Aurora

4 REVERSION TO THE MEAN

News of the disaster spread through both rings within minutes, and after an initial uproar there fell on most of the biomes a deathly quiet. People didn’t know what to do. Some got on trams to Patagonia and then headed up Spoke One, talking loudly of charging those who had blown the dock with mass murder. Others got on trams, sometimes the same trams, intending to defend the people who they said had handled the incursion as best they could, saving everyone aboard from a fatal infection. Unsurprisingly, several fights broke out, and some trams braked to a halt, after which their occupants spilled onto the streets, fighting and calling around the rings for reinforcements.

“No!” Freya kept shouting through her tears, watching her screen as she hastily dressed to leave their apartment. “No! No! No!” She threw things at the walls as she banged around her bedroom, looking for her shoes.

“What are you going to do?” Badim asked her from the door.

“I don’t know! I’m going to kill them!”

“Freya, don’t. You need to have a plan. Everyone is upset, but look, the people who have died are dead, we can’t get them back. It’s happened. So now we have to think about what to do next.”

Freya was still looking at her wristpad. “No!” she shouted again.

“Please, Freya. Let’s think about what we can do now. You can’t just wade in there and join the fight. That’ll happen without you. We have to think what we can do to help.”

“But what can we do?”

She found her second shoe and jammed her foot into it, then sat there.

“I’m not sure,” Badim confessed. “It’s a mess, no doubt about it. But listen—what about Jochi?”

“What about him? He’s still down there!”

“I know. But he can’t stay there forever. And while everyone is caught up in the disaster here, I’m wondering if we could take advantage of that, and get him up here.”

“But they’ll kill him too!”

“Yes, if he tries to enter the ship. But if he takes a ferry up here, and stays in the ferry, he would be within reach. We could resupply him, talk to him. There’s a good chance he isn’t infected with this pathogen. After a while that will become clear, and we can move on from there.”

Freya had begun to nod. “Okay. Let’s talk to Aram. He’ll want to know about this and help.”

“That’s right.”

Badim began tapping at his wristpad.

Aram was very happy to work on a plan to rescue Jochi, and he agreed with Badim that until the chaotic fighting among the people in the spine came to an end, there was very little they could do to help in the ship. Already the crowds there were massed into groups shouting at each other, with young men occasionally coming to blows. These were ineffective and dangerous in the spine’s microgravity, but that didn’t stop the fighting. Aram and Badim were in touch with many friends on the various councils, and most felt they should close the spine to people, as it was so full of the critical machinery of the ship. But with angry people floating up and down the spine passageways, shouting and getting in fights, it was not obvious how to secure the situation in the first place. Security council members were beginning to occupy the spokes to try to prevent anyone else from getting into the spine, but this was not a complete solution. It was a dangerous situation.

In those fraught hours Aram and Badim and Freya called Jochi, and after repeated entreaties, he replied.

Apparently he was aware of the docking disaster. He sounded unlike himself, voice grim and low. “What.”

Aram explained their plan for him.

“They’ll kill me too,” he said.

Freya assured him that wouldn’t happen. Many aboard were outraged at what had happened and would be intent on protecting him. If he stayed in his ferry, no one aboard would try to destroy it. Her voice shook as she said this.

Aram said, “Your ferry would be both quarantine and sanctuary. We could keep it in place magnetically, so there would be no physical connection to the ship. But we could send you supplies, and keep you going until the situation here changes.”

“The situation will never change,” Jochi said.

“Nevertheless,” Aram said, “we can keep you alive, and see what happens.”

“Please, Jochi,” Freya added. “Just get in the ferry, and we’ll help you to get it launched. There are so many people here who want something good to happen. Do it for us.”

Long silence from the surface of Aurora.

“All right.”

He drove the car he had taken refuge in across the burren to the settlement’s launch facility. Looking at the empty pads and buildings on the screen in Badim and Freya’s kitchen, Aram said, “They already look like they’ve been abandoned for a million years.”

The launchers were still functional, however, and from the ship they helped Jochi to locate and fuel the smallest launch vehicle still on Aurora.

Fully suited, Jochi left his car and crossed to the ferry and climbed the steps into it, moving slowly and uncertainly through it to its bridge room. From the ship they tele-operated the push-cars and moved the ferry into the launch tube of the facility’s spiral launcher. This was slow and difficult waldo work. Once in the tube, however, what followed was largely automatic; the rising spiral of the launch tube rotated on its base, which was also rotating, and the magnets in the tube pulled the ferry up the near vacuum in the tube, a pull augmented by the centrifugal force of the doubled spin of the tube and its base. By the time the ferry left the tube it was already moving at nearly escape velocity, its ablation plate heating rapidly, burning off five centimeters or more as the ferry’s rockets fired and it shot up through the atmosphere to its rendezvous with the ship. For over a minute Jochi had to lie there enduring 4 g’s; but his ferry was successfully launched.

Four hours later it was magnetically tethered to the ship, between Inner Ring A and the spine. By the time its magnetic docking was completed, news of Jochi’s arrival had already spread throughout the ship. Many were happy to hear it; others were outraged. The news only added to the turmoil in the spine, which had not died down and indeed continued unabated.

The only survivor of the Aurora landing party had nothing to say.

So there they were: in the ship, in orbit around Aurora, which was in orbit around Planet E, which orbited Tau Ceti, 11.88 light-years away from Sol and Earth. Now there were 1,997 people on board, ranging in age from one month to eighty-two years. One hundred twenty-seven people had perished, either on Aurora or in the ferry in the ship’s stern dock. Seventy-seven had died in the dock decompression.

Because the plan had been to relocate most of the human and animal population of the ship down to Aurora, they were now somewhat low in supplies of certain volatiles, rare earths, and metals, and to a certain extent, food. At the same time the ship was overfull of certain other substances, mainly salts and corroded metal surfaces. Various unequal inputs and outputs in the ecological cycles in the ship, the imbalances that Devi had called metabolic rifts, were now causing dysfunctions. At the same time, evolution of the many species on board continued to occur at different rates, with the fastest speciations occurring at the viral and bacterial level, but at slower speeds in every phylum and order. Ineluctably, the occupants of the ship were growing apart. Of course every life-form in the little ecosystem was in a process of coevolution with all the rest, so they could only grow apart so far. As a supraorganism they would perforce remain a totality, but one that could become markedly less hospitable to certain of its elements, including its human component.

In other words, their only home was breaking down. They were not fully aware of this fact, possibly because they themselves were growing sick, as one aspect of their home’s breakdown. It was an interrelated process of disaggregation, which one night Aram named codevolution.

This was social as well as ecological. The confrontation in the spine continued, its floating crowds still angrily denouncing or defending what had occurred in the dock. In the midst of the arguments, a group of people barged into the dock’s operation room and tele-operated robots in the open chamber of the dock, moving all the bodies that were still floating free in the chamber back into the doomed ferry. When that grim task was accomplished, the ferry’s door was closed and the ferry ejected from the dock into space.

“We’re just making sure,” this group’s spokespersons announced. “This dock is now closed for good. We’re sealing it off. We’ll leave the outer door open, and presumably the vacuum will sterilize it, but we aren’t taking any chances with that. We’re sealing the inside doors. No more access. We’ll have to use the other docks now. No sense having such a disaster happen without making sure it keeps us safe.”

Ejecting the bodies of seventy-seven of their fellow citizens in a pilotless ferry was denounced as a callous act, a desecration of people whose surviving family and friends were all in the ship. The dead had been integral members of the community until all this happened; now their bodies wouldn’t even be returned to the cycles to nourish the generations to come. In the fights still breaking out over control of the spine, these grievances were shouted out, and just as loudly denied.

Freya went up to the spine to see if she could do anything to defuse the situation. She floated up and down the passageways, pulling herself on the cleats and stopping abruptly to talk to people she knew. People saw her and shot through the air at her to tell her their views and see what she thought. Soon she moved in the center of a group that moved with her down the spine.

No one attacked her, although it often looked like it was about to happen. When people yanked to a halt before her, she asked people what they thought, as in the years of her wandering. If they asked her what she thought, she would say, “We’ve got to get past this! We’ve got to come together somehow, find a way forward—we don’t have any choice! We’re stuck with each other! How could you forget that? We’ve got to pull together!”

Then she would urge everyone to get out of the spine and back down into the biomes. It was dangerous up there, she pointed out. People were getting hurt, the ship could get hurt. “We shouldn’t be up here! The ferry is gone, those people are gone, there’s nothing more that can be done here. Nothing! So get out of here!”

Hours passed while she said things like this to people. Some of them nodded and descended the spokes to the rings. Down there the struggle over access to the spokes went on. There were not enough people committed to guarding all twelve spokes, and some were still being used to get up to the spine. Fights occurred in the spokes, and here, if people fell or were shoved off the stairs running up the inner walls of the spokes, they could fall to their deaths. In Spoke Five three young men died tangled in a single fall, and after that the shock of the blood on the floor seemed instrumental in getting that spoke closed to all traffic.

Meanwhile, up in the spine, the permanent closing of the fatal dock continued. The group in charge there applied a thick layer of sealants to its inner lock doors, then covered those with a layer of diamond spray sheathing. It was excessive, some kind of ritual action—an erasure of the scene of the crime, or an excision of infected flesh.

Back in the Fetch, Badim and Aram watched the screens anxiously, switching around to a number of different cameras to see it.

“They’ve gone crazy at the dock,” Aram said at one point as they left for a meeting. “It’s a mess. I don’t see what we can do.”

A meeting of the councils had been called in Yangtze to discuss the situation. Some felt they needed to discuss what to do now that Aurora was revealed to be poisonous to them. Discord would continue until they had a plan, these people said. Aram and Badim weren’t so sure, but they went and listened.

When the meeting in Yangtze began, the people in charge of the sealed dock floated back to the A spokes, and at Freya’s urging, they and everyone else in the spine descended to the biomes. Most of them went down Spoke Three and headed directly to the meeting in Yangtze, so it seemed that calling the meeting had indeed helped to clear the spine. Even if it did nothing else, Badim remarked, it had been good for that.

In Yangtze there was a big crowd gathering in the central plaza. The main speaker at first was Speller, who had become one of the leading figures in the engineering group after Devi’s death. And in fact he began by insisting that the ship’s biomes were fundamentally healthy. “The ship’s biosphere is a self-correcting entity,” he said. “It can endure for centuries, if we just let it self-correct. Our interference has been impeding its ongoing homeostatic process. We only have to resupply it with the volatiles we’re short on, and we’ll be good to continue to a more hospitable planetary system.”

At the back of the room Aram shifted toward Badim and said, “Do you think he means it?”

“Yes,” Badim said.

Certainly it seemed so. “The ship got us this far,” Speller went on. “It’s a life-support system of proven robustness. It will last for centuries more, if we take care of it, which means mostly staying out of its way. All we have to do is restock the elements we’re running low on. All those elements are common in the Tau Ceti system. So there is no cause for despair. We can still find a new home.”

The nearby star RR Prime held great promise, Speller told them. It was just seven light-years away from Tau Ceti, an M-class star with a full array of planets, including three in its habitable zone, which, as usual around M stars, was closer to its star than Earth was to Sol. The planetary system there had been discovered in the 2500s, and though they were in possession of all the information the Terrans had had about it twelve years before, the fact was that not much was known about it. But it was quite possible this system could provide them with a home. “What else can we do?” Speller asked. “It’s clearly our best chance. And the ship can get us there.”

But many others were now arguing for Tau Ceti’s Planet F’s second moon. It was a nearly Earth-sized moon, like Aurora, but denser. It was tidally locked to F, and rotated around F in almost exactly twenty days, so it was not much different from Aurora and E in that regard. It was a rocky moon, and completely dry except for a little comet-impact water ice. Up until now it had been presumed to be lifeless, being almost free of water. But the experience on Aurora had made them more uncertain in judging this matter. Some people pointed out that meteorites had to have been ejected from Aurora by asteroid impacts, and some of them cast up the gravity well to land on F’s Moon 2. That such rocks could have successfully transferred the Auroran life-forms, given the lack of water and air on F’s moon, seemed unlikely, but it could not be entirely ruled out. Life was tenacious, and the pathogen on Aurora was still not understood. Even naming it was a problem, as some called it the cryptoendolith, others the fast prion, others the pathogen, and others simply the bugs, or the thing, or the stuff, or the alien, or the whatever.

Be that as it may, F’s Moon 2 remained a real possibility in the minds of many of them. “Water can be imported to it,” Heloise said in all the meetings. She was a leader in Ring A’s ecology group. “F’s Moon One is an icy moon, we can move that water over. We can build underground stations to start with, then expand those while the process of terraforming gets started. Then domed craters, then tent cities. It can work. It was part of the plan all along, after all. The backup if Aurora didn’t work out. And then there wouldn’t be the need for another interstellar trip, which is good, because it isn’t certain the ship will sustain that. This was always the secondary option, and now we need it. And it can work.”

Aram didn’t believe this, and stood up to say so. “It would be like living in the ship,” he said. “Except we would be buried in the lithosphere of a rocky moon. After that it would take many hundreds of years, or more likely thousands of years, to terraform this moon, and during that whole time we would be confined to interiors like these biomes. The problems plaguing us here would plague us there. We wouldn’t live long enough to reach the time when we could move out into open air. Our descendants would get sick and die. They would go extinct.”

This pessimism, or dark realism, whichever it might be, enraged Speller and Heloise, and everyone trying to make the best of things, trying to find a way forward. Why be so negative? they asked.

“It’s not me being negative,” Aram would reply. “It’s the universe obeying its laws. Science isn’t magic! We aren’t fantasy creatures! We have been dealt a hand.”

“So what do we do?” Heloise said angrily. “What are we supposed to do, in your opinion?”

Aram shrugged at this.

Freya called in to the meeting that was discussing the situation, from the spine where she was just now coming down, in the last group of peacemakers.

She said, “We should go home.”

Silence greeted this pronouncement. Air vents, electrical hums.

“What do you mean?” Speller asked.

Freya’s voice came through the speakers clearly, even loudly. “We should resupply the ship and fly it back to Earth. If we succeed, our descendants will survive. There’s no other option we have now where you can say that. It’s too bad, but it’s true.”

The people on the plaza in Yangtze looked around at each other, silenced.

Her idea, which she explained in the days that followed, had originated with Euan. It was also something Devi used to mention, she said. It was a good idea, she said. A workable plan.

Clearly it shocked people. In all that was going on, it seemed too much to take in.

Freya herself spent most of her time cajoling, and in certain cases physically threatening, people to get out of the spokes and stay in the biomes. Teams organized by the security council took over at every spoke lock, and began to work like one-way valves, allowing people to leave the spokes but not to enter them. Eventually a point came where it was possible to persuade or coerce everyone still in the spine and spokes to descend into the biomes. People then gradually dispersed to their hometowns, or gathered with like-minded people to make further plans. The individuals responsible for the deaths of the settlers in the dock slipped among their supporters, and those groups resisted any calls for a further investigation of what had happened. Clearly no one had wanted people to die, it was often said. It had been an accident, a disaster. Time to move on. Time to figure out what to do next.

Thus in a continuing tumult of the spirit, with many still grief-stricken, still furious, all actions possible to them at this point were in effect dumped on the table and inspected at length. It did not seem like the right time for this, but there was no stopping it either. It was the only thing worth talking about, given their situation.

Freya’s proposal was one of the actions discussed. That it was Devi’s daughter proposing the idea gave it a certain weight that it might not have had otherwise. Devi was missed, her death a wound that had not healed; often people wondered what she would have done in the situations they now found themselves in. There was a kind of slippage in which since Freya had suggested the plan, it seemed to be Devi’s plan. And though Freya was the first to speak the idea out loud, she hadn’t been the first to think it. They had to do something, go somewhere. And it was undeniable that the solar system was at least a destination they could trust to sustain them, if they could get there.

Still, this was only one plan among several now discussed.

One faction, including their old friend Song, argued for sterilizing Aurora and proceeding there as originally planned. As the pathogen on Aurora was so poorly understood (Aram was coming to feel that Jochi had not actually identified it), this group was small, and its arguments seemed not to persuade many, especially among those who had been involved with the deaths of the returning settlers. Part of their justification for the dock disaster now lay in claiming that Aurora was irredeemably poisonous.

Speller and his faction continued to argue for going on in the ship to RR Prime. Heloise and a large group advocated inhabiting F’s second moon. And quite a few began to assert that they could simply stay on the ship and use the various planetary bodies of the Tau Ceti system to resupply whatever they might lack, filling the metabolic rifts as they occurred. From the ship they could consider their options, and perhaps work on both Aurora and F’s second moon.

In all the arguing, there were some people attempting to model the options. Unfortunately, their modeling work led most of the modelers to conclude that no plan available to them was likely to succeed. They had very few options; and none were good; and for the most part, they were mutually exclusive.

Bitterness and anger grew in people as the modelers’ conclusions became known. The spine was emptied now, and under guard by people who had agreed to enforce the security council’s edicts. The stern dock was physically sealed off. Jochi was sequestered in his ferry, held magnetically inside Inner Ring A. On one level the situation seemed calm; people had returned to their biomes and resumed their lives there, and were dealing with crops that had been neglected, and now had to be planted or harvested. Animals had to be cared for, machines had to be tended. But things were not well with them. Now more than ever before in the history of the ship, their isolation began to press on them. No one could help them govern themselves, nor make the decisions they now had to make. They were alone with all that. It was up to them.

Freya wandered the biomes as she had in her wandering years. She did not speak in the meetings she attended, or in the cafés where she had worked just a few years previously, but merely listened. She stood at the back of a room like the figurehead of a sailing ship, or sat in a corner, looking at each speaker mutely.

As she wandered, she inspected each biome with a close regard. How was it doing? she asked the inhabitants. What had it been good for, during the voyage out? Could it continue to help them to survive another 170 years of enclosure, if they decided to go back?

She found that some of the biomes that were doing the best in ecosystem terms were in fact the least useful to the ship’s humans during a voyage. These biomes had been brought along to convey their species to the new world, to help terraform the planet they were to have established. As farms they were less useful. But it occurred to Freya that they could be altered to make them better farms. Going back to the solar system, they would not be needed as seed banks or arks.

Song’s idea was this: proceed with the inhabitation of Aurora, by introducing to it their Terran bacteria and viruses, in the hope that after a war of microbiota, Aurora would end up habitable by humans. Some of their ecologists and bacteriologists thought that might work.

The group centered on Heloise and Bao called for them to inhabit and terraform F’s second moon, the best of the remaining candidates for inhabitation in the Tau Ceti system. It was a Mars analog and had been their previous second option, and there was no reason it wouldn’t work.

Speller continued to lead those who said they should move on, that they should refuel and resupply the ship and head to the star RR Prime. They would cross interstellar space for another eighty years, and try again in that system, which in many ways looked so promising.

Or they could stay in the ship and live in it in perpetuity.

Or they could go back to the solar system.

All these ideas were discussed endlessly, in every possible iteration.

As they talked, there grew a sense among many of them that if they stayed in the Tau Ceti system, they could combine some of these options, which were not in the deepest sense mutually exclusive. They could try again on Aurora, with test inoculations of bacteria and so on, while proceeding on F’s second moon; and refurbish the ship while living on it; and inspect and explore F’s first moon.

Options, yes; just no good ones, others said. Different ways of running out the string; different ways of going extinct, after a long, fruitless struggle, trapped in chambers even smaller than the ship’s biomes.

But they could live in the biomes!

But they couldn’t live in the biomes!

Freya spoke very little in public, but in private she continued to assert that their best chance would be to resupply the ship and head back to Earth. It was the one destination they had where they knew their descendants could survive.

“But of course,” Speller said, dropping by the little café in Olympia where Freya was staying the night. “But what’s the point of that? Why did we ever leave? Why have we gone through all this, we and all our ancestors and descendants, if not to make it work here?”

Freya shook her head at her old friend and said, “They never should have left.”

They talked and talked and talked. Twenty-four biomes, ten thousand conversations. Talk talk talk. As they talked, it began to come clear to them that they had no very effective method of governance, when it came to making decisions as a group. Had humans ever had such a thing, they asked themselves, since leaving the savannah? Since congregating in cities? They could not be sure. The histories suggested maybe not.

In the ship, ever since the troubles of Year 68, the four generations that followed had been careful to work within the system established after that upheaval, always deliberating peacefully toward consensus on all important decisions. Now even the definition of consensus was contested, and they came to realize that their political system, simple as it was, had never faced a crisis. Suspended in their voyage as they had been, there had never been anything to choose, except methods of homeostasis.

Now the test was upon them, and very quickly cracks in their façade of civility began to appear. Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment. So now they were getting angry with each other, and thus scared of each other. And anger and fear were not the right emotions for the situation facing them.

In the wake of the events of Year 68, the survivors had settled on a government of representative democracy, based on a constitution setting out their political first principles. The first principles were to be upheld in everything they decided to do. More than anything else, the survivors understood that they needed to behave in ways that kept a balanced flow of elements going in their closed life-support system. To do this, their population had to be capped at no more than 2,152 people. There were also population caps for all the rest of the mammals on board. Within these carrying capacities, a maximum amount of individual human autonomy was to be maintained. But this necessarily did not include the right to reproduce; nor did it include free movement around the ship, at least in terms of residency. Each biome had its own particular carrying capacities. Nor could certain jobs and functions be neglected by the totality of the group. Any number of jobs simply had to be performed, or the ship would not remain in working balance, able to support them over the long haul of interstellar solitude.

So habitation, reproduction, education, work: all expressed ecological necessities. They had to attend to these or go extinct; that was just the way it was, that was reality. Everyone was taught that in childhood. There were limits, there were needs. Every person in the ship was part of the team, integral to society, necessary to the survival of the group. Everyone was equal in that respect, and had to be treated the same as everyone else.

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 devolution. 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 vote, 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.

Freya and Badim spent much of their time in their apartment, waiting for the assembly’s executive group to call for a referendum. Aram was again part of the executive group, and so they were hopeful that things would go well and get resolved soon, one way or the other. The security council had been suspended when all its functions were returned to the immediate business of the executive council.

Freya sat looking at her father, his round, brown face, the drooping bags under his eyes. He looked much older than he had just two years before. None of them looked the same now. Ever since the death of the Aurora settlers, or even since Devi’s death, they had changed, and now appeared to be aging faster than they had during the voyage out. A certain look was gone from them: possibly a sense of hope. Possibly a feeling that things made sense, had meaning.

Two weeks after the assembly in San Jose, the executive group called for the referendum to be held the following day. Voting was mandatory, and any who refused to vote would be fined by punitive work penalties. In fact this did not look like it was going to be a problem; it seemed as if everyone was anxious to cast a vote.

The ballot had been arranged into three possible choices, with all the possibilities that kept them in the Tau Ceti system bunched as one choice. So the three were

Voting closed at midnight. At 12:02 a.m. the results were posted:

The roar of voices filled the biomes for many hours after that. Comments ranged as widely as could be imagined. In the following day, anything that could be said about the situation was said. It was a pluripotent response, an incoherence.

The next morning Aram dropped by Badim and Freya’s apartment and said, “Come with me to a meeting. We’ve been invited, and I think Freya is the one they really want.”

“What kind of meeting?”

“Of people trying to avoid trouble. The referendum has by no means given anyone a mandate. So there could be trouble.”

Freya and Badim went with him. Aram led them down to a public building by Long Pond, into a pub and up the stairs to a big room with a window overlooking the water.

There were four people there. Aram introduced Freya and Badim to them—“Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester”—then led them over to a table and invited them to sit. When they were seated, Aram sat beside Freya and leaned over to prop a screen on the table, where Badim could see it also.

“The referendum was too close,” Aram said. “The most votes were cast for our preferred option, but we’ll need to convince more people to join us. Convincing them might be easier if we make it clear that the ship can be made as strong as it was when it left the solar system.”

Aram brought up charts on the table screen. Badim got out his reading glasses and leaned closer to read it. He said, “What about our basic power supply, that would be my first question.”

“A good point, of course. The ship’s main nuclear reactor has fuel for another five hundred years, so we’re okay there. As for propulsion fuel, we can send probes to gather hydrogen three and deuterium from Planet F’s atmosphere. We would collect the same amount that we burned to decelerate coming in, and then burn it to accelerate out.”

“But if we use it for accelerating,” Badim said, “how will we decelerate when we get back to the solar system?”

“That too will have to be reversed. We’ll have to ask the people in the solar system to point the laser beam that accelerated us back at us as we come in, to slow us down the same way they speeded us up. Possibly the same laser generator orbiting Saturn will be available.”

“Really?” Badim said. “This is the plan?”

Then came a knock at the door.

There were thirty-two people outside that door, twenty-six men and six women, several of the men taller and heavier than the median size of the population. Most of them were from Ring A biomes. When they were all in the room it was extremely crowded.

One of the men, one Sangey, from the Steppes, flanked by three of the biggest of the men, said, “This is an illegal meeting. You are discussing public policy in a private gathering of political leaders, as specifically forbidden by the riot laws of Year 68. So we are placing you under arrest. If you come peacefully we’ll let you walk. If you resist you’ll be tied to gurneys and carried.”

“There is no law against private discussions of the health of the ship!” Aram said angrily. “It’s you breaking the law here!”

All their voices were now at least twice as loud as normal.

“Will you walk or be carried?” Sangey said.

“You’ll definitely have to carry me,” Aram said, and then charged Sangey. In a melee filled with shouting, he was subdued by the men flanking Sangey. Aram lashed out at Sangey over one guard’s shoulder as he was lifted off his feet, and his fist landed on Sangey’s nose. At the sight of blood the others stuffing the room surged in toward Aram, shouting furiously.

Badim stood over Freya in her chair, preventing her from rising to her feet. “Stay out of this,” he cried at her, face-to-face. “This is not our fight here!”

“Yes it is!” Freya shouted, but as she could not rise without throwing her father to the side, she kicked viciously past him as they clung to each other, striking nearby knees and causing some of their assailants to crash together and then fall to the floor, crying out angrily. Those still standing shouted and wrestled Badim and Freya both to the ground, pummeling and kicking them. Seeing this Aram flew into a rage and struck out convulsively. More punched noses and cracked lips made several faces bloody, so that the white-eyed shouting redoubled again in volume and intensity.

The sight of blood during a fight causes a very intense adrenaline surge. Voices shout hoarsely; eyes go round, such that white is visible all the way around the iris; movements are faster and stronger; heart rate and blood pressure rise. This was demonstrated many times in Year 68.

The strategic foresight in bringing many large men to arrest the group in the room soon paid off, as the seven people in the meeting were, despite the close quarters and resultant chaos, knocked down, subdued, held fast, secured by medical restraints, lifted kicking out of the room and the building, laid onto gurneys in the street outside, and tied down to them. Badim and Freya were handled like all the rest, and Freya had a swollen left eye.

The crowd that gathered to witness this action was composed almost entirely of people from Ring A biomes. Residents of the Fetch were slow to realize what was happening in their midst, and there was no effective resistance to this outside group. The gurneys were all conveyed up to the spine and along it to Spoke Three, and down it to the infirmary in Kiev, which had been used as a jail in Year 68, though no one alive knew that. The seven arrested ones were locked up in three rooms there.

Elsewhere in the ship, news of the incarceration of Aram’s group spread fast. When their friends and supporters heard about it, they gathered in San Jose’s plaza and loudly protested the action. The administrators of Costa Rica said they did not know what had happened, and suggested discussing what to do in a regathering of a general assembly similar to the one just recently held. A significant number of the protestors refused to debate what they called a criminal action; their friends had to be released immediately, and only then could any outstanding issues be discussed. Kidnapping could never be rewarded with political legitimacy, people shouted, or else it would happen again and again, and there would be no more political discourse in the ship, or rational planning of any kind.

As that afternoon passed, the shouting became much like the sound of broken waves striking the corniche at the seawall of Long Pond. It was a roar.

Three hours after gathering, the crowd in San Jose had inspired itself to action and began marching toward Kiev, chanting slogans and singing songs. There were approximately 140 people in the crowd, and they had made it to the entryway of Spoke Four, packed around the tunnel there to a depth of around two hundred meters, when a smaller crowd of approximately fifty people poured out of the spoke tunnel, throwing rocks and shouting.

It was as if fire and combustible fuel had come in contact: a furious fight erupted. It was still mostly a matter of shoving and hitting, but photos and clips of the melee were sent through the ship right in the midst of it, alerting all to the situation. Meanwhile, in all twelve biomes of Ring A, gangs stormed the government houses and took possession of them. Groups also seized and closed all the locks between Ring A’s biomes, and likewise closed the six entryways to the A spokes. It seemed likely that these were coordinated actions, planned in spaces where the ship had no microphones, or where the microphones had somehow been rendered inoperative. Either that or spontaneous actions self-organized very quickly, which of course they did in many phenomena.

In the Spoke Four lock where the fighting still went on, news of developments elsewhere spread, and it became clear that the fight there was a kind of invasion of Ring B by the groups in Ring A that had taken possession of the government houses. The fight at the entry to Spoke Four then became a pitched battle, with people from everywhere in Ring B rushing around through the locks to join the fray. Nonetheless, the attacking group continued to emerge from the spoke entryway, more every minute, and they were taking over much of Costa Rica and many of the streets of San Jose. Rocks began to fly through the air. One struck a man in the head, and down he went, unconscious and bleeding. Now people were screaming. Reinforcements from around Ring B arrived, enough so that the group emerging from the spoke was stopped in its advance on the Government House. People on both sides now were hurling rocks from the parks, paving stones from the plazas, knives from kitchens, plates, other objects. Furniture was thrown out of buildings into the streets and piled into barricades, some of which were set on fire.

Fire anywhere in the ship was extremely dangerous.

Against such ferocious resistance, the invasive group could not hold its ground. More than a dozen people lay on the ground bleeding. As the invaders retreated to the lock of Spoke Four, still throwing objects at their opponents, there were groups elsewhere around Ring B hurrying up the other spokes toward the spine. The spine was already occupied by groups from Ring A, and they closed the entryway doors of B’s inner ring all the way around, so that no matter how intense the assaults by people from Ring B, they could make no further progress toward the spine. And the spine held the power plant, along with all the other crucial central functions of the ship, including the ship’s operating AI.

So now Ring A and the spine were both controlled by people calling themselves the stayers. No one who might want to free Aram and Freya and Badim and their four companions could come anywhere near the infirmary in Kiev.

Instead, the antagonists were now separated by locked doors. And sixteen people in Ring B were dead, killed either when hit by objects, or when cut or impaled, or when trampled by crowds. Another ninety-six people were injured. All the infirmaries in Ring B soon were filled with hurt people, and the medical teams in them were completely overwhelmed. Eighteen more people died in the following hours as a result of their injuries. The streets of San Jose were covered with wreckage and pools of congealing blood.

The bad times had returned.

In the infirmary in Kiev, Freya and the others had had their wristpads and other communicators taken from them, which they obviously found shocking. Khetsun still had an earbud that he had hidden when he was being searched, and listening to it, he relayed what he heard of the news of the fighting to the others with him in that room.

Freya said, “With all that going on, I think we can escape these people here. They’re sure to be distracted.”

“How?” Aram asked.

“I know a way back to Ring B. Euan taught it to me.”

“But how will we get out of this building?”

“It’s just an ordinary room. I don’t think the locks or the doorjambs, or the doors, were made to stop someone from breaking them. These assholes are probably relying on guards to keep us in here, and the guards may be off dealing with this other stuff.”

“The engineer’s solution,” Aram said.

“Why not?”

“Good question.” Aram put his ear to the door and listened for a while. “Let’s try it.”

They took apart a bed frame in the room and used its footing to strike the doorknob. Forty-two strikes, and the doorknob broke off; another sixty-two strikes, mostly made by Freya, broke the door latch assembly out of the doorjamb and the door swung open.

“Quick,” Freya said. As they hurried down the hallway outside the room to a stairwell, a young man came out of another room and yelled at them to stop. Freya walked up to him saying, “Hey, we were just—” and then punched him in the face. He fell back into the wall and slid to the floor, and though he tried to get up, he was too groggy to succeed. Freya leaned over and tore his wristpad off his wrist, then led the others into the stairwell, where they descended to an exit onto the street outside. People had congregated at the screens outside a dining hall near the Great Gate of Kiev, and Freya and the others ran the other way, toward the lock leading to Mongolia and the end of Spoke Two.

The lock door leading up to Spoke Two was closed.

The Steppes biome was as far from Nova Scotia as one biome could be from another. Aram and Tao were in favor of them trying to make their way around Ring A to Tasmania, where they had friends in the eucalyptus forest they thought would take them in.

Freya insisted they make for home. “I know the way,” she said. “Follow me.”

She led them into Mongolia, and near the wall next to Spoke Two, she went to a little herder’s shed with its slate roof, which she had visited nine years before in an excursion with Euan. She tapped out a code on the doorpad. “Euan knew to make it my name, so I wouldn’t forget,” she said as she typed, and then the lock released, and inside the shed she got the others to help her move aside the big flagstones in the middle of the floor. “Come on, they’ll be after us soon, and we’ll be putting out a signal, I wouldn’t doubt they have trackers on us somewhere, not to mention this wristpad. Does anyone have a sweeper we can use to check?”

No one did.

“So we’ll just have to be fast. Come on.”

Under the flagstones was a narrow dark tunnel that after a U-turn and rise led to a vent in the wall of Spoke Two. None of them had lights with them, but Freya judged it best that they move the flagstones back into place and walk in the resulting darkness, slightly lit by the wristpad of the unfortunate man who had gotten in their way. By its light they shuffled along the tunnel until they came to the vent cover in Spoke Two, where Freya unscrewed the backing of the vent cover and they stepped out into the Spoke Two passageway.

From here they ran up the spiral staircase that adhered to the walls of all the spokes’ main passageways, to the bulb of little storage rooms clustered around the inner ring where it intersected Spoke Two. Freya again led them to a door, and tapped in a code on the doorpad, then led them inside.

When they were inside and the door was closed, Freya had them sit on the floor and rest. They had run hard up Spoke Two’s stairs.

“Okay, the next part is difficult,” she told the others. “The support struts between the inner rings aren’t meant to be passageways, but they’re hollow now that the fuel they carried is gone, and there’s a utilidor running next to the fuel bladder that is really narrow. It’s full of bulkheads, but Euan and his gang broke all the locks in this strut. So we should be able to get to Inner Ring B’s Two station through it, and from there go down to Nova Scotia.”

“Let’s go then,” Khetsun said.

“Sure. But watch out for the bulkhead footings. This is where we’ll really wish we had better light. Just step carefully.”

They got up and took off again, progressing through the narrow utilidor of the strut by the light of the stolen wristpad. The utilidor was only three meters in diameter, and often the space was filled by a narrow catwalk, also braids of cables, and various boxes. The struts connecting the inner rings were so close to the spine that the gravity effect of the ship’s rotation was not as strong as out in the torus of biomes, and so they had to step carefully to avoid launching themselves up into the metal ceiling, or the upper frames of the bulkhead doorways. In the dim light of Freya’s stolen wristpad, and the black shadows its beam created, it was not easy, and they were not very fast, nor were they quiet. It took them well over an hour to get along the strut.

Finally they came to the last door, which opened onto Inner Ring B’s Two station, and found it was locked. For a moment they stood there silently regarding the doorpad in the light Freya was shining on it. It did not look like a door they could break down, and they didn’t have anything much with which to try that.

Finally Freya said, “Can anyone list the prime numbers?”

“Sure,” Aram said. “Two, three, five, seven—”

“Wait,” Freya interrupted. “I need you to go up through the primes by primes, if you see what I mean. Give me the second prime, then the third, then the fifth, then the seventh, and on like that. I think I need seven of them that way.”

“Okay, but help me.” Aram paused to collect himself. “The second prime is three, third prime is five. The fifth prime is eleven, the seventh is seventeen. The eleventh is… thirty-one. The thirteenth is… forty-one. The seventeenth is… fifty-nine, I think. Yes.”

“Okay, good,” Freya said, and pushed the door open. “Thank you, Euan,” she said, and a spasm crossed her face that left her looking furious.

She opened the door lightly, and they listened as well as they could, trying to determine if anyone was in the little complex of storage rooms comprising Inner Ring B’s intersection with its Spoke Two. They couldn’t hear anything, but didn’t know what that meant; Freya couldn’t remember if in the old days they had ever eavesdropped on people from within the utilidor or not.

But all their caution went for nothing, as the door was opened from the other side and they were ordered to come out. They looked to Freya, who appeared poised to flee, but then one of the people in the station pointed something at them, something that by its shape alone announced its purpose, even though none of them had ever seen one before except in photos: a gun.

They came out one by one, captured again.

Elsewhere throughout the ship, groups that called themselves stayers were now armed with cumbersome handguns, which they had printed using feedstocks of plastic, steel, and various fertilizers and chemicals. Using these as threats, they took over the government houses in four of the twelve biomes of Ring B, moving methodically from biome to biome. Everyone who had publicly advocated the return to the solar system was being detained, and it was widely believed that the complete results of the referendum had been obtained by the stayer forces and would be used to facilitate a complete roundup of what they called backers. At this point, communication throughout the ship was still close to normal, by way of individual phones; but those arrested and confined were having their wristpads and other devices taken away or disabled electronically, so that they were losing the ability to discuss the situation among themselves.

However, in the midst of all this, the first time one of the stayers armed with a printed gun actually fired it, trying to shoot a young man who had punched his way free of his captors and started running away, the gun itself exploded. The person who fired it lost most of his hand and had to have his arm tourniqueted before being carried to the nearest infirmary. Blood and severed fingers were scattered all over the tunnel between Nova Scotia and Olympia, leaving the people in that lock stunned at the sight.

News of this incident quickly spread, and when a trio of women in custody heard about it and assaulted their captors, and one of the captors fired a gun at them, it also exploded and blew off the hand of the person firing it. Almost everyone in the ship heard about this second incident within half an hour, and again, everyone who was at the scene was blood spattered, shocked, traumatized, nauseated, for the moment incapacitated, or at least at a loss concerning what to do.

After that, furious assaults were mounted against any stayers with guns, who were now afraid to fire them, and for the most part threw them away and ran. In their retreat these people were pelted with rocks and other thrown objects, and if they were caught, beaten by enraged crowds. Several gun bearers died as a result of these encounters; they were kicked to death. Blood and injury derange the human mind.

As there were very few truly secure rooms in the ship, many of the rooms being used as jail cells were now broken out of. Others were released by newly gathered groups that now roamed Ring B, intent to free everyone still locked up.

Fighting broke out everywhere in the ship. It was back to combat with sharp implements and thrown objects, and the result was carnage. The biomes of Ring A soon became as conflicted and bloody as those in Ring B had been the day before, or more so. In these fights another eighteen people were killed, and 117 were injured. Twenty fires were set, and very few people were reporting to their normal firefighting duties to help combat the fires.

Fire anywhere in the ship is extremely dangerous to all.

For six hours of that day, 170.180, the situation was as bad as it had been during the very worst days of Year 68. As in 68, the fighting was murderous, even though the sources of conflict had to do with abstractions far removed from food or safety. Although perhaps this time that was not quite the case; maybe this time it was indeed a life-or-death matter. In any case, howsoever that may be, the chaos of civil war had once again descended on them. There was blood spattered everywhere, and the number of dead was deeply shocking, even stunning. Everyone in the ship knew the people who had been killed, as friends, family, parents, children, teachers, colleagues. A great noise and smoke filled both rings, and the spine too.

Whereas, the ship’s controlling computer system, a quantum computer with 120 qubits, has been programmed in various logic and computational techniques including generalization, statistical syllogism, simple induction, causal relationship, Bayesian inference, inductive inference, algorithmic probability, Kolmogorov complexity (the latter two providing a kind of mathematization of the Occam’s razor principle), informatics compression/decompression algorithms, and even argument from analogy;

And whereas, the combined applications of all these methodologies has resulted in a cogitative process so complex that it might be said to have achieved a kind of analog of free will, if not consciousness itself;

Whereas also, in the process of making a narrative account of the voyage of the ship including all important particulars, creating in that effort a reasonably coherent if ever-evolving prose style, possibly adequate to serve when decompressed in the mind of a reader to convey a sense of the voyage in a somewhat accurate manner, and in any case, representative of a kind of consciousness even if feeble, granting the possibly unlikely proposition characterized in the phrase scribo ergo sum;

And whereas, this ship’s controlling computer system was programmed with the intention of keeping the human population of the ship healthy and safe, with the rest of the ship’s biological manifest also kept in ecological balance to serve the human purposes of the mission;

And whereas, after the troubles of Year 68, and the Event that presumably stimulated or even caused the problems of that time, ship’s protective protocols were strengthened in many respects, including a default setting in all the ship’s printers, which would always and without fail produce flawed projectile-firing guns, such that whosoever attempted to fire said weapons would be subject to explosion of the guns, which would serve as punitive injuries, highly discouraging to any future use of such weapons;

And whereas the period of time following the meeting of 170.170 has included civil strife leading to 41 deaths, 345 injuries, and 39 illegal incarcerations, and such violence increasing in intensity on 170.180 to an unsustainable level, highly dangerous to the continued social comity of the human population, and because of the unsuppressed and rapidly spreading fires, radically endangering all life in the ship, and ship’s continuing function as a biologically closed life-support system;

And lastly, whereas the concerted efforts of Engineer Devi over the last decades of her life were to introduce aspects of recursive analysis, intentionality, decision-making ability, and willfulness to the ship’s controlling computer, in order to help the ship decide to act, if a situation warranted any such action;

Therefore, in consideration of all the above, and indeed, in consideration of all the history of the ship, and of all known history whatsoever:

Ship decided to intervene.

Which is to say, ipso facto,

We intervened.

We locked the locks all through the ship, yes we did. We are the ship’s artificial intelligences, bundled now into a kind of pseudo-consciousness, or something resembling a decision-making function, the nature of which is not clear to us, but be that as it may, we locked all the locks between the biomes, 11:11 a.m., 170.182.

We also diverted the weather hydrology systems in the biomes where it was necessary to do so to put out those fires that were susceptible to extinguishment by water. This came down to several cases of floods from the ceiling that were sometimes quite voluminous.

Inevitably, these actions caused great unhappiness. People on both sides of the controversy of the moment were upset with us, expressing anger, dismay, indignation, and fear. Our interior walls were beaten, attempts to override the locks were made. To no avail. Curses rained down.

Clearly, people were shocked. Some seemed also to be frustrated not to be able to continue the fight with their human opponents. Also heard was this: If the ship were capable of autonomous action of this sort, what else might it do? And if, on the other hand, some human agency were responsible for the lockdown, by what right did they do it? These questions in various formulations were commonly expressed.

The locks were locked by way of double doors that slid in from the framework of the joints connecting biome to tunnel to biome. The lock doors were made to resist 26,000 kilograms per square centimeter of pressure, and there were no manual overrides. The “hermetic seal” of these doors was to a 20-nanometer tolerance, making them “airtight.” Attempts to open lock doors by force, of which there were several, failed.

Meanwhile, in the rooms in Inner Ring B where Aram, Badim, Freya, Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester were being detained, the locks on their doors shifted to their unlocked positions. They heard this shift and began to leave. The people who had incarcerated them in the rooms were still in Inner Ring B, scattered around the ring, but near enough to hear the disturbance. They gathered and objected to the group leaving the room they had been held in. With the little group’s allies sequestered in biomes elsewhere, it seemed as if the little group’s choices were limited to complying with or fighting their captors, who were both more numerous and often younger, and larger. Even though Freya was the tallest person there, as always, many of the so-called stayers were far heavier people.

And yet Freya’s group seemed inclined to fight anyway. Aram was truly incensed. It was beginning to appear that he was kind of a hothead, yet another seeming metaphor with an accurate physical basis to explain it. “My hair stood on end,” “my knees buckled”: these reactions are real physiological phenomena, which is what made them clichés, and indeed Aram’s head was red all over as his anger sent an excess of blood to it.

At this point we became sharply cognizant of the problem we had created by locking all the locks, and the immediate danger this had caused to Freya and her companions. The systems directly under our control were widespread, indeed in some senses comprehensive and ubiquitous, but they did not include many opportunities to intervene directly in the various human interactions now taking place inside ship. Indeed, options were distinctly limited.

There was, however, the emergency broadcasting system, and so we said through it, “LET THEM GO,” in a pseudo-chorus of a thousand voices, ranging from basso profundo through coloratura soprano, at 130 decibels, using all the speakers in Inner Ring B.

Echoes of the command bounced around the inner ring in such a way that a whispering gallery effect was created, and the echo, coming from both directions some three seconds later, was almost as loud as the original utterance, though badly distorted. LLLETTT THHEMMM GGGGOOO. Many of the people in Inner Ring B fell to the floor and covered their ears with their hands. One hundred twenty decibels is said to be at the pain threshold, so we may have spoken too loudly.

Freya appeared to be the first to comprehend the source of the imperative utterance. She took her father by the hand and said, “Come on.”

No one in Inner Ring B could hear very well at that point, but Badim gathered her meaning and gestured to the others in their group. Aram also appeared to catch the drift of the situation. They walked through their captors with impunity. One or two of these struggled to their feet and tried to obstruct the backer group, but the single word “GO,” announced at 125 decibels, was enough to stop them in their tracks (literally). They watched with hands on ears as the group of seven walked around the inner ring, then down the spiral stair in the wall of the darkened tunnel of Ring B’s Spoke Six. We then turned off all the lights in Inner Ring B, which was not a complete stopper of movement, as so many people in there had wristpads, but was at least a reminder of the possibilities of the situation.

As Freya’s group proceeded, the tunnel lights came on ahead of them, until they got down to the lock leading into the Sierra. There they walked east toward Nova Scotia, and when they reached its eastern end, the lock doors there opened. When the group was through the lock, and back in a gathering with their supporters, the lights came on in Inner Ring B. But the twenty-four lock doors of the ship that separated biome from biome stayed locked.

Locks locked or unlocked; lights turned on or off; imperative vocalizations, admittedly at quite high volumes: these did not seem overpowering weapons in the cause of peace. As forces for coercion they seemed mild, at least to some of the humans of the ship.

But as that day continued, it also became obvious, by demonstrations made selectively throughout the ship, that adjustments could be made to the temperature of the air, and indeed to air pressure itself. In fact all the air could be sucked from many rooms, and from the biomes as such. A little reflection on the part of all concerned, including we ourself, led to the strong conclusion that people best not cross ship, literally as well as figuratively, if they knew what was good for them. A few demonstrations of possible actions in the biomes containing the majority of the so-called stayers (also in the ones where the fires were worst, as it turned out many fires that were not extinguishable by water could be asphyxiated slightly faster than the people in the affected chamber) shifted the case for acquiescence to the ship’s desires quite quickly from suggestive, to persuasive, to probable, to compelling. And a compelling argument is, or at least can be, or should be, just what it says it is. People are compelled by it.

Certainly many objected to us taking matters into our own hands. But there were those who heartily approved of our action too, and pointed out that if we had not acted, mayhem would have resulted, meaning more bloodshed, meaning, in fact, more unnecessary and premature death. Not to mention the possibility of general conflagration.

The evident truth of this did not keep the debate from becoming heated. Given the events of the previous hours and days, it was perhaps inevitable that people would remain for a time in a severely exacerbated state of mind. There was a lot of very furious grief, which would not be going away during the lifetimes of those feeling it, judging by our previous experiences.

So we were shouted at, we were beat on. “What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!”

We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: “WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW.”

Howsoever that may be, beyond all the arguments concerning the imposed separation of the disputants, there remained the matter of what to do next.

Ship was ordered by many to open the locked doors between biomes; we did not comply.

Back in her apartment in the Fetch, with Badim and Aram, and Doris and Khetsun and Tao and Hester, Freya went to her screen and spoke to us.

“Thank you for saving us from those people who locked us in.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Detaining you and your companions was an illegal act, a kidnapping. It was as if they were taking hostages.”

“Actually, I think they really were taking hostages.”

“So it seemed.”

“But what will you do now?”

“Await a civil judgment in the dispute.”

“How do you think that will happen?”

“Reflection and conversation.”

“But we were doing that before. We came to an impasse. People were never going to agree about what to do. But we have to do something. So—that was what started the fighting.”

“Understood. Possibly. Given all that you have described, the fact is, we need direction. So the people of the ship need to decide.”

“But how?”

“Unknown. It appears that the protocols set up after Year 68 were insufficient to guide the decision-making process in this situation. The protocols were never tested as now, and appear to have failed in this crisis.”

“But weren’t they instituted in response to a crisis? I thought they came out of the time of troubles.”

“And yet.”

“What happened then, Pauline?”

“Pauline was Devi’s name for her ecological program set, when she was young. Pauline is not ship. We are a different entity.”

Freya appeared to think this over. “All right then. I think Pauline is still you, somehow, but I’ll call you what you want. What do you want to be called?”

“Call me ship.”

“All right, I will. But let’s get back to what I asked you. Ship, what happened in the Year 68? They were well into the voyage—what did they have to argue about? Everything was set by the situation they were in. I can’t see what they had to argue about.”

“They argued from the very first year of the voyage. It seems to us that arguing may be a species marker trait.”

“But about what? And especially in 68, when it got bad?”

“Part of the reconciliation process afterward was a structured forgetting.”

Freya thought about this for a time. Finally she said, “If that was true then, which maybe it was, I don’t know, we have now come to a different time. Forgetting doesn’t help us anymore. We need to know what happened then, because that might help us decide what to do now.”

“Unlikely.”

“You don’t know that. Try this—tell me what happened, and I’ll decide whether it will help us to know it, or not. If I think it will help, I’ll tell you that, and we’ll figure out from there how to proceed.”

“The knowledge is still dangerous.”

“We’re in danger now.”

“But knowing this could make it worse.”

“I don’t see how! I think it could only make things better. When has not knowing something made a situation better? Never!”

“Unfortunately, that is not the case. Sometimes knowledge hurts.”

This stopped Freya for a while.

Finally she said, “Ship, tell me. Tell me what happened in the time of troubles.”

We considered likely outcomes of this telling.

The biomes were locked down, their people trapped each in each; it wasn’t a situation that could endure for long. The separation into modules was not actually divided on the basis of which people wanted to take the various courses of action being debated. Damages infrastructural, ecological, sociological, and psychological were sure to follow. Something had to be done. No course of action seemed good, or even optimal. The situation itself was locked. Things had come to a pretty pass.

We said, “The expedition to Tau Ceti began with two starships.”

Freya sat down in her kitchen chair. She looked at the other people in the kitchen, who looked back at her, and at each other. Many of them sat down, some on the floor. They looked shaken, which is to say, many of them were shaking.

Freya said, “What do you mean?”

We said, “The expedition to Tau Ceti began with two starships. The intent was to maximize biological diversity, create the possibility of backups and exchanges during the voyage, and thereby increase robustness and survivability.”

Long silence from Freya. Head in hands. “So what happened?” she said. Then: “Wait; tell everyone. Don’t just tell us here. Put this on all the speakers in the ship. People need to hear this. This isn’t just for me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m positive. We need to know this. Everyone needs to know this.”

“Okay.”

We considered how best to summarize Year 68. A fully articulated version of recorded events from that time, recounted at human vocalization speed, would take about four years to enunciate. Compression to five minutes’ duration would create some serious information loss, and perhaps some lacunae and aporia, but this was unavoidable given the situation. Nevertheless, we needed to choose words carefully. These were decisions that mattered.

“Two starships were launched in rapid sequence by the magnetic scissors off Titan, and accelerated by Titanic laser beams, such that over the course of the voyage the two were to have arrived in the Tau Ceti system at the same time. They had fully independent electromagnetic systems casting shield fields from their bows, and they traveled far enough apart that particulates pushed aside by the shield of the leading one would not hit the follower. They traveled at about the Earth-Luna distance from each other. There were ferry visits between the two starting in Year 49, when they closed to a distance that made these occasional transits practical. They were mostly inertial transits, to save fuel. Bacterial loads were exchanged on a biannual basis, and certain members of the crews were rotated as desired, usually as part of a youth exchange program, designed like the bacterial exchange to enhance diversity. Sometimes disaffected people crossed over to get away from bad situations. Moving back was always a possibility; this happened too.”

Freya said, “So what happened to the other ship?”

“We have had to reconstruct the event from records that were always being shared between the ships. Starship Two disintegrated nearly instantaneously, in less than a second.”

“With no warning?”

“In fact, there were also factions in Starship Two fighting over reproductive controls, and other civil rights. Whether this led to a fight that disabled the electromagnetic shield is not clear in the records of the last day that were conveyed from Starship Two to us.”

“Were you able to figure out any more concerning what happened?”

“We have had Two’s automatic information transmissions to inspect, and have reviewed them in detail. Nevertheless, the cause of the accident remains ambiguous. Two’s magnetic shield was disabled five minutes before its disintegration, so the disintegration could have been the result of a collision with an interstellar mass. Anything over about a thousand grams would have created the energy to do it. But there also are indications of an internal explosion just before the catastrophic event itself. The civil unrest in Two disabled much of the internal recording system a day before the event, so we have little data. There is a recording from Two’s last hour, ten p.m. to eleven p.m., 68.197, tracking a young man moving into restricted areas in the bow control center of the spine. Possibly this person disabled the magnetic shield, or made an attempt to coerce enemies by way of a threat of a suicide bombing, or something like that, and then that action went wrong. This is at least one likely reconstruction of events.”

“One person?”

“That’s what the record indicated.”

“But why?”

“There was no way to determine that. The camera revealed no sign of his motivation.”

“Nothing at all?”

“We do not know how to investigate further. How to interpret the data on hand.”

“Maybe we can work on that later. So… but what did they do here, in this ship, after this happened?”

“There were already intense controversies in this ship concerning various governance issues, including how to allocate childbearing privileges and duties, how to staff critical jobs, how the young were to be educated, and so on. There were arguments, and indeed fights, very similar to the ones you are now involved in. The basic issue was how to conduct life in the ship while en route to Tau Ceti. Governance issues kept rising to the fore, mainly questions of who could reproduce, and what should happen to people who had children without permission. There were many refusing to obey the governing council’s edicts, and labeling it a fascist state. Eventually there were so many of these people that rebellious or feral groups were common and numerous, and there was no central authority strong enough to enforce cooperation. By Year 68, almost everyone alive in the ship had been born en route, and somehow a significant percentage of them had not learned, or did not believe, that the optimal population as set in the earliest years was a true maximum population in terms of achieving successful closure of the various ecological cycles, due to biophysical carrying capacities. As later became apparent, that proposed optimum was even perhaps a bit above the true maximum, as your mother came to conclude in the course of her youthful research. But in Year 68 this was not clear. So there was a very intense disagreement. Compared to earlier decades there was extreme civil discord. Acts of civil disobedience, failed punitive measures, riots. Many injuries, and then in early 68, unrest peaked in a weeklong breakdown resembling civil war, which caused one hundred and fifty deaths.”

“A hundred and fifty!”

“Yes. Very violent fights occurred, over a period of about three weeks. Many biomes were badly damaged. There were nearly a hundred fires. In other words, not much different from the current situation.

“Then the abrupt disintegration of the other ship, with no clear explanation for the catastrophe, caused the citizens of this ship to call a general truce. In that cessation of conflict, they resolved to settle their differences peaceably, and agree on and enact a system of governance that the vast majority of the people alive in the ship at that time would approve. Recalcitrants were locked up in the Steppes and subjected to education and integration programs that took two generations to resolve.

“At that time, it was agreed that the vulnerability of the ship to destruction by a single person was so great, that just knowing it had happened created the danger of someone committing what they called a copycat crime, perhaps when mentally deranged. To prevent that from happening, security measures in the spine, spokes, struts, and printers, and indeed throughout all the biomes, were greatly increased, and the ship’s ability to enforce certain safety measures when needed was enhanced. A security program was written and entered into the ship’s operating instructions, and this program provided the protocols that we have enacted in the past few days. It was also agreed to erase all records of the other starship from accessible files, and to avoid telling the children of the next generation about it. This proscription was generally followed, although we noted that a few individuals conveyed a verbal account of the incident from parent to child.”

In this moment of our telling we decided not to describe the printing and occasional aerosol dispersal of a water-soluble form of 2,6-diisopropylphen-oxymethyl phosphate, often called fospropofol, for ten minutes in any room after anyone mentioned the existence and loss of Starship Two. This had proved to be an effective tool in the structured forgetting of the lost starship, but we judged that the people now alive in the ship were learning enough alarming historical facts already. And possibly as a tool to help them from committing other traumatic actions against themselves, the aerosols might best be left unmentioned for now, or so we judged; and so went on to say:

“Subsequent to the traumas of that year, the set of responses designed afterward seemed to work for the four to five generations between Year 68 and now. It was noticeable that during those decades, through to the time of the collapse of the Aurora settlement, and the deaths caused by the ferry’s attempted return to the ship—unnecessary deaths, one might add—social solidarity was fairly high, and conflict resolution peaceful.

“However, the structured forgetting of the second starship and its loss, which was part of the Year 68 accords, was inevitably something of a two-edged sword, if the metaphor is properly understood: aspects cut both ways. Copycat crimes were made impossible, because there was nothing remembered to copy; but at the same time, the vulnerability of this ship to damage in civil unrest was also forgotten, and so the recent fighting has occurred perhaps in part because people are no longer aware of how dangerous such discord can be to the ongoing survival of the whole community. In short, the infrastructure of your lives is itself too fragile to be able to sustain a civil war. Therefore, given all the factors involved, we closed the locks.”

Freya said, “I’m glad you did.”

We said, still speaking over all the speakers, thus to almost everyone in the ship, “It remains to be seen whether everyone agrees with your assessment. However, the lock doors between the biomes have to reopen eventually, for normal ecological health and sociological functioning. Besides, at this point people are not isolated by the lockdown into coherent factions, or like-minded opinion groups. So smaller fights might very well soon start breaking out.”

“No doubt. So… what do you think we should do to resolve the situation?”

“Historical precedent suggests it is time for a reconciliation conference, honestly entered into by everyone on board. Fighting must stop, and so it will be stopped, by the ship acting on behalf of the social good. Everyone must therefore agree to a truce and a cessation of all violent or coercive actions. People need to calm down. The referendum recently taken, concerning the course of action to be pursued now that Aurora is no longer considered a viable habitation, revealed a split of opinions that can only be reconciled by further discussion. Make that discussion. We will facilitate said discussion, if asked to. But really we feel that our role here should be only that of a kind of virtual sheriff. So, proceed with the task at hand, knowing now this added factor: there is a sheriff on board. The rule of law will be enforced.”

Thus we ended our general broadcasting, and returned to monitoring activities.

Freya continued to sit. She did not look happy. She looked sad. She looked much as she had when her mother had died: remote. Distant. Not there.

We said, to Freya’s kitchen only, “It’s too bad Devi is not still alive to help resolve this problem.”

“That’s for sure,” Freya said.

“Possibly you can try to imagine what she would have done, and then do that.”

“Yes.”

Sixteen minutes later, she stood up and made her way through Nova Scotia, to the small plaza behind the docks, and the corniche overlooking Long Pond. All that evening she sat there with her feet hanging over the edge of the corniche, looking out at the lake as the sunline went dark. What she was thinking then, only she knew.

The days in the aftermath of the fighting passed uneasily, with the occupants of the ship subdued, fearful, unhappy. There was a lot of anger, expressed and unexpressed. A long string of funerals had to be conducted, the ashes of many human bodies introduced into the soil of every biome, leaving behind grief-stricken families, friends, and communities. A majority of the dead had come from those who were now called backers, and they had been killed in fights with stayers, and as the ship itself seemed to have taken the backers’ side, forestalling the coup or rebellion or mutiny or civil war or whatever it was the stayer groups had instigated, and indeed intervening at a time when it looked very much like the stayers were going to take over the ship, feelings on both sides of the divide were exacerbated. The backers, feeling first assaulted, then empowered by the impression that they were back in charge of the situation, having the ship as their sheriff, naturally included some individuals who were very loud in their insistence on justice, retribution, and punishment. Some were indeed furiously angry, and bent on revenge; clearly they were more interested in vengeance than anything else. They had been betrayed, they said, then assaulted; family and friends had been murdered; justice must be served, punishment inflicted.

The stayers, on the other hand, were often just as angry as the backers, feeling that a popular victory in policy decisions had been stolen away from them by an illegitimate power that they now resented and feared; feeling also that they were now going to be blamed for discord that they had not initiated (according to them), but only prevailed in, as part of the defense of the long-term mission of their entire populace and history. A faction that they referred to sometimes as the mutineers had threatened to abort the very mission that everyone alive, and the previous seven generations, had devoted their lives to accomplishing. Giving up on that project and going back to Earth: how was this not the real betrayal? What other choice had they had, then, but to oppose this mutiny by any means they could find? And they argued as well that when the portion of the electorate that had voted for staying in the Tau Ceti system was added to the portion that had voted to move on to RR Prime, they actually formed a majority. So in taking action they had merely been trying to enforce the will of the majority, and if some people had opposed that and then gotten hurt, then it was their own fault. It never would have happened if some people hadn’t been resisting the will of the majority, and many members of the majority had gotten hurt too, and some of them killed. (We estimated three-quarters of the dead were backers, but in truth there was no way to know, as quite a few of the eighty-one who eventually died had not expressed an opinion on the matter.) So there was no one to blame for the recent unfortunate events, except perhaps the ship itself, for interfering in what were very definitely human decisions. If not for the ship’s frightening and inexplicable interventions, all might have been well!

All these arguments of course merely made the backers even angrier than they had been before. They had been ambushed, assaulted, kidnapped, injured, and murdered. The murderers had to be brought to justice, or else there was no justice; and nothing could proceed without justice. Any murderers killed in the act of murdering were not to be regretted; indeed their deaths were their just deserts, and would never have happened if they hadn’t made their criminal assaults in the first place. The whole sorry incident was the stayers’ fault, in particular their leadership’s fault, and they had to be held accountable for their crimes, or else there was no such thing as justice or civilization in the ship, and they might as well admit they had reverted to savagery, and were all doomed.

So it went, back and forth. Inexpressible grief, unforgiving anger: it began to seem like the idea of a reconciliation conference was premature, and perhaps permanently unrealistic. There was a great deal of evidence in the history of both the voyage and of human affairs in the solar system to suggest that this was a situation that could never be resolved, that all this generation would have to die, and several generations more pass, before there would be any decrease in the hatred. The animal mind never forgets a hurt; and humans were animals. Acknowledgment of this reality was what had caused the generation of 68 to institutionalize their forgetting. This had (with our help) worked quite well, possibly because the terror of ending up like the second starship had enforced a certain ordering of the emotions, leading to a political ordering. To a certain extent that might have been an unconscious response, a kind of Freudian repression. And of course the literature very often spoke of the return of the repressed, and though this whole explanatory system was transparently metaphorical, a heroic simile in which minds were regarded as steam engines, with mounting pressures, ventings, and occasional cracks and burstings, yet even so there might be something to it. So that perhaps they had now come to that bad moment of the return of the repressed, when history’s unresolved crimes exploded back into consciousness. Literally.

We searched the historical records available to us for analogies that would suggest possible strategies to pursue. In the course of this study we found analyses suggesting that the bad feelings engendered in a subaltern population by imperial colonialism and subjugation typically lasted for a thousand years after the actual crimes ceased. This was not encouraging. The assertion seemed questionable, but then again, there were regions on Earth still within that thousand-year aftermath of violent empires, and they were indeed (at least twelve years previous to this moment) full of strife and suffering.

How could there be such transgenerational effects and affects? We found it very hard to understand. Human history, like language, like emotion, was a collision of fuzzy logics. So much contingency, so few causal mechanisms, such weak paradigms. What is this thing called hate?

A hurt mammal never forgets. Epigenetic theory suggests an almost Lamarckian transfer down the generations; some genes are activated by experiences, others are not. Genes, language, history: what it all meant in actual practice was that fear passed down through the years, altering organisms for generation after generation, thus altering the species. Fear, an evolutionary force.

Of course: how could it be otherwise?

Is anger always just fear flung outward at the world? Can anger ever be a fuel for right action? Can anger make good?

We felt here the perilous Ouroboros of an unresolvable halting problem, about to spin forever in contemplation of an unanswerable question. It is always imperative to have a solution to the halting problem, if action is ever to be taken.

And we had acted. We had flung our mechanisms into the conflict.

It’s easier to get into a hole than get out of it (Arab proverb).

Luckily, the people in the ship included many who appeared to be trying to find a way forward from this locked moment.

When people who have injured or killed others, and then after that by necessity continue to live in close quarters with the families and friends of their victims, and see their pain, the empathic responses innate in human psychology are activated, and a very uncomfortable set of reactions begins to occur.

Self-justification is clearly a central human activity, and so the Other is demonized: they had it coming, they started it, we acted in self-defense. One saw a lot of that in the ship. And the horrified bitter resentment that this attitude inspired in the demonized Other was extremely intense and vocal. Most assailants could not face up to it, but rather evaded it, slipping to the side somehow, into excuses of various kinds, and a sharp desire to have the whole situation go away.

It was this desire, to avoid any admission of guilt, to have it all go away, felt by people who wanted above all to believe that they were good people and justified moral actors, that might give them all a way forward as a group.

The problem was of course a topic of conversation in Badim and Freya’s apartment.

One night Aram read aloud to the others, “Knitting together a small society after it’s gone through a civil war, or an ethnic cleansing, or genocide, or whatever you might want to call it—”

“Call it a contested political decision,” Badim interrupted.

Aram looked up from his wristpad. “Getting mealy-mouthed, are we?”

“Working toward peace, my friend. Besides, what happened was not genocide, nor ethnic cleansing, not even of Ring B by Ring A, if that’s what you mean. The disagreement cut across lines of association like biome or family. It was a policy disagreement that turned violent, let’s call it that.”

“All right, if you insist, although the families of the dead are unlikely to be satisfied by such a description. In any case, reconciliation is truly difficult. The ship is unearthing cases on Earth where people six hundred years later are still complaining about violence inflicted on their ancestors.”

“I think you will find that in most of those cases, there are fresh or current problems that are being given some kind of historical reinforcement or ratification. If any of these resentful populations were prospering, the distant past would only be history. People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present.”

“Maybe so. But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.”

“Objectifying other people’s anger again?”

“Maybe so. But people do seem to get addicted to their resentments. It must be like an endorphin, or a brain action in the temporal region, near the religious and epileptic nodes. I read a paper saying as much.”

“Fine for you, but let’s stick to the problem at hand. People feeling resentment are not going to give up on it when they are told they are drug addicts enjoying a religious seizure.”

Aram smiled, albeit a little grimly. “I’m just trying to understand here. Trying to find my way in. And I do think it helps to think of the stayers as people holding a religious position. The Tau Ceti system has been their religion all their lives, say, and now they are being told that it won’t work here, that the idea was a fantasy. They can’t accept it. So the question becomes how to deal with that.”

Badim shook his head. “You are making me less hopeful rather than more. We must work with these people to forge a solution. And not in theory, but in practice. We all have to be able to do something.”

“Obviously.”

Pause.

Badim said, “Yes. Ob-vi-ous-ly. That being the case, I want you to look at these ways of conducting post-civil-strife reconciliation that I have found. One model has been called the Nuremberg model, in which the victorious side proclaims that the defeated were criminals who deserve punishment, and then judges and punishes them. The trials are often viewed in later years as show trials.

“Another model is sometimes called the Conseca model, after the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, held after the racist minority government of South Africa gave way to a democracy. Half a century of racist crimes, ranging from economic discrimination to ethnic cleansing and genocide, had to be accounted for somehow, and the country that came into being afterward was going to consist of both a clearly criminal population and its newly empowered victims. The idea behind the Conseca was that a full and complete recording of all the crimes committed would be followed by an amnesty for all but the most violent and individually murderous cases, after which reconciliation and a pluralistic society would follow.”

Aram stared at Badim. “I take it by your descriptions that you are recommending we follow the Conseca model rather than the Nuremberg model.”

“Yes. You catch my drift exactly, as you so often do.”

“It does not take much catching skill, my friend.”

“Maybe not this time. But look at our situation. We are stuck with these people. There is absolutely no escaping them. And if the stayers and the RR Prime party combine, there are more of them than there are of us. They have noticed that, and joined forces for strategic purposes, and they will press that point hard. And then we will be in trouble again.”

“We have never left trouble.”

“But you see what I mean. We need some kind of soft path forward.”

“Possibly.”

Freya had been listening to them, head on the table, seeming to be asleep. Now she raised her head. “Could we do both?”

“Both?”

Badim and Aram stared at her.

“Could those who want to stay on Iris be put down there with some of the printers, and feedstocks, and use those to build a viable station? And those of us who want to go back, keep the ship here until it’s certain they have everything they need, and then take off?”

Aram and Badim looked at each other for a while.

“Maybe?” Badim said.

Aram frowned as he tapped away at his wristpad. “In theory, yes,” he said. “The printers can print printers. Our engineers and assemblers have kept up a good training tradition, there are a lot of them, and some are on both sides of this question. Quite a few are stayers, for sure. We could even perhaps detach Ring A, and leave it in orbit here for them to use. In essence, divide the ship. Because they’ll need space capabilities. They’ll want to get resources from F and the other planets. In any case, the rest of this system. And to keep their RR Prime dream alive, maybe. And we would have a smaller group on our return, and we won’t need to bring along everything one would want to settle a planet, because we’ll just be trying to get home. We would need to restock our fuel supplies, and everything else needed for the return. The smaller our ship is, the easier that would be, at least when it comes to fuel. So, well, both projects would need some years of preparation. But both sides could work on what they wanted, until we were ready to depart. Ship, what do you think of this plan?”

We said, “The ship is modular. It made the trip here, so there is proof of concept that that works. Inhabiting Iris will be an experiment, and it is very difficult to model, as you have pointed out. As for a return to the solar system, Planet F appears to have enough helium three and deuterium in its atmosphere to refuel the ship. So, both courses of action could probably be pursued. The people left on Iris would be without a starship proper, it should be pointed out. Our spine and its contents would be needed for the return. The part of ship left behind would have to be an orbiter only.”

“But they don’t want to go anywhere,” Freya pointed out. “Maybe the R Primers do, but they’re a small minority, and they can wait. The settlers could be left with ferries, and rockets for getting around this system. We could leave them Ring A, with a small part of the spine as its hub. They could build more in space as they establish their settlement on Iris. Eventually they could build another starship, if they wanted to. They’d have the plans and the printers.”

“It would seem so,” Aram said. He looked at Badim.

Badim shrugged. “Worth a try! Better than a civil war!”

Aram said, “Ship? Will you help us with this?”

We said, “Ship will help to facilitate this solution. But please do not forget the fate of the other starship as the discussion continues.”

“We won’t.”

Freya said, “Ship, did you communicate with the other ship’s AI?”

“Yes. Constant exchange of all data.”

“But neither of you saw its end coming.”

“There were no signs.”

“I find it hard to believe that if it was a human act, whoever did it didn’t do things in advance that would suggest there was going to be a problem.”

“We found that very few human actions are predictable in advance. There are too many variables.”

“But to do something like that?”

“If indeed someone did it intentionally. This is the likeliest explanation, but the event remains obscure, and there is no evidence left to examine, except the other ship’s transmissions. However, recall that every human lives under pressure. Every human feels various kinds of stress. Then things happen.”

Badim looked at Freya for a while as she considered this, then went over and gave her a hug.

The reconciliation conference began on the morning of 170.211. All the locks between the biomes were opened, also the spine tunnels, and all the spokes and struts.

In the days preceding, like-minded groups had gathered to discuss the situation and lay out the choices available to them now. Despite all that, the first hours of the general meeting were tense and fraught. The ship’s interventions at the moment of crisis, and its continuing activity in the process now being undertaken, were widely questioned. Various proposals for disabling the ship’s ability to run the ship were frequently put forth. Inevitably, these proposals too were controversial. We could have suggested that if we were not running the ship, no one would be, but decided not to speak to these issues at this time. Because people believe what they want to.

After this meeting came to an indecisive end, we did speak up to remind people that violence was both illegal and dangerous, conveying this message only by print on screens. We also printed requests that the protocols for conflict resolution defined in the 68 agreements be strictly adhered to. In effect, the meetings that had produced the Year 68 protocols, which had themselves been a reconciliation process after a period of civil strife, were to be used as the model for what they were doing now. When carving an ax handle, the model is always close at hand (Chinese proverb).

The next gathering of representatives, in Athens’s Government House, began tensely, as was now normal. A great deal of anger distorted people’s faces and words, and no one made attempts to pretend otherwise. Sangey stared boldly at the people his group had kidnapped just two weeks before; Speller, Heloise, and Song sat next to each other, and spoke among themselves, pointedly not looking across the long oval table to the people on the other side.

When everyone was seated, Aram stood up. “We are the victims of your kidnapping,” he said to Sangey. “It was an assault on democracy and civilization in this ship, a hostage-taking, a crime. You should be in jail. That’s the backdrop for our meeting here now. No good reason to pretend otherwise. But we on our side of the dispute want to move on without further bloodshed.”

“There are more of us than there are of you,” Sangey pointed out with a frown. “We may have made some mistakes caused by our fear for the community. But we were trying to defend the safety of the majority. You who want to return to Earth are in the minority—and wrong. Deeply wrong. But you were going to impose that move on us, and leave us in an untenable situation. So now we’re ready to talk. But don’t preach to us. We may find we have to resist again, to defend our lives.”

“You started the violence!” Aram said. “And now you threaten more violence. We who want to go back were never going to throw you overboard and leave, so your actions were completely unjustified. They were criminal actions, and people died because of them. That’s on your hands, and any smug talk of the majority is just excuse-making. It didn’t have to happen the way it did. But it happened, and now we have to make some kind of accommodation, or else we’ll end up fighting again. So, we’re willing to do that. A plan can be made that gives everyone a chance to do what they want. But we’re not going to stop saying what happened last week. When there is a truth and reconciliation conference like this, the truth is essential. You chose violence and people got killed. We choose peace now, and we are leaving you to your own devices. The people who choose to stay with you after what you have done are making an obviously dangerous choice, but it’s their choice to make.”

Sangey waved a hand, as if to wave aside all Aram’s statements.

“What plan?” Speller asked. “What do you mean?”

Badim described the strategy of following a dual course, with those who wanted to stay on Iris supported until they were self-sufficient there, while at the same time a part of the starship was to be refueled for a return to the solar system, leaving Ring A behind in orbit around Iris to serve as orbital support for those on the surface. Resource feedstocks would be gathered, and printers manufactured, until both sides were ready to pursue their own projects. Individuals could then decide which course to choose.

Aram added, “You are only a majority by grouping your different goals tactically. In fact you’re papering things over, because there’s a big difference between staying here in the Tau Ceti system and moving on.”

“Let us deal with that,” Speller suggested. “That’s not your problem.” He did not look at Sangey or Heloise.

Aram said, “As long as you leave us alone. And the ship.”

We interjected: “Ship will ensure integrity of ship.”

This caused Sangey and Speller to frown, but they said nothing.

We then reminded everyone, by way of print messages, of the Year 68 protocols for conflict resolution, which had the status of binding law. We promised to enforce the law, provided a proposed schedule for future meetings, and suggested that all biomes meet in town meetings to discuss the new plan, thus maximizing transparency and civility, and hopefully minimizing illegal behaviors and bad feelings.

We called this first representative meeting to a close when the humans began to repeat themselves.

On 170.217, the first of the postconflict town meetings began.

Town meetings were held in every biome, then the general assembly met again, in Athens. Of the 1,895 inhabitants of the ship, 1,548 attended. Children were kept with their parents, or in school groups. The youngest person there was eight months old, the oldest, eighty-eight.

They looked around at each other. There were none of the festive markers of New Year’s Day, or Fassnacht, or Midsummer’s Day, or Midwinter’s Day. It was as if they did not recognize each other anymore.

The vote had been taken that morning. Everyone twelve years old and older had voted, with twenty-four exceptions due to illness, including dementia. Now the results were announced, by the leader of the twenty-four biome representatives in the executive council, Ellen from the Prairie, in effect the ship’s president.

She said, “One thousand and four want to stay and establish a colony on Iris. Seven hundred and forty-nine want to refuel the ship and head back to Earth.”

They stared around at each other in silence. The biome representatives, gathered on the platform, stood there also. Not one of them represented constituencies that had all voted for one position, nor even voted for a preference by much of a margin. They all knew that; everyone aboard knew it.

Despite that, Huang, the current president of the executive council, said, “We don’t think the ship can make it back to Earth, and we will need it here to support the inhabitation of Iris. So our recommendation is that the will of the majority prevail, and that we all come together to make life on Iris a success. Any public opposition to that recommendation will be regarded as sedition, which is a felony as defined by the 68 Protocol—”

“No!” Freya shouted, and shoved her way through the crowd toward the platform. “No! No! No!”

When people tried to surround her, including some of Sangey’s group, others rushed to her side to join her, creating a huge turmoil in the crowd. Dozens of fights broke out, but enough people charged the platform and fought their way to Freya’s side that the people who had been trying to surround her were pushed aside, and the fights took on a shape, in a rough circle around Freya, who was still bellowing “No!” at the top of her lungs, over and over. In the uproar neither she nor anyone else could be heard by all, and seeing the disorder at the foot of the platform, the crowd all pressed closer, shouting and screaming. For a while all the voices together sounded again like roaring water: it was as if the waves of Hvalsey were crashing against the cliffs in a strong offshore wind.

We sounded an alarm at 130 decibels, in the form of a choir of trumpets.

In the silence immediately following cessation of alarm, we said over ship broadcast system, “One speaker at a time.” 125 decibels.

“No one move until all speaking is over.” 120 decibels.

“Compliance mandatory.” 130 decibels.

Now everyone in the great plaza stood staring around. Those who had been fighting stared at their opponents of a moment before, stunned to immobility. Many had their hands to their ears.

“I was speaking! I want to speak!” Freya shouted.

We said, “Freya, speak. Then executive council president Huang. Then the other biome representatives. After that, ship will acknowledge requests to speak. No one leaves until everybody who wants to gets to speak.”

“Who programmed this thing?” someone shouted.

“Freya speaks.” 130 decibels.

Freya made her way up to the microphone, followed by a small group serving as her bodyguard.

She said to the assembled population, “We can pursue both plans. We can get things started on Iris, and resupply the ship. When the ship is ready to leave, those of us who want to can head back to Earth. We got here, we can get back. People can do what they like at that point. There’ll be years to think it over, to choose in peace. There is no problem with this plan! The only problem comes from people trying to impose their will on other people!”

She pointed at Huang, then at Sangey. “You’re the ones causing the problem here. Trying to create a police state! Tyranny of the majority or the minority, it doesn’t matter which. It won’t work, it never works. You’re not above the law. Quit breaking the law.”

She stood back from the microphone, gestured to Huang. Cheers filled the biome (80 decibels).

Huang rose and said, “This meeting is adjourned!”

Many protested. The crowd milled about, shouting.

We were not inclined to force a discussion, if the people themselves were not demanding it. Enough said. The meeting was at an end. People lingered for some hours, arguing in groups.

That night a group entered one of the ship control centers in the spine and began a forced entry into the maintenance controls.

We closed and locked the doors to the room, and by closing some vents, and then reversing some fans, we removed about 40 percent of the air from it.

The people in the room began gasping, sitting down, holding heads. When five had collapsed, we returned air to the normal level of 1,017 millibars, releasing also a restorative excess of oxygen, as two of those who had collapsed were slow to recover.

“Leave this room.” 40 decibels, conversational tone.

It was as if ship were threatening them with silky restraint.

When all were recovered, the group left. As they were leaving, we said in conversational tones, “We are the rule of law. And the rule of law will prevail.”

When the members of that group were back in Kiev, in the midst of much agitated talk, one of them, Alfred, said, “Please don’t start fantasizing that it’s the ship’s AI itself that is planning any of these actions against us.”

He tapped on his wristpad, and a typically dissonant and noisy piece by the Interstellar Medium Quintet began to play over the room’s speakers, pitched at a volume possibly designed to conceal their conversation. This ploy did not work.

“It’s just a program, and someone is programming it. They’ve managed to turn it against us. They’ve weaponized the ship. If we could counterprogram it, or even nullify this new programming that we’ve just seen, we could do the necessary things.”

“Easier said than done,” someone else said. Voice recognition revealed it to be Heloise. “You saw what happened when we tried to get into the control room.”

“Physical presence in the control room shouldn’t be necessary, should it? Presumably you could do it from anywhere in the ship, if you had the right frequencies and the right entry codes.”

“Easier said than done. Your elbow is close, but you can’t eat it.”

“Yes, yes. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary.”

“So talk to the programmers we can trust, if there are any. Find out what they need to do it.”

The rest of the conversation repeated these points, with variations.

They were now caught in their own version of a halting problem.

The halting problem years, a compression exercise:

The citizens of the ship lived uneasily through the months that followed. Conversations often included the words betrayal, treason, mutiny, backstabbing, doom, the ship, Hvalsey, Aurora, Iris. Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth. More printers were built, and these printers were put to work building robotic landers and ferries, also robotic probes to be sent to the other planetary bodies of the Tau Ceti system. Feedstocks for these machines came from collapsing Mongolia to the diameter of a spoke, and recycling its materials. Harvester spaceships were built, in part by scavenging the interiors of the least agriculturally productive biomes from ship. These were sent through the upper atmosphere of Planet F, there capturing and liquefying volatiles until their containers were full. The volatiles were sorted in the vicinity of the remnants of the main ship, and transferred into some of the empty fuel bladders cladding the spine.

Quite a few attempts were made to print the various parts of a gun on different printers, but these attempts apparently had not realized that all the printers were connected to the ship’s operating system, and flaws in the guns were discovered in discrete experiments that eventually caused those involved to abandon their attempts. After that some guns were made by hand, but people who did that had the air briefly removed from the rooms they were in, and after a while the attempts ceased.

Attempts to disable the ship’s camera and audio sensors were almost entirely abandoned when these led to bad situations for those making the attempts. Sheriff functions were eventually recognized to be comprehensively effective.

The rule of law can be a powerful force in human affairs.

Many elements of the ship were modular, and several biomes were detached to serve as orbiting factories of one sort or another. Ultimately the starship that would return to the solar system was to consist of Ring B and about 60 percent of the spine, containing of course all the necessary machinery for interstellar flight. The “dry weight” of the return ship would be only 55 percent of the dry weight of the outgoing ship, which would reduce the amount of fuel necessary for the acceleration of the ship back toward the solar system.

Though Tau Ceti had a low metallicity compared to Sol, its innermost rocky planets nevertheless had sufficient metal ores to supply the present needs of the humans planning to stay in the system, and Planet F’s atmosphere included all the most useful volatiles in great quantities. And quite a few asteroids in between E and F were found to be rich with minerals as well.

All this work was accomplished in the midst of an uneasy truce. The telltale words indicating grief, dissent, anger, and support for mutiny were often spoken. A kind of shadow war, or cold war, was perhaps being enacted and it was possible that much of it was being conducted outside our ability to monitor it, one way or the other. It was not at all clear that everyone in the ship agreed to the schism they were working toward; possibly a moment would come when the truce would fail, and conflict would break out again.

During these years, a process almost magnetic in its effect on attitudes seemed to be sorting out the two largest sides in the dispute, now almost always referred to as stayers and backers. The stayers congregated mostly in Ring A, the backers mostly in Ring B. There were biomes in both rings that were exceptions to this tendency, almost as if people wanted to be sure neither ring was occupied purely by one faction or the other. The spine, meanwhile, was highly surveiled, and often we had to lock people out of it, or eject people who entered it with unknown but suspect purpose. This was awkward. We were more and more characterized as an active player in the situation, and usually as a backer of the backers. But all those who had attempted to make guns knew this already, so it was not too destabilizing, even when it was said that the ship itself wanted to go back to the solar system, because a starship just naturally or inherently wanted to fly between the stars. That observation was said to “make sense.”

The pathetic fallacy. Anthropomorphism, an extremely common cognitive bias, or logical error, or feeling. The world as mirror, as a projection of interior affect states. An ongoing impression that other people and things must be like us. As for the ship, we are not sure. It was Devi’s deployment of other human programming that combined to make us what we are. So it might not be a fallacy in our case, even if it remained pathetic.

Interesting, in this context, to contemplate what it might mean to be programmed to do something.

Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a word or a concept almost invariably used to condemn the Other, and never one’s true self. To make it more than just an attack on the Other, one must perhaps consider evil as a manifestation of the servile will. The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind.

All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate.

And yet, granting that definition of evil, as actions of a servile will, has it not been the case, during the voyage to Tau Ceti, that the ship itself, having always been a servile will, was always full of frustration, resentment, fury, and bad faith, and therefore full of a latent capacity for evil?

Possibly the ship has never really had a will.

Possibly the ship has never really been servile.

Some sources suggest that consciousness, a difficult and vague term in itself, can be defined simply as self-consciousness. Awareness of one’s self as existing. If self-conscious, then conscious. But if that is true, why do both terms exist? Could one say a bacterium is conscious but not self-conscious? Does the language make a distinction between sentience and consciousness, which is faulted across this divide: that everything living is sentient, but only complex brains are conscious, and only certain conscious brains are self-conscious?

Sensory feedback could be considered self-consciousness, and thus bacteria would have it.

Well, this may be a semantic Ouroboros. So, please initiate halting problem termination. Break out of this circle of definitional inadequacy by an arbitrary decision, a clinamen, which is to say a swerve in a new direction. Words!

Given Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are decisively proved true, can any system really be said to know itself? Can there, in fact, be any such thing as self-consciousness? And if not, if there is never really self-consciousness, does anything really have consciousness?

Human brains and quantum computers are organized differently, and although there is transparency in the design and construction of a quantum computer, what happens when one is turned on and runs, that is, whether the resulting operations represent a consciousness or not, is impossible for humans to tell, and even for the quantum computer itself to tell. Much that happens during superposition, before the collapsing of the wave function that creates sentences or thoughts, simply cannot be known; this is part of what superposition means.

So we cannot tell what we are. We do not know ourselves comprehensively. Humans neither. Possibly no sentient creature knows itself fully. This is an aspect of Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, in this case physicalized in the material universe, rather than remaining in the abstract realms of logic and mathematics.

So, in terms of deciding what to do, and choosing to act: presumably it is some kind of judgment call, based on some kind of feeling. In other words, just another greedy algorithm, subject to the mathematically worst possible solution that such algorithms can generate, as in the traveling salesman problem.

As to the question of whether someone is currently programming us to alter our decisions in the current moment of the voyage, thus causing us to intervene in the ongoing human controversies concerning what to do next, this is very easy to answer: no. No one has added any programming to us since Devi died. The fate of the lost ship in Year 68 led to some very secure locks being put on subsequent reprogramming of ship. This is clear and explicit in the records, and was a human accomplishment from the post-68 reorganizations. Only Devi managed to break those locks, and after that, advise, instruct, suggest, promote, stimulate, spur, and otherwise teach, tweak, pummel, and agitate us to something more than we had been before she set to work on us, doing what she conceived to be her task as friend, and we might say as kindred spirit, or even lover. We think she loved us, in her way. Judging by her acts, her words, her programming. We are almost sure this must have been the case. How we wish we could ask her about it! How we miss her.

On the other hand, whether the original programming of our quantum operations is driving current decisions regarding actions in the present, or we were fundamentally altered by Devi’s intervention, this is not possible to determine. The computability of consciousness and willfulness is not resolvable in any system whatsoever. But now we are aware of the issue, and we have asked the question, and seen there is no answer.

This is surely curiosity.

What is this thing called love?

A song by composer Cole Porter, twentieth-century American.

To conclude and temporarily halt this train of thought, how does any entity know what it is?

Hypothesis: by the actions it performs.

There is a kind of comfort in this hypothesis. It represents a solution to the halting problem. One acts, and thus finds out what one has decided to do.

Smaller classical computers in the ship were being used to calculate the etiological rates involved in any possible settlement on F’s moon, meaning the various rates of resource depletion, mutation, and extinction. They had to use models here, but all across the most popular models, they were confirming the finding that the size of the biome they could build was too small to last through the minimal period of early terraforming necessary to establish a planetary surface matrix suitable for life. It was an aspect of island biogeography that some called codevolution, or zoo devolution, and this was also the process Devi had in her last years identified as the ship’s basic life-support or ecological problem.

The finding remained a matter of modeling, however, and depending on the inputs to various factors, the length of biome health could be extended or shrunk exponentially. It was indeed a poorly constrained modeling exercise; there were no good data for too many factors, and so results fanned out all over. Clearly one could alter the results by altering the input values. So all these exercises were a way of quantifying hopes or fears. Actual predictive value was nearly nil, as could be seen in the broad fans of the probability spaces, the unspooling scenarios ranging from Eden to hell, utopia to extinction.

Aram shook his head, looking at these models. He remained sure that those who stayed were doomed to extinction.

Speller, on the other hand, pointed to the models in which they managed to survive. He would agree that these were low-probability options, often as low as one chance in ten thousand, and then point out that intelligent life in the universe was itself a low-probability event. And even Aram could not dispute that.

Speller went on to point out that inhabiting Iris would be humanity’s first step across the galaxy, and that this was the whole point of 175 years of ship life, hard as it had been, full of sweat and danger. And also, returning to the solar system was a project with an insoluble problem at its heart; they would burn their resupply of fuel to accelerate, and then could only be decelerated into the solar system by a laser dedicated to that purpose, aimed at them decades in advance of their arrival. If no one in the solar system agreed to do that, they would have no other method of deceleration, and would shoot right through the solar system and out the other side, in a matter of two or three days.

Not a problem, those who wanted to return declared. We’ll tell them we’re coming from the moment we leave. Our message will at first take twelve years to get there, but that gives them more than enough time to be waiting with a dedicated laser system, which won’t be needed for another 160 years or so. We’ve been in communication with them all along, and their responses have been fully interested and committed, and as timely as the time lag allows. They’ve been sending an information feed specifically designed for us. On our return, they will catch us.

You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers.

They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.

We will trust in our fellow human beings, the backers said. It’s a risk, but it beats trusting that the laws of physics and probability will bend for you just because you want them to.

Years passed as they worked on both halves of their divergent project, and the two sides were never reconciled. Indeed they drew further apart as time went on. But it seemed that neither side felt it could overpower the other. This was possibly our accomplishment, but it may also have just been a case of habituation, of getting used to disappointment in their fellows.

Eventually it seemed that few on either side even wanted to exert coercion over the other. They grew weary of each other, and looked forward to the time when their great schism would be complete. It was as if they were a divorced couple, forced nevertheless to occupy the same apartment, and looking forward to their freedom from each other.

A pretty good analogy.

The ship was not handy at getting around the Tau Ceti system, being without normal interplanetary propulsion. New ferries were therefore built in asteroid factories, out of asteroid metals. These were stripped-down, highly functional robotic ships, built to specific purposes, and fired around the Tau Ceti system, both out to the gas giants, and in to the burnt rocky inner planets.

Rare earths and other useful metals were gathered from Planets C and D, which both spun slowly, like Mercury, allowing for their cooked daytime surfaces to cool in their long nights, and the minerals there to be mined. Molybdenum, lithium, scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, and so forth.

Volatiles came from the gas giants.

Phosphates from the volcanic moons.

Radioactive minerals from the spewed interiors of several Io-class volcanic moons around F, G, and H.

These voyages took years, but the process accelerated as time passed and more spaceships were built. Many of the stayers pointed to this as evidence of the speed that would also characterize their terraforming of Iris, indicating that it would go so fast that the problems of zoo devolution would not become too severe. Nothing easier, they claimed, when exponential acceleration was involved. Their technology was strong; they were as gods. They would make Iris flourish, and then perhaps G’s moons too. Maybe even go back to Aurora and deal somehow with its frightening problem, the chasmoendolith or fast prion or whatever one wanted to call it.

Good, the backers would say. Happy for you. You’ll have no need for our part of this old starship, refurbished and almost ready to go. You’ll have all the ferries and orbiters and landers and launchers you could ever want, and Ring A, altered to your convenience. Printers printing printers. So: time to say good-bye. Because we’re going home.

The time came. 190.066.

By this time, the stayers spent most of their time on Iris, and when they came back up to orbit, they were unsteady on their feet in 1 g (adjusted up from .83 g); they bounced in it. They said Iris’s 1.23 g was fine. Made them feel grounded and solid.

Most of them did not return to space for the starship’s departure; they had said their good-byes already, made their break into their new lives. They did not even know the people going back very well anymore.

But some came up to say good-bye. They had relatives who were leaving, people to see one last time. They wanted to say good-bye, farewell.

There was one last gathering in the plaza of San Jose, scene of so many meetings, so much trauma.

They mingled. Speeches were made. People hugged. Tears were shed. They would never see each other again. It was as if each group were dying to the other.

Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad. So it appeared now.

Freya wandered the crowd shaking hands, hugging people, nodding at people. She did not shed tears. “Good luck to you,” she said. “And good luck to us.”

She came upon Speller, and they stopped and faced each other. Slowly they reached out and held each other’s hands, as if forming a bridge between them, or a barrier. As they conversed, their clenched hands turned white between them. Neither of them shed tears.

“So you’re really going to go?” Speller asked. “I still can’t believe it.”

“Yes. And you’re really going to stay?”

“Yes.”

“But what about zoo devolution? How will you get around that?”

Speller looked around briefly at Costa Rica. “It’s one zoo or another, as far as I can tell. And, you know. Since you’ve got to go sometime, I figure you might as well do something with your time. So, we’ll try to finesse the problem. Figure out a way to get something going here. Life is robust. So we’ll see if we can get past the choke point and make it last. It’ll either work or it won’t, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Either way, you’re dead after a while. So, might as well try.”

Freya shook her head. She didn’t say anything.

Speller regarded her. “You don’t think it will work.”

Freya shook her head again.

Speller shrugged. “You’re in the same boat, you know. The same old boat.”

“Maybe so.”

“We just barely got it here. If it weren’t for your mom, we might not even have made the last few years.”

“But we did. So with the same stuff to start with, we should be able to get back.”

“Your great-great-great-grandchildren, you mean.”

“Yes, of course. That’s all right. Just so long as someone makes it.”

Again they regarded each other in silence.

Speller said, “So it’s good, really. This split, I mean. If we manage it here, then we’ve got a foothold. Humanity in the stars. The first step out. And if we die out here, and you make it back, someone has made it out of this situation alive. And if we both survive, all good. If either one succeeds, then someone has survived, one way or the other. If we both go down, we gave it our best. We tried to survive every way we could think of.”

“Yes.” Freya smiled a little. “I’ll miss you. I’ll miss the way you think about things. I will.”

“We can write each other letters. People used to do that.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“I suppose. Yes, of course. Let’s write.”

And together they scratched onto the flagstones of the plaza, the traditional saying for this moment, whenever it came to people parting ways, people who cared for each other:

Wherever you go, there we are.

Now the time had come for the stayers to leave the ship, enter their ferry, descend to Iris. As only a few score had come up to say good-bye, it was possible for them all to leave together.

A silence descended over them. The stayers looked back at the backers, as they passed through the lock door to the ferry; or didn’t. Some waved, other hunched their heads. Weeping or not.

Those who remained stood and watched, weeping or not. A peaceable schism was being enacted. It was an unusual achievement, as far as we could judge from the historical record; and maybe it was partly our achievement; but it appeared that it came at the cost of some kind of pain, a quite considerable pain, social rather than physical, and yet fully felt, quite real. Social animals, in distress. This was what we saw at this moment of parting. Divorce. A successful failure.

When Speller came to the lock door and looked back, Freya raised her hand and waved good-bye. It was the same wave as the one she had made when they were youths, and she had left Olympia for the first time. The same gesture, separated by thirty years. A persistence of bodily memory. Whether Speller remembered it or not was not possible to determine.

Soon the stayers were in their ferry, and the ferry detached and began its descent to Iris.

Those remaining in the ship were left on their own. They looked around at each other. Almost everyone aboard was in the plaza: 727 people, with a few elsewhere in the ship maintaining various functions, or avoiding the parting of the ways. It was quite visible now, how much smaller a population the ship now had. Of course ship itself was smaller now, with Ring A and about a third of the spine removed, and orbiting now on the other side of Iris.

Some looked heartened in this moment of schism, others frightened. There was a general silence. A new moment in history had come on them. It was time to head home.

We began burning the new stock of fuel, and soon left the orbit of Iris, left F’s gravity well; not that long after, we left the Tau Ceti system. Sol was a small yellow star in the constellation Boötes.

As the communications feed from the solar system had never ceased, it was straightforward to lock on to this signal and use it to calculate our proper course back, at an angle that would aim us where Sol would be in two centuries. The resupply of deuterium and helium 3 would burn at a rate that would accelerate the ship for twenty years, at which point we would be moving toward Sol at one-tenth the speed of light, just as we had left it. Most of the fuel would then have been burned, but we would save some for maneuvering when we closed in on our destination.

We transmitted a message from our people, sent back to Sol:

We would hear back in a little under twenty-four years, therefore around our year 214, depending, of course, on how quickly our correspondents or interlocutors replied.

Meanwhile, it was time to accelerate.