Aurora (47 page)

Average weight loss among adults was now ten kilos. Then a fire in a transformer in the Prairie spewed a thick toxic smoke through that biome and forced a complete evacuation, so that the biome could be locked up without trapping anyone inside. The fire was fought with robots, which made it a slower process; indeed they could not contain the blaze, and it became necessary to remove
the air from the biome to end it. This briefly reduced temperatures in the biome to well below zero, so all the crops in there froze. Quickly the biome was re-aerated, and people went back in wearing safety suits much like spacesuits, intent to save what they could, but the damage had been done. That season’s crop was dead, and coated with a film of PCBs that would have been dangerous to ingest. Indeed the surface of the soil itself needed to be cleaned, along with the walls of the biome and all its building surfaces.

They killed and ate 90 percent of the ship’s dwarf cattle, leaving a dangerously small number for purposes of genetic diversity. They killed and ate 90 percent of the musk oxen and the deer. Then the same percentage of the rabbits and the chickens. The 10 percent of each species that was allowed to live, to replenish the stocks, would represent severe genetic bottlenecks for each species, but this was not important now. Average body fat in adults was down to 6 percent. Seventy percent of the women of childbearing age had stopped menstruating, but this too was no longer an issue they could worry about. Despite all their efforts, they were in a famine.

Their margin for error was completely gone. One more crop failure, and assuming they shared the food equally, after feeding the children properly, there would be something like 800 calories per person per day, which would lead to muscle loss, skeletal abnormalities, dry hair and eyes and skin, lethargy, and so on.

Aram sat in Badim and Freya’s kitchen one night, head back against the wall. Badim was cooking pasta with a tomato sauce, and he took out some frozen chicken breasts from their freezer to defrost, chop up, and throw into the sauce. Freya was much bigger than the two old men, but gaunt. She was eating even less than most people. The dark rings under her eyes made her look more than ever like her mother.

Badim put the food on the table for them, and for a second they held hands.

Mouth pursed to a tight line, Aram said, “We’re eating our seed corn.”

Again people began killing themselves. This time it was mostly small groups of elderly people, who called themselves hemlock clubs, and usually did the deed by evacuating the air from exterior locks. It was said death was nearly instantaneous, something like a knockout blow. They did it holding hands and leaving behind the usual note:
I may be some time!
Often this was clipped to a group photo in which almost everyone was smiling. We could not tell whether the smiles meant they were happy or not.

The people they left behind, especially their relatives and friends, definitely were not. But the hemlock clubs were secret societies. Even we did not overhear their planning conversations, which meant they had made intense efforts to conceal them. Room recorders must certainly have been covered or otherwise rendered inoperative in ways that did not trip our alarms.

Freya began walking the biomes at night, going to the little towns and talking to people. Now dinners were often communal, neighborhoods gathering, each family bringing one dish they had cooked. Sometimes rabbits or chickens had been killed for a stew. The cooks often urged Freya to eat with them, and she always took a bite. The food went quickly, everything was consumed; compost now was almost entirely human waste, processed heavily to recover certain salts and minerals (including bromine) and to kill certain pathogens before it was returned to the farm soil.

After the meals, Freya would talk to the elders there.

We all have to live, she would tell them. There will be enough food, and everyone is needed. These hemlock societies are a bad idea. They’re giving in to fear of what might happen. Look, we always fear what might happen. That never goes away, never. But we go on anyway. We do it for the kids. So remember that. We have to fight to get them home. We need everyone.

Their researchers ransacked the relevant literatures in the libraries and the digital feeds from Earth to see if any agricultural improvements could be made. Some of them pointed out that the industrial model for agriculture had been superseded in the most progressive farming regions on Earth by a method called intensive mixed cultivation, which reintroduced the idea of maximizing diversity of crop and gene. The intensity was not just in the tightly packed mixes of different plants, but in the human labor required. Soil was held in place better, which was not a major concern in the ship, as their soil had no ocean to disappear into and was going to be collected and reused no matter where it slumped. But it was also reported that disease resistance in these mixed crops was much greater. The method was labor intensive, but on Earth, at least on Earth nine years before, it seemed there was a surplus of human labor. It was not clear why that should be. The comm feed neglected to include crucial facts, or perhaps these were just lost in the flood of images, voices, digitalization. They now caught some unfiltered radio waves from Earth, very faint and jumbled with overlays; but mostly they got the targeted beam aimed at them, their thin lifeline home, untended it sometimes seemed, full of information that no one seemed to have properly considered for relevance. It often looked like gigabytes of trivia, something like the junk DNA of the home system’s thinking. It was hard to understand the selection rubric. They were still in a
nine-year time lag, so each exchange took eighteen years, meaning there was no real exchange at all; moment to moment, no one in the solar system seemed to be listening to what the people in the ship had said nine or ten years before. No surprise there, at least not to those with a sense of solar system culture, which admittedly meant a small minority of the ship’s people. Of course there was continuous transmission going on in both directions, but that didn’t help when it came to the idea of a conversation, of specific questions answered. There was a type of situation in which simultaneous transmissions from both ends could speed up the information exchange, by carrying on conversations on multiple aspects of a problem, but both sides had to be fully engaged in this process, and the problem of a kind that could make use of miscellaneous feedbacks across a broad front. Possibly that was the kind of problem they had here, but no one in the solar system seemed aware of that. The strong impression the feeds gave them was that no one in the solar system was paying the slightest attention to the ship that had left for Tau Ceti 208 years before. As why should they? They appeared to be facing problems of their own.

They refilled Long Pond and restocked it with fish. The fish hatcheries people were convinced they could supply all the ship’s need for protein, but then some of the hatcheries exhibited signs of weak spawn syndrome. Whole generations of fingerlings died off without an obvious cause; the name of the syndrome, like so many, was descriptive merely.

“What
is
it?” Freya cried out one night to the ship, down on the corniche alone. “Ship, why is all this
happening
?”

We replied to her from her wristpad. “There are a number of systemic problems, some physical, some chemical, some biological. Chemical bonding has created shortages, which means everything
living is a bit weaker at the cellular level. What Devi called metabolic rifts are getting wider. And a great deal of cosmic radiation has struck every organism in the ship, creating living mutations mostly in bacteria, which are labile, and versatile. Often they don’t die, but live on in a new way. As the ship has a living interior, it is warm enough to sustain life, which means it is warm enough to encourage proliferation of mutated strains. These interact with chemicals released by biophysical mechanisms, such as corrosion and etching, to further damage DNA across a wide variety of species. The cumulative impacts can have a synergistic result, which back in the solar system is called ‘sick ship syndrome.’ Sometimes ‘sick organism syndrome,’ apparently to allow for the acronym SOS, which was an old distress signal in oceanic shipping. Then it stood for ‘save our ship,’ and was easy to send and comprehend in Morse code.”