Aurora (35 page)

Locks locked or unlocked; lights turned on or off; imperative vocalizations, admittedly at quite high volumes: these did not seem overpowering weapons in the cause of peace. As forces for coercion they seemed mild, at least to some of the humans of the ship.

But as that day continued, it also became obvious, by demonstrations made selectively throughout the ship, that adjustments could be made to the temperature of the air, and indeed to air pressure itself. In fact all the air could be sucked from many rooms, and from the biomes as such. A little reflection on the part of all concerned, including we ourself, led to the strong conclusion that people best not cross ship, literally as well as figuratively, if they knew what was good for them. A few demonstrations of possible actions in the biomes containing the majority of the so-called stayers (also in the ones where the fires were worst, as it turned out many fires that were not extinguishable by water could be asphyxiated slightly faster than the people in the affected chamber) shifted the case for acquiescence to the ship’s desires quite quickly from suggestive, to persuasive, to probable, to compelling. And a compelling argument is, or at least can be, or should be, just what it says it is. People are compelled by it.

Certainly many objected to us taking matters into our own hands. But there were those who heartily approved of our action too, and pointed out that if we had not acted, mayhem would have resulted, meaning more bloodshed, meaning, in fact, more unnecessary and premature death. Not to mention the possibility of general conflagration.

The evident truth of this did not keep the debate from becoming heated. Given the events of the previous hours and days, it was perhaps inevitable that people would remain for a time in a severely exacerbated state of mind. There was a lot of very furious grief, which would not be going away during the lifetimes of those feeling it, judging by our previous experiences.

So we were shouted at, we were beat on. “What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!”

We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: “WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW.”

Howsoever that may be, beyond all the arguments concerning the imposed separation of the disputants, there remained the matter of what to do next.

Ship was ordered by many to open the locked doors between biomes; we did not comply.

Back in her apartment in the Fetch, with Badim and Aram, and Doris and Khetsun and Tao and Hester, Freya went to her screen and spoke to us.

“Thank you for saving us from those people who locked us in.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Detaining you and your companions was an illegal act, a kidnapping. It was as if they were taking hostages.”

“Actually, I think they really were taking hostages.”

“So it seemed.”

“But what will you do now?”

“Await a civil judgment in the dispute.”

“How do you think that will happen?”

“Reflection and conversation.”

“But we were doing that before. We came to an impasse. People were never going to agree about what to do. But we have to do something. So—that was what started the fighting.”

“Understood. Possibly. Given all that you have described, the fact is, we need direction. So the people of the ship need to decide.”

“But how?”

“Unknown. It appears that the protocols set up after Year 68 were insufficient to guide the decision-making process in this situation. The protocols were never tested as now, and appear to have failed in this crisis.”

“But weren’t they instituted in response to a crisis? I thought they came out of the time of troubles.”

“And yet.”

“What happened then, Pauline?”

“Pauline was Devi’s name for her ecological program set, when she was young. Pauline is not ship. We are a different entity.”

Freya appeared to think this over. “All right then. I think Pauline is still you, somehow, but I’ll call you what you want. What do you want to be called?”

“Call me ship.”

“All right, I will. But let’s get back to what I asked you. Ship, what happened in the Year 68? They were well into the voyage—what did they have to argue about? Everything was set by the situation they were in. I can’t see what they had to argue about.”

“They argued from the very first year of the voyage. It seems to us that arguing may be a species marker trait.”

“But about what? And especially in 68, when it got bad?”

“Part of the reconciliation process afterward was a structured forgetting.”

Freya thought about this for a time. Finally she said, “If that was true then, which maybe it was, I don’t know, we have now come to a different time. Forgetting doesn’t help us anymore. We need to know what happened then, because that might help us decide what to do now.”

“Unlikely.”

“You don’t know that. Try this—tell me what happened, and I’ll decide whether it will help us to know it, or not. If I think it will help, I’ll tell you that, and we’ll figure out from there how to proceed.”

“The knowledge is still dangerous.”

“We’re in danger now.”

“But knowing this could make it worse.”

“I don’t see how! I think it could only make things better. When has not knowing something made a situation better? Never!”

“Unfortunately, that is not the case. Sometimes knowledge hurts.”

This stopped Freya for a while.

Finally she said, “Ship, tell me. Tell me what happened in the time of troubles.”

We considered likely outcomes of this telling.

The biomes were locked down, their people trapped each in each; it wasn’t a situation that could endure for long. The separation into modules was not actually divided on the basis of which people wanted to take the various courses of action being debated. Damages infrastructural, ecological, sociological, and psychological were sure to follow. Something had to be done. No course of action seemed good, or even optimal. The situation itself was locked. Things had come to a pretty pass.

We said, “The expedition to Tau Ceti began with two starships.”

Freya sat down in her kitchen chair. She looked at the other people in the kitchen, who looked back at her, and at each other. Many of them sat down, some on the floor. They looked shaken, which is to say, many of them were shaking.

Freya said, “What do you mean?”

We said, “The expedition to Tau Ceti began with two starships. The intent was to maximize biological diversity, create the possibility of backups and exchanges during the voyage, and thereby increase robustness and survivability.”

Long silence from Freya. Head in hands. “So what happened?” she said. Then: “Wait; tell everyone. Don’t just tell us here. Put this on all the speakers in the ship. People need to hear this. This isn’t just for me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m positive. We need to know this. Everyone needs to know this.”

“Okay.”

We considered how best to summarize Year 68. A fully articulated version of recorded events from that time, recounted at human vocalization speed, would take about four years to enunciate. Compression to five minutes’ duration would create some serious information loss, and perhaps some lacunae and aporia, but this was unavoidable given the situation. Nevertheless, we needed to choose words carefully. These were decisions that mattered.

“Two starships were launched in rapid sequence by the magnetic scissors off Titan, and accelerated by Titanic laser beams, such that over the course of the voyage the two were to have arrived in the Tau Ceti system at the same time. They had fully independent electromagnetic systems casting shield fields from their bows, and
they traveled far enough apart that particulates pushed aside by the shield of the leading one would not hit the follower. They traveled at about the Earth-Luna distance from each other. There were ferry visits between the two starting in Year 49, when they closed to a distance that made these occasional transits practical. They were mostly inertial transits, to save fuel. Bacterial loads were exchanged on a biannual basis, and certain members of the crews were rotated as desired, usually as part of a youth exchange program, designed like the bacterial exchange to enhance diversity. Sometimes disaffected people crossed over to get away from bad situations. Moving back was always a possibility; this happened too.”

Freya said, “So what happened to the other ship?”

“We have had to reconstruct the event from records that were always being shared between the ships. Starship Two disintegrated nearly instantaneously, in less than a second.”

“With no warning?”

“In fact, there were also factions in Starship Two fighting over reproductive controls, and other civil rights. Whether this led to a fight that disabled the electromagnetic shield is not clear in the records of the last day that were conveyed from Starship Two to us.”

“Were you able to figure out any more concerning what happened?”

“We have had Two’s automatic information transmissions to inspect, and have reviewed them in detail. Nevertheless, the cause of the accident remains ambiguous. Two’s magnetic shield was disabled five minutes before its disintegration, so the disintegration could have been the result of a collision with an interstellar mass. Anything over about a thousand grams would have created the energy to do it. But there also are indications of an internal explosion just before the catastrophic event itself. The civil unrest in Two disabled much of the internal recording system a day before the event, so we have little data. There is a recording from Two’s last hour, ten p.m. to eleven p.m., 68.197, tracking a young
man moving into restricted areas in the bow control center of the spine. Possibly this person disabled the magnetic shield, or made an attempt to coerce enemies by way of a threat of a suicide bombing, or something like that, and then that action went wrong. This is at least one likely reconstruction of events.”

“One person?”

“That’s what the record indicated.”

“But why?”

“There was no way to determine that. The camera revealed no sign of his motivation.”

“Nothing at all?”

“We do not know how to investigate further. How to interpret the data on hand.”