Aurora (28 page)

Surely the bad times had come again.

N
ews of the disaster spread through both rings within minutes, and after an initial uproar there fell on most of the biomes a deathly quiet. People didn’t know what to do. Some got on trams to Patagonia and then headed up Spoke One, talking loudly of charging those who had blown the dock with mass murder. Others got on trams, sometimes the same trams, intending to defend the people who they said had handled the incursion as best they could, saving everyone aboard from a fatal infection. Unsurprisingly, several fights broke out, and some trams braked to a halt, after which their occupants spilled onto the streets, fighting and calling around the rings for reinforcements.

“No!” Freya kept shouting through her tears, watching her screen as she hastily dressed to leave their apartment. “No! No! No!” She threw things at the walls as she banged around her bedroom, looking for her shoes.

“What are you going to do?” Badim asked her from the door.

“I don’t know! I’m going to kill them!”

“Freya, don’t. You need to have a plan. Everyone is upset, but look, the people who have died are dead, we can’t get them back. It’s happened. So now we have to think about what to do next.”

Freya was still looking at her wristpad. “No!” she shouted again.

“Please, Freya. Let’s think about what we can do now. You can’t just wade in there and join the fight. That’ll happen without you. We have to think what we can do to help.”

“But what
can
we do?”

She found her second shoe and jammed her foot into it, then sat there.

“I’m not sure,” Badim confessed. “It’s a mess, no doubt about it. But listen—what about Jochi?”

“What about him? He’s still down there!”

“I know. But he can’t stay there forever. And while everyone is caught up in the disaster here, I’m wondering if we could take advantage of that, and get him up here.”

“But they’ll kill him too!”

“Yes, if he tries to enter the ship. But if he takes a ferry up here, and stays in the ferry, he would be within reach. We could resupply him, talk to him. There’s a good chance he isn’t infected with this pathogen. After a while that will become clear, and we can move on from there.”

Freya had begun to nod. “Okay. Let’s talk to Aram. He’ll want to know about this and help.”

“That’s right.”

Badim began tapping at his wristpad.

Aram was very happy to work on a plan to rescue Jochi, and he agreed with Badim that until the chaotic fighting among the people in the spine came to an end, there was very little they could do to help in the ship. Already the crowds there were massed into groups shouting at each other, with young men occasionally coming to blows. These were ineffective and dangerous in the spine’s microgravity, but that didn’t stop the fighting. Aram and Badim were in touch with many friends on the various councils, and most felt they should close the spine to people, as it was so full of the critical machinery of the ship. But with angry people floating up and down the spine passageways, shouting and getting in fights, it was not obvious how to secure the situation in the first place. Security council members were beginning to occupy the spokes to try to prevent anyone else from getting into the spine, but this was not a complete solution. It was a dangerous situation.

In those fraught hours Aram and Badim and Freya called Jochi, and after repeated entreaties, he replied.

Apparently he was aware of the docking disaster. He sounded unlike himself, voice grim and low. “What.”

Aram explained their plan for him.

“They’ll kill me too,” he said.

Freya assured him that wouldn’t happen. Many aboard were outraged at what had happened and would be intent on protecting him. If he stayed in his ferry, no one aboard would try to destroy it. Her voice shook as she said this.

Aram said, “Your ferry would be both quarantine and sanctuary. We could keep it in place magnetically, so there would be no physical connection to the ship. But we could send you supplies, and keep you going until the situation here changes.”

“The situation will never change,” Jochi said.

“Nevertheless,” Aram said, “we can keep you alive, and see what happens.”

“Please, Jochi,” Freya added. “Just get in the ferry, and we’ll help you to get it launched. There are so many people here who want something good to happen. Do it for us.”

Long silence from the surface of Aurora.

“All right.”

He drove the car he had taken refuge in across the burren to the settlement’s launch facility. Looking at the empty pads and buildings on the screen in Badim and Freya’s kitchen, Aram said, “They already look like they’ve been abandoned for a million years.”

The launchers were still functional, however, and from the ship they helped Jochi to locate and fuel the smallest launch vehicle still on Aurora.

Fully suited, Jochi left his car and crossed to the ferry and climbed the steps into it, moving slowly and uncertainly through it to its bridge room. From the ship they tele-operated the push-cars and moved the ferry into the launch tube of the facility’s spiral launcher. This was slow and difficult waldo work. Once in the tube, however, what followed was largely automatic; the rising
spiral of the launch tube rotated on its base, which was also rotating, and the magnets in the tube pulled the ferry up the near vacuum in the tube, a pull augmented by the centrifugal force of the doubled spin of the tube and its base. By the time the ferry left the tube it was already moving at nearly escape velocity, its ablation plate heating rapidly, burning off five centimeters or more as the ferry’s rockets fired and it shot up through the atmosphere to its rendezvous with the ship. For over a minute Jochi had to lie there enduring 4 g’s; but his ferry was successfully launched.

Four hours later it was magnetically tethered to the ship, between Inner Ring A and the spine. By the time its magnetic docking was completed, news of Jochi’s arrival had already spread throughout the ship. Many were happy to hear it; others were outraged. The news only added to the turmoil in the spine, which had not died down and indeed continued unabated.

The only survivor of the Aurora landing party had nothing to say.

So there they were: in the ship, in orbit around Aurora, which was in orbit around Planet E, which orbited Tau Ceti, 11.88 light-years away from Sol and Earth. Now there were 1,997 people on board, ranging in age from one month to eighty-two years. One hundred twenty-seven people had perished, either on Aurora or in the ferry in the ship’s stern dock. Seventy-seven had died in the dock decompression.

Because the plan had been to relocate most of the human and animal population of the ship down to Aurora, they were now somewhat low in supplies of certain volatiles, rare earths, and metals, and to a certain extent, food. At the same time the ship was overfull of certain other substances, mainly salts and corroded metal surfaces. Various unequal inputs and outputs in the ecological cycles in the ship, the imbalances that Devi had called metabolic rifts, were now causing dysfunctions. At the same time, evolution of the many species on board continued to occur at
different rates, with the fastest speciations occurring at the viral and bacterial level, but at slower speeds in every phylum and order. Ineluctably, the occupants of the ship were growing apart. Of course every life-form in the little ecosystem was in a process of coevolution with all the rest, so they could only grow apart so far. As a supraorganism they would perforce remain a totality, but one that could become markedly less hospitable to certain of its elements, including its human component.

In other words, their only home was breaking down. They were not fully aware of this fact, possibly because they themselves were growing sick, as one aspect of their home’s breakdown. It was an interrelated process of disaggregation, which one night Aram named
codevolution
.

This was social as well as ecological. The confrontation in the spine continued, its floating crowds still angrily denouncing or defending what had occurred in the dock. In the midst of the arguments, a group of people barged into the dock’s operation room and tele-operated robots in the open chamber of the dock, moving all the bodies that were still floating free in the chamber back into the doomed ferry. When that grim task was accomplished, the ferry’s door was closed and the ferry ejected from the dock into space.

“We’re just making sure,” this group’s spokespersons announced. “This dock is now closed for good. We’re sealing it off. We’ll leave the outer door open, and presumably the vacuum will sterilize it, but we aren’t taking any chances with that. We’re sealing the inside doors. No more access. We’ll have to use the other docks now. No sense having such a disaster happen without making sure it keeps us safe.”

Ejecting the bodies of seventy-seven of their fellow citizens in a pilotless ferry was denounced as a callous act, a desecration of people whose surviving family and friends were all in the ship.
The dead had been integral members of the community until all this happened; now their bodies wouldn’t even be returned to the cycles to nourish the generations to come. In the fights still breaking out over control of the spine, these grievances were shouted out, and just as loudly denied.

Freya went up to the spine to see if she could do anything to defuse the situation. She floated up and down the passageways, pulling herself on the cleats and stopping abruptly to talk to people she knew. People saw her and shot through the air at her to tell her their views and see what she thought. Soon she moved in the center of a group that moved with her down the spine.

No one attacked her, although it often looked like it was about to happen. When people yanked to a halt before her, she asked people what they thought, as in the years of her wandering. If they asked her what she thought, she would say, “We’ve got to get past this! We’ve got to come together somehow, find a way forward—we don’t have any choice! We’re stuck with each other! How could you forget that? We’ve got to pull together!”

Then she would urge everyone to get out of the spine and back down into the biomes. It was dangerous up there, she pointed out. People were getting hurt, the ship could get hurt. “We shouldn’t be up here! The ferry is gone, those people are gone, there’s nothing more that can be done here. Nothing! So get out of here!”

Hours passed while she said things like this to people. Some of them nodded and descended the spokes to the rings. Down there the struggle over access to the spokes went on. There were not enough people committed to guarding all twelve spokes, and some were still being used to get up to the spine. Fights occurred in the spokes, and here, if people fell or were shoved off the stairs running up the inner walls of the spokes, they could fall to their deaths. In Spoke Five three young men died tangled in a single fall, and after that the shock of the blood on the floor seemed instrumental in getting that spoke closed to all traffic.

Meanwhile, up in the spine, the permanent closing of the fatal dock continued. The group in charge there applied a thick layer of sealants to its inner lock doors, then covered those with a layer of diamond spray sheathing. It was excessive, some kind of ritual action—an erasure of the scene of the crime, or an excision of infected flesh.