Aurora (27 page)

This sounded much like Devi, and Freya put her head in her hands.

Later:

“Although it is a very pretty world. It would have been nice.”

Later:

“Maybe that’s why we’ve never heard a peep from anywhere. It’s not just that the universe is too big. Which it is. That’s the main reason. But then also, life is a planetary thing. It begins on a planet and is part of that planet. It’s something that water planets do, maybe. But it develops to live where it is. So it can only live there, because it evolved to live there. That’s its home. So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You’ll never hear back. So that’s my answer to the paradox. You can call it Euan’s Answer.”

Later:

“So, of course, every once in a while some particularly stupid form of life will try to break out and move away from its home star. I’m sure it happens. I mean, here we are. We did it ourselves. But it doesn’t work, and the life left living learns the lesson, and stops trying such a stupid thing.”

Later:

“Maybe some of them even make it back home. Hey—if I were you, Freya? I would try to get back home.”

Later:

“Maybe.”

Later, still walking south, Euan passed a ravine cleaving the sea cliff. The cliff was a little lower to each side of this cleft, and the cleft ran back and up into the burren at a steep angle, such that there was a clattering creek running down it, which pooled in the sand of the beach, under the cliffs to each side. Where the pool was closest to the sea, a shallow broad flow of water cut through wet sand and poured down to the swirling foam.

The wind whistled down the cleft. Higher up the cleft narrowed, and the walls to each side steepened, looked impassable. Rather than climb up there and investigate, Euan walked right through the beach stream, splashing fearlessly, though at its middle it was knee deep. His fever was quite high at this point. The numbers from his suit were there at the bottom of his screen, glowing red.

Freya hunched over, arms across her stomach, in a position she had often taken when Devi had been ill. She got up and went to their kitchen and got some crackers to eat. She chomped on the crackers, drank a glass of water. She inspected the water in her glass, swallowed some more of it, returned to her chair and the screen.

Euan continued south and came to a broader part of the beach, with some wind-sculpted dunes sheltered under the cliff. He scrambled to the top of the tallest dune. Tau Ceti was a blaze too bright to look at, pouring its light over the top of the cliff and onto the ocean. Euan sat down.

“Nice,” he said.

The wind was still at his back. As one looked down at the waves, it was clear that the wind held them up for a time as they tried to break; they swept in toward the land, then reared up and hung there with a vertical face as they moved onshore, trying to fall but getting held up by the wind; then finally the steepest section would pitch down in a roiling burst of white spray, some of which whiteness launched upward and was caught on the wind and hurled back over the wall of white water. Quick fat ehukai crossed these tails of spray.

“I’m feeling hot,” Euan said. He walked off the edge of the dune and glissaded down the sand facing the sea.

Freya clutched her stomach under both forearms, put her mouth down on the back of one fist.

Euan looked out at the waves for a long time. The dark gray strand between beach pool and ocean was crosshatched with black sand streaks, far to each side of the shallow runnel of water pouring down into the breakers.

Freya watched him silently. His fever was really very high.

He lay down on the sand. His helmet cam now mostly showed the sand under him, rumpled and granular, flecked with streamers of foam. Broken waves swept up the strand, stalled, retreated in a pebbly rush, leaving a line of foam. The water hissed and grumbled, and occasionally waves offshore cracked dully. Tau Ceti had separated from the sea cliff now, and all the water between the beach and the horizon was a bouncing mass of blue and green. The broken waves were an intense tumbling white. The waves as they were about to break turned translucent. Euan sounded like he might be asleep. Freya herself nodded over her arms, put her forehead on the table.

Much later something caused her to raise her head. She watched as Euan stood up.

“I’m hot,” he croaked. “Really hot. I guess it’s got me.”

He dug around in his little backpack.

“Well, I’m out of food anyway. Water too.”

He tapped away at his wristpad. There was a whirring noise.

“There you go,” he said. “Now I can drink from the stream. From the pool here too, I’m sure. It must be mostly fresh.”

“Euan,” Freya croaked. “Euan, please.”

“Freya,” he replied. “Please yourself. Look, I want you to turn your screen off.”

“Euan—”

“Turn your screen off. Wait, I guess I can do it myself from here.” He tapped again at his wristpad. Freya’s screen went dark.

“Euan.”

“It’s all right,” he said out of the dark screen. “I’m done for. But we’re all done for sometime. At least I’m in a beautiful place. I like this beach. I’m going to go for a swim now.”

“Euan.”

“It’s all right. Turn your sound off too. Turn it down anyway. These waves are loud. Wow, this water is cold. That’s good, eh? Colder the better.”

Water sounds enveloped his voice. He was saying “Ah, aah,” as if getting into a bath that was too hot. Or too cold.

Freya held her hands over her mouth.

The watery sounds got louder and louder.

“Aah. Okay, big wave coming! I’m going to ride it! I’m going to stay under if I can! Freya! I love you!”

After that there were only water sounds.

Several of the people in Hvalsey disappeared into the surrounding countryside. Some went off in silence, suit GPSs disabled; others stayed in communication with their friends on the ship. A few broadcast their ends to anyone who cared to watch and listen. Jochi stayed in his car and refused to speak to anyone, even Aram, who grew silent himself.

Then all of the Hvalsey survivors except for Jochi ignored instructions from the ship to stay on Aurora and prepped one of the ferries to return them to orbit. Doing this without help from the ship’s ferry technicians was difficult, but they looked up what they had to know in the computers they had, and fueled the little craft with liquid oxygen and crammed into the ferry, and used the spiral sling and rocket boost to achieve a rendezvous with the ship in its orbit.

As they had been forbidden reentry into the ship, and told that no quarantine was going to last long enough for them to be judged safe to reenter, it was an awkward question what to do when their ferry arrived to dock with the ship. Some in the ship said that if those in the ferry survived for a certain period of time, say a year (some said ten), then it would be obvious that they were not vectors for the pathogen, and could be allowed to reenter. Others disagreed with that. When the committee that was hastily convened by the executive council and charged with making the decision announced that they did not think there was any
quarantine period long enough to prove the settlers were safe, many were relieved to hear it; others loudly disagreed. But the question still remained what to do about the landing party, now approaching the ship in its orbit.

The emergency committee spoke to the Greenlanders by radio, telling them to keep a physical distance from the ship, to remain near it as a kind of small satellite of it. The Greenlanders agreed to that, at first; but when they were running out of food, water, and air, and resupplies did not appear when promised from the ship, due to a technical problem with the ferry being used for the task, as was explained to them, they nevertheless powered their ferry in and approached the main lock in the ferry dock, at the stern end of the spine. From there they proposed to occupy Inner Ring A’s rooms at Spoke One, with the rooms permanently sealed off from the spine and the biomes. They would remain in those rooms and become as self-sufficient as possible, for as long a quarantine period as the people on the ship required. After that the question of reintegration could be reconsidered, and if people on the ship had become comfortable with the idea, the settlers might be able to rejoin the larger life of the ship.

After a brief meeting, permission to pursue this plan was expressly denied by the committee, as representing too much of a danger of infection to all the life on the ship. A small crowd of people, mostly men from Patagonia and Labrador, the two biomes at the end of Spoke One, gathered outside the ferry dock’s lock door and exhorted each other to resist any incursion by what they called the infected party. Others were alarmed when they saw on screens that this group was gathering, and some of them began to get on the trams and head for the spine to intervene in some poorly defined manner. In Labrador and the Prairie the tram stops began to fill with people, many angrily arguing with other groups they
ran into. Fights broke out, and some young men levered the tram tracks off their piste in the Prairie, stopping traffic from moving around Ring B.

Hanging just outside the docking port, the settlers in their ferry reported that overcrowding in their little vehicle had caused something in it to malfunction in such a way that they were quickly running out of breathable air, and they were therefore going to enter the ship’s dock as proposed. They warned those in the ship that they were coming in, and the people inside the dock’s main lock door told them not to do it. People on both sides were shouting angrily now. Then lights on the operations console inside the dock showed that the settlers were coming in, and at that point some of the young men inside the operations room rushed the security council members there operating the lock, knocking them down and taking over the console. By now the shouting was such that no one could understand anyone else. The ferry entered the docking port, which automatically secured it in position. The outer door of the dock closed, the dock was aerated, and the dock’s entry walktube extended to connect the ferry hatch to the inner lock door, all automatically. The settlers in the ferry opened their hatch and began to leave the ferry by way of the walktube, but at the same time, the people now in charge of the dock’s operations console locked the inner lock door and opened the outer lock door, which in three seconds catastrophically flushed the dock and the walktube and the opened ferry of their air. All the seventy-two people in the ferry and walktube then died of decompression effects.