Aurora (43 page)

The first new generation passed their second birthdays, and most of them began to walk a little before or after that time. It took a few months more to be sure that as a cohort their ability to walk was coming much later than had been true for earlier generations in the ship. We did not share this finding. However, as it became more statistically significant it also became more anecdotally obvious, and soon became one of those class of anecdotes that got discussed.

“What’s causing this? There has to be a reason, and if we knew what it was, we could do something about it. We can’t just let this go!”

“They get such close attention, more than ever before—”

“Why should you think that? When were babies not attended to by their parents? I don’t think that was ever true.”

“Oh come on. Now you have to get permission to have one, they’re rare, they’re the focus of everyone’s lives, of course they get more attention.”

“There were never good records kept of developmental stuff like this.”

“Not true, not true at all.”

“Well, where are they then? I can’t find them. It’s always anecdotal. How can you say exactly when a toddler is toddling? It’s a process.”

“Something’s changed. Pretending it hasn’t won’t work.”

“Maybe it’s just reversion to the mean.”

“Don’t say that!”

That was Freya, her voice sharp.

“Don’t say that,” she said again in the silence of the others. “We have no idea what the norm was. Besides, the concept itself is contested.”

“Well, okay. But say what you like, you can see them staggering. We need to figure out why, that’s all I’m saying. No sticking our head in the sand on stuff like this. Not if we want someone to get home.”

There were batteries of tests available to give to children to gauge their cognitive development. The Pestalozzi-Piaget Combinatoire had been worked up in the ship in the forties, using various games as tests. For most of a year Freya sat on the floor of the kindergarten and played games with the return kids, as they were called. Simple puzzles, word games, invitations to rename things, arithmetical and geometrical problems played with blocks. It did not seem to us as if these tests could reveal very much about the reasoning of the children, or their analogic abilities, their deductions from negative evidence, and so on; they were all partial and indirect, linguistically and logically simple. Still, the clear result of each session was to leave Freya more and more troubled. Less appetite on her part; more contrary replies to Badim and others; less sleep at night.

Not that it was only the games with children that gave her and the others cause for alarm. More quantitatively, crop yields were
down in the Prairie, the Pampas, Olympia, and Sonora; and dropouts in electrical power from the spinal generators were increasing, by 6.24 outages and 238 kilowatt-hours per month, on average, which would cause serious problems in all kinds of functions in a matter of several months. It was possible to trace and isolate the sections of the grid where the outages were most frequent, but in fact they were spread through many points in the spine and spokes.
Geobacter
was suspected as the cause, as it was often found on the wiring. As with other functional components of the ship, maintenance was becoming advisable.

They worked on these problems whenever they could locate them, and we did the same. For many components, function had to be maintained while repairs were effected, and for the most part, the elements to be repaired had to be removed and refurbished and then put back in place, as for many materials there were not feedstocks adequate to be able to replace larger components outright. Exterior walls, for instance.

Thus insulation had to be stripped away, leaving live wires exposed to be cleaned, and the insulating material broken down and reconstituted, and then replaced over the wires, without at any time being able to shut down power from the system as a whole. A schedule of partial shutdowns could be arranged, and was. And yet the unscheduled power losses, while nondebilitating, nevertheless reduced functions, including of the sunlines.

We began to investigate the recursive algorithms in the file marked by Devi “Bayesian methodology.” Looking for options. Wishing Devi were here. Trying to imagine what Devi would say. But this, we found, was impossible. This was precisely what one lost when someone died.

All this ongoing malfunction was particularly problematic when it came to the sunlines. All the light on the ship (aside from
incidental ambient incoming starlight, which taken altogether came to 0.002 lux) was generated by the ship’s lighting elements, which made use of a fairly wide array of designs and physical properties. Their artificial sunlight varied in luminosity from 120,000 lux on a clear midday to 5 lux during the darkest twilight storms. This was all well regulated, along with a moonlight effect at night ranging from a full moon effect of 0.25 lux to 0.01 lux, on the classic lunar schedule. But when the lighting elements had to be refurbished or resupplied, then it was as if unscheduled eclipses were occurring. Crops were therefore affected, their growth delayed in ways that stunted them at harvest time. Increasing the biome’s light after a dimming did not compensate for the loss of light at the appropriate times. Nevertheless, despite the agricultural costs, given the inevitable wear on the lighting elements themselves, the required maintenance simply had to be done. But as a result, less food was grown.

The executive council and the general assembly, meaning everyone on the ship over twelve years old, was asked by Aram’s lab group to consider questions of carrying capacity. This was only a formalization of a conversation that was now going on in many ways, as each biome had become its own land use debate as to which types of foods to grow. Did they have the caloric margin to raise animals for meat anymore? Vat-grown meat was clearly more efficient in terms of time and energy, but the meat vats’ feedstock supplies were of course a limiting factor there. And it was not always easy to change biomes rapidly from pasture and grazing land to crop agricultures. Every change in the biomes had ecological ramifications that could not be fully modeled or predicted, and yet there was very little margin for error, if they happened to damage the health of an ecosystem by trying too quickly to make it more productive in food terms. They needed all the biomes to be healthy.

Everyone came to agree that the least productive biomes in agricultural terms should be converted to farmland. Biodiversity was not important now, compared to food.

We were glad to see people finally coming to conclusions that had long been suggested by a fairly simple algorithmic exploration of their available options. In fact, we probably should have mentioned it ourselves. Something to remember, going forward.

So they reprogrammed Labrador’s climate, warming it up quite significantly, and adding a rainy season that was similar to that of a prairie. On Earth, this new weather regime would have been more appropriate some twenty degrees of latitude farther south than Labrador, but this was neither here nor there (literally), as they were now intent to maximize agriculture. They drained the swamps that resulted when the glacier and permafrost melted, and used the water elsewhere, or stored it. Then they went in with bulldozers and plowed the land flat, after which they added soil inoculants from nearby biomes, also compost and other augmentations, and when all these changes had been made, planted wheat, corn, and vegetables. Labrador’s reindeer, musk oxen, and wolves were sedated and removed to enclosures in the alpine biome. A certain percentage of the ungulates were killed and eaten, and their bones rendered for their phosphorus, as with all the ship’s animals after death.

The human population of Labrador dispersed into the other biomes. There was some disaffection and bitterness in that. It was in Labrador where several generations of children had been brought up as if living in the ancient ice ages of Earth, then at puberty taken out of the ship to have the ship revealed to them: a memorable event for the youngsters. To many people from the other biomes this had seemed like an unnecessary life trauma, but most of the people subjected to it brought their own children
up in the same way (62 percent), so that fact had to be conceded, and possibly it was as these Labradorans said: their childhood upbringing helped them as adults. Other Labradorans contested this, sometimes heatedly. Whether they exhibited a higher incidence of mental difficulties in later life was also contested. The way they put it was, “The dream of Earth will drive you mad, unless you live the dream. In which case that too will drive you mad.”