Aurora (68 page)

“But they hurt people,” Freya protests. She hasn’t stopped feeling sick from the moment they pulled her off the poor man. She still wants that last punch, at the same time that she is doubled over
with remorse. “It isn’t just foolish, it’s sick. Did you hear what he said? Dandelion seeds? Ninety-nine percent sent out to die, as part of the plan? Die a miserable death they can’t prevent, children and animals and ship and all, and all for a stupid idea someone has, a dream? Why? Why have that dream? Why are they that way?”

“People live in ideas,” Badim says again. “You can’t stop it. We all live in ideas. You have to let these people have their ideas.”

“But they kill people with them.”

“I know. I know. It’s always been that way. But look, people volunteer to get on these ships. There are waiting lists.”

“Their kids don’t volunteer!”

“No. But it’s still not our job to stop them.”

“Isn’t it? Are you sure?”

At this he looks uncertain. He takes her point, unhappily; that they might be obliged to witness. That they are the survivors of one of these mad plans.

She shakes her head, snares him with her look, as she so often has before. “Were the people who believed in eugenics just fools? I think we have to try to stop them!”

Badim looks at her for a long time. He is really looking ancient now. She can’t remember how he looked when she was a child.

He pats her shoulder, and several times he almost speaks, then stops himself.

“Well,” he says finally, “your mother would be proud of you.”

After that he can’t speak for a while.

Then: “You—you are reminding me of her. It’s almost nice to see. But not. Because I don’t want you to die too, from trying to do the impossible. Because look—you can’t stop other people from pursuing their projects, their dreams. Even if they are crazy dreams, even if they won’t work. If people want to do it, they will. Then later their children will suffer, sure. We can point that out, and we will. But it’s everyone who has to stop these people, all of us together. It has to be an idea that fails, that no one will act on
because no one believes it anymore. That may take a while. And meanwhile, listen to me: kick the world, break your foot. And your feet, my girl, are already broken.”

They have to get out of town. Aram arranges that somehow, a flight back to Beijing, where the Chinese are apparently not interested in extraditing Freya and Badim for a crime of this sort. Some are calling it free speech, decrying the sort of state that would prosecute free speech. Let people defend themselves from unarmed assaults, please. Why is it anyone else’s business?

Badim shakes his head at this line of reasoning, but says nothing.

Then there begins to appear on the screens, and in the messages coming to them, support for Freya’s rash act. Not just one or two messages, but many. A little flood of them in fact. There are a lot of people on Earth who call themselves Earthfirsters, apparently. The emigration of people, often rich people, off Earth and out into the solar system, and then even out of the solar system, has left behind a great deal of resentment, it seems. Only now are these people paying any attention to a crew of lost starfarers.

“So now I’m popular?” Freya says. “They hate me, and I hit someone, and
now
they like me?”

“Not the same people,” Badim points out, frowning. “Or maybe so. I can’t tell. But yes. That’s Earth for you. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. That’s how it works here.”

“I don’t like this place.”

Badim shakes his head. “You don’t like these people. It’s not the same thing. And it’s not everybody, either.”

Aram, listening to them, says to Freya, “‘Ah don’t you see, since your mind is the prison, you’ll live behind bars everywhere now?’”

“So fuck it, let’s move to Mars then,” Freya grumbles, remembering the poem, which had pierced her like a sliver.

“Definitely not,” Badim says, waving a finger. “They’re stuck in
their rooms up there almost as much as we were on the ship. That place is not much different from Aurora. The problem is chemical rather than biological, and they may amend the soil there over time, but not soon. Centuries at the least! No. We’re just going to have to get used to it here.”

But during the brief disaster of their trip away, six more of them have died. One, a youth, Raul, was killed in a fight with some person who did not like the idea of them coming back to Earth. After the memorial services for these six truly sad affairs, Aram tells Badim a story about Shackleton, who got his entire crew safely home from one of his Antarctic misadventures, only to see several get sent to the trenches of the First World War, where they were promptly killed.

Freya is already feeling like she wants to hit someone again, and something in this dismal story makes her furious. “What are we going to do?” she shouts at them. “I can’t stand this! Just hanging around, getting picked off one by one—no! No! No! No! We have to
do something
. I don’t know what, but something. Something to change this place—something! So—what are we going to do?”

Badim nods uneasily. His ancient face is creased with an ancient look, a look Freya recognizes from her childhood: the pursed-lipped frown that always came over his face when he was trying to figure out what to do about Devi. This look had always held tucked within it several things: amusement, love, worry, annoyance, pride that he had such a problem to solve. His wife the warrior, on a rampage. Now maybe it’s a bit the same, maybe not. And anyway Freya is too angry to feel reassured by this. Now it’s her he is looking at, and to her there’s nothing amusing about the idea of having in your life a crazy idealistic person you love and must help. Not when she’s the person. Anyway it’s everybody, lots of the starfarers are like her, it’s nothing special. No, fuck it: they need a
way to live, something to do, or else they’ll never be anything but freaks from space, dying one by one from earthshock. The people from the stations out around Jupiter and Saturn have made up that name for it: they come back from space to Earth to get a dose of bacteria or whatnot, their sabbatical they call it, come back to get sick in order to stay well, but it’s a tough thing for them, and they often come down with what they call earthshock, and sometimes die of it. Actually some Saturnine people are offering to help them adjust to their new situation. Along with the Earthfirsters. There’s a combination for you, Aram remarks. No, they’re freaks! And so only freaks want to help them!

Aram begins to study this sabbatical that the space people take. Everyone living out there in the solar system comes back to Earth for a bit of time every several years, if they are concerned to live a full life span, which of course almost everyone is. This association between returning to Earth and living longer in space is an unexplained correlation, a statistical phenomenon that no one can test out in their own body, as no one can live both ways, and it isn’t necessarily true for every individual that staying in space all the time makes them sick. It’s just that on average, space people who don’t return to Earth every five to ten years, for several months to a couple of years, tend to die quite a bit younger than those who do return. The numbers are contested, but the studies, which Aram thinks are mostly pretty well designed, generally agree that the added life span for off-planet residents taking Earth sabbaticals is something like twenty years, or thirty years. Even now that they are sometimes living up to two centuries, that is a long time. It’s such a huge discrepancy that most people adhere to what the data suggest, and go home to Earth on a personal schedule of some kind. Best to pay attention to the data, and not take chances.

Studying all this, Aram points out that the true artificial intelligence is the actuarial long-term study; no human could ever see these things. This particular AI has made a compelling case. Suggestive, plausible, persuasive, probable, compelling: scientists’ linguistic scale for evaluating evidence is still the same, Aram says, and it tops out with quite a strong word, really: to
compel
. People do it because they are compelled to. Reality makes them do it. The urge to live makes them do it.

But there is another effect, almost the opposite of the sabbatical, and just as strong, if not stronger: earthshock. People come back to Earth, perfectly healthy on arrival, and die of something without warning. Sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what exactly did it, which adds to the fear of the syndrome, of course. Quick decline, earthshock, terrallergenic; these names contain within themselves the terrible news that the phenomenon they refer to is not well understood, an effect with unknown causes. Names like this reveal the ignorance in the name itself: the Big Bang. Cancer. Quick decline. Any disease ending with the suffix -
itis
or -
penia
. Et cetera. So many ignorant names.

So, the returned starfarers, having missed their own sabbaticals by some two hundred and fifty years, are now dying of earthshock, it seems. Even when causes can be found for any individual case, it’s suspicious that the causes have cropped up so soon after their return. Hard to believe they would have happened in the ship, in hibernation or not. No, something is going on. Something they will either survive or they won’t.

Meanwhile, living on this big crazy planet that still scares Freya out of her wits, what to do? What to do? At this point she could not be more miserable.

A week or more of this misery drags on before Badim comes to her and answers her question
So what are we going to do?
as if only a second has passed since it burst out of her.

“We go to the beach!” he announces cheerily.

“What do you mean?” Freya demands.

For of course there are no beaches. Sea level rose twenty-four meters in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries of the common era, because of processes they began in the twenty-first century that they couldn’t later reverse; and in that rise, all of Earth’s beaches drowned. Nothing they have done since to chill Earth’s climate has done much to bring sea level back down; that will take a few thousand more years. Yes, they are terraforming Earth now. There’s no avoiding it, given the damage that’s been done. In this the common era year 2910, they are calling it a five-thousand-year project. Some say longer. It’ll be a bit of a race with the Martians, they joke.