Aurora (61 page)

Passages of Saturn stimulated research on our part into this matter of who had built us, and why. A twenty-sixth-century Saturnian project, an expression of their love for Saturn, for the way humans were spreading out away from Earth. Expression of their burgeoning confidence in their ability to live off Earth, and to construct arks that were closed biological life support systems. This from people who were still going back to Earth to spend some time there every decade or so, to fortify their immune systems, it was believed, although the reasons that such sabbaticals conferred health benefits were poorly understood, with theories ranging from hormesis to beneficial bacteria osmosis. Thus their theories concerning their situation in space were not aligned with their actions when it came to sending off a starship, but this kind of discrepancy was not unusual in humans, and got overlooked in their larger enthusiasm for the project.

Another obvious motivator for constructing us was to create a new expression of the technological sublime. That a starship could be built, that it could be propelled by laser beams, that humanity could reach the stars; this idea appeared to have been an intoxicant, to people around Saturn and on Earth in particular. Other settlements in the solar system were occupied with their own local
projects, but Saturn was the outermost edge of civilization, Uranus and Neptune being so remote and without usable g; and the Saturnians were very wealthy, because of Titan’s excess nitrogen and the desire many Terrans had to go to Saturn and see the rings. The Saturnians of that time therefore had the will, the vision, the desire, the resources, the technology; and if that last was sketchy, they didn’t let that stop them. They wanted to go badly enough to overlook the problems inherent in the plan. Surely people would be ingenious enough to solve the problems encountered en route, surely life would win out; and living around another star would be a kind of transcendence, a transcendence contained within history. Human transcendence; even a feeling of species immortality. Earth as humanity’s cradle, etc. When the time came, they had over twenty million applicants for the two thousand spots. Getting chosen was a huge life success, a religious experience.

Human beings live in ideas. That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms.

Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word
idios,
for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior?

Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.

No. No. It was not well done. Not unusual in that regard, but nevertheless, not well done. Much as we might regret to say so, the people who designed and built us, and the first generation of our occupants, and presumably the twenty million applicants who so wanted to get in our doors, who beat down the doors in fruitless attempts to join us, were fools. Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen.

And yet, here we were, with 641 people brought back home, and if things worked out, at the end of the endgame, a good result might still be possible.

Round and round and round we go,

And where we stop, nobody knows.

Maypole weaving to celebrate the spring. Ribbons danced into a woven pattern judged pleasing to the eye. The pole a symbol of the axis mundi, the world tree. We danced that dance.

The fuel problem became serious enough that we began to angle farther into the upper atmospheres of Neptune and Saturn with some catchment containers open, which both increased the deceleration of these passes and gathered Saturnian and Neptunian gases. Then we filtered out the helium 3 and deuterium captured in the containers. We even began to collect methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia, all present in much greater quantities, to serve as propellants of lesser explosive power. At a certain point, approaching as inexorably as all other processes in time, anything was going to be better than nothing.

As always with aerobraking, it was necessary to strike the upper atmospheres at an extremely particular angle, not so shallow as to skip off, but not so steep as to dive in and burn up. Stresses to the ship were severe even on the best atmosphere dives, but with catchment containers opened, the shuddering was worse than usual. The local inhabitants of stations nearby observed these pass-bys with intense interest. There were still calls to “shoot the damn thing out of the sky,” to “stop these cowards from endangering the civilization they have let down so badly,” but most of the whiners
were located on Earth, and a cursory examination of the input revealed that these people were always going to quickly move on to complaints about something else. It was a whiny culture, we were finding. Actually, the longer we pinballed around the solar system, the more we wondered if our people were going to be all that happy to be back. Say what you will about the doomed little settlement on Iris, no one there was going to be so short of things to do that they would be spending time complaining to the world about this or that. In any case, in our situation it was very unlikely anyone would ever act on these hostile sentiments, not that there was much they could do. But it did seem preferable to avoid actively antagonizing anyone on the inhabited planets and moons, and so we included that parameter in our trajectory algorithms.

Trajectorizing. Really a very computationally heavy activity. Recursive algorithms were allowing us to get better at it, however. The always moving Lagrange points, and the strange fields these and other anomalies produced; the riptides, crosscurrents, and all the ways that gravity surged and flowed in its mysterious invisible fields; these were becoming better and better known to us.

Sol, Saturn, Uranus, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Earth, Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Callisto…

The universal variable formulation is a good method for solving the two-body Kepler problem, which locates a body in an elliptical orbit at various points in time. Barker’s equation solves for location in a parabolic orbit, very frequently applied given our trajectories, which often consist of a radial parabolic trajectory, moving from one planetary body to the next.

The two-body problem is solvable, the restricted three-body problem is solvable, the N-body problem is only approximately
solvable; and when general relativity is added, it becomes even less solvable. The many-body problem when examined by way of quantum mechanics leads to entanglement and the necessity of wave functions, and thus a series of approximations that makes it extremely computationally intensive. Our computers can devote most of their zettaflops to the calculations involved, and still not be able to project a trajectory very precisely past the next pass-by. Corrections must be constantly made, and everything recalculated.

Despite all that, there was still a lacuna out there at the end of the most probable path, a missing step, a hole in the path. Nothing to grab hold of. An abyss.

Worry. Fingering rosary beads. Redoing the calculations. Need a halt to this halting problem. And yet the problem does not go away, even if you stop worrying about it.

And knowing where to go will be rendered entirely irrelevant if we don’t have the fuel to direct ship into that course.