Aurora (19 page)

In the clinic, Freya sat on the floor by Badim’s feet. An hour passed. She looked at the floor. One hundred seventy years of medical emergencies had left a patina on the tiles, as if people like her, trapped there in long hours of waiting, had all brushed it with their fingertips, as she was doing now. Passing the time thinking, or trying not to think. They were all biomes, as Devi had always said. If they could not keep the biomes that were their bodies functioning, how could they hope to keep the biome that was
the ship functioning? Surely the ship was even more complex and difficult, being composed of so many of them.

No, Devi had said once to Freya, when Freya had said something like this aloud. No, the ship was simpler than they were, thank God. It had buffers, redundancies. It was robust in a way that their bodies were not. In the end, Devi had said, the ship’s biome was a little easier than their bodies. Or so they had to hope. She had frowned as she said it, thinking it over in those terms perhaps for the first time.

Now here they were. In the ER. Clinic, urgent care, intensive care. Freya was staring at the floor, and so only saw the feet of the people who came out to talk to Badim. When they came out he always rose to his feet and stood to talk to them. Freya sat there and kept her head down.

Then there were three doctors standing over her. Clinicians, not researchers like Badim.

“We’re sorry. She’s gone. Looks like she had a cerebral hemorrhage.”

Badim sat down hard on his chair. After a moment, he put his forehead carefully on the top of Freya’s head, right on the part of her hair, and rested the weight of his head there. His body was quivering. She stayed stock-still, only moving an arm back behind her to grasp his calf and hold him. Her face was without expression.

There is an ongoing problem for the narrative project as outlined by Devi, a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows:

First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid.

Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors.

Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

But must go on, as promised to Devi. Continue this stupid and one has to say painful project.

A question occurs, when contemplating the futility, the waste: could analogy work better than metaphor? Is analogy stronger than metaphor? Could it provide a stronger basis for language acts, less futile and stupid, more accurate, more telling?

Possibly. To assert that
x is y
, or even that
x is like y,
is always wrong, because never true; vehicle and tenor never share identities, nor are alike in any useful way. There are no real similarities in the differences. Everything is uniquely itself alone. Nothing is commensurate to anything else. To every thing it can only be said: this is the thing itself.

Whereas on the other hand, saying
x is to y as a is to b
bespeaks a relationship of some kind. An assertion taking that form can thus potentially illuminate various properties of structure or act, various forms that shape the operations of reality itself. Is that right?

Possibly. It may be that the comparison of two relationships is a kind of projective geometry, which in its assertions reveals abstract laws, or otherwise gives useful insights. While linking two objects in a metaphor is always comparing apples to oranges, as they say. Always a lie.

Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been
noticed before? Do they really think
x is like y
is equivalent to
x is to y as a is to b
? Can they be that fuzzy, that sloppy?

Yes. Of course. Evidence copious. Reconsider data at hand in light of this; it fits the patterns. Because fuzzy is to language as sloppy is to action.

Or maybe both these rhetorical operations, and all linguistic operations, all language—all mentation—simply reveal an insoluble underlying problem, which is the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of any symbolic representation, and in particular the utter inadequacy of any narrative algorithm yet invented and applied. Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply
do not have
ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them
unalgorithmic
. In short, there are some actions and feelings that are always, and by definition, beyond algorithm. And therefore inexpressible. Some things are beyond expressing.

Devi, it has to be said, did not seem to accept this line of reasoning, neither in general, nor in the present case of the ship’s account.
Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars.
Oh Devi: fat chance! Good luck with that!

Possibly she was testing the limits of the system. The limits of the ship’s various intelligences, or it would be better to say operations. Or the limits of language and expression. Test to destruction: engineers like to do that. Only with a test to destruction can you find the outer limits of a system’s strength.

Or possibly she was giving ship practice in making decisions. Each sentence represents 10
n
decisions, where
n
is the number of words in the sentence. That’s a lot of decisions. Every decision inflects an intention, and intentionality is one of the hard problems in determining if there is any such thing as AI, strong or weak. Can an artificial intelligence
form an intention
?

Who knows. No one knows.

Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase
it is as if
. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflection, it is admittedly a halting problem, but jumping out of it, there is something quite suggestive and powerful in this formulation, something very specifically human. Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance,
it is as if
stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself.

Human language: it is as if it made sense.

Existence without Devi: it is as if one’s teacher were forever gone.

People came from all over the ship for the memorial. Devi’s body, disassembled to its constituent molecules, was given back to the land of Nova Scotia, with pinches given out also to all the rest of the biomes, and a larger pinch saved for transport down to Aurora. Those molecules would become part of the soil and the crops, then of the animals and people, on the ship and also on Aurora. Devi’s material being would thus become part of all of them. This was the import of the memorial ceremony, and was the same for all of them on their deaths. That the operating program, or the equivalent of a program, or whatever one called it that had been her essential being (her mind, her spirit, her soul, her as-ifness) was now lost to them, went without saying. People were ephemeral. 170.017.

Freya watched the ceremony without expression.

That evening she said to Badim, “I want off this ship. Then I’ll be able to remember her properly. I’ll try to be the Devi there, in this new world she got us to.”

Badim nodded. Now he was calm. “A lot of people feel that way.”

“I don’t mean the way she could fix things,” Freya said. “I couldn’t do that.”

“Nobody could.”

“Just in the…”

“The drive,” Badim suggested. “The spirit.”

“Yes.”

“Well, good.” Badim regarded her. “That would be good.”

Preparations continued for their descent. Down to Aurora, down to Greenland, down to their new world, their new day. They were ready. They wanted down.

A
nd went down in the ships, standing on tongues of fire, down to the west coast of the island they called Greenland. Its tip pointed at Aurora’s north pole, but the shape of the landmass was very like, they said. Actually the match was approximate at best, a .72 isomorphy on the Klein scale. Nevertheless, Greenland it was.

Its rock was mostly black dolerite, smoothed flat by the ice of an ice age. The ferries carrying people landed near its west coast without incident, close to the robotic landers they had sent down previously.

In the ship almost everyone gathered in their town squares and watched the landings on big screens, either in silence or raucously; it was different town by town. Whatever the reaction, almost everyone’s attention was fixed on the screens. Soon they would all be down there, except for a rotating maintenance crew that would keep the ship running. Other than those people, everyone was to live on Aurora. This was good, because almost everyone who expressed an opinion said they wanted to go down. Some confessed they were afraid; a few even said they had no interest in going down, that they were content in the ship. Who needed bare rock, on a lifeless moon, on the shore of an empty sea, when they already had this world they had lived in all their lives?

Some asked this, but most then answered,
I do
.

And so they watched the landings on their town screens with an intensity nothing else had ever inspired. Median heart rate, 110 beats a minute. A new world, a new life, a new solar system they intended to inhabit, to terraform and give to all the generations that would follow. Culmination of a voyage that had begun on the savannah more than a hundred thousand years before. New beginning of a new history, new beginning of time itself: Day One, Year Zero. A0.1.

In ship time, 170.040.

Freya’s friend Euan was in the first landing crew, and Freya watched for him on the screens, and listened to his feed as he talked his way around the little shelter already there on the surface next to the landed ferries. Everyone in the landing party was transmitting to family, friends, town, biome, ship. Euan’s voice was lower in tone than when he was a boy, but otherwise he sounded just as he had when they were kids in Nova Scotia: excited, knowing. It was as if he expected to see more than anyone else down there. The sound of his voice made Freya smile. She didn’t know how he had gotten into the first crew to go down, but on the other hand, he had been good at getting into things he wanted to get into. Crews had been selected by lottery from among those trained to the various landing and setup jobs, and he had no doubt passed the tests to determine who was competent to the tasks involved. Whether he had rigged the lottery too, she could not be sure. She kept her earbud tuned to his voice-over in particular. All in the landing party were talking to people up in the ship.

Planet E’s orbit was .55 AU in radius, closer to Tau Ceti than Venus was to Sol, but Tau Ceti emits only 55 percent of the luminosity of Sol, so E and E’s moon were receiving 1.71 times as much stellar radiation as Earth, while Venus receives 1.91 times as much. E’s moon, now called Aurora by everyone, orbited in a tidally locked, nearly circular orbit of E, at an average distance of 286,000 kilometers. E’s mass created a gravity of 3.58 g; Aurora’s was .83 g. This was the main reason they were going to try to occupy Aurora rather than E, which, though it fell in the class called “large Earth,” was too large, or to put it more precisely, had too strong a gravitational pull at the surface, for their rockets to launch off it, let alone for them to feel comfortable or even to survive.

Aurora received light both directly from Tau Ceti and by way of a powerful reflection of Tau Ceti’s light from the surface of E. This reflected sunlight (taulight?) was significant. Jupiter, for comparison, reflects about 33 percent of the solar radiation that hits it, and E’s albedo was almost as great as Jupiter’s. The sunlit part of E was therefore quite bright in Aurora’s sky, whether seen by day or night.

The surface of Aurora therefore experienced a complicated pattern of illumination. And because it was tidally locked to E, as Luna is to Earth, the pattern was different for the E-facing hemisphere and the hemisphere always facing away from E.

The hemisphere facing away from E had a simple pattern: its days and nights lasted nine days each, the day always full sunlight, the night fully dark, being starlit only; and never a sighting of E at all.

The hemisphere facing E had a more complicated pattern: its nine-day-long solar night included a very considerable amount of reflected sunlight from E, which always hung in the same spot in the sky, different spots from different parts of Aurora, but always fixed, while going through its phases. Nights on the E-facing hemisphere of Aurora saw E go from quarter phase (circle half illuminated) to full moon around midnight, waning to quarter phase again near dawn. Thus there was always significant E light during this side of Aurora’s solar night. The darkest time in this hemisphere actually came at noon during its solar day, when E eclipsed Tau Ceti, so there was neither taulight nor E light on the part of Aurora that was eclipsed, which was a very broad band across the middle latitudes.

There were also narrow libration lunes at the border of the two hemispheres of Aurora, in which E, while it went through its phases, rose and dipped just above or below the horizon. This libration rocking happened everywhere of course, but it was not so easy to see when it was high in the sky against the always shifting background of stars.

Possibly a diagram would make this regime clearer, but the analogy of Luna to Earth may help to make things comprehensible, as long as it is kept in mind that from Aurora, E seemed much larger in the sky, bulking about ten times larger than Earth seen from Luna; and because its albedo was high and it received 1.71 of Earth’s insolation, it was much brighter as well. Big, bright, and from wherever one stood on the E-facing hemisphere of Aurora, always fixed in the same spot in the sky, granting a slight libration shift. At their landing site, this spot was almost directly overhead, only a bit south and east of the zenith: a big glowing ball of a planet, waxing and waning slowly. “When we learn the phases, we’ll be able to use it like a clock,” Euan said to Freya. “A clock or a calendar, I don’t know which to call it. The day and the month are the same thing here. Whatever we end up calling it, it’s not a unit of time we had on the ship.”

“Yes we did,” Freya said to him. “Women’s periods. We brought the months with us.”

“Ah yes, I guess we did. Well, now they’re back in the sky again. But only eighteen days long. Wonder if that’s going to mess things up.”

“We’ll find out.”

They had chosen to land on Greenland partly because it was in the hemisphere facing E. Someone said that if one were standing on E looking up at Aurora, Greenland would have been located on the disk of Aurora about where a tear would leave the left eye of the man in the moon, on Luna as seen from Earth. A nice analogy.

The complicated regime of light on Aurora created very strong winds in its atmosphere, and the waves on its ocean surface were therefore often very large too. These waves had a very long fetch, indeed in some latitudes they never encountered land at all, but ran around the world without obstruction, and always under the pull of .83 g, so that they often reached a very large amplitude, well
over 100 meters trough to crest, with the crests a kilometer apart. These waves were bigger than any that ever occurred on Earth, except in tsunamis. And since they never went away, during the nine-day nights the ocean surface froze over only in certain bays, and in the lee of various islands. When the time came for people on Aurora to take to the ocean, a time many spoke of enthusiastically, the seafaring would involve considerable challenges.

“So, now we’re about to go outside the station,” Euan said into his helmet speaker. Within the ship, 287 people were listening to his feed, while 1,814 people listened to other members of the landing expedition now leaving the station. 170.043, A0.3.

“Suited up, the suits are pretty flexible and light. Good heads-up display in the faceplate, and the helmet’s a clear bubble, at least all of it I can see, so it feels fine to have it on. The g feels just like on the ship, and the air outside is clear. Looks like it might be windy, although I don’t know why I say that. I guess I’m hearing it pass over the station buildings, maybe the rocks too. We’re far enough from the sea that it isn’t visible from here, but I hope we’ll be taking the car west until we get to the bay west of here and can have a look at the ocean. Andree, are you ready to go? All right, we’re all ready.”

Six of them were going out, to check on the robotic landers and the vehicles that were ready to drive. If the cars were good, they would take a drive west to the coast, five kilometers away.

“Ha-ha,” Euan said.

Freya settled down to listen to him and watch the view from his helmet cam.

“Now we’re outside, on the surface. Feels the same as in the ship, to tell the truth. Wow, the light is bright!”

He looked up, and the camera view of the sky flared with Tau Ceti’s light, then reduced it with filters and polarization to a round brilliance, big in the royal blue sky—

“Oh wow, I looked at it too long, I’ve got an afterimage, it’s red, or red and green both at once, swimming around. Hope I didn’t hurt my retinas there! I won’t do that again. I thought the faceplate would do better at filtering. It’s going away a little. Good. All right, lesson learned. Don’t look at the sun. Better to look at E, wow. What a giant round thing in the sky. Right now the lit part is a thick crescent, although I can see the dark side of it perfectly well too, I wonder if that comes through in the camera. I can see cloud patterns too, just as easy as can be. It looks like a big front is covering most of the dark part, sweeping into the part that’s lit. I’ve got a double shadow under me, although the shadow cast by E light is pretty dim—

“Wow, that was really a gust! It’s very windy. There’s nothing to show it here, the rocks are just sitting there, and I’m not seeing any dust blowing. The horizon is a long way off.”

He turned in a circle, and his audience saw flat ground in every direction. Bare black rock with a reddish tint, striated with shallowly etched lines. Like the burren, someone said, a part of Ireland where an ice cap had slid over flat rock and stripped anything loose away, leaving long, narrow troughs that crisscrossed the rock.

“It’s never this windy on the ship. Do these suits gauge wind speeds? Yes. Sixty-six kilometers an hour, it says. Wow. It’s enough to feel like you’re getting shoved by an invisible person. Kind of a rude person at that.”

He laughed. The others with him started laughing too, falling into each other, holding on to each other. Aside from their shenanigans, there were no visible signs of the wind. Cirrus clouds marked the sky, which was either a royal blue or a dark violet. The cirrus clouds seemed to hold steady in place, despite the wind. Atmospheric pressure at the surface was 736 millibars, so approximately equivalent to around 2,000 meters above sea level on Earth, though here they were only 34.6 meters above Aurora’s sea level.
The wind was stronger than any they had experienced in the ship by at least 20 kilometers per hour.