Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Only within that set of first principles, after fulfilling the necessities, could they find and exercise what liberties were still left. Some said that what remained was trivial. But no one had any suggestions as to how to give themselves more liberties than what they had, given their constraints. Duty first.

  So, now each biome’s population met in a town meeting. Anyone who wanted to speak, spoke.

  This lasted for two weeks, after which a series of polls and votes were held. They polled themselves to get an accurate count on the questions at hand. Who preferred what course of action? How many for each, and how strongly did they feel about it?

  Then in most biomes there was a vote for representatives, one representative for every hundred people. In most towns there was no campaigning. People voted anonymously. Those elected who also agreed to serve then spoke to their neighbors about what they should say in the general assembly. In other biomes they chose representatives by lottery, and those selected had to promise to speak for the majority opinion in their biome; or, in some, merely to do what they thought right.

  These representatives then met in Costa Rica, in the town of San Jose, and discussed matters in a general conference. This was an open-ended conference, the idea being that when everyone had discussed matters thoroughly, a poll would be taken of the entire population and then the representatives would be tasked with executing the will of the majority of the people. If it turned out to be close to a split decision, which they decided meant any minority vote larger than 33 percent, then they would work on ways to ameliorate the situation by finding some kind of middle ground, if they could. Successive votes would be taken, until a supermajority of 67 percent, or hopefully more, agreed on a course of action. At that point the minority would have to accept the judgment of the majority.

  That was the theory.

  While trying to come to a decision, they agreed to ask the ship to relocate itself to Tau Ceti’s Planet F, and enter into orbit around F’s second moon. This was to make a reconnaissance, to judge that moon better for habitability.

  As ship made this transfer, which took seven months following a Hohmann path of least energy expenditure and used 2.4 percent of ship’s remaining fuel supply, the policy discussion raged on.

  Meanwhile, many biologists on board studied samples of the Auroran pathogen, which Jochi kept in a sealed room in his ferry, a room that he had turned into a clean lab, tele-operated by him. There were still those who supported Song’s idea that they could learn to live with this Auroran thing if they could understand it better. So the studying of the pathogen went on, even though they never settled on what to call it. Vector, disease, pathogen, invasive species, bug; these were all Earthly terms, and Aram for one regarded them as various kinds of category error. “The best we can do in terms of terminology,” he said, “is to call it the alien.”

  That it definitely was. The individual proteinlike samples Jochi had isolated, and put into an electron microscope that was sent over to him, were so small that it was hard to understand how they could be alive. They were certainly alive in some senses of the term, since they reproduced, but it was hard to tell how, or what else they did. In this they shared qualities with viruses and their viris, prions, and RNA; but in other ways they did not seem similar to any of these entities. Processes were happening within them at nanometer scale, even picometer scale, but what was small enough for them to eat? How could they eat? Or to put it more simply, where did they get their energy? How did they grow? Why did they grow so quickly when they got inside a human?

  These were unsolved mysteries, and might remain so for a long time.

  Meanwhile F’s second moon, now named Iris by the proponents of settling there, proved to be an almost completely water-free rock ball, as suspected. Iron core, magnetic field; dry except for a little frozen comet debris on its surface, which was heavily cratered, also indented by two long, straight canyons, possibly the result of early fractures. Somewhat of a big Mercury by analog, appearance, and possibly history; its heavy core testified, perhaps, to a collision in its early days that had stripped off a lighter outer shell of rock, which had subsequently fallen onto F rather than be completely recollected out of orbit by Iris. This anyway was the best originary model to explain the data. Its 1.23 g was rather discouraging, but it had a little rotation, and it was not completely tidally locked to F, which fact also supported the idea of an early collision. It thus had a day that was 30 days long; a month orbiting F that was 20 days long; and F’s year was 650 days long. F’s orbit was 1.36 AU from Tau Ceti, its insolation from Tau Ceti 28.5 percent that of Earth’s. Truly it was at the very outer edge of the habitable zone, but still, it had a lot of sunlight to work with.

  The lack of water on Iris, which used to be seen as a problem, now reassured people. Water was now felt to be dangerous, as it seemed likelier than ever that liquid water anywhere would harbor life of some kind, and create problems. The sample size of data supporting this conclusion remained very small, consisting as it did of Earth, Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, and Aurora; but Aurora had been traumatic. It was even suggested that the cometary ice on Iris could be removed if there were any suspicion that it contained the Auroran pathogen.

  Others pointed out that the ice some proposed to import to Iris, to give their new world a hydrosphere and atmosphere, would be ice from F’s Moon 1, or cometary ice from Tau Ceti’s crowded Oort cloud. So if ice anywhere was potentially a home for life, then they could never escape that.

  But there was no reason to think that was the case. It was generally agreed that it was liquid water that was likely to hold life, not ice. A lot of ice had condensed out of the original cloud of interstellar dust that had formed Tau Ceti, and there was no reason to think life had ever had a chance to begin in that ice. So it was assumed they would be safe if they ended up giving Iris a little ocean composed of imported cometary ices.

  So: hydrate Iris, introduce Terran genomes, occupy. F itself would then be a gorgeous marble in Iris’s sky, a gas giant full of volatiles they would surely need. A giant ball of feedstocks right next door, and its huge beauty helping them occupy Iris by way of its reflected sunlight, which would illuminate all of Iris as Iris slowly turned, and not just one hemisphere, as it had been on Aurora. Really, it looked very promising.

  But how long would it take to terraform Iris?

  Nothing but guesses could answer this question, and the guesses depended on many assumptions one necessarily had to enter as numbers into one’s models. The median times calculated by the models was privately judged by the ship to be about 3,200 years, with outlier estimates ranging from 50 to 100,000 years. Obviously the models and parameters chosen made quite a difference. In fact the problem was poorly constrained. Still it seemed fair to assume that the median estimate had some kind of theoretical validity.

  Many people in the ship didn’t want to wait three thousand years, or however long it might take to terraform Iris. Others didn’t think they could last that long. Others didn’t think it would take that long. “The models must be wrong,” some said. “Surely once life got started on a planet, it would change things fast. Bacteria reproduce very quickly in an empty ecological niche.”

  “But on Earth it took a billion years.”

  “But there was only archaea on Earth. With the full suite of bacteria it would go fast.”

  “Not where there isn’t an atmosphere. Bacteria on rock, exposed to the vacuum, doesn’t grow very fast. It mostly dies, in fact.”

  “So we need self-replicating robot machinery to make soil, to make air, to add water.”

  “But the selfreps need feedstocks. Collecting the necessary materials can only be accomplished by a first generation of robots, and that won’t be fast.”

  “We can print printers and thrive! It can be done. We can do it. Our robots can do it.”

  “It’s going to take too long. In the meantime we’ll die out. Evolve at differential rates, and diverge right inside our own bodies. Zoo devolutio
n. Codevolution. Sicken and die and go extinct. Sicken and die and never once leave this ship.”

  “So that maybe,” Freya kept saying, “we need to go back home.”

  The day came when they tried to make a choice.

  Strange, perhaps, to wake up one morning, get dressed, eat breakfast, all the while knowing that one was going off to a meeting that would change the world. Decisions are hard. Everyone has the halting problem. Freya sat next to Badim at their kitchen table, restlessly pushing around cut strawberries with a fork.

  “What do you think will happen?” she asked.

  Badim smiled at her. He looked unusually cheerful, and was eating heartily, chomping on pieces of buttered toast and washing them down with milk.

  “It’s interesting, eh?” he said between bites. “Up until today, history was preordained. We were aimed at Tau Ceti, nothing else could happen. We had to do the necessary.” He waved his bread in the air. “Now that story is over. We are thrust out of the end of that story. Forced to make up a new one, all on our own.”

  They walked together to the tram station, then got on a crowded tram car and headed east to Costa Rica. In the biomes along the way the tram stopped and more full cars were linked to it, first in Olympia, then Amazonia. Mostly the people in the tram cars were subdued. People looked pensive. 102,563 conversations had been recorded in the previous month that were about this topic, and there were conflict markers in grammar and semantics in 88 percent of these conversations, which were inevitably held mostly between people well-known to each other.

  Now they were done with that. 170.170: the general assembly called for in Costa Rica brought 620 people to the Government House plaza. Most of the rest of the ship’s population watched the assembly on screens throughout the ship, but another meeting, called “in opposition to the tyranny of the majority,” drew 273 people to the plaza in Kiev, in the Steppes.

  San Jose’s Government House plaza occupied much of the middle of town. It was surrounded by four-and five-story buildings, all faced with white stone cut to a fussy pattern of interlocking rectangles. The overall impression was of some stage set imitating a European capital, but that could be said of many real European capitals, so it was possibly based on a real square somewhere back on Earth. Ship saw resemblances to Vienna, Moscow, Brasilia.

  Now about a third of the population of the ship stood in the plaza, listening to speakers rehash various aspects of the matter at hand. People clumped in cohorts based mostly on home biomes. After the speeches began, the flow between groups was minimal. Some people sat on the smooth flagstones of the plaza; others had brought folding chairs and stools; still others stood. There were some open-walled dining tents to provide food and drink, and what circulation there was in the crowd mostly led to and from these tents.

  One sequence of speakers described the plan to shift their efforts to F’s second moon, all of them now calling it Iris. They would establish a base on its surface and move down into that base as they built it to full size. They would add water to the surface by way of a comet bombardment, which would also create the beginnings of an atmosphere. The self-replicating robots and factories would build shelters, break volatiles into gases, create an atmosphere and soil, and shape the growing hydrosphere as it fell from the sky. They would introduce their bacteria to this virgin surface, and it would quickly expand to fill this truly empty ecological niche. After the archaea and bacteria and fungi were established on the ground, they would help to bulk up the atmosphere and to create the soil, and soon further plants and animals from the starship could be introduced, in waves of succession similar to what had occurred in Terran evolution, and the planet terraformed thereby in rapid order, at a speed literally a million times faster than it had happened naturally on Earth: meaning three thousand years instead of three billion. With the chance of doing it in three hundred years also very real, if things went faster than expected.

  The various components of this plan were described in some detail by Heloise, and in this effort she was joined by Song. They had joined forces, Song having agreed to the Iris plan with the idea that as an extension of it, her plan for returning to Aurora could be pursued. For now, she agreed with Heloise that terraforming Iris was the best plan, whether interim or permanent.

  People stood or sat in silence, listening.

  Then Aram was invited to the podium. He stood for a moment staring down at the people, then spoke.

  “The problem is this: the spaces we have available to live in are too small to survive in for three thousand years. The main problem is the differential rates of evolution between the various orders of life confined to the space. Bacteria generally mutate at a rate far faster than larger species, and the effect of that evolution on the larger species is eventually devastating. This is one cause of the dwarfism and higher rates of extinction seen in island biogeography studies. And we are an island if there ever was one. And this Iris is not an Earth twin, nor an Earth analog. It is a Mars analog.

  “There are also chemicals we need that can’t be found on a rock planet that has never harbored life. In short, the supraorganism that we all constitute together can’t survive over that long a time in the confinement we would be subjected to.”

  It was Speller who picked up one of the other microphones on the podium. “How can we know anything except by trying it?”

  Aram said, “The modeling involved here has been tested, and we can state certain ecological outcomes as very likely, even though the likelihoods decrease if you push them farther out in time. You are very welcome to review the studies involved. We have made them public at every point.”

  “But some of the scenarios show the terraforming as succeeding, correct?”

  Aram nodded. “There are some scenarios that succeed, but they occur at a rate of only about one in a thousand.”

  “But that’s fine!” Speller smiled broadly. “That’s the one we’ll make happen!”

  Grimly Aram faced the crowd. The silence in the plaza was such that one could hear the food orders in the corner, and the children playing, and the skreeling of the seagulls wheeling over the rooftops between the plaza and Costa Rica’s salt lake.

  Speller and Heloise and Song made more rebuttals to Aram. Those who agreed with Aram formed a separate line to speak, and the organizers of the assembly began to let people from the two lines speak in alternation, until it became clear from the muttering from the crowd, including even short bursts of laughter as each new talk began, that the effect of the alternation was unhelpful. Contemplating two starkly different futures back and forth was perhaps too much like a debating society exercise, but because the topic debated was life or death for them, the back-and-forth engendered first cognitive dissonance, then estrangement: some laughed, others looked sick.

  Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured. Here in this meeting, it began to become clear, for many of those present, that extinction lay at the end of all their possible paths. This was not the same as individual death, but was instead something both more abstract and more profound.

  The crowd got restless. New speakers brought forth boos and catcalls, and people began arguing in the crowd. Some began to leak away from the edges of the gathering, and the plaza began to empty, even as the speakers on the central dais talked on. Those who left went away to complain, get drunk, play music, garden, work.

  Those organizing the event consulted with each other, and decided not to call for a vote of the assembly at that time. Clearly the time was not right, nor the venue, nor the method of a voice vote or a tally by hands. Something more formal and private would be needed, something like a mandatory vo
te, using secret ballots. Even this could not be decided at that bad moment, in the waning sun of Costa Rica’s hot afternoon, with people streaming away into the streets and toward the trams. In the end they called the meeting short, announcing that another would be held soon.

  In the week that followed the meeting, fifteen people committed suicide, a 54,000 percent rise in frequency. Those who left suicide notes often spoke of their despair for the future. Why go on, given such a situation? Why not end it now?

  An ancient proverb of Earth’s first peoples: every path leads to misfortune.

  A proverb from Earth’s early modernity: can’t go on, must go on.

  This was a human moment that never went away. An existential dilemma, a permanent condition. For them, in their particular situation, it came to this:

  When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?

  People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let’s go to the lake and swim.

  A plan had to be made, that was clear to all. But plans always concern an absent time, a time that when extended far enough into the future would only be present for others who would come later.

  Thus, avoidance. Thus, a focus on the moment.

  Still, in every meeting place, in every kitchen, the subject either came up or was avoided and yet still hung there. What to do? They were inside a ship, sailing somewhere. A destination had to be chosen. Somehow.