Aurora (41 page)

Good, the backers would say. Happy for you. You’ll have no need for our part of this old starship, refurbished and almost ready to go. You’ll have all the ferries and orbiters and landers and launchers you could ever want, and Ring A, altered to your convenience. Printers printing printers. So: time to say good-bye. Because we’re going home.

The time came. 190.066.

By this time, the stayers spent most of their time on Iris, and when they came back up to orbit, they were unsteady on their feet in 1 g (adjusted up from .83 g); they bounced in it. They said Iris’s 1.23 g was fine. Made them feel grounded and solid.

Most of them did not return to space for the starship’s departure; they had said their good-byes already, made their break into their new lives. They did not even know the people going back very well anymore.

But some came up to say good-bye. They had relatives who were leaving, people to see one last time. They wanted to say good-bye, farewell.

There was one last gathering in the plaza of San Jose, scene of so many meetings, so much trauma.

They mingled. Speeches were made. People hugged. Tears
were shed. They would never see each other again. It was as if each group were dying to the other.

Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad. So it appeared now.

Freya wandered the crowd shaking hands, hugging people, nodding at people. She did not shed tears. “Good luck to you,” she said. “And good luck to us.”

She came upon Speller, and they stopped and faced each other. Slowly they reached out and held each other’s hands, as if forming a bridge between them, or a barrier. As they conversed, their clenched hands turned white between them. Neither of them shed tears.

“So you’re really going to go?” Speller asked. “I still can’t believe it.”

“Yes. And you’re really going to stay?”

“Yes.”

“But what about zoo devolution? How will you get around that?”

Speller looked around briefly at Costa Rica. “It’s one zoo or another, as far as I can tell. And, you know. Since you’ve got to go sometime, I figure you might as well do something with your time. So, we’ll try to finesse the problem. Figure out a way to get something going here. Life is robust. So we’ll see if we can get past the choke point and make it last. It’ll either work or it won’t, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Either way, you’re dead after a while. So, might as well try.”

Freya shook her head. She didn’t say anything.

Speller regarded her. “You don’t think it will work.”

Freya shook her head again.

Speller shrugged. “You’re in the same boat, you know. The same old boat.”

“Maybe so.”

“We just barely got it here. If it weren’t for your mom, we might not even have made the last few years.”

“But we did. So with the same stuff to start with, we should be able to get back.”

“Your great-great-great-grandchildren, you mean.”

“Yes, of course. That’s all right. Just so long as someone makes it.”

Again they regarded each other in silence.

Speller said, “So it’s good, really. This split, I mean. If we manage it here, then we’ve got a foothold. Humanity in the stars. The first step out. And if we die out here, and you make it back, someone has made it out of this situation alive. And if we both survive, all good. If either one succeeds, then someone has survived, one way or the other. If we both go down, we gave it our best. We tried to survive every way we could think of.”

“Yes.” Freya smiled a little. “I’ll miss you. I’ll miss the way you think about things. I will.”

“We can write each other letters. People used to do that.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“I suppose. Yes, of course. Let’s write.”

And together they scratched onto the flagstones of the plaza, the traditional saying for this moment, whenever it came to people parting ways, people who cared for each other:

Wherever you go, there we are.

Now the time had come for the stayers to leave the ship, enter their ferry, descend to Iris. As only a few score had come up to say good-bye, it was possible for them all to leave together.

A silence descended over them. The stayers looked back at the backers, as they passed through the lock door to the ferry; or didn’t. Some waved, other hunched their heads. Weeping or not.

Those who remained stood and watched, weeping or not. A peaceable schism was being enacted. It was an unusual achievement, as far as we could judge from the historical record; and maybe it was partly our achievement; but it appeared that it came at the cost of some kind of pain, a quite considerable pain, social rather than physical, and yet fully felt, quite real. Social animals, in distress. This was what we saw at this moment of parting. Divorce. A successful failure.

When Speller came to the lock door and looked back, Freya raised her hand and waved good-bye. It was the same wave as the one she had made when they were youths, and she had left Olympia for the first time. The same gesture, separated by thirty years. A persistence of bodily memory. Whether Speller remembered it or not was not possible to determine.

Soon the stayers were in their ferry, and the ferry detached and began its descent to Iris.

Those remaining in the ship were left on their own. They looked around at each other. Almost everyone aboard was in the plaza: 727 people, with a few elsewhere in the ship maintaining various functions, or avoiding the parting of the ways. It was quite visible now, how much smaller a population the ship now had. Of course ship itself was smaller now, with Ring A and about a third of the spine removed, and orbiting now on the other side of Iris.

Some looked heartened in this moment of schism, others frightened. There was a general silence. A new moment in history had come on them. It was time to head home.

We began burning the new stock of fuel, and soon left the orbit of Iris, left F’s gravity well; not that long after, we left the Tau Ceti system. Sol was a small yellow star in the constellation Boötes.

As the communications feed from the solar system had never ceased, it was straightforward to lock on to this signal and use it to calculate our proper course back, at an angle that would aim us
where Sol would be in two centuries. The resupply of deuterium and helium 3 would burn at a rate that would accelerate the ship for twenty years, at which point we would be moving toward Sol at one-tenth the speed of light, just as we had left it. Most of the fuel would then have been burned, but we would save some for maneuvering when we closed in on our destination.

We transmitted a message from our people, sent back to Sol:

We would hear back in a little under twenty-four years, therefore around our year 214, depending, of course, on how quickly our correspondents or interlocutors replied.

Meanwhile, it was time to accelerate.

O
n the first night after ignition, all but thirty-three of the 727 aboard the ship gathered in the Pampas, just outside Plata, and danced around a bonfire. The fire was a one-time indulgence, and mostly burned clean gases. Laughter, drumming, and dancing, the glossy reflective brilliance in their firelit eyes: they were off again! And back to Earth at that! It was as if they were drunk. Indeed many of them were drunk. Some of those who were not drunk remarked that the fire reminded them of the time of rioting. Not everyone approved of it.

In the weeks that followed there were many signs of happiness and even exhilaration as the ship accelerated out of the Tau Ceti system. The accelerant fuel would burn until the ship was moving at its target interstellar speed of .1
c
. During these first months the entire 727 members of the crew often gathered on the pampas for festivals. In these their carnival spirits were unleashed again, even though there were no more bonfires. Average sleep time dropped by eighty-four minutes a night. By the time the ship had cleared Tau Ceti’s thick Oort cloud, 128 of the 204 women of childbearing age were pregnant. All twelve biomes of their remaining ring were being tended with a devotional intensity. People spoke of a quiet euphoria, a sense of purpose. They were returning to a home they had never seen, but their nostalgia was at the cellular level, they said, encoded in their genome. Which may even have been true, in some sense more than metaphorical.

Freya and Badim settled back into their apartment in the Fetch, behind the corniche at the end of Long Pond, with Aram next door. They did not go sailing as in the days of Freya’s childhood, but lived in a quiet style, working in the Fetch’s medical clinic. Some of the doctors there were unhappy that so many
women were going to have children around the same time. “It’s the only normal situation where either patient could die,” Badim explained to Freya. She herself was nearly past childbearing age, something she sometimes regretted. Badim told her she was the parent of everyone aboard, that that would have to be enough for her. She did not respond to this.

In any case, the issue of reproductive regulation once again came to everyone’s attention. At this point they could afford to increase their population, and possibly needed to, in order to fulfill all the jobs necessary to keep their society functioning through the decades and generations to come. Farming, education, medicine, ecology, engineering: all these and more were crucial occupations. No one aboard felt they could hold the population much below a thousand and still get the jobs done. But not too fast! the doctors said.

During this year of pregnancy they reestablished their governance system by holding town meetings in every biome, and gathering a new assembly and executive council, which Freya was asked to join, it seemed to her as a kind of ceremonial figure. She was forty-six years old.

Soon, analysis of their situation caused them to begin to farm intensively throughout all the biomes, to rebuild their food reserves. They agreed that all the young people should attend school full-time, and the students were given the aptitude tests with a rigor that the adults on board had never faced. A large team attended to the communication feed from Earth, recording and studying everything that these contained. This was perhaps premature, as significant historical and even biophysical changes would very likely occur in the 170 years before they got back, and no one in the ship would be alive when the ship reentered the solar system. Nevertheless, interest was high.

What they could gather concerning events in the solar system gave them reasons to worry. In the time the feed had been sent out, almost twelve years before, in what had been the common
era year 2733, political turmoil appeared to be more or less continuous. Their feed did not include any basic system-wide background data, so the facts of the situation had to be inferred from the various strands of the feed, but it looked certain that on Earth the sea level was many meters higher than it had been when their ship had started its voyage, and the carbon dioxide level in Earth’s atmosphere was around 600 parts per million, having been brought down significantly from the time the ship had left, when it had been close to 1,000 ppm. That suggested carbon drawdown efforts, and there were sulfur dioxide distributions over the north polar region of Earth, indicating geoengineering was being attempted. Several hundred names for Terran nations had been collated from the news feed, and yet the list did not seem complete. There were many scientific stations on Mars, also in the asteroids; thousands of asteroids had been hollowed out and made into little spinning terraria. There were also many stations and even tented cities on the larger Jovian and Saturnian moons—all but Io, not surprising given its radiation levels. There was a mobile city on Mercury, rolling always westward to stay in the dawn terminator. Luna, though dotted by stations and tented cities, and the source of many of the information feeds sent to the ship, was not being terraformed. Some in the ship declared that very little had advanced in the solar system during the time the ship had been gone, and no one had a ready explanation for this plateauing of effort or achievement, if indeed that was what it was. Of course there was the standard S-curve of the logistic function, charting the speed of growth seen in so many physical phenomena; whether human history also conformed to this pattern of diminishing returns, no one could say. In short, no one could analyze the feed from Earth and explain what was going on there. Theories in the ship were widespread, but really the feeds constituted only about 8.5 gigabytes of data per day, so the information stream was thin. It left a lot of room for speculation.

As we became more aware of this uncertainty about the situation in the solar system, we wondered if we should halt the acceleration of the ship a bit earlier than had been planned, to save some fuel for later.

Birth weights for the new generation were a bit lower than the average established on the voyage out, and there was a higher percentage of stillbirths and problem births, and birth defects. The medical team couldn’t explain any of this, and some of them said there was no explanation, that the sample size was too small for it to be statistically significant. But it was emotionally significant, and there were a lot of upset new parents, and this distress moved out through the entire population by a kind of conversational or emotional osmosis. There was no difficulty in detecting a change in mood. People were apprehensive. Average blood pressure, heart rate, sleeping time: all shifted in the direction of increased stress, of increased apprehension and fear.

“Why is it happening?” people asked. “What’s different?”

They often asked Freya, as if, she said to Badim, she could channel Devi and give them an answer. Inasmuch as she had none of Devi’s flair for forensic investigation, she could only reply, “We need to find out.” This she knew Devi would have said. After that of course came the moment when things got harder, the moment when Devi in her time had so often led the way. There was no one like Devi alive in the ship now, they said to each other. This we could confirm unequivocally, though we did not.

For a period of about three months they experienced a series of electrical shorts in the tropical biomes, and teams went in search of the problem but found nothing, until they went up into the spine, where, inside an electrical cabinet the size of a closet, which
was always kept locked to prevent tampering and sabotage, they found a floating water droplet over a meter in circumference, its water white with unidentified bacterial life. On examination the bacteria turned out to be a form of
Geobacter,
a kind of bacteria that in large measure fed directly on electrons. After further investigation, strands of this strain of
Geobacter
were found elsewhere in the electrical systems of the ship.

General consternation. Static electricity was unavoidable in the ship, and in the microgravity of the spine, fields of static electricity could condense humidity out of the air and create concentrations of water, and then keep floating water drops from touching any sidewalls, until they grew to sizes like this one. And there was no easy way for the ship to be provided with sensors that would detect such water drops, which could gather in many so-called dead places in the spine, and even in functioning spaces like this electrical cabinet. Then also, as there were thin films of bacteria (also viruses and archaea) covering every surface in the ship, bacterial growths were almost sure to follow in any water droplets that condensed.

After the trauma on Aurora, many were made nervous by this reminder that microflora and -fauna were everywhere among them. The ship had always been stuffed with such life-forms, of course, and all the larger animal bodies as well; any analogy to Aurora was a false one. But the people in the ship lived by so many highly questionable analogies, it was no doubt difficult for them to know where to draw the line (so to speak).

Freya was asked to join a task force assembled to go through the ship looking for any signs of condensation, also any resulting concentrations of mold, fungus, and bacteria.

“The invitation is really to Devi,” Freya said to Badim.

He agreed, but also urged her to join the study.

The results of their investigation disturbed them. The ship was indeed alive with microbial life, as everyone had known, but without regarding it as a problem; it was just the way things were
inside any structure that included any life at all. Now, however, they had seen the problems in the newborns, and their crop yields were coming up consistently smaller than during the voyage out, even though the same plants were receiving the same light and nutrients. Birth weights were down in all the animals aboard, while miscarriages were up. So the living nature of the ship’s interior became something ominous and foreboding.

“Look, it’s always been this way,” Freya reminded the executive council when the task force met with the council to discuss it. “There’s no way to sterilize the ship when it’s a set of biomes. It’s alive, that’s all.”

No one could disagree. Howbeit their uneasiness, they simply had to live in a rich broth of bacteria, in a cumulative microgenome that was so much larger than their own genome that it was beyond a complete reckoning, especially as it was fluid and always changing.

But some bacteria were harmful. Same with archaea, fungi, viruses, prions, viris, and v’s. They needed to make distinctions, as part of their ability to keep a healthy biosphere going. Some pathogens had to be tolerated, others had to be killed, if possible; but any attempt to kill bacteria meant that resistant surviving strains of that species would become more dominant and more resistant, in the usual way of things at the micro levels of life, or at all levels of life perhaps.

Dangerous to try to kill things, Freya reminded them. She knew full well, with a sinking sense that she was remembering her earliest memories, that Devi had believed that trying to kill any invasive species usually created more problems than it solved. A destabilized microbiome often caused more harm than anything a balanced microbiome could inflict. Better, therefore, to try to balance things with the least amount of intrusion. Subtle touches, all designed to finesse things for balance. Balance was the crucial thing. Teeter-totters, gently teeter-tottering up and down. Devi
had even been an advocate of everyone getting an inoculation of helmiths, meaning ringworms, to give them better resistance to such parasites later. She had been a bit fanatical in that regard, as in so many.

The council and everyone else agreed with Freya on this matter; it was the common wisdom. But they were beginning to suffer problems none of them had seen before. The oldest person aboard was only seventy-eight years old. Median age was thirty-two. None of them had seen all that much in their short lives, and the complex of problems that Aram called zoo devolution was new to them, if not in the abstract, then in the lived experience.

As teams continued to inspect the ship, they found that some of the bacteria living around weld points, and in the gaps and cracks between walls and components, were eating away at the physical substrates of the ship. The corrosion was not chemical but biochemical. As they investigated further they found that all the ship’s walls, windows, framing, gears, and glues had been altered by bacteria, first chemically and then physically and mechanically, in that their function was becoming impaired. Protozoa and amoeba, bacteria and archaea were found on the gaskets around windows and lock doors, also on the components of spacesuits, and in cable insulation, and in the interior panels and chips of the electrical systems, including the computers. Electrical components were often warm, and there was moisture in the air. They were finding microorganisms that lived on and degraded carbon steel, even stainless steel. And anywhere two different kinds of materials met, the microbial life living in the meeting points of these materials created galvanic circuits, which over time corroded both materials. Pitted metal; etched glass; eaten, digested, and excreted plastics: everything had stiffened and disintegrated right in place, without moving except under the forces of the centrifugal rotation of the ship, and the pressure of the ship’s acceleration. Little creatures numbering in the quadrillions or quintillions—it
was impossible to get a good estimate, much less a real count—all grew, and ate, and died, and were born and grew again, and ate again. They were eating the ship.