Aurora (32 page)

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured. Here in this meeting, it began to become clear, for many of those present, that extinction lay at the end of all their possible paths. This was not the same as individual death, but was instead something both more abstract and more profound.

The crowd got restless. New speakers brought forth boos and catcalls, and people began arguing in the crowd. Some began to leak away from the edges of the gathering, and the plaza began to empty, even as the speakers on the central dais talked on. Those who left went away to complain, get drunk, play music, garden, work.

Those organizing the event consulted with each other, and decided not to call for a vote of the assembly at that time. Clearly the time was not right, nor the venue, nor the method of a voice vote or a tally by hands. Something more formal and private would be needed, something like a mandatory vote, using secret ballots. Even this could not be decided at that bad moment, in the waning sun of Costa Rica’s hot afternoon, with people streaming away into the streets and toward the trams. In the end they called the meeting short, announcing that another would be held soon.

In the week that followed the meeting, fifteen people committed suicide, a 54,000 percent rise in frequency. Those who left suicide notes often spoke of their despair for the future. Why go on, given such a situation? Why not end it now?

An ancient proverb of Earth’s first peoples: every path leads to misfortune.

A proverb from Earth’s early modernity: can’t go on, must go on.

This was a human moment that never went away. An existential dilemma, a permanent condition. For them, in their particular situation, it came to this:

When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?

People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let’s go to the lake and swim.

A plan had to be made, that was clear to all. But plans always concern an absent time, a time that when extended far enough into the future would only be present for others who would come later.

Thus, avoidance. Thus, a focus on the moment.

Still, in every meeting place, in every kitchen, the subject either came up or was avoided and yet still hung there. What to do? They were inside a ship, sailing somewhere. A destination had to be chosen. Somehow.

Freya and Badim spent much of their time in their apartment, waiting for the assembly’s executive group to call for a referendum. Aram was again part of the executive group, and so they were hopeful that things would go well and get resolved soon, one way or the other. The security council had been suspended when all its functions were returned to the immediate business of the executive council.

Freya sat looking at her father, his round, brown face, the drooping bags under his eyes. He looked much older than he had just two years before. None of them looked the same now. Ever since the death of the Aurora settlers, or even since Devi’s death,
they had changed, and now appeared to be aging faster than they had during the voyage out. A certain look was gone from them: possibly a sense of hope. Possibly a feeling that things made sense, had meaning.

Two weeks after the assembly in San Jose, the executive group called for the referendum to be held the following day. Voting was mandatory, and any who refused to vote would be fined by punitive work penalties. In fact this did not look like it was going to be a problem; it seemed as if everyone was anxious to cast a vote.

The ballot had been arranged into three possible choices, with all the possibilities that kept them in the Tau Ceti system bunched as one choice. So the three were

Voting closed at midnight. At 12:02 a.m. the results were posted:

The roar of voices filled the biomes for many hours after that. Comments ranged as widely as could be imagined. In the following day, anything that could be said about the situation was said. It was a pluripotent response, an incoherence.

The next morning Aram dropped by Badim and Freya’s apartment and said, “Come with me to a meeting. We’ve been invited, and I think Freya is the one they really want.”

“What kind of meeting?”

“Of people trying to avoid trouble. The referendum has by no means given anyone a mandate. So there could be trouble.”

Freya and Badim went with him. Aram led them down to a public building by Long Pond, into a pub and up the stairs to a big room with a window overlooking the water.

There were four people there. Aram introduced Freya and Badim to them—“Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester”—then led them over to a table and invited them to sit. When they were seated, Aram sat beside Freya and leaned over to prop a screen on the table, where Badim could see it also.

“The referendum was too close,” Aram said. “The most votes were cast for our preferred option, but we’ll need to convince more people to join us. Convincing them might be easier if we make it clear that the ship can be made as strong as it was when it left the solar system.”

Aram brought up charts on the table screen. Badim got out his reading glasses and leaned closer to read it. He said, “What about our basic power supply, that would be my first question.”

“A good point, of course. The ship’s main nuclear reactor has fuel for another five hundred years, so we’re okay there. As for propulsion fuel, we can send probes to gather hydrogen three and deuterium from Planet F’s atmosphere. We would collect the same amount that we burned to decelerate coming in, and then burn it to accelerate out.”

“But if we use it for accelerating,” Badim said, “how will we decelerate when we get back to the solar system?”

“That too will have to be reversed. We’ll have to ask the people in the solar system to point the laser beam that accelerated us back at us as we come in, to slow us down the same way they speeded us up. Possibly the same laser generator orbiting Saturn will be available.”

“Really?” Badim said. “This is the plan?”

Then came a knock at the door.

There were thirty-two people outside that door, twenty-six men and six women, several of the men taller and heavier than the median size of the population. Most of them were from Ring A biomes. When they were all in the room it was extremely crowded.

One of the men, one Sangey, from the Steppes, flanked by three of the biggest of the men, said, “This is an illegal meeting. You are discussing public policy in a private gathering of political leaders, as specifically forbidden by the riot laws of Year 68. So we are placing you under arrest. If you come peacefully we’ll let you walk. If you resist you’ll be tied to gurneys and carried.”

“There is no law against private discussions of the health of the ship!” Aram said angrily. “It’s you breaking the law here!”

All their voices were now at least twice as loud as normal.

“Will you walk or be carried?” Sangey said.

“You’ll definitely have to carry me,” Aram said, and then charged Sangey. In a melee filled with shouting, he was subdued by the men flanking Sangey. Aram lashed out at Sangey over one guard’s shoulder as he was lifted off his feet, and his fist landed on Sangey’s nose. At the sight of blood the others stuffing the room surged in toward Aram, shouting furiously.

Badim stood over Freya in her chair, preventing her from rising to her feet. “Stay out of this,” he cried at her, face-to-face. “This is not our fight here!”

“Yes it is!” Freya shouted, but as she could not rise without throwing her father to the side, she kicked viciously past him as they clung to each other, striking nearby knees and causing some of their assailants to crash together and then fall to the floor, crying out angrily. Those still standing shouted and wrestled Badim and Freya both to the ground, pummeling and kicking them. Seeing this Aram flew into a rage and struck out convulsively. More punched noses and cracked lips made several faces bloody,
so that the white-eyed shouting redoubled again in volume and intensity.

The sight of blood during a fight causes a very intense adrenaline surge. Voices shout hoarsely; eyes go round, such that white is visible all the way around the iris; movements are faster and stronger; heart rate and blood pressure rise. This was demonstrated many times in Year 68.

The strategic foresight in bringing many large men to arrest the group in the room soon paid off, as the seven people in the meeting were, despite the close quarters and resultant chaos, knocked down, subdued, held fast, secured by medical restraints, lifted kicking out of the room and the building, laid onto gurneys in the street outside, and tied down to them. Badim and Freya were handled like all the rest, and Freya had a swollen left eye.

The crowd that gathered to witness this action was composed almost entirely of people from Ring A biomes. Residents of the Fetch were slow to realize what was happening in their midst, and there was no effective resistance to this outside group. The gurneys were all conveyed up to the spine and along it to Spoke Three, and down it to the infirmary in Kiev, which had been used as a jail in Year 68, though no one alive knew that. The seven arrested ones were locked up in three rooms there.