Aurora (65 page)

The image of the sun is filtered down to a simple orange ball, marred by a scattering of black sunspots. The image on the screen shifts, the sunspots jump to a new position, possibly this present moment. The predicted time of their ship’s transit behind the sun is just over three days, and now that time is almost over. They sit there in that no-time in which one can’t say whether time is passing or not. Maybe it was like that when they were hibernating; maybe now they have the ability to get back into that mind, when pushed that way. It’s too long, no one can say how long it is, or remember how long it’s supposed to take, or sense how long it feels. Freya is feeling sick now, obscurely aware that there is perhaps a rocking of this immense ship that is impacting her even though she can’t quite feel it. Many look like they’re feeling the same. Ungodly edge of nausea, the feeling she hates most of all, worse than the sharpest pain. Queasy dread. Like others, she staggers off to go to the bathroom, walks around the halls to make the time pass, feeling the dread squeeze her insides harder and harder.

Then a line of minute white particulates emerges from the right edge of the solar mass on the screen, like a meteor that has broken up, like a brief shimmer of the aurora borealis, and she sits down on the floor. Badim is beside her, holding her. Around her is everyone she’s ever known, all stunned and holding each
other. They are stunned. Freya looks at Badim, he shakes his head. “They’re gone.”

She leaves that moment, that place.

Badim and Aram share a sad glance. Another conflagration of mice, going up in flames by the tens of thousands, as they have a wont to do. All the animals likewise. And Jochi. And the ship. It spawned them in its last days, like a salmon, Aram says. Have to hold to that thought. Poor Jochi, my boy. Aram wipes his eyes over and over.

Their minders are solicitous. They tell them that their ferry included a computer with ten zettabytes of memory, which may include good backups, may constitute a viable copy of their ship’s AI.

Badim shakes his head at them as they say this. “It was a quantum computer,” Badim explains gently, as if breaking the news of a death to a child. “It was not reducible to its records.”

A coldness comes over Freya, a kind of calm. So much has died. They made it back, they are home for the first time: but this place is not their home, she sees that now. They will always be exiles here, on a world too big to believe. Indeed it seems best to stick to disbelief for a while, stay in that disconnect. The intermittences of the heart being what they are, the feel of things will come back, eventually. And that will be soon enough.

They are taken to Hong Kong, and a couple of weeks later their township anchors offshore from it—a harbor city as big as a dozen or twenty of their biomes stitched together, and filled with many skyscrapers quite a bit taller than any biome, taller than a spoke, possibly taller than the spine. It’s hard to keep any sense of perspective against the sky. The day before it was cloudy, and the flat gray cloud looked like an immense roof over the visible world. Aram says those clouds were three kilometers high, and now he and Badim are arguing about how high the clear blue sky appears to be.

“You mean if it was a dome,” Badim points out.

“Of course, but it looks like one,” Aram says. “At least to me. I know it’s a scattering of sunlight, but doesn’t it look like a solid dome? I think it does. Just look at it. It’s much like a biome ceiling.”

He and Badim have taken to consulting a book they’ve found on their wristpads, an ancient text called
The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air,
and now they pore over a section called “Apparent Flattening of the Vault of Heaven,” which confirms Aram’s contention that the sky can be perceived as a dome. “See,” Aram says, pointing at his wristpad, “the top of the sky looks lower to the viewer than the horizon is distant to him, by a factor ranging from two to four, it says, depending on the observer and the viewing conditions. Does that seem right to you?”

Badim peers up and out the open doorway to the upper deck. He and Aram walk out on this upper deck all the time, unconcerned by the exposure. “It does.”

“And this explains why these skyscrapers look so tall, perhaps, as the writer goes on to say that we tend to think the midway point of the arc between horizon and zenith is at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, as it would be if the dome were a hemisphere. But with the dome being lower than the horizon is far away, the midway point of the arc is angled much lower, say around twelve to twenty-five degrees. So we consistently think things are higher than they are.”

“Well, but I think also that these skyscrapers are just stupendously tall.”

“No doubt, but we’re seeing them even taller than they are.”

“Show me what you mean.”

They put on sunscreen, hats, and sunglasses, and go out on the open upper deck of the great township and turn in circles, putting their hands out at the sky and chattering as they peer at their wristpads. They seem to be adjusting very well to the new world, and to the death of their lifelong home, of Jochi their lost guest.
Freya still feels stunned, and she cannot yet even stand before the windows, nor do more than glance out the big open doorway between her and them; and the idea of going outside onto the deck with them is enough to knock her into a chair. A black emptiness fills her right to the skin.

Many of Hong Kong’s buildings emerge from the water of the city’s bay, a result no doubt of the big sea level rise, which some of her shipmates now claim to have read about or seen in the feed, but now it’s here below them, in the canals that thread between all the buildings closest to water, and the long, narrow boats grumbling airily past them, leaving in their wakes a slosh of waves and smell of salt and burnt cooking oil. Cry of wheeling gulls. Hot, humid, reeking. If any of their tropical biomes had felt as hot and humid as this, had smelled like this, they would have been sure something had gone wrong.

Behind all the skyscrapers are green hills, dotted everywhere with buildings. They’re still looking around at all this tremendous landscape when they are taken off their township, led into a long low ferry. It’s kind of like moving in a tram from one biome to another. No need to go outside the long cabin of the ferry, but Freya’s in a panic at the thought that she may have to. She’s been provided with boots that come up to just above her knees, and these seem to give her more support and balance than she’s been used to. She still can’t feel her feet, but as she walks the boots seem to know what she is trying for, and with some care she can walk pretty well.

Then up a tubular walkway, somewhat like one of their spoke interiors; then into an elevator car; then out into a room that opens out all along one wall to another open deck, located apparently some hundreds of meters above the bay. Up there in the sky, just under an inrush of low clouds, the marine layer, as Badim calls it. Whose idea was this?

Now the people of the ship are going out onto the open deck and very often falling down, many weeping or crying out, many going back inside the room to seek shelter. Freya huddles by the elevator. The starship’s people see her there and come over and hug her, and some of their hosts are laughing, others crying, all presumably moved to see people who have never been outdoors try to come to terms with it.

They’re like the winter lambs, some translation box says, let out of the barn in the spring.

A lot of their legs are messed up. Come on, get them back inside, the same box and voice says. You’re going to kill them with this stuff.

The box’s voice has a Terran accent, speaks English harshly and with a lot of tonal bounce. As if, Badim says, English were Chinese. Hard to understand.

Crying with embarrassment and frustration, feeling her face burn red, Freya breaks from her crowd and staggers on her new boots right out the open doorway wall, out onto the open deck, keeping her eyes squeezed nearly shut. Feeling faint, she walks to a chest-high wall with a railing on its top, something she can grasp like a lifeline.

She stands there in the wind and opens her eyes and looks around, her stomach like a black hole inside her, pulling her in. Sun incandescing through the clouds low overhead.

That’s a mackerel sky, says the translation box. Nice pattern. Warp and weft. Might rain tomorrow.

Oh my God, someone is saying over and over, and then she feels in her mouth that it’s her saying it. She stops herself with a fist in her mouth. Hangs on to the railing with her other hand. She can see so far she can’t focus on it. She closes her eyes, clenches the railing hard with both hands. Keeps her eyes closed so she won’t throw up. She needs to get back into the room, but is afraid to walk. She will fall, crawl back desperately afraid, everyone will see it. She’s stuck there, and so puts her forehead down on the railing. Tries to relax her stomach.

She feels Badim’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

“Not really.”

After a while she says, “I wish Devi could have seen this. She would have liked it more than me.”

“Yes.”

Badim sits on the deck beside her, his back against the retaining wall. His face is tilted to the sky. “Yes, she would have liked this.”

“It’s so big!”

“I know.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”

“Do you want to move back from the edge?”

“I don’t think I can move yet. What we can see from here”—waving briefly at the bay and ocean, the hills, the skyscraper city springing up around them, the glare of the sun slanting through the clouds—“just what we can see from here, right now, is bigger than our whole ship!”

“That’s right.”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Believe.”

“But we were in a toy!”

“Yes. Well. It had to be as small as they thought would work, so they could push it to a good interstellar speed. It was a case of conflicting priorities. So they did what they could.”

“I can’t believe they thought it would be okay.”

“Well. Do you remember that time you told Devi that you wanted to live in your dollhouse, and she said you already did?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, she did. She got really mad.”

“Oh that brings it back! That time she got mad!”

Badim laughs. Freya slides down beside him and laughs too.

Badim puts his hands under his sunglasses, wipes tears from his eyes. “Yes,” he says. “She got mad a lot.”

“She did. But I guess I never really knew why, until now.”

Badim nods. He keeps his hands under his glasses, over his eyes. “She didn’t either, not really. She never saw this, so she didn’t really know. But now we know. I’m glad. She would be glad too.”

Freya tries to see her mother’s face, hear her voice. She can still do it; Devi is still there, especially her voice. Her voice, the ship’s voice. Euan’s voice, Jochi’s voice. All the voices of her dead. Euan on Aurora, loving the wind as it knocked him around. She reaches up and grabs the railing, pulls herself up and stares down at the great city. She holds on for dear life. She’s never felt sicker.

They’re put on a train to Beijing. They ride in broad plush seats, on the upper story of two long cars, linked like two biomes by a passageway. They constitute a moving party, with windows and skylight domes and the land flowing past them, flat and green, hilly and brown, on and on and on and on.