by Migration
Sonja stood at the sink by the kitchen window, watching Helmut out in the yard feeding the two goats from a bucket of scraps and peelings. Some friends who had visited them recently while making the obligatory outing to bring the children to Plantation had been astonished to see somebody washing dishes by hand. Sonja hadn’t been able to convey the feeling of inner fulfillment that she experienced from doing things in simple, uncomplicated ways. It gave a sense of being in control of her life, of knowing she could get by on her own abilities if she had to – even if it was no more than a fond illusion out here, in an artificial island surrounded by billions of miles of empty vastness from any natural world or star. But beyond that, nobody knew what circumstances might lie in store for that future generation in the years following landfall on Hera. Sonja was one of those who liked to think that she was helping to keep alive the spirit of human self-reliance and resourcefulness that might one day prove indispensable in building the new world that was to be.
Oh, she knew of course that the images that Plantation presented were a facade. But whereas this had never been denied by the high-intensity, nuclear-energized, air-fertilized agricultural levels and manicured surface park of Evergreen, at least Plantation made the effort to pretend at being a natural planet. Even if it did cheat a bit by crowding things together and making the houses too high for their ground plan, it provided a constant reminder that would become more important as years passed by of the origins the human race had sprung from, how far it had progressed, and the qualities that had enabled it to do so.
Sonja could remember her early exhilaration on joining Aurora as a teacher, at the prospect of helping to bring about education as it should be: teaching minds how to think and discover their own creative potential, as opposed to indoctrinating them with the destructive prejudices and survival politics that came as part of the cultural legacies on Earth. And in the burgeoning that had taken place since in things like the arts, sciences, and innovative engineering, her expectations had been largely fulfilled.
However, more recent times had seen movement in directions that gave her misgivings. Sonja had always felt unbounded confidence in the power of human creativity to solve its problems of today and continue building better tomorrows. In particular, she believed in the ability of human inventiveness to create new resources out of what hadn’t been resources before. A resource wasn’t a resource until the knowledge and the means existed to make use of it. At the time of Aurora’s departure, large areas of Earth had existed where there was no use for oil or gasoline. Until the development of catalyzed fusion in Sofi, deuterium had been nothing more than a trace curiosity in the oceans. And new discoveries seemed to happen consistently on scales that dwarfed everything that had gone before. There was no principle in Nature that said the process of breaking through into new regimes of understanding and energy control couldn’t continue indefinitely, pointing to a future unbounded in terms of what could be known and achieved. The old world’s inability to grasp this had driven it to self-destruction in fighting over access to resources that it thought were shrinking and finite, when instead, it could have been creating more on an unlimited scale. Aurora represented a distillation of that potential from an environment threatened with being overrun by the weeds of finite thinking, and its concentration into a seed that would one day grow into a world that Earth could probably never become. That her own children and those that she taught would be a part of bringing alive that vision was what brought meaning to her life.
However, while the people that she and Helmut encountered on a day-to-day basis generally echoed similar sentiments – they had moved to Plantation mostly for the same reasons, and tended to be of the same outlook – different ideas were being voiced elsewhere. Although nothing in the present circumstances approached what could be called a problem, some sections of the population were expressing concern over the finiteness of the resources that Constellation commanded, and calling for a policy of restraint on population growth. Recent months had seen protests at the Envoy program and demands for it to be reconsidered on the grounds that physical materials constituted the most valuable asset to be had in the present situation, and sending anything away represented the height of irresponsibility. Sonja and others like her were hard put to think of a better way of investing it. Even more disturbing were those advocating a more forceful, centralized authority empowered to impose such standards if judged (by whom was left vague) to be in the common good, which went against the whole principle of renouncing force in favor of trust in rationality and the power of persuasion that Aurora had been founded on.
Most people, it was true, accepted the projections showing that the amounts of materials that had been sent ahead to be recovered in the course of the voyage would ensure a sustainable balance with the kind of growth that was expected, and regarded the agitating as a device to build a political power base. But there were those coming of age now who had no memory of such principles or the times that had engendered them. And some of the strange beliefs that were taking hold among the cults that had emerged on Etanne hinted that perhaps the trust in human rationality might have been somewhat misplaced.
Outside, Helmut swilled the empty bucket under the yard faucet at the end of the shed, stowed it inside, and headed back toward the house. He appeared through the kitchen door moments later. “You know, I hope all this work turns out to be worth it,” he said, wiping his feet on the mat. “It would be a bit ironic if they find Hera teeming with animal life that’s not much different from what we know. Too bad they weren’t able to put down any surface landers…. Hello, you’re looking solemn. Is it meditation hour or something?”
Sonja smiled, shook her head, and returned her attention to the cutlery that she had been wiping and putting away. “It’s nothing. I was just thinking about the gloomy things they’re teaching children in some places these days – that there’s going to be overpopulation, and we’ll start running out of everything. Young minds have a right to expect better inspiration than that kind of thing from their elders.”
“Oh, it’s just a fad that’ll pass away. When people start inventing problems to worry about, it’s a sure sign that they don’t have any real ones. So it’s really good news in a way.”
“I wish everybody thought like that!”
Helmut looked around. “Speaking of children, where is our own contribution to Hera’s future? Isn’t Theis back yet?”
“She went off with Uggam, probably on one of their romps. You know what they’re like. Sometimes I think she should have been a boy, too.” Sonja moved away to make room for Helmut to rinse his hands at the sink.
“What’s to eat?” he asked over his shoulder.
“I was going to warm the casserole. There’s still about half left.”
“Good. It gets better every time it’s reheated – like stew…. So, you’re worried that people might lose confidence in the future.”
“It’s more the kind of political system that they say we’ll have to have to control things – everything planned and universally enforced,” Sonja said. “Exactly what Aurora was supposed to avoid.” She waved a hand as Helmut turned and reached for the towel. “Oh, I know that Ormont would never allow anything like that. But he’s not as young as he was, and he won’t be there forever. It’s some of the ones I see with ambitions to move into his place that bother me. And enough people are listening to them.”
Helmut was about to reply, when a fit of barking erupted in the yard outside. “What now?” He turned and craned his neck to peer through the window. “Be quiet, Boot.” Then a series of raps sounded from the front of the house.
“Someone’s at the door,” Sonja said. “I’ll go.”
“If it’s Kato again, tell him the seeds should be here tomorrow,” Helmut called after her. Then, through the window, “Shut up, you silly animal.”
From the indistinct murmuring filtering through to the kitchen, Helmut recognized the voice of Narel, who delivered the mail – usually from
an electrically powered cart, sometimes on horseback. One of the things that Plantation’s originators had been unanimous about was in wanting a world in which leisurely natural rhythms held sway, decoupled from the real-time torrent of electronic communications and event reporting that drove the rest of Constellation. A consequence was that the message links from Aurora and elsewhere terminated at the service hub – which was invisible from the occupied surface parts of Plantation – and the content distributed as mail. Newcomers invariably protested even though they knew what to expect, and tolerated it when they realized that nothing was going to change; then, after a while, a majority came to confess that in some ways they rather liked it. Removing the immediacy of things that were happening in other places, they said, gave more meaning to their own lives and the people around them who were a part of it. Which had been precisely the intention.
The door at the front closed, and Sonja reappeared, opening an envelope. “Narel says that the old fellow on the other side of Huan who was sick is gone. They took him out on the ferry to Aurora yesterday. It doesn’t sound so good.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. I liked him. He always had great stories to tell down there in the bar. Still, not exactly unexpected, I suppose…. Who is it? Culia again, asking if her kids can come and stay with us, I bet.”
Sonja shook her head as she unfolded the paper from inside. Her face lit up as she read rapidly over it. “No, it’s from Korshak. He’s coming here again.”
“Korshak? It’s been a while. What’s he doing – bringing Mirsto and Vaydien on another trip?”
“No, alone… to do with something that he’s gotten involved in. He’ll stop by and see us, of course, he says, but he isn’t sure quite when… Oh, and good stars, Helmut! He’ll be arriving on Plantation tomorrow!”
SEVENTEEN
In his days back on Earth, Korshak had observed that virtually everybody had times when they needed to retreat into privacy. Country people enjoyed it naturally anytime they chose, simply by virtue of the distances separating them from neighbors. People in towns, on the other hand, unable to escape the closeness of others, manufactured artificial barriers in the form of subtle codes conveyed through mannerisms and behavior, telling the world when they wanted to be left alone. It naturally followed that urban dwellers were better at reading them, which was perhaps why farmers trying to be sociable found cities to be generally unfriendly places, while town folk tended to see their rural cousins as artless hicks.
Under the conditions of space habitats committed to a voyage that for most would last more than a lifetime, protecting privacy had become one of the most universally respected values. Hence, there would be no point in contacting people involved with administration on Plantation and hoping to get a lead on somebody who might have gone to work there. Not everyone wanted their whereabouts to be bandied around, and their reasons were considered to be their business. All of which meant that the only way for Korshak to pursue things further was to go there in person and see what he could turn up.
Plantation was built as a torus one mile across, formed from a quarter-mile-diameter tube. Since the whole idea had been to create a setting reminiscent of Earth, the outer part of the “wheel” thus formed – corresponding to the tread and adjoining area of walls on an automobile tire – was constructed as a continuous series of window sections, providing all-around visibility of the starfield. This was a consequence of the gravity being synthesized as opposed to simulated by rotation, which enabled the outer periphery of the torus to function as the roof, with the floor and lower parts of the walls forming a valley curving back upon itself below.
A plasma-discharge channel running below the full circle of the roof, fitted with ultraviolet and X-ray filtering, created six localized, albeit peculiarly elongated, “Suns,” shining in a pastel sky provided by optically active cells in the roof panels that absorbed red and scattered blue. The moving daytime zone extended a little over halfway around Plantation and completed a circuit every twenty-four hours, while the dark section enjoyed a natural nighttime sky with the roof optics turned off.
Six spokes connected the torus to a hub structure containing the external communications, power generation and support services, docking facilities, and other backstage machinery that the inhabitants did a good job of pretending didn’t exist.
Korshak had been there before, as had just about every parent of young children. Few could resist an unrelenting barrage of entreaties to see the animals and walk through the fabled woodlands (even if the latter were barely a tenth of a square mile in size). Apart from that, not many wanted to. The experience was the nearest the adults would ever come to reliving times that were permanently gone, as well as a bringing to life for a moment the dreams of those who had never known them – and never would.
Dressed in casual working clothes and carrying a bag of personal effects in case he ended up staying over, he emerged from the spoke elevator with other passengers off the same ferry into a subground reception level. The surroundings of metal walls and decking, with girder lattices overhead, and a service desk beside a corridor of doors and windows could have been in any part of Constellation. As was true generally, the support structures for the valley floor above looked light and flimsy to anyone originally native to Earth. Two flights of stairs in which gravity increased progressively led to a vestibule, by which time weight was normal. From there the arrivals passed through a set of double doors and entered a different world.
The reverse sides of the doors were of wood – well, wood-grain veneer over molded plastic – as opposed to the plain lime color on the vestibule side. The doors were in keeping with the woodwork and decor of the lobby Korshak was now in. It was nothing like the fashionably styled interiors of clean lines and blended contours to be found through Aurora and elsewhere, but had more the character of Sofi before the onset of its age of widespread mechanization and electricity. There wasn’t an illuminated sign or a viewscreen in sight. Instead, the walls were covered in a repeating pattern of floral and leaf designs – an unusual taste in itself – and adorned with paintings of Earthscapes and rural scenes, and mirrors in ornamental frames set between niches holding statues, pottery, and assorted bric-a-brac. Lamps with ornamental fittings and shades hung from molded ceilings above wooden flooring relieved by carpets, with furnishings carved and finished to suit.
The entrance from outside was at the far end, through which could be seen a covered porch and steps with posts to the sides, and beyond it, glimpses of a building with figures standing outside, and foliage blending into the greenery of what looked like a hillside rising in the background. Several others from the ferry just ahead of Korshak disappeared through a glass-paned door to the side, on the far side of which were tables with people talking and eating. From previous visits, he knew it to be a local meeting place and general store called First Stop situated at the center of the minivillage called Jesson, clustered around the spoke head. He headed toward a door across the lobby, next to stairs leading up, with a frosted window in which were etched the words services, accommodation, inquiries. Inside was a small counter, a message and information board taking up most of the wall to one side, and a door opening to an office space at the rear. Korshak rang the bell provided, and after a short delay punctuated by sounds of papers rustling and the scrape of a chair leg, a woman appeared. She was somewhere in her fifties, short and dumpy, with dark hair cut in bangs across her forehead and makeup applied liberally around her mouth and eyes. She was wearing a loose, robelike dress of purple and lilac with vivid floral designs.
“Hi,” she greeted. “Welcome to Plantation.”
“Oh, you read minds, too?” Korshak said.
“The morning ferry is just in. It was a pretty safe bet. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to see what help openings you have here. This is where they’re listed, right?”
“Temporary? Time for a change of scene?”
“Exactly.”
It was a comm
on enough situation. Despite the efforts to create illusions to the contrary, Constellation living was confined to limited space and constrained within narrow bounds of experience. Just about everybody needed to take periodic breaks from their regular routine in whatever ways presented themselves. A while previously, Mirsto had gone away to a two-week “camp” on Beach devoted to swimming, diving, and the craft of handling small boats, while Vaydien went to work for a spell in an EVA suit on construction of the Envoy probe. Although Lois Iles still mainlined in lasers and optics in Aurora’s Hub observatory, she spent almost as much time these days rediscovering old-world music and creating virtual Earthscapes. Small wonder that Istella was always bustling. Korshak needed to talk to whoever dealt with the filling of occupational vacancies on Plantation, and posing as somebody seeking a change himself had seemed the most direct way. A bit devious, maybe, but such had been the story of his life.
The woman peered at him more closely. “I know the face from somewhere,” she said.
“Small worlds we live in.”
“Probably from sometime before, when I was on Aurora. Anyway, we can take care of things in the office.”
“How long ago was that?” Korshak asked as she waved him around the end of the counter and indicated the door through to the back.
“About six months. I used to manage a laundry on Siden, but it got boring. Back on Earth I always liked gardening, so I figured why not give Plantation a try? I wasn’t so sure about the going-primitive part, though. But I had some friends who’d moved here, and they said, ‘Dari, you know, when you’ve gotten used to the pace of things and find you don’t need all the junk, and you get to know some of the people, you won’t want to go back.’ And you know what? They were right. I love it out here.”
