucking in giant granite boulders from inland, some to drop offshore and make reefs, others to drop at the foot of the bluffs to establish a new strand on, others to grind down into new sand, gravel, shingle, cobble—whatever type of rock that used to be there on the shore. It takes certain mixes of minerals to make a beach that will last, to make it nice. Also certain kinds of reefs offshore. Millions of tons of sand and rock have to be moved and
installed. There is so much their guides want to tell them, these guides all sun-browned, hair crisped by sun and salt, eyes aglow.

  The starfarers are tired by their journey—jet-lagged, they have been taught to call it—out of synch with the planet’s rotation, diurnal rhythm, circadian rhythm—an odd malady that they are learning to recognize. After a first tour of this coastline, driven around in a car on roads along the top of the bluff, then around the shores of the estuary, with many stops to get out and look (but Freya does not get out), they are taken to an inn on the bluff’s edge. The inn seems to be a modest little conference center, with bungalows around a main building. Freya gets out when the car is parked inside a garage, and makes her way up to the lobby, then, in a controlled dash under a walkway, hustles to her assigned bungalow, next to the one occupied by Badim and Aram. Once she is settled, she looks out her open doorway to see the two old men stretched out on reclining chairs, in the shade of an overhang extending from their bungalow, looking out at the ocean. The overhang is called a ramada, they have been told.

  Badim notices her and says, “Freya my dear, come on out and join us! Give it a try!”

  “I will in a bit,” she replies irritably. “I’m unpacking.”

  From the bluff they can see out over the ocean for a long way. A flat blue plate of stunning size, wrinkled with white light. Badim and Aram talk again about optical phenomena. They are aficionados at this point, and are hoping to see the green flash at sunset. Apparently Earth’s gravity, or atmosphere, they argue about which, bends the light from the sun in such a way that just before it dips under the horizon and disappears, the Earth is actually physically between the observer and the sun, but the sunlight is curving around the globe because of the atmosphere, or gravity, and as blue light curves more than red light, this curve around the Earth splits the light as if passing it through a prism, and this means that the last visible point of sunlight turns, not blue, which would be too much of a bend and too much like the sky’s color, but green, said to be a pure brilliant emerald green. “This we have to see!” Aram declares.