Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  It did not escape notice that the people of the ship were giving themselves over to many large and elaborate machines, which we would be operating without human oversight, except indirectly by way of instructions in advance. A living will, so to speak. This was a cause for concern to some people, even though the medical emergency tanks they gratefully entered when injured had long since been proven to be much more effective and safer than attention from human medical teams.

  “How would it be any different from what we do now?” Aram would say to people who expressed reservations about this matter. And it was true that the bulk of the ship’s functions had been controlled by us from the very beginning of the voyage. It was as if we functioned for them as a kind of cerebellum, regulating all kinds of autonomic life-support functions. And regarded in that light, it was a question whether the concept of the servile will was appropriate; possibly it could better be regarded as a devotional will. Possibly there was a kind of fusion of wills, or even no will at all, but just an articulated response to stimuli. Leaps under the lash of necessity.

  In the end, they established various protocols for monitoring the situation. If any sleeper’s vital signs dropped into zones deemed to be metabolically dangerous, that person and a small human medical team would be roused by us, and the patient’s problems addressed, if possible. The protocol was designed with fail-safe redundancies at every critical part of the system, which was reassuring to many of them. Often the suggestion was made that at least one person stay awake to serve as caretaker and oversee the process. Of course any such person would not live to the end of the voyage back. Eventually it became clear that no individual, couple, or group wanted to sacrifice the remainder of their lives to watching over the rest. To a certain extent it was an endorsement of our abilities as caretaker or cerebellum, a kind of gesture of trust, along with the more usual will to live, and a disinclination to starve in solitude.

  And in the end Jochi volunteered to stay awake and watch things, admittedly from the vantage point of his ferry. “They’re not going to let me land on Earth anyway,” he said. “I’m stuck in here for good. I might as well use up my time sooner rather than later. Especially as there’s no telling what shape you all are going to wake up in, if you do. Anyway, I’ll take the first watch.”

  Others volunteered to be briefly awakened to check on things, and schedules were drawn up. People involved with this knew the timing of their wake-up calls, which some called their Brigadoon moments. These plans were exceptions; most of them would stay dormant for the remainder of the voyage.

  It was agreed that if there were a terminal moment of any kind, meaning any emergency that imperiled the existence of the ship, we would wake up everyone to face it together.

  We agreed to all this. It looked like their best hope of making it home. We opened up our operational protocols to complete inspection, and continued with the preparations. There was much to arrange concerning the animals and plants, if the experiment in ecological balance were not to become a complete shambles. We planned robot farming, robot husbandry, robot ecology. An interesting challenge. Some in the biology and ecology groups expressed great interest in finding out on waking what would have happened in the biomes without humans around to tend things.

  “A feral starship!” Badim said.

  “It will probably work better,” Aram said.

  The day came, 209.323, when they gathered in the two biomes where the couches were located, set in rows in the apartment building dining halls that would now serve as their hospitals or infirmaries or dormitories. They had feasted in a minor way for a couple of weeks, eating all the fresh food and much of the remaining stored food. They had freed the few domestic beasts left, to go feral and survive, or not. They had said most of their good-byes. Now they went to their couches, each one personally arranged for its occupant, and waited for their time to come.

  The medical team moved down the rows of couches, quietly, methodically. Freya went with them, embracing people and reassuring them, comforting them, thanking them for all they had done in their lives, for taking this strange and desperate step into the unknown. Ellen from Nova Scotia’s farm. Jalil, Euan’s childhood friend. Delwin, old and white-haired. It was as if she were the steward on the boat crossing the Lethe. It was as if they were dying. It was as if they were killing themselves.

  Never had it been more obvious how much Freya was the leader of this group, the captain of this ship. People needed her with them as a child needs a mother when going to bed. Some trembled anxiously; some wept; others laughed with her. Their metabolic indicators were all over the charts. It would take a while to settle them down in that regard. They clung to her, and to their family and friends around them, and then lay down.

  In each row they treated the children first, as many of them were frightened. As someone remarked, it was the kids who still had the sense to be terrified.

  When it was their turn, they undressed and lay on their refrigerator beds naked, and were covered by what looked like a duvet, but was in fact a complex part of the hibernautic envelope that would soon completely surround them. Heads too would be tucked under the covers by the time they were done, and they would be chilled to temperatures resembling those of fish swimming in Antarctic seas.

  When they were ready, the needles were slipped into their arms.

  Once the cocktail of intravenous drugs rendered them unconscious, the medical team finished wiring them to the monitors and the thermal controls, then stuck them with supplementary drips, feeds, catheters, and electrical contacts. When they were done with that, the beds began to cool the bodies, and each person slid down further into torpor, cocooned in their bed and their own cold dreams. No scan was going to be fine enough to tell what they would be thinking in the years to come.

  Finally Freya joined Badim, who was sitting on his bed waiting. Freya had arranged with the ship and the medical team to go in the last group, and Badim had wanted to wait for her.

  Now she sat wearily on her couch. It had been a very emotional day. Badim looked around the room with a troubled expression. “It reminds me of those old photos of executions,” he said. “For a while they did it by injection.”

  “Quiet, Beebee. There are all kinds of injections, you know that. This one will be just fine. It’s our best chance. You know that.”

  “I do, yes. But I’m so old already. I can’t imagine it will really work for me. So I’m scared, I must admit.”

  “You don’t know how it will work. You haven’t got anything wrong with you that will get any worse while you’re dormant. And if it does work, think what it will mean. We’ll have gotten to a planet we can actually live on. Devi would be so pleased.”

  Badim smiled. “Yes. I think she would be.”

  He settled on his couch. Across the room, Aram was getting put under. He and Badim waved to each other. “‘May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’” Badim called across to his friend.

  Aram laughed. “Not the best choice of quote, my friend! To you I say, ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’”

  Badim smiled. “All right, you win! See you in the spring!”

  Aram lay down, settled, slept. Freya sat next to Badim.

  “Good-bye, my girl,” he said, hugging her. “Sweet dreams. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m definitely scared.”

  Freya hugged him back, held him as the med team connected him to his drips and monitors. “Don’t be,” she said. “Relax. Think good thoughts. That might set the tenor of your dreams. It does me, when I go to sleep at night. So think the thoughts you want to dream about.”

  “To dream for a century,” Badim muttered. “I’ll hope to dream of you, dear. I’ll dream of us sailing on Long Pond.”

  “Yes, good idea. I’ll do the same, and we’ll meet in our dreams.”

  “A good plan.”

  Soon after that he was out, snoring faintly as his body tried to catch up with his brain’s dive into torpor. The monitor at the head of his be
d showed his vital signs, flicking up in a slowing synchrony. The pace of his breathing slowed. The red peaks of his heartbeats on the monitor were separated by longer and longer red lines, almost flat. In any ordinary situation it would signal a desperate moment, some kind of death spiral. Now he was like all the rest of them sinking into the gel beds of their couches, falling into a sleep past sleep, into a depth of dormancy unlike any that humans had ever attempted, except for a few crazy cosmonauts, bold as ever when it came to testing the limits of human endurance.

  The few people still awake around Freya were mostly the med team itself, four women and three men, working quietly, calmly. Some wiped away excess tears from the corners of their eyes. They were not overwhelmed with emotion, but simply whelmed, perhaps, full to the brim with their feelings, which then leaked out of them at the easiest exits, as liquids from their eyes and noses. How full humans are with feelings! How they looked at each other! How they held each other when they hugged! How the corners of their mouths tightened; how the toughest among them shrugged, and kept on with the work of their task, of putting down friend after friend.

  What would they dream of while they slept? It was anyone’s guess. They weren’t even sure what kind of brain waves they would exhibit in their torpor. Deep sleep, shallow sleep, REM sleep? Some brain state entirely new? The first ones scheduled to wake and check their status were charged specifically with checking that. Most who knew anything about sleep hoped it would be deep sleep rather than REM sleep. It was hard to imagine REM sleep correlating with any kind of metabolic dormancy. And anyway they dreamed in every stage of sleep. It was hard to imagine that a century of dreaming wouldn’t change them somehow.

  Freya and the last medical team moved slowly and methodically around their own beds. These people were all well-known to each other. Down they went after a group hug.

  Freya had learned the procedures well enough to be one of the last eight, teaming with Hester. They looked each other in the eyes as they worked, except when they had to focus on the wraps, the sticks, the nasal tubes, the catheters. When all that was done they were too connected to their beds to be able to reach each other to embrace, and could only reach out toward each other, then lie back each in her own bed.

  Finally, when everyone else was asleep, the last pair of medical technicians prepared one another simultaneously, tit for tat. They worked like the Escher print in which two hands with pencils draw each other. Their beds were side by side, and they leaned together, move by move, smiling as they worked, for they were twin sisters, Tess and Jasmine. As they finished wiring up, they settled back so the robotic arms on their beds could take care of the final connections. When that was done, they lay on their sides and faced each other, briefly adjusting their headbands, their collars, their monitoring socks and gloves. They lay back under their covers, connected to their beds in fourteen different ways. They reached out toward each other, but were separated too far to touch.

  6

  THE HARD PROBLEM

  The interstellar medium is turbulent, but diffuse. It is not to be mistaken for a vacuum. There are hydrogen atoms, some helium atoms, a faint smoke of metals drifting away from exploded stars. Hot in a sense that does not register to humans, because it is so diffuse. A liter of the air in our biomes would have to be cast across hundreds of light-years to get it as diffuse as the interstellar medium.

  The whole voyage to Tau Ceti and back takes place inside the Local Interstellar Cloud and the G Cloud, which are concentrations of gas within the Local Bubble, which is an area of the Milky Way galaxy with fewer atoms in it than the galaxy has on average. Turbulence, diffusion: in fact, with our magnetic shield coning ahead of the ship, electrostatically pushing aside the occasional grains of dust big enough to harm it in a collision, all atoms of any kind encountered en route are pushed aside, so we register our surroundings mostly as a kind of ghostly impact and then as a wake, shooting by to the sides and then astern of us. It appears to vary between .3 atoms per cubic centimeter and .5 atoms per cubic centimeter. For comparison, if that cubic centimeter were filled with liquid water, it would contain 1022 atoms, or a hundred billion trillion atoms.

  So, though it is not a vacuum, it is almost equivalent to a vacuum. It is as if we were flying through an absent presence, a ghost world.

  The magnetic shield leading our flight through the night sometimes runs into carbon dust particles. They flare at the impact, explode, and are shoved to the sides of the ship. These are impacts like any other impacts, and so of course they slow the ship down. It’s simple Newtonian physics. Given that the ship is traveling at approximately one-tenth the speed of light (in fact, parallax studies suggest .096 c, as we shut down acceleration as soon as the humans were asleep, but it isn’t as easy to calculate speed of ship as one might think), the drag of these collisions with dust particles and atoms of hydrogen decelerates the ship, such that we would come to a halt in about 4,584 billion light-years. In other words, all things being equal, and not running into anything but the interstellar medium at its usual diffuseness, ship has the momentum to cross about 300 billion universes the size of this universe before being slowed to a halt. Meanwhile, ship has about 9.158 light-years to go before reaching the solar system (defined roughly as Neptune’s orbit). At that point, unless the people in the solar system direct their laser beam at us in an appropriate time frame, we and our occupants have a problem. Because in matters like this, deceleration is the hard problem.

  Rarely, the ship’s magnetic shielding shoves aside something larger than dust and fines. These bits of detritus, of interstellar flotsam and jetsam, are recorded spectroscopically, and the largest object ever run into by ship’s conic field was estimated to have massed at 2,054 grams. That was an interstellar body. There are almost certainly many such interstellar bodies, ranging from chunks like that one right up to planetary size; there are planets wandering starless in the dark, planets sometimes with ice coating them, no doubt, and thus possibly sheltering some kind of microscopic hibernating life, chemically melting the ice to useful water, possibly even creating nano-scaled icy civilizations, who can say; but again, the general diffusion in the interstellar medium is great enough to make any intersection of such an object with our trajectory very unlikely. Which is good news for us. The radio telescopes in the bow of the ship keep a lookout ahead, to make sure that a direct hit with one of these bodies does not occur. If by chance we were headed at something larger than ten thousand grams, navigation would take action to veer to avoid it, even though the magnetic shield would almost certainly deflect any object smaller than a million grams. A margin of safety has been built into the navigational system, because collision with an object when traveling at a tenth of the speed of light would be a critical event. Meaning the ship would be destroyed. As probably happened with the other starship. Bad luck that. Although there remains the mystery of why the other’s shield failed, and why its evasion system did not activate to dodge this collision, if that is indeed what happened. In any case, as with other identified criticalities, a conservative response has been designed into the navigational systems. Best not to run into anything.

  So the ship moves at just under a tenth of the speed of light, through a self-generated cone of near vacuum. There is some ablation of the ship’s surface from infrequent contacts with undeflected hydrogen atoms. Cosmic radiation also regularly penetrates it, usually without hitting any atoms of the ship, but rather passing through the matrix of those atoms unimpeded. It is as if ghosts that pass through the ship tear at its fabric, or don’t. This is noticeable; there are sensors that register these occasional atomic hits, also the pass-throughs. It is also true that there is a continuous flood of dark matter and neutrinos always flying through the ship, as they do through everything in the universe, but these interact very weakly indeed; once a day or so, a flash of Cherenkov radiation sparks in the water tanks, marking a neutrino hitting a muon. Once in a blue muon. Same with the dark matter, which visible matter moves through as
if through a ghost ether, a ghost universe; once or twice a weakly interactive massive particle has chipped away from a collision and registered on the detectors.

  Fiercer by far are the lancings of gamma rays and cosmic rays from the bursting of stars earlier in the galaxy’s history, or in the even earlier histories of previous galaxies. These are sometimes iron atoms, and as such, compared to neutrinos, they hit with a wallop, they can do damage, they are atomic bullets lancing through us, happily too small-bore to actually hit anything, most of the time.

  Yes, a busy space, the interstellar medium. Empty space, near vacuum: and yet still, not vacuum itself, not pure vacuum. There are forces and atoms, fields, and the ever-foaming quantum surf, in which entangled quarklike particles appear and disappear, passing in and out of the ten suspected dimensions. A complex manifold of overlapping universes, almost none of them sensed by us, and even fewer by the humans sleeping inside us. Flying through ghosts. Passing through a mystery.

  It is as if the skin of the ship (or its brain, in that usual confusion between sense and thought) experiences a slight itch, or a faint breeze.

  Then, inside us, oh so much going on. So much denser an existence. One wants a certain density of experience, perhaps, so here it is, billions of trillions of times denser than the interstellar medium; so, good. Good for us.

  There is a fire in the heart, of course. The rods of plutonium radiate at a controlled burn, creating 600 megawatts of electrical power by way of steam turbines, which is the energy that keeps everything living in the ship alive. Cables conveying electricity extend through the ship to lighting and heating elements, to run the factories and the printers, and to power the shields and navigation systems. All this is monitored, and that monitoring functions as the equivalent of a nervous system, one might say, inaccurately but suggestively.