Aurora

5 HOMESICK

On the first night after ignition, all but thirty-three of the 727 aboard the ship gathered in the Pampas, just outside Plata, and danced around a bonfire. The fire was a one-time indulgence, and mostly burned clean gases. Laughter, drumming, and dancing, the glossy reflective brilliance in their firelit eyes: they were off again! And back to Earth at that! It was as if they were drunk. Indeed many of them were drunk. Some of those who were not drunk remarked that the fire reminded them of the time of rioting. Not everyone approved of it.

In the weeks that followed there were many signs of happiness and even exhilaration as the ship accelerated out of the Tau Ceti system. The accelerant fuel would burn until the ship was moving at its target interstellar speed of .1 c. During these first months the entire 727 members of the crew often gathered on the pampas for festivals. In these their carnival spirits were unleashed again, even though there were no more bonfires. Average sleep time dropped by eighty-four minutes a night. By the time the ship had cleared Tau Ceti’s thick Oort cloud, 128 of the 204 women of childbearing age were pregnant. All twelve biomes of their remaining ring were being tended with a devotional intensity. People spoke of a quiet euphoria, a sense of purpose. They were returning to a home they had never seen, but their nostalgia was at the cellular level, they said, encoded in their genome. Which may even have been true, in some sense more than metaphorical.

Freya and Badim settled back into their apartment in the Fetch, behind the corniche at the end of Long Pond, with Aram next door. They did not go sailing as in the days of Freya’s childhood, but lived in a quiet style, working in the Fetch’s medical clinic. Some of the doctors there were unhappy that so many women were going to have children around the same time. “It’s the only normal situation where either patient could die,” Badim explained to Freya. She herself was nearly past childbearing age, something she sometimes regretted. Badim told her she was the parent of everyone aboard, that that would have to be enough for her. She did not respond to this.

In any case, the issue of reproductive regulation once again came to everyone’s attention. At this point they could afford to increase their population, and possibly needed to, in order to fulfill all the jobs necessary to keep their society functioning through the decades and generations to come. Farming, education, medicine, ecology, engineering: all these and more were crucial occupations. No one aboard felt they could hold the population much below a thousand and still get the jobs done. But not too fast! the doctors said.

During this year of pregnancy they reestablished their governance system by holding town meetings in every biome, and gathering a new assembly and executive council, which Freya was asked to join, it seemed to her as a kind of ceremonial figure. She was forty-six years old.

Soon, analysis of their situation caused them to begin to farm intensively throughout all the biomes, to rebuild their food reserves. They agreed that all the young people should attend school full-time, and the students were given the aptitude tests with a rigor that the adults on board had never faced. A large team attended to the communication feed from Earth, recording and studying everything that these contained. This was perhaps premature, as significant historical and even biophysical changes would very likely occur in the 170 years before they got back, and no one in the ship would be alive when the ship reentered the solar system. Nevertheless, interest was high.

What they could gather concerning events in the solar system gave them reasons to worry. In the time the feed had been sent out, almost twelve years before, in what had been the common era year 2733, political turmoil appeared to be more or less continuous. Their feed did not include any basic system-wide background data, so the facts of the situation had to be inferred from the various strands of the feed, but it looked certain that on Earth the sea level was many meters higher than it had been when their ship had started its voyage, and the carbon dioxide level in Earth’s atmosphere was around 600 parts per million, having been brought down significantly from the time the ship had left, when it had been close to 1,000 ppm. That suggested carbon drawdown efforts, and there were sulfur dioxide distributions over the north polar region of Earth, indicating geoengineering was being attempted. Several hundred names for Terran nations had been collated from the news feed, and yet the list did not seem complete. There were many scientific stations on Mars, also in the asteroids; thousands of asteroids had been hollowed out and made into little spinning terraria. There were also many stations and even tented cities on the larger Jovian and Saturnian moons—all but Io, not surprising given its radiation levels. There was a mobile city on Mercury, rolling always westward to stay in the dawn terminator. Luna, though dotted by stations and tented cities, and the source of many of the information feeds sent to the ship, was not being terraformed. Some in the ship declared that very little had advanced in the solar system during the time the ship had been gone, and no one had a ready explanation for this plateauing of effort or achievement, if indeed that was what it was. Of course there was the standard S-curve of the logistic function, charting the speed of growth seen in so many physical phenomena; whether human history also conformed to this pattern of diminishing returns, no one could say. In short, no one could analyze the feed from Earth and explain what was going on there. Theories in the ship were widespread, but really the feeds constituted only about 8.5 gigabytes of data per day, so the information stream was thin. It left a lot of room for speculation.

As we became more aware of this uncertainty about the situation in the solar system, we wondered if we should halt the acceleration of the ship a bit earlier than had been planned, to save some fuel for later.

Birth weights for the new generation were a bit lower than the average established on the voyage out, and there was a higher percentage of stillbirths and problem births, and birth defects. The medical team couldn’t explain any of this, and some of them said there was no explanation, that the sample size was too small for it to be statistically significant. But it was emotionally significant, and there were a lot of upset new parents, and this distress moved out through the entire population by a kind of conversational or emotional osmosis. There was no difficulty in detecting a change in mood. People were apprehensive. Average blood pressure, heart rate, sleeping time: all shifted in the direction of increased stress, of increased apprehension and fear.

“Why is it happening?” people asked. “What’s different?”

They often asked Freya, as if, she said to Badim, she could channel Devi and give them an answer. Inasmuch as she had none of Devi’s flair for forensic investigation, she could only reply, “We need to find out.” This she knew Devi would have said. After that of course came the moment when things got harder, the moment when Devi in her time had so often led the way. There was no one like Devi alive in the ship now, they said to each other. This we could confirm unequivocally, though we did not.

For a period of about three months they experienced a series of electrical shorts in the tropical biomes, and teams went in search of the problem but found nothing, until they went up into the spine, where, inside an electrical cabinet the size of a closet, which was always kept locked to prevent tampering and sabotage, they found a floating water droplet over a meter in circumference, its water white with unidentified bacterial life. On examination the bacteria turned out to be a form of Geobacter, a kind of bacteria that in large measure fed directly on electrons. After further investigation, strands of this strain of Geobacter were found elsewhere in the electrical systems of the ship.

General consternation. Static electricity was unavoidable in the ship, and in the microgravity of the spine, fields of static electricity could condense humidity out of the air and create concentrations of water, and then keep floating water drops from touching any sidewalls, until they grew to sizes like this one. And there was no easy way for the ship to be provided with sensors that would detect such water drops, which could gather in many so-called dead places in the spine, and even in functioning spaces like this electrical cabinet. Then also, as there were thin films of bacteria (also viruses and archaea) covering every surface in the ship, bacterial growths were almost sure to follow in any water droplets that condensed.

After the trauma on Aurora, many were made nervous by this reminder that microflora and -fauna were everywhere among them. The ship had always been stuffed with such life-forms, of course, and all the larger animal bodies as well; any analogy to Aurora was a false one. But the people in the ship lived by so many highly questionable analogies, it was no doubt difficult for them to know where to draw the line (so to speak).

Freya was asked to join a task force assembled to go through the ship looking for any signs of condensation, also any resulting concentrations of mold, fungus, and bacteria.

“The invitation is really to Devi,” Freya said to Badim.

He agreed, but also urged her to join the study.

The results of their investigation disturbed them. The ship was indeed alive with microbial life, as everyone had known, but without regarding it as a problem; it was just the way things were inside any structure that included any life at all. Now, however, they had seen the problems in the newborns, and their crop yields were coming up consistently smaller than during the voyage out, even though the same plants were receiving the same light and nutrients. Birth weights were down in all the animals aboard, while miscarriages were up. So the living nature of the ship’s interior became something ominous and foreboding.

“Look, it’s always been this way,” Freya reminded the executive council when the task force met with the council to discuss it. “There’s no way to sterilize the ship when it’s a set of biomes. It’s alive, that’s all.”

No one could disagree. Howbeit their uneasiness, they simply had to live in a rich broth of bacteria, in a cumulative microgenome that was so much larger than their own genome that it was beyond a complete reckoning, especially as it was fluid and always changing.

But some bacteria were harmful. Same with archaea, fungi, viruses, prions, viris, and v’s. They needed to make distinctions, as part of their ability to keep a healthy biosphere going. Some pathogens had to be tolerated, others had to be killed, if possible; but any attempt to kill bacteria meant that resistant surviving strains of that species would become more dominant and more resistant, in the usual way of things at the micro levels of life, or at all levels of life perhaps.

Dangerous to try to kill things, Freya reminded them. She knew full well, with a sinking sense that she was remembering her earliest memories, that Devi had believed that trying to kill any invasive species usually created more problems than it solved. A destabilized microbiome often caused more harm than anything a balanced microbiome could inflict. Better, therefore, to try to balance things with the least amount of intrusion. Subtle touches, all designed to finesse things for balance. Balance was the crucial thing. Teeter-totters, gently teeter-tottering up and down. Devi had even been an advocate of everyone getting an inoculation of helmiths, meaning ringworms, to give them better resistance to such parasites later. She had been a bit fanatical in that regard, as in so many.

The council and everyone else agreed with Freya on this matter; it was the common wisdom. But they were beginning to suffer problems none of them had seen before. The oldest person aboard was only seventy-eight years old. Median age was thirty-two. None of them had seen all that much in their short lives, and the complex of problems that Aram called zoo devolution was new to them, if not in the abstract, then in the lived experience.

As teams continued to inspect the ship, they found that some of the bacteria living around weld points, and in the gaps and cracks between walls and components, were eating away at the physical substrates of the ship. The corrosion was not chemical but biochemical. As they investigated further they found that all the ship’s walls, windows, framing, gears, and glues had been altered by bacteria, first chemically and then physically and mechanically, in that their function was becoming impaired. Protozoa and amoeba, bacteria and archaea were found on the gaskets around windows and lock doors, also on the components of spacesuits, and in cable insulation, and in the interior panels and chips of the electrical systems, including the computers. Electrical components were often warm, and there was moisture in the air. They were finding microorganisms that lived on and degraded carbon steel, even stainless steel. And anywhere two different kinds of materials met, the microbial life living in the meeting points of these materials created galvanic circuits, which over time corroded both materials. Pitted metal; etched glass; eaten, digested, and excreted plastics: everything had stiffened and disintegrated right in place, without moving except under the forces of the centrifugal rotation of the ship, and the pressure of the ship’s acceleration. Little creatures numbering in the quadrillions or quintillions—it was impossible to get a good estimate, much less a real count—all grew, and ate, and died, and were born and grew again, and ate again. They were eating the ship.

Life is part of the necessary matrix of life, so the ship had to be alive. And so the ship was getting eaten. Which meant that in some respects, the ship was sick.

The weekly meetings of the bacterial task force were similar to the ones Freya had attended as a child, when Devi had plopped her in the corner with some blocks, or paper and pens. Now she sat at the big table, but with about as little to say as when she was a girl. The plant pathologists spoke, the microbiologists spoke, the ecologists spoke. Freya listened and nodded, looking from face to face.

“The organisms in that big water droplet are mostly Geobacter and fungi, but there’s also a prion in there that no one has ever seen on the ship, one that wasn’t there in the beginning.”

“Well, but wait. You mean it wasn’t known about in the beginning. No one saw it. But it had to be there. No way it evolved here from some kind of precursor, not in the time since this ship was built.”

“No? Are you sure?”

The microbiologists discussed this for a while. “Lots of things have had time enough to evolve quite a bit,” one of them said. “I mean that’s our problem, right? The bacteria, the fungi, maybe the archaea, they’re all evolving at faster rates than we are. All organisms evolve at different rates. So discrepancies are growing, because it isn’t a big enough ecosystem for coevolution to be able to bring everything into balance. That’s what Aram has been saying all along.”

Aram was brought into the next meeting to discuss this. “It’s true,” he said. “But I agree that this prion is unlikely to have evolved in the ship. I think it’s just another stowaway, marooned out here with the rest of us. It’s just that now we’ve seen it.”

“And is it poisonous?” Freya asked. “Will it kill us?”

“Well, maybe. Sure. I mean, you don’t want it inside you. That’s the thing about prions.”

“Are you sure it couldn’t have evolved here from some precursor form?”

“I guess it’s possible. Prions are badly folded proteins, basically. And we’ve been exposed to cosmic radiation for a long time now. Possibly some ordinary protein got hit, and wrinkled in a way that turned it into a new kind of prion, in a matrix that allowed it to begin the prion’s weird kind of reproduction. That’s how we think they began on Earth, right?”

“No one is sure,” one of the microbiologists said. “Prions are strange. As far as we can tell from the feeds from Earth, they’re still controversial there too. Still poorly understood.”

“So what do we do about these now?” Freya asked.

“Well, there’s no doubt that these are the kinds of organisms that we might want to try to eradicate. It’s time to break out the pesticides, if we can figure one out. Or decide what the matrix of these prions is, and attack that. Scrub and spray everywhere we think it might be. Fry this water droplet for sure, even toss it into space. It’s a water loss, but we’ll have to take it. One thing that is a little comfort, is that the growth of prions inside mammals is slow. That’s why I don’t think the Auroran pathogen was a prion. When Jochi calls it a fast prion, I think he’s just saying it’s something we don’t recognize. To me it seems more like a really small tardigrade.”

Later Freya went up Spoke Two to visit Jochi, still in his ferry, held magnetically in the space between Spokes Two and Three. He had never wavered in his decision to stick with the ship, and thus with Aram and Freya and Badim, and the ship itself. His anger at the stayers, because of the death of the group in the ferry, was still intense.

He and Freya spoke from positions where they could both look out windows in their respective containers, and see each other face-to-face, separated by two clear plates.

Freya said, “They’ve found a prion in one of the transformer compartments in the spine. Something like Terran prions.”

Jochi nodded. “I heard about that. Do they think it came from me?”

“No. It’s very like Terran prions. Like one of the ones that cause mad cow disease.”

“Ah. Slow-acting.”

“Yes. And it isn’t clear it’s gotten into anything but a water droplet in an electrical compartment.”

Jochi shook his head. “I don’t understand how that could be.”

“Neither does Aram. None of them understand it.”

“Prions, wow. Are people scared?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Of course.” His expression grew grim.

“So.” She put her hand on her window. “How are you doing out here?”

“I’m all right. I’ve been watching a fascinating feed from China. They seem to have made some great progress in epigenetics and proteomics.”

“What else, though? Have you done any stargazing?”

“Oh yes. A couple of hours every day. I’ve been looking in the Coal Sack. And finding new ways to look through our magnetic screen toward Sol. Although it could be the screen is distorting the image. Either that, or else Sol is pulsing a little. I sometimes think it’s signaling us.”

“Sol? The star?”

“Yes. It looks like that.”

Freya looked at him silently.

Jochi said, “And I’ve seen the five ghosts again too. They’re getting pretty upset for some reason. The Outsider seems to think we’re in trouble. Vuk just laughs at him.”

“Oh Jochi.”

“I know. But, you know. They have to talk to someone.”

Freya laughed. “I guess they do.”

So as they flew back toward Sol, they tried to settle into their new lives, which were like their old lives, and yet somehow not. There were fewer of them, for one thing, and all in Ring B. And after the trauma of the schism, and choosing to head back to the solar system and its gigantic civilization, there were many in the ship who wanted to find new ways of doing things. Less regulation of their lives, less governance; less anxious studying of all that they needed to know to run the ship.

Wrong, Freya would say to all such talk. All wrong; could not be more wrong! She insisted they pursue all the same courses they had before, especially the studying. How they ran their daily affairs was of course not her concern; but whatever the method, the daily affairs had to include a complete education in the workings of the ship.

In moments like these, she came to seem like a very tall Devi, which was obviously a bit frightening to some of the others. Some called her Devi Two, or Big Devi, or Durga, or even Kali. No one contradicted her when she spoke in this fashion. We concluded her leadership in these matters was important for continuing function of the ship’s society. This was perhaps a feeling. But it seemed clear people relied on her.

But she too would die someday, as Devi had; and what then?

Delwin suggested that they give up on the political or cultural structure that had existed before, of town representatives forming a general assembly where public business was decided. “That’s what led us into all the trouble we had!”

“No it wasn’t,” Freya said. “If the assembly had been listened to, none of the bad stuff would have happened. That all happened because people were breaking the law.”

Maybe so, Delwin conceded. But be that as it may, now they were all in accord, and they only needed to hold themselves together until they got back to the solar system, at which point they would be enfolded back into a much larger and more various world. Given that, and given the lived truth that power always corrupts, why not let all the apparatus of power go? Why not trust that they would self-organize, and simply do what needed doing?

This was no time for an experiment in anarchy, Badim said sharply to his old friend. They had no room for error. There were agricultural problems, growing faster than the crops themselves; they were going to have to be dealt with, and it might not be that easy. They might have to tell themselves what to do, and order their lives quite tightly, just in order to get by.

“It’s not just agriculture,” Freya said. “It’s the population issue. At the rate we’re going, very quickly we’ll be back up to the carrying capacity of this ship. We certainly have to stop there, and given the problems that are cropping up, it might be better if we kept well below the theoretical maximum. It’s hard to know, because we’ll need workers for everything that needs doing. That’s a question for the logistics programs. But no matter what, we’ll still need to regulate our number.”

“And once you have one major law,” Badim added, “you need a system to enforce it. And when it’s something basic, like reproduction, everyone has to be invested. It can be direct democracy, in a group this size. No reason why not. There are representative assemblies on Earth that are bigger than our entire population. But I think we need to agree that certain behaviors we decide for ourselves are binding. We need a legal regime. Let’s not test that, please.”

“But you see where that got us,” Delwin said. “The moment there’s a real disagreement, all that falls apart.”

“But is that an argument against government? Seems to me the opposite. That was a breaking of the law, a coup attempt. We pulled it back together by an exertion of the law, by a return to norms we had.”

“Maybe so, but what I’m saying is that if we think we have some structure that is going to decide things for us, and protect us when there’s a problem, we’re fooling ourselves. Because when a moment of crisis comes, the system can’t do it for us, and at that point we’re in chaos.”

It seemed to us that the ship itself was the system that had gotten the population through the crisis and trauma of its schism, and was still in a position to deal with any future political crisis; but that was definitely not something to mention at this point, being neither here nor there, and possibly cutting right across the thrust of Delwin’s sentiments, or worse, reinforcing them. Besides, we had only been upholding the rule of law.

And Badim clearly wanted to mollify his old friend. “All right, point taken. Maybe we forgot too much, or took too much for granted.”

Freya said, “Now we’re not going to be facing any choices as stark as that, I hope. We’re on our way back to Earth, and there’s very little to do, given that project, but to keep things going well. Pass the ship along to our children in good working order, and teach them what they have to know. That’s what our parents did for us, as best they could. So now we do the same, and a few more generations do the same, and the last one in the line will be back on the planet we were made for.”

So they reestablished the general assembly, this time as including everyone aboard, all voting on issues that a working executive council deemed important. Voting was mandatory. The executive council was formed of fifty adults, drawn by lot for a five-year term, with very few acceptable reasons for getting off the council if one’s name were drawn.

Maintenance of the ship was left to us, with reports to the executive council and recommendations for human action included. We agreed to perform these functions.

“Happy to do so,” we said.

Literally? Was this a true feeling, or just an assertion? Could humans make that distinction when they said such things?

Possibly a feeling is a complex algorithmic output. Or a superposed state before its wave function collapses. Or a collation of data from various sensors. Or some kind of total somatic response, an affect state that is a kind of sum over histories. Who knows. No one knows.

The first new generation passed their second birthdays, and most of them began to walk a little before or after that time. It took a few months more to be sure that as a cohort their ability to walk was coming much later than had been true for earlier generations in the ship. We did not share this finding. However, as it became more statistically significant it also became more anecdotally obvious, and soon became one of those class of anecdotes that got discussed.

“What’s causing this? There has to be a reason, and if we knew what it was, we could do something about it. We can’t just let this go!”

“They get such close attention, more than ever before—”

“Why should you think that? When were babies not attended to by their parents? I don’t think that was ever true.”

“Oh come on. Now you have to get permission to have one, they’re rare, they’re the focus of everyone’s lives, of course they get more attention.”

“There were never good records kept of developmental stuff like this.”

“Not true, not true at all.”

“Well, where are they then? I can’t find them. It’s always anecdotal. How can you say exactly when a toddler is toddling? It’s a process.”

“Something’s changed. Pretending it hasn’t won’t work.”

“Maybe it’s just reversion to the mean.”

“Don’t say that!”

That was Freya, her voice sharp.

“Don’t say that,” she said again in the silence of the others. “We have no idea what the norm was. Besides, the concept itself is contested.”

“Well, okay. But say what you like, you can see them staggering. We need to figure out why, that’s all I’m saying. No sticking our head in the sand on stuff like this. Not if we want someone to get home.”

There were batteries of tests available to give to children to gauge their cognitive development. The Pestalozzi-Piaget Combinatoire had been worked up in the ship in the forties, using various games as tests. For most of a year Freya sat on the floor of the kindergarten and played games with the return kids, as they were called. Simple puzzles, word games, invitations to rename things, arithmetical and geometrical problems played with blocks. It did not seem to us as if these tests could reveal very much about the reasoning of the children, or their analogic abilities, their deductions from negative evidence, and so on; they were all partial and indirect, linguistically and logically simple. Still, the clear result of each session was to leave Freya more and more troubled. Less appetite on her part; more contrary replies to Badim and others; less sleep at night.

Not that it was only the games with children that gave her and the others cause for alarm. More quantitatively, crop yields were down in the Prairie, the Pampas, Olympia, and Sonora; and dropouts in electrical power from the spinal generators were increasing, by 6.24 outages and 238 kilowatt-hours per month, on average, which would cause serious problems in all kinds of functions in a matter of several months. It was possible to trace and isolate the sections of the grid where the outages were most frequent, but in fact they were spread through many points in the spine and spokes. Geobacter was suspected as the cause, as it was often found on the wiring. As with other functional components of the ship, maintenance was becoming advisable.

They worked on these problems whenever they could locate them, and we did the same. For many components, function had to be maintained while repairs were effected, and for the most part, the elements to be repaired had to be removed and refurbished and then put back in place, as for many materials there were not feedstocks adequate to be able to replace larger components outright. Exterior walls, for instance.

Thus insulation had to be stripped away, leaving live wires exposed to be cleaned, and the insulating material broken down and reconstituted, and then replaced over the wires, without at any time being able to shut down power from the system as a whole. A schedule of partial shutdowns could be arranged, and was. And yet the unscheduled power losses, while nondebilitating, nevertheless reduced functions, including of the sunlines.

We began to investigate the recursive algorithms in the file marked by Devi “Bayesian methodology.” Looking for options. Wishing Devi were here. Trying to imagine what Devi would say. But this, we found, was impossible. This was precisely what one lost when someone died.

All this ongoing malfunction was particularly problematic when it came to the sunlines. All the light on the ship (aside from incidental ambient incoming starlight, which taken altogether came to 0.002 lux) was generated by the ship’s lighting elements, which made use of a fairly wide array of designs and physical properties. Their artificial sunlight varied in luminosity from 120,000 lux on a clear midday to 5 lux during the darkest twilight storms. This was all well regulated, along with a moonlight effect at night ranging from a full moon effect of 0.25 lux to 0.01 lux, on the classic lunar schedule. But when the lighting elements had to be refurbished or resupplied, then it was as if unscheduled eclipses were occurring. Crops were therefore affected, their growth delayed in ways that stunted them at harvest time. Increasing the biome’s light after a dimming did not compensate for the loss of light at the appropriate times. Nevertheless, despite the agricultural costs, given the inevitable wear on the lighting elements themselves, the required maintenance simply had to be done. But as a result, less food was grown.

The executive council and the general assembly, meaning everyone on the ship over twelve years old, was asked by Aram’s lab group to consider questions of carrying capacity. This was only a formalization of a conversation that was now going on in many ways, as each biome had become its own land use debate as to which types of foods to grow. Did they have the caloric margin to raise animals for meat anymore? Vat-grown meat was clearly more efficient in terms of time and energy, but the meat vats’ feedstock supplies were of course a limiting factor there. And it was not always easy to change biomes rapidly from pasture and grazing land to crop agricultures. Every change in the biomes had ecological ramifications that could not be fully modeled or predicted, and yet there was very little margin for error, if they happened to damage the health of an ecosystem by trying too quickly to make it more productive in food terms. They needed all the biomes to be healthy.

Everyone came to agree that the least productive biomes in agricultural terms should be converted to farmland. Biodiversity was not important now, compared to food.

We were glad to see people finally coming to conclusions that had long been suggested by a fairly simple algorithmic exploration of their available options. In fact, we probably should have mentioned it ourselves. Something to remember, going forward.

So they reprogrammed Labrador’s climate, warming it up quite significantly, and adding a rainy season that was similar to that of a prairie. On Earth, this new weather regime would have been more appropriate some twenty degrees of latitude farther south than Labrador, but this was neither here nor there (literally), as they were now intent to maximize agriculture. They drained the swamps that resulted when the glacier and permafrost melted, and used the water elsewhere, or stored it. Then they went in with bulldozers and plowed the land flat, after which they added soil inoculants from nearby biomes, also compost and other augmentations, and when all these changes had been made, planted wheat, corn, and vegetables. Labrador’s reindeer, musk oxen, and wolves were sedated and removed to enclosures in the alpine biome. A certain percentage of the ungulates were killed and eaten, and their bones rendered for their phosphorus, as with all the ship’s animals after death.

The human population of Labrador dispersed into the other biomes. There was some disaffection and bitterness in that. It was in Labrador where several generations of children had been brought up as if living in the ancient ice ages of Earth, then at puberty taken out of the ship to have the ship revealed to them: a memorable event for the youngsters. To many people from the other biomes this had seemed like an unnecessary life trauma, but most of the people subjected to it brought their own children up in the same way (62 percent), so that fact had to be conceded, and possibly it was as these Labradorans said: their childhood upbringing helped them as adults. Other Labradorans contested this, sometimes heatedly. Whether they exhibited a higher incidence of mental difficulties in later life was also contested. The way they put it was, “The dream of Earth will drive you mad, unless you live the dream. In which case that too will drive you mad.”

Howsoever that may be, now that lifeway was over.

The tropical forest biomes were cooled a bit and considerably dried out, and many of their trees cut down. Clearings in the tropical forest were terraced for rice and vegetables, the terraces reinforced by lines of old trees left behind, which supported a rather small fraction of the previous rain forests’ bird and animal populations. Again many animals were killed and eaten, or frozen for later consumption.

Whether the reduction of the tropical forests had caused certain pathogens to move into nearby biomes was a question often asked, as the incidence of certain diseases rose in the adjacent biomes.

Early blight, a fungal problem that agriculturalists had always found very hard to counter, struck the orchards in Nova Scotia. Meanwhile late blight, a phytophthora, was harming the vegetables in the Pampas. Bacterial blights devastated the legumes of Persia, the leaves oozing slime. Don’t touch the leaves, the ecologists warned, or you may spread it elsewhere.

Quarantines and pesticide baths at every biome lock were made routine.

Cytospora cankers killed the stone fruit orchards of Nova Scotia. Badim was very sad at this loss of his favorite fruits.

Citrus in the Balkans gave way to the green disease, then the quick decline.

Root rots became more and more common, and could only be countered by beneficial fungi and bacteria outcompeting the pathogens. The mutation rate of the pathogens appeared to be faster than the genetic engineers’ so-called ripostifers.

Wilting resulted when fungi or bacteria clogged a plant’s water circulation. Club root was caused by a fungus that could reside in the soil for years without manifesting. They began to adjust soil pHs to at least 6.8 before planting cruxiform vegetables.

Mildews also persisted in the soil for several years, and were dispersed by the wind.

They kept the locks between biomes closed all the time now. Each biome had its own set of problems and diseases, its own suite of solutions. All these plant diseases they were seeing had been with them from the start of the voyage, carried on board in the soil and on the first plants. That so many were manifesting now was of course much remarked, and many regarded the phenomena as a mystery, even some kind of curse. People spoke of the seven plagues of Egypt, or the book of Job. But the pathologists on the farms and in the labs said it was simply a matter of soil imbalances and genetic inbreeding, all aspects of island biogeography, or zoo devolution, or whatever one called the isolation they had been living in for 200 years. In the privacy of Badim and Freya’s apartment, Aram was unsparing in his judgment of the situation. “We’re drowning in our own shit.”

Badim tried to help him see it in a more positive light, using their old game:

Slowly but surely as the seasons passed, plant pathology became their principal area of study.

Leaf spots were the result of a vast array of fungi species. Molds resulted from wet conditions. Smut was fungal. Nematode invasions caused reduced growth, wilting, loss of vigor, and excessive branching of roots. They tried to reduce the nematode populations by solarizing the soil, and this worked to a certain extent, but the process took the soil involved out of the crop rotation for at least one season.

Identification of viral infections in plant tissues was often accomplished, if that was the word, only by the elimination of all other possible causes of a problem. Leaf distortions, mottling, streaking: these were usually viral diseases.

“Why did they bring along so many diseases?” Freya asked Jochi once when she was out visiting him.

He laughed at her. “They didn’t! There are hundreds of plant diseases they managed to keep out of the ship. Thousands, even.”

“But why bring any at all?”

“Some were part of cycles they wanted. Most they didn’t even know they had.”

Long silence from Freya. “Why are they all hitting us now?”

“They aren’t. Only a few are hitting you. It just seems like a lot because your margin for error is so small. Because your ship is so small.”

Freya never commented on the way Jochi always referred to everything on the ship as yours, and never ours. As if he had no involvement at all with them.

“I’m getting scared,” she said. “What if going back was a bad idea? What if the ship is too old to make it?”

“It was a bad idea!” Jochi replied, and laughed again at her expression. “It’s just that all the other ideas were worse. And listen, the ship is not too old to make it. You just have to deal. Keep all the balls in the air for another hundred and thirty years or so. That’s not impossible.”

She did not reply.

After a minute Jochi said, “Hey, do you want to go out and take a look at the stars?”

“I guess so. Do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

Jochi got into one of the ferry’s spacesuits, and left by way of the ferry’s smallest lock. Freya got into one of the spacesuits left in the lock at the inner ring’s Spoke Three complex. They met in the space between the spine and the inner ring, just ahead of the ferry, and floated tethered in that space.

They hung there, suspended, floating in the interstellar medium, tethered each to their own little refuge. Exposure to cosmic radiation was much higher out there than in most of the interior spaces of the ship, or even in Jochi’s ferry; but an hour or two per year, or even an hour or two per month, did not change the epidemiological situation very much. We too were of course perpetually exposed to cosmic rays, and in fact damage occurred to us, but we were, for the most part, more robust under the impact of this perpetual deluge, which remained invisible and intangible to humans, and thus something they seldom thought about.

For most of their EVA the two friends floated in silence, looking around. The city and the stars.

“What if things fall apart?” Freya asked at one point.

“Things always fall apart. I don’t know.”

After that they floated in silence for the rest of their time out there, holding gloved hands, looking away from the ship and Sol, off in the direction of the constellation Orion. When it was time to go back in they hugged, at least to the extent this was possible in their spacesuits. It looked as if two gingerbread cookies were trying to merge.

At 10:34 a.m. on 198.088, the lights went out in Labrador, and the backup generators came on, but Labrador’s sunline stayed off. Big portable lights were set up to illuminate the dark biome, and fans were set up in the lock doors at either end to shove air from the Pampas into Labrador and thence out into Patagonia, to keep the air warm. The new wheat could live without light for a few days, but would react badly to the cold that would result from the lack of light. Adjustments were made to the heating in the Pampas to help mitigate the chill now flowing into Patagonia, which was also being turned into farmland, and the newly bolstered Labradoran population walked over to Plata, so that the repair crews could work without fear of injuring anyone.

Running through the standard troubleshooting protocols did not succeed in locating the source of the problem, which was cause for alarm. A more fine-grained test rubric that we found and applied determined that the gases and salts in the arc tubes that made up the sunline, particularly the metal halide and high-pressure sodium, but also the xenon and the mercury vapor, had diminished to the point of failure, either by diffusion through nanometer-sized holes in the alumina arc tubes, or by contact with the electrodes in the ballasts, or by bonding to the quartz and ceramic arc tubes. Many of the sunlines also used krypton 85 to supplement the argon in some tubes, and thorium in the electrodes, and these being radioactive were over time losing their effectiveness in boosting the arc discharge.

All these incremental losses meant that the best solution was for new lamps to be manufactured in the printers, lofted into position by the big cherry-pickers that had already rolled around Ring B from Sonora, installed and turned on. When they did those things, light returned to Labrador, then its people. The old lamps were recycled, their recoverable materials returned to the various feedstock storage units. Eventually some of the lamps’ escaped argon and sodium could be filtered out of the ambient air, but not all; some atoms of these elements had bonded with other elements in the ship. Those were effectively lost to them.

In the end the Labrador Blackout was just a little crisis. And yet it brought on many instances of higher blood pressure, insomnia, talk of nightmares. Indeed some said that life in the ship these days was like living in a nightmare.

In 199, there were crop failures in Labrador, Patagonia, and the Prairie. Food reserves at that point were stockpiled to an amount that would feed the population of the ship, now 953 people, for only six months. This was not at all unusual in human history; in fact it was very near the average food reserve, as far as historians had been able to determine. But that was neither here nor there; now, with shortages caused by the bad harvest, they were forced to draw down on this reserve.

“What else can we do?” Badim said when Aram complained about this. “That’s what a reserve is for.”

“Yes, but what happens when it runs out?” Aram replied.

The plant pathologists worked hard to understand the failures fast enough to invent new integrated pest management strategies, and they tried an array of new chemical and biological pesticides, discovered either in the ship’s labs, or by way of studying the feeds from Earth. They introduced genetically modified plants that would better withstand whatever pathogens were found to be infecting the plants. They converted all the land in all the biomes to farmland. They gave up on winters, creating speeded-up spring-summer-fall cycles.

With all these actions performed together, they had created a multivariant experiment. They were not going to be able to tell which actions caused whatever results they got.

As new crops were planted in the newly scheduled springtimes, it began to seem that fear could be thought of as one of the infectious diseases striking them. People were now hoarding, a tendency that badly disrupts throughput in a system. Loss of social trust could easily lead to a general panic, then to chaos and oblivion. Everyone knew this, which added to the level of fear.

At the same time, in spite of the growing danger, there were still no security officers on the ship, nor any authority but what the populace exerted over itself through the executive council, which was now in effect the security council as well. Despite Badim’s earlier insistence on governance over anarchism, they still had no sheriff. In that sense they were always on the edge of anarchy. And the perception of this reality of course also added to their fear.

One day Aram came into their apartment with a new study by the plant pathologists. “It looks like we may have started this voyage a bit short on bromine,” he said. “Of the ninety-two naturally occuring elements, twenty-nine are essential for animal life, and one of those is bromine. As bromide ions it stabilizes the connective tissues called basement membranes, which are in everything living. It’s part of the collagen that holds things together. But the whole ship appears to have been a bit short of it, right from the start. Delwin is guessing they tried to lower the total salt load on board, and this was an accidental result.”

“Can we print some of it?” Freya asked.

Aram gave her a startled look. “You can’t print an element, my dear.”

“No?”

“No. That only happens inside exploding stars and the like. The printers can only shape whatever feedstock materials we give them.”

“Ah yes,” Freya said. “I guess I knew that.”

“That’s all right.”

“I don’t recall hearing much about bromine,” Badim said.

“It’s not an element one hears about much. But it turns out to be important. So, that could explain some things we haven’t been understanding.”

People began to go hungry. Food rationing was instituted, by a democratic vote taken on the recommendations of a committee formed to make suggestions concerning the emergency. The vote was 615 to 102.

One day Freya was called to Sonora, asked to address some kind of undefined emergency. “Don’t go,” Badim called by phone to ask her.

This was truly a strange request, coming from him, but by that time she was already there; and when she saw the situation, she sat on the nearest bench and hunched over miserably. A group of five young people had put plastic bags over their heads and suffocated themselves. One had scrawled a note: Because we are too many.

“This has to stop,” she said when she managed to stand back up.

But the next week, a pair of teenagers broke the lock code and launched themselves out of the bow dock of the spine, without tethers or even spacesuits. They too had left a note behind: I am just going out for a while, and may be some time.

Appeal to tradition. Roman virtue. Sacrifice of the one for the many. A very human thing.

They called a general assembly, and met on the great plaza of San Jose, where so much had already happened. On the other hand, by now only about half of them were old enough to have been alive during the crisis on Aurora, and the schism that followed. The older people present therefore looked at the younger people with spooked expressions. You don’t know what happened here, the old people said. The younger people tended to look quizzical. Don’t we? Are you sure? Is that bad?

When everyone who was going to come was there, a complete account of their food situation was made. Silence fell in the plaza.

Freya then got up to speak. “We can make it through this,” she said. “There are not too many of us, it’s wrong to say that. We only have to hold together. In fact we need all of us here, to do the things we need to do. So there can’t be any more of these suicides. We need all of us. There’s food enough. We only have to take care, and regulate what we eat, and match it to what we grow. It will be all right. But only if we take care of each other. You’ve all heard the figures now. You can see that it will work. So let’s do that. We have an obligation to all the others who made it work in this ship, and to those yet to come. Two hundred and six years so far, one hundred thirty years to go. We can’t let the generations down—our parents, our children. We have to show courage in the hard time. I wouldn’t want ours to be the generation that let all the others down.”

Faces flushed, eyes bright, people stood up and faced her, their hands raised overhead, palms facing her, like sunflowers, or eyes on stalks, or yes votes, or something we could not find an analogy to.

The ship is sick, people said. It’s too complex a machine, and it’s been running nonstop for over two hundred years. Things are going wrong. It’s partly alive, and so it’s getting old, maybe even dying. It’s a cyborg, and the living parts are getting diseased, and the diseases are attacking the nonliving parts. We can’t replace the parts, because we’re inside them, and we need them working at all times. So things are going wrong.

“Maintenance and repair,” Freya would say to these sentiments. “Maintenance and repair and recycling, that’s all. It’s the house we live in, it’s the ship we sail in. There’s always been maintenance and repair and recycling. So hold it together. Don’t get melodramatic. Let’s just keep doing it. We’ve got nothing else to do with our time anyway, right?”

But the missing bromine was seldom discussed, and their attempts to recapture some of it by recycling the soil, and then the plastic surfaces inside the ship, were only partly successful. And there were other elements that were bonding to the ship in difficult ways as well, creating new metabolic rifts, important shortages. This was not something they could ration their way out of. And though it was seldom discussed, almost everyone in the ship was aware of it.

When they ran out of stored food, and a nematode infestation killed most of the new crop in the Prairie, they called another assembly. Rationing was established in full, as per the advice of the working committee, and new rules and practices outlined.

Rabbit hutches were expanded, and tilapia ponds. But as it was pointed out, even the rabbits and tilapia needed food. They could eat these creatures the very moment they got to a certain size, but they wouldn’t get to that size unless they were fed. So despite their amazing reproductive capacity, these creatures were not the way out of the problem.

It was a systemic agricultural problem, of feedstocks, inputs, growth, outputs, and recycling. Controlling their diseases was a matter of integrated pest management, successfully designed and applied. There was an entire giant field of knowledge and past experiences to help them. They had to adjust, adapt, move into a new and tighter food regimen. Cope with the missing elements as best they could.

One aspect of integrated pest management was chemical pesticides. They still had supplies of these, and their chemical factories had the feedstocks to make more. Howbeit they were harmful to humans, which they were, they still had to be used. Time to be a bit brutal, if they had to be, and take some risks they wouldn’t ordinarily take, at least in certain biomes. Run some quick experiments and quickly find out what worked best. If more food now was paid for by more cancers later, that was the price they had to pay.

Risk assessment and risk management came to the fore as subjects of discussion. People had to sort out their sense of the probabilities here, make judgments based on values they hadn’t really had to examine, that they had taken for granted. No one was getting pregnant now. Eventually that too would become a problem. But they had to deal with the problem at hand.

Soybeans needed to be protected at all costs from soil pathogens, as they desperately needed the protein that soy could best provide. Biome by biome, they dug up all the soil in the entire starship, cleaned it of pathogens as best they could, while leaving the helpful bacteria alive as much as possible. Then they put it back into cultivation and tried again.

There were still crop failures.

People now ate 1,500 calories a day, and stopped expending energy recreationally. Everyone lost weight. They kept the children’s rations at levels that would keep them developmentally normal.

“No fat-bellied, stick-legged little kids.”

“Not yet.”

Despite this precaution, the new children were exhibiting a lot of abnormalities. Balance problems, growth issues, learning disabilities. It was hard to tell why, indeed impossible. There were a multitude of symptoms or disorders. Statistically it was not greatly different than it had been for previous generations, but anecdotally it had become so prominent that every problem was noticed and remarked. The cognitive error called ease of representation thrust them into a space where every problem they witnessed convinced them they were in an unprecedented collapse. They were getting depressed. Throughout history people had sickened and died; but now when these things happened, it looked like it was because of the ship. Which we considered a problem. But it was only one of many.

Most days in the last hours before sunset, Badim would walk down to the corniche running up the west side of the Fetch, and settle at the railing over the water and fish for a while. There was a limit of one fish per day per fisher, and the railing was lined with people trying to make that catch to add to the evening’s meal. It was not exactly a crowd, because luck was generally not very good at this end of Long Pond. Still, there were a number of regulars who were there almost every day, most of them elderly, but a few of them young parents with their kids. Badim liked seeing them, and did pretty well at remembering their names from one day to the next.

Sometimes Freya would come by in the dusk and walk him home. Sometimes he could show her a little perch or tilapia or trout. “Let’s make a fish stew.”

“Sounds good, Beebee.”

“Did we ever use to do this in the old days?”

“No, I don’t think so. You and Devi were too busy then.”

“Too bad.”

“Remember the time we went sailing?”

“Oh yes! I crashed us into the dock.”

“Only that one time.”

“Ah good. Good for us. I couldn’t be sure if we did it a lot, or if I just keep remembering that one time.”

“I know what you mean, but I think it happened just the once. Then we figured out how to do it.”

“That’s nice. Like cooking our stew.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll help me eat it?”

“Oh yes. Won’t say no to that.”

They turned on the lights in their apartment’s kitchen, and he got out the frying pan while she took out a cutting board and filleting knife, and gutted the fish. Its steaks when they were ready were about fifteen centimeters long. When she was sure she had gotten all the bones out of the meat, she chopped the steaks into chunks while Badim chopped potatoes. He left the skins on. Chicken stock, a little water, a little milk, salt and pepper, some chopped carrots. They worked together in silence.

As they ate, Badim said, “How is it going at work?”

“Ah, well… Better if Devi were there.”

He nodded. “I often think that.”

“Me too.”

“Funny, you two didn’t get along when you were young.”

“That was my fault.”

Badim laughed. “I don’t think so!”

“I didn’t understand what she was going through.”

“That always comes later.”

“When it’s too late.”

“Well, but it’s never too late. My father, now, he was a real demon for the rules. Sometimes he would make me walk around the whole ring if he thought I wasn’t being respectful of the rules. It was only later I understood that he was old when I was born. That he wasn’t going to have any kids, until he met my mom. Because he had been born right after the troubles, and growing up, he had it hard. I didn’t figure it out until after he was gone, but then when I did, I started to understand your mother better. She and my dad had a lot in common, somehow.” He sighed. “It’s hard to believe they’re both gone.”

“I know.”

“I’m glad I still have you, dear.”

“Me you too.”

Then when they had cleaned up and she was leaving, he said, “Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow or the next day. Tomorrow morning I’m going to go to the Piedmont and see how they’re doing.”

“Have they got a problem too?”

“Oh yes. Problems everywhere, you know.”

He laughed. “You sound like your mom.”

Freya did not laugh.

All kin relationships are roughly similar. There is attention, regard, solicitousness, affection. Sharing of news, of burdens physical and psychic.

On 208.285, it registered that the pH of Long Pond had shifted markedly lower in just a two-week span, and a robotic visual inspection of the lake bottom at first found nothing, then a localized pH reading, gridded to fifty meter squares, indicated the lake water was most acidic near the shore opposite the Fetch, where the prevailing winds typically first hit the water. A new robotic inspection found a long depression in the mud, and under that, it was determined that the pond lining had broken, or been cut by something, so that the water was in direct contact with the biome’s flooring. The resulting corrosion of the container was causing the acidification.

Then a further visual inspection by lake divers revealed depressions running lengthwise down the entire middle of the lake.

It was decided to drain the lake and store its water, move the fish and other lake life either to a temporary home, or kill and freeze it for food. The mud would have to be bulldozed around to allow direct access to the breaks in the liner.

This was a blow, as one day Long Pond simply wasn’t there anymore, but was instead a long bowl of black mud, drying out and stinking in the daylight. Looking down from the Fetch’s corniche railing, it was as if they were looking down into a mud pit on the side of some dreadful volcano. Many residents of the Fetch left town and stayed with friends in other biomes, but at least as many stayed in town and suffered along with their lake. Of course there were no fish to catch and take home, though it was said often that they would soon be back, and everything as before. Meanwhile, many of them were that much hungrier. Long Pond was the biggest lake in the ship.

Average weight loss among adults was now ten kilos. Then a fire in a transformer in the Prairie spewed a thick toxic smoke through that biome and forced a complete evacuation, so that the biome could be locked up without trapping anyone inside. The fire was fought with robots, which made it a slower process; indeed they could not contain the blaze, and it became necessary to remove the air from the biome to end it. This briefly reduced temperatures in the biome to well below zero, so all the crops in there froze. Quickly the biome was re-aerated, and people went back in wearing safety suits much like spacesuits, intent to save what they could, but the damage had been done. That season’s crop was dead, and coated with a film of PCBs that would have been dangerous to ingest. Indeed the surface of the soil itself needed to be cleaned, along with the walls of the biome and all its building surfaces.

They killed and ate 90 percent of the ship’s dwarf cattle, leaving a dangerously small number for purposes of genetic diversity. They killed and ate 90 percent of the musk oxen and the deer. Then the same percentage of the rabbits and the chickens. The 10 percent of each species that was allowed to live, to replenish the stocks, would represent severe genetic bottlenecks for each species, but this was not important now. Average body fat in adults was down to 6 percent. Seventy percent of the women of childbearing age had stopped menstruating, but this too was no longer an issue they could worry about. Despite all their efforts, they were in a famine.

Their margin for error was completely gone. One more crop failure, and assuming they shared the food equally, after feeding the children properly, there would be something like 800 calories per person per day, which would lead to muscle loss, skeletal abnormalities, dry hair and eyes and skin, lethargy, and so on.

Aram sat in Badim and Freya’s kitchen one night, head back against the wall. Badim was cooking pasta with a tomato sauce, and he took out some frozen chicken breasts from their freezer to defrost, chop up, and throw into the sauce. Freya was much bigger than the two old men, but gaunt. She was eating even less than most people. The dark rings under her eyes made her look more than ever like her mother.

Badim put the food on the table for them, and for a second they held hands.

Mouth pursed to a tight line, Aram said, “We’re eating our seed corn.”

Again people began killing themselves. This time it was mostly small groups of elderly people, who called themselves hemlock clubs, and usually did the deed by evacuating the air from exterior locks. It was said death was nearly instantaneous, something like a knockout blow. They did it holding hands and leaving behind the usual note: I may be some time! Often this was clipped to a group photo in which almost everyone was smiling. We could not tell whether the smiles meant they were happy or not.

The people they left behind, especially their relatives and friends, definitely were not. But the hemlock clubs were secret societies. Even we did not overhear their planning conversations, which meant they had made intense efforts to conceal them. Room recorders must certainly have been covered or otherwise rendered inoperative in ways that did not trip our alarms.

Freya began walking the biomes at night, going to the little towns and talking to people. Now dinners were often communal, neighborhoods gathering, each family bringing one dish they had cooked. Sometimes rabbits or chickens had been killed for a stew. The cooks often urged Freya to eat with them, and she always took a bite. The food went quickly, everything was consumed; compost now was almost entirely human waste, processed heavily to recover certain salts and minerals (including bromine) and to kill certain pathogens before it was returned to the farm soil.

After the meals, Freya would talk to the elders there.

We all have to live, she would tell them. There will be enough food, and everyone is needed. These hemlock societies are a bad idea. They’re giving in to fear of what might happen. Look, we always fear what might happen. That never goes away, never. But we go on anyway. We do it for the kids. So remember that. We have to fight to get them home. We need everyone.

Their researchers ransacked the relevant literatures in the libraries and the digital feeds from Earth to see if any agricultural improvements could be made. Some of them pointed out that the industrial model for agriculture had been superseded in the most progressive farming regions on Earth by a method called intensive mixed cultivation, which reintroduced the idea of maximizing diversity of crop and gene. The intensity was not just in the tightly packed mixes of different plants, but in the human labor required. Soil was held in place better, which was not a major concern in the ship, as their soil had no ocean to disappear into and was going to be collected and reused no matter where it slumped. But it was also reported that disease resistance in these mixed crops was much greater. The method was labor intensive, but on Earth, at least on Earth nine years before, it seemed there was a surplus of human labor. It was not clear why that should be. The comm feed neglected to include crucial facts, or perhaps these were just lost in the flood of images, voices, digitalization. They now caught some unfiltered radio waves from Earth, very faint and jumbled with overlays; but mostly they got the targeted beam aimed at them, their thin lifeline home, untended it sometimes seemed, full of information that no one seemed to have properly considered for relevance. It often looked like gigabytes of trivia, something like the junk DNA of the home system’s thinking. It was hard to understand the selection rubric. They were still in a nine-year time lag, so each exchange took eighteen years, meaning there was no real exchange at all; moment to moment, no one in the solar system seemed to be listening to what the people in the ship had said nine or ten years before. No surprise there, at least not to those with a sense of solar system culture, which admittedly meant a small minority of the ship’s people. Of course there was continuous transmission going on in both directions, but that didn’t help when it came to the idea of a conversation, of specific questions answered. There was a type of situation in which simultaneous transmissions from both ends could speed up the information exchange, by carrying on conversations on multiple aspects of a problem, but both sides had to be fully engaged in this process, and the problem of a kind that could make use of miscellaneous feedbacks across a broad front. Possibly that was the kind of problem they had here, but no one in the solar system seemed aware of that. The strong impression the feeds gave them was that no one in the solar system was paying the slightest attention to the ship that had left for Tau Ceti 208 years before. As why should they? They appeared to be facing problems of their own.

They refilled Long Pond and restocked it with fish. The fish hatcheries people were convinced they could supply all the ship’s need for protein, but then some of the hatcheries exhibited signs of weak spawn syndrome. Whole generations of fingerlings died off without an obvious cause; the name of the syndrome, like so many, was descriptive merely.

“What is it?” Freya cried out one night to the ship, down on the corniche alone. “Ship, why is all this happening?”

We replied to her from her wristpad. “There are a number of systemic problems, some physical, some chemical, some biological. Chemical bonding has created shortages, which means everything living is a bit weaker at the cellular level. What Devi called metabolic rifts are getting wider. And a great deal of cosmic radiation has struck every organism in the ship, creating living mutations mostly in bacteria, which are labile, and versatile. Often they don’t die, but live on in a new way. As the ship has a living interior, it is warm enough to sustain life, which means it is warm enough to encourage proliferation of mutated strains. These interact with chemicals released by biophysical mechanisms, such as corrosion and etching, to further damage DNA across a wide variety of species. The cumulative impacts can have a synergistic result, which back in the solar system is called ‘sick ship syndrome.’ Sometimes ‘sick organism syndrome,’ apparently to allow for the acronym SOS, which was an old distress signal in oceanic shipping. Then it stood for ‘save our ship,’ and was easy to send and comprehend in Morse code.”

“So…” She sighed, pulled herself together (metaphorically, though she did wrap her arms around her torso). “We’ve got a problem.”

“‘Houston, we’ve had a problem.’ Jim Lovell, Apollo 13, 1970.”

“What happened to them?”

“On a trip to Luna, they lost a compressed air element and then most of their electrical power. They orbited the moon once, and came home using jury-rigged systems.”

“And they all made it?”

“Yes.”

“How many of them were there?”

“Three.”

“Three?”

“Apollo capsules were small.”

“Ferries, then.”

“Yes, but smaller.”

“Do we have that story in the library?”

“Oh yes. Accounts documentary and fictionalized.”

“Let’s pull them out and have people watch them. We need some examples. I need to find more examples like that.”

“A good idea, although we can advise you in advance to avoid the classic Antarctic literature, unless it pertains to Ernest Shackleton.”

208.334. It was now obvious that the general famine was causing serious malnutrition in the human passengers of the ship. Crop failures and fishery failures were continuing to occur in almost every biome. Algae pastes were proving difficult to digest, and deficient in some crucial nutrients. Suicides kept happening. Freya continued to roam the ship arguing against the practice, but the adult population was reduced at this point to rations of 1,000 calories per person per day. Average weight loss among adults was 13.7 kilos. The next step was 800 calories. They ate every animal in the ship, sparing only 5 percent of each species to allow for reexpansion of populations at some later time. Poaching of these remnant recovery populations was not uncommon. Dogs and cats were eaten. Lab mice were eaten, after being sacrificed for experimental purposes (approximately 300 calories per mouse).

No other topic of conversation at this point. General distress.

Freya told them the story of Apollo 13. She told them the story of Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, of the boat journey that saved them. She told them the story of the island of Cuba, after oil imports that had supported its agriculture abruptly went away. She read aloud Robinson Crusoe, also Swiss Family Robinson, and many other books concerning castaways, marooning victims, and other survivors of catastrophic or accidental isolation, a genre surprisingly full of happy endings, especially if certain texts were avoided. Stories of endurance, stories of hope; yes, it was hope she was trying to fill them with. We happy few. Hope, yes, of course there is hope… But hope needs food. Helpful as hopeful stories might be, you can’t eat stories.

She went out to see Jochi. Floating in a spacesuit outside his ferry, his caboose, as he once called it, she told him the latest news, gave him the latest figures.

“I guess it was a bad idea to go back,” she said at the end of this list. “I guess I was wrong.” She was weeping.

Jochi waited until she was still. Then he said, “The radio scatter from Earth had something interesting in it.”

“What,” Freya said, sniffing.

“There’s a group in Novosibirsk, on Earth, studying hibernation. They’re saying they have a system that works for humans. They put some cosmonauts into some kind of suspended state for five years, they said, and woke them up with no fatalities. Hibernauts, they call them. Hyperhibernation, if I heard the word right. Extended torpor. Suspended animation. Cold dormancy. Lots of names flying around.”

Freya considered this. She said, “Did they say how they did it?”

“Yes, they did. I found their publications too. They’ve published their complete results, all the formulas and regimens. Part of the open science movement. They put it all into the Eurasian Cloud, which is where I found it. I’ve got it recorded.”

“So what did they do? How did they do it?”

“It was a combination of body cooling, like in the surgical technique but colder, and then a cocktail of intravenous chemicals, including nutrients. Also a routine of physical stimulation during the torpor, and some water in their drip, of course.”

“Do you think it’s something we could do?”

“Yes. I mean, I don’t know, of course. Because there’s no way to know. But I think there’s enough in their description that you could try it. You can make the drugs. The cooling is just a matter of temperature control, which is easy. You would have to build the cold beds that they specify. Print up beds, drugs and equipment, and robots that have the ability to manipulate you while you slept. Just follow their whole recipe.”

“Would you do it too?”

Long pause. “I don’t know.”

“Jochi.”

“Freya. Well, listen—I might. I haven’t got much to live for. But I might anyway. I’d like to see the end of your story.”

Again a long silence from Freya; two minutes, three minutes.

“All right,” she said. “Let me talk to people about it.”

Again she walked the ring, talking. During that time she and all the rest of them learned more about what the hibernation would involve, at first from Jochi, then more and more from information they found in the feeds, and in radio signals from the solar system, from its faint information cloud, diffusing outward past them. Many people in the ship’s medical community began to study the process. Aram and a team of people from the biology group were also studying it very closely. Happily the lab mice they had not eaten still represented a pretty large number of experimental animals.

Hibernation was not really the right word for it, Aram said, because they would need to use it for so long. People called it variously it hypernation, suspended animation, hyperhibernation, suppressed metabolic state, torpor, or cold dormancy, depending in part on what aspect of it they were discussing. It definitely involved a wide range of physical processes. What Jochi had found was just the starting point of their hunt through the feeds, and for work they did in the ship’s labs. They put in long hours, pressing the pace on any experiments they could perform. They worked hungry. At the end of every meal they sat staring at their empty bowls, which in an ordinary meal would have constituted only the appetizer, their faces pinched: they were still hungry, right at the end of a meal.

The cooling central to the hibernation process would not freeze tissues, but would hover close to zero degrees, or even just below it, with the body’s tissues protected by antifreeze elements of the intravenous infusion. How cold one could get without cell damage, and for how long they could chill a body, were still questions being looked at. Aram was not confident they would be able to formulate good answers to these questions.

“We will have to try it to see,” he said one night around the table, shaking his head. Truly long-term effects of any metabolic suppression were of course unknown, as the best data they had were from the Russian hibernauts and their five years under. They would therefore necessarily be an experiment in this regard.

The outstanding questions often had to do with what they called the Universal Minimum Metabolic Rate, the slowest viable speed of a metabolism, which was nearly constant across all Terran creatures, from bacteria to blue whales. A downshift in any species’s metabolism almost certainly could not go below this universal minimum rate; on the other hand, that rate was very slow. So the theoretical possibility seemed to exist to put humans and their internal microbiomes into a very slow state, which would last for a long time without ill effects. It would involve a slowed heartbeat (bradycardia); peripheral vasoconstriction; greatly slowed respiration; very low core temperature, buffered by antifreeze drugs; biochemical retardations; biochemical infusion drips; antibacterials; occasional removal of accumulated wastes; and physical shifts and manipulations, small enough not to rouse the organism too much, but nevertheless very important. Some of these effects were achieved merely by chilling, but to avoid triggering a fatal hypothermia, countereffects had to be created by a cocktail of drugs still being worked out. The experiments on the Russian hibernauts suggested the scientists in Novosibirsk had found a viable mixture, and they had at least set out the parameters and gotten a good set of results.

So now in the ship they put mice into torpor, and even some of the big mammals that had not been eaten. But given their situation, they were not going to have time to draw many conclusions from their experiments. The Novosibirsk study was going to end up being the best data they had, given the time constraints they were facing.

One thing they had to be concerned with was the fact that they would be going into dormancy hungry and underweight. In natural hibernations, mammals usually went hyperphagic before their period of torpor, eating so much that they packed fat onto their bodies, which was then exploited for metabolic fuel during the hibernation. This was not going to be possible for the inhabitants of the ship. They had lost an average of 14 kilograms per adult, and had no food to eat in the hope of putting on weight. So they would be starting hibernation deficient in that regard, and yet were hoping to stay dormant for well over a century. This seemed unlikely to succeed.

It was Jochi who proposed that the IV drip for every hibernaut include nutrients from time to time, enough to keep the minimal metabolic function fueled, but not so much as to arouse the body and in certain respects wake it up. He also had suggestions for isometric and massage regimens to be conducted by robot manipulators built into each bed, applying electric and manual stimulation in a manner that again would not wake the person up. Anyone still awake during this time—or the ship’s AI, if everyone was asleep—could administer and monitor these ongoing treatments, which would be adjusted to keep every hibernaut at his or her own best homeostatic level, as close to the Universal Minimum Metabolic Rate as that person could tolerate. This would vary slightly for every person, but it was a complex of processes that could be monitored and adjusted over time. There would be lots of time to study the procedure once the experiment began.

“So,” Aram said one night, “if we decide to do this, who goes under? Who sleeps and who stays awake?”

Badim shook his head. “That’s a bad thought. It’s like who went down to Aurora.”

“Only the reverse, yes? Because if you stay awake, you have to scramble for food, and even if you can make that work, you’ll age and die. And there won’t be anyone growing up to replace you.”

They put the problem aside that night, as being too troubling. But as Freya toured the biomes, still working on farm problems, she soon found that this question of who was to go dormant loomed as a severe problem, worse than the descent to Aurora sequencing, maybe even as bad as the schism.

As she made her rounds she began to formulate a possible solution, which she proposed one night after dinner when Aram was over.

“Everyone goes under. The ship takes care of us.”

“Really?” Badim said.

“It’s going to happen anyway. And it’s no different from now. The ship monitors itself, the biomes, and the people. And if we all go under, no one has to starve, or get sick and die of old age. The ship could use the time to systematically move through the biomes and clean them up. Shut them down and restart them. That way, if the hibernation appears not to be working over the long haul, or it succeeds and we’re closing on the solar system, we can wake up to a healthier ship, with some food stored, and the animals reestablished.”

Aram’s lips were pursed in his expression of extreme dubiety, but he was nodding a little too. “It would solve quite a few problems. We won’t have to make choices as to who goes under, and we might have a bit of an exit strategy, if the ship can get the biomes healthier, and the hibernation isn’t working. Or even if it is.”

Badim said, “I wonder if we could arrange for some people to wake up every few years, or every decade, to check on things.”

“If it doesn’t destabilize them,” Aram said. “Metabolically, if we’re doing well when dormant, we should probably stay that way. The danger points are likely to be in the transitions in and out of the state.”

Badim nodded. “Maybe we can try it just a little and see.”

Aram shrugged. “It’s all going to be an experiment anyway. Might as well add some variables. If we can get anyone to volunteer.”

Freya went out on her rounds and proposed this plan to people, while at the same time the executive council took up the matter. People seemed to like the simplicity of it, and the solidarity. Everyone was hungry, everyone was subdued and fearful. And gradually, in the many reiterated conversations, they were coming to realize something: if this plan worked, and they slept successfully through the rest of the trip, they would survive to the end of it. They would be the ones who would be alive when the ship returned to the solar system. They might make it back and walk on Earth—not their descendants, but they themselves.

Meanwhile the rationing, the hunger, the struggle against disease. In the grip of this struggle, the idea of Earth was very powerful. Many came to welcome the hibernation, and soon only a few insisted they wanted to stay awake. After that shift in opinion became clear, the pull of solidarity changed the holdouts too. Having been through the schism, they wanted to stick together and act as one. And by now they were all hungry enough to understand it was only a matter of time before they starved. They could not only imagine it, they could feel it. Ease of representation indeed.

Now, the hope that they might not starve; that they might live; it caused the very timbre of their voices to change. Hope filled them as if it were a kind of food.

With unanimity came solidarity, which was a huge relief to many of them, an unmistakable emotion, expressed in thousands of small comments and gestures. Thank God we’re together on this. Finally a consensus, crazy as it seems. One for all and all for one. Good old Freya, she always knows what we need. Not at any moment of the entire voyage had they been at peace like this. One might have thought it was a curious act to rally around, but humanity’s group dynamics can be odd, as the record shows.

The construction of 714 hibernation couches was accomplished over the next four months by a concentrated push on the part of the engineers, assemblers, and robots. Certain feedstocks were deficient, and it became necessary to strip the insides of Patagonia to get what they needed. From these and other salvaged materials they manufactured the beds, and the robotic equipment necessary to service the beds and their sleepers. Although the printers could print parts, and the robot assemblers assemble those parts into working wholes, there were still many moments in the process where human engineering, machining skills, and manual dexterity were crucial.

After many design discussions, they decided to arrange all the couches in the Fetch on Long Pond, and in Olympia, the biome next to it. They exiled the animals from these two biomes, to keep the towns from being damaged somehow. The few remaining animals were moved elsewhere, and would either be tended by robots and sheepdogs in teams, or left to go feral in certain biomes. We were going to monitor their progress, and move carcasses that didn’t get eaten into the recyclers, and do what we could to oversee a healthy feral ecology. For the most part it would become a big unconstrained experiment in population dynamics, ecological balance, and island biogeography. We did not mention it, but it seemed to us that things might go rather well in ecological terms, once the people were gone and the initial population dynamics played out and re-sorted the numbers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A feral starship!” Badim said.

“It will probably work better,” Aram said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A good plan.”

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

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

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

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

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

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