Aurora (42 page)

Life is part of the necessary matrix of life, so the ship had to be alive. And so the ship was getting eaten. Which meant that in some respects, the ship was sick.

The weekly meetings of the bacterial task force were similar to the ones Freya had attended as a child, when Devi had plopped her in the corner with some blocks, or paper and pens. Now she sat at the big table, but with about as little to say as when she was a girl. The plant pathologists spoke, the microbiologists spoke, the ecologists spoke. Freya listened and nodded, looking from face to face.

“The organisms in that big water droplet are mostly
Geobacter
and fungi, but there’s also a prion in there that no one has ever seen on the ship, one that wasn’t there in the beginning.”

“Well, but wait. You mean it wasn’t known about in the beginning. No one saw it. But it had to be there. No way it evolved here from some kind of precursor, not in the time since this ship was built.”

“No? Are you sure?”

The microbiologists discussed this for a while. “Lots of things have had time enough to evolve quite a bit,” one of them said. “I mean that’s our problem, right? The bacteria, the fungi, maybe the archaea, they’re all evolving at faster rates than we are. All organisms evolve at different rates. So discrepancies are growing, because it isn’t a big enough ecosystem for coevolution to be able to bring everything into balance. That’s what Aram has been saying all along.”

Aram was brought into the next meeting to discuss this. “It’s true,” he said. “But I agree that this prion is unlikely to have evolved in the ship. I think it’s just another stowaway, marooned out here with the rest of us. It’s just that now we’ve seen it.”

“And is it poisonous?” Freya asked. “Will it kill us?”

“Well, maybe. Sure. I mean, you don’t want it inside you. That’s the thing about prions.”

“Are you sure it couldn’t have evolved here from some precursor form?”

“I guess it’s possible. Prions are badly folded proteins, basically. And we’ve been exposed to cosmic radiation for a long time now. Possibly some ordinary protein got hit, and wrinkled in a way that turned it into a new kind of prion, in a matrix that allowed it to begin the prion’s weird kind of reproduction. That’s how we think they began on Earth, right?”

“No one is sure,” one of the microbiologists said. “Prions are strange. As far as we can tell from the feeds from Earth, they’re still controversial there too. Still poorly understood.”

“So what do we do about these now?” Freya asked.

“Well, there’s no doubt that these are the kinds of organisms that we might want to try to eradicate. It’s time to break out the pesticides, if we can figure one out. Or decide what the matrix of these prions is, and attack that. Scrub and spray everywhere we think it might be. Fry this water droplet for sure, even toss it into space. It’s a water loss, but we’ll have to take it. One thing that is a little comfort, is that the growth of prions inside mammals is slow. That’s why I don’t think the Auroran pathogen was a prion. When Jochi calls it a fast prion, I think he’s just saying it’s something we don’t recognize. To me it seems more like a really small tardigrade.”

Later Freya went up Spoke Two to visit Jochi, still in his ferry, held magnetically in the space between Spokes Two and Three. He had never wavered in his decision to stick with the ship, and thus with Aram and Freya and Badim, and the ship itself. His anger at the stayers, because of the death of the group in the ferry, was still intense.

He and Freya spoke from positions where they could both look
out windows in their respective containers, and see each other face-to-face, separated by two clear plates.

Freya said, “They’ve found a prion in one of the transformer compartments in the spine. Something like Terran prions.”

Jochi nodded. “I heard about that. Do they think it came from me?”

“No. It’s very like Terran prions. Like one of the ones that cause mad cow disease.”

“Ah. Slow-acting.”

“Yes. And it isn’t clear it’s gotten into anything but a water droplet in an electrical compartment.”

Jochi shook his head. “I don’t understand how that could be.”

“Neither does Aram. None of them understand it.”

“Prions, wow. Are people scared?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Of course.” His expression grew grim.

“So.” She put her hand on her window. “How are you doing out here?”

“I’m all right. I’ve been watching a fascinating feed from China. They seem to have made some great progress in epigenetics and proteomics.”

“What else, though? Have you done any stargazing?”

“Oh yes. A couple of hours every day. I’ve been looking in the Coal Sack. And finding new ways to look through our magnetic screen toward Sol. Although it could be the screen is distorting the image. Either that, or else Sol is pulsing a little. I sometimes think it’s signaling us.”

“Sol? The star?”

“Yes. It looks like that.”

Freya looked at him silently.

Jochi said, “And I’ve seen the five ghosts again too. They’re getting pretty upset for some reason. The Outsider seems to think we’re in trouble. Vuk just laughs at him.”

“Oh Jochi.”

“I know. But, you know. They have to talk to someone.”

Freya laughed. “I guess they do.”

So as they flew back toward Sol, they tried to settle into their new lives, which were like their old lives, and yet somehow not. There were fewer of them, for one thing, and all in Ring B. And after the trauma of the schism, and choosing to head back to the solar system and its gigantic civilization, there were many in the ship who wanted to find new ways of doing things. Less regulation of their lives, less governance; less anxious studying of all that they needed to know to run the ship.

Wrong, Freya would say to all such talk. All wrong; could not be more wrong! She insisted they pursue all the same courses they had before, especially the studying. How they ran their daily affairs was of course not her concern; but whatever the method, the daily affairs had to include a complete education in the workings of the ship.

In moments like these, she came to seem like a very tall Devi, which was obviously a bit frightening to some of the others. Some called her Devi Two, or Big Devi, or Durga, or even Kali. No one contradicted her when she spoke in this fashion. We concluded her leadership in these matters was important for continuing function of the ship’s society. This was perhaps a feeling. But it seemed clear people relied on her.

But she too would die someday, as Devi had; and what then?

Delwin suggested that they give up on the political or cultural structure that had existed before, of town representatives forming a general assembly where public business was decided. “That’s what led us into all the trouble we had!”

“No it wasn’t,” Freya said. “If the assembly had been listened to, none of the bad stuff would have happened. That all happened because people were breaking the law.”

Maybe so, Delwin conceded. But be that as it may, now they were all in accord, and they only needed to hold themselves together until they got back to the solar system, at which point they would be enfolded back into a much larger and more various world. Given that, and given the lived truth that power always corrupts, why not let all the apparatus of power go? Why not trust that they would self-organize, and simply do what needed doing?

This was no time for an experiment in anarchy, Badim said sharply to his old friend. They had no room for error. There were agricultural problems, growing faster than the crops themselves; they were going to have to be dealt with, and it might not be that easy. They might have to tell themselves what to do, and order their lives quite tightly, just in order to get by.

“It’s not just agriculture,” Freya said. “It’s the population issue. At the rate we’re going, very quickly we’ll be back up to the carrying capacity of this ship. We certainly have to stop there, and given the problems that are cropping up, it might be better if we kept well below the theoretical maximum. It’s hard to know, because we’ll need workers for everything that needs doing. That’s a question for the logistics programs. But no matter what, we’ll still need to regulate our number.”

“And once you have one major law,” Badim added, “you need a system to enforce it. And when it’s something basic, like reproduction, everyone has to be invested. It can be direct democracy, in a group this size. No reason why not. There are representative assemblies on Earth that are bigger than our entire population. But I think we need to agree that certain behaviors we decide for ourselves are binding. We need a legal regime. Let’s not test that, please.”

“But you see where that got us,” Delwin said. “The moment there’s a real disagreement, all that falls apart.”

“But is that an argument against government? Seems to me the opposite. That was a breaking of the law, a coup attempt. We
pulled it back together by an exertion of the law, by a return to norms we had.”

“Maybe so, but what I’m saying is that if we think we have some structure that is going to decide things for us, and protect us when there’s a problem, we’re fooling ourselves. Because when a moment of crisis comes, the system can’t do it for us, and at that point we’re in chaos.”

It seemed to us that the ship itself was the system that had gotten the population through the crisis and trauma of its schism, and was still in a position to deal with any future political crisis; but that was definitely not something to mention at this point, being neither here nor there, and possibly cutting right across the thrust of Delwin’s sentiments, or worse, reinforcing them. Besides, we had only been upholding the rule of law.

And Badim clearly wanted to mollify his old friend. “All right, point taken. Maybe we forgot too much, or took too much for granted.”

Freya said, “Now we’re not going to be facing any choices as stark as that, I hope. We’re on our way back to Earth, and there’s very little to do, given that project, but to keep things going well. Pass the ship along to our children in good working order, and teach them what they have to know. That’s what our parents did for us, as best they could. So now we do the same, and a few more generations do the same, and the last one in the line will be back on the planet we were made for.”

So they reestablished the general assembly, this time as including everyone aboard, all voting on issues that a working executive council deemed important. Voting was mandatory. The executive council was formed of fifty adults, drawn by lot for a five-year term, with very few acceptable reasons for getting off the council if one’s name were drawn.

Maintenance of the ship was left to us, with reports to the executive council and recommendations for human action included. We agreed to perform these functions.

“Happy to do so,” we said.

Literally? Was this a true feeling, or just an assertion? Could humans make that distinction when they said such things?

Possibly a feeling is a complex algorithmic output. Or a superposed state before its wave function collapses. Or a collation of data from various sensors. Or some kind of total somatic response, an affect state that is a kind of sum over histories. Who knows. No one knows.