Aurora Read online

  Like all the biomes, this one was a combination of wilderness, zoo, and farm. The two villages here, as in most of the biomes, were placed near the midline of the cylinder, not far from the locks at each end.

  Freya walked a path that ran parallel to the tram tracks. In the little village of Plata, a group of residents who had been informed she was coming greeted her and led her to a plaza. Here she was to live in rooms above a café. At the tables on the plaza outside the café she was fed lunch, and introduced by her hosts to many people of the town. They spent the afternoon telling her how wonderful Devi had been when a cistern of theirs had broken, before Freya was born. “A situation like that is when you really need your engineers to be good!” they said. “So quick she was, so clever! So in tune with the ship. And so friendly too.”

  Freya nodded silently at these descriptions. “I’m nothing like her,” she told them. “I don’t know how to do anything. You’ll have to teach me something to do, but I warn you, I’m stupid.”

  They laughed at her and assured her they would teach her everything they knew, which would be easy, as it was so little.

  “This is my kind of place then,” she said.

  They wanted her to become a shepherd, and a dairy worker. If she didn’t mind. Lots of people came to the Pampas wanting to be a gaucho, to ride horses and throw bola balls at the legs of unfortunate calves. It was the signature activity of the Pampas, and yet very seldom performed. The cows on the ship were an engineered breed only about a sixth the size of cows back on Earth, and generally cared for in dairy pastures, so the big need was for people to go out with the sheep, and let the sheepdogs know what needed doing. This was also an excellent opportunity for bird-watching, as the pampas were home to a large number of birds, including some very large and graceful, or some said graceless, cranes.

  Freya was agreeable; it would be better than the salmon factory, she told them, and as she was also to help in the café at night, she would get to see people and talk, as well as go out on the low green hills.

  So she settled in. She paid attention to the people in the café at night. It was noticeable that they tended not to disagree with her, and usually took a kind tone with her. They talked around her pretty often, but when she said something, the silences that followed were a bit longer than would be typical in a conversation. She was somehow irrefutable. Possibly it came from a feeling that she was in some way different; possibly it was a form of respect for her mother. Possibly it was a result of her being taller than anyone else, a big young woman, said by many to be attractive. People looked at her.

  Eventually Freya herself noticed this. Soon afterward, she began a project that occupied much of her free time. At the end of the evening’s work in the café, she sat down with people and asked them questions. She would start by declaring it was a formal thing: “I’m doing a research project during my wander, it’s for the sociology institute in the Fetch.” This institute, she would sometimes admit, was her name for Badim and Aram and Delwin. Typically, she asked people two things: what they wanted to do when they got to Tau Ceti; and what they didn’t like about life in the ship, what bothered them the most. What you don’t like, what you hope for: people often talk about these things. And so they did, and Freya tapped at her wristpad that was recording part of what they said, taking notes and asking more questions.

  One of the things she found people didn’t like surprised her, because she had never thought about it much herself: they didn’t like being told whether or not they could have children, and when, and how many. All of them had had birth control devices implanted in them before puberty, and would remain sterile until they were approved for childbearing by the ship’s population council; this council was one of the main organizations that the biome councils contributed to, adding members to the committee. This process, Freya came to understand, was a source for a great deal of discord over the years of the voyage, including most of its actual violence—meaning mostly assaults, but also some murders. Many people would not serve on any council, because of this one function that councils had. In some biomes council members had to be drafted to the work, either because people didn’t want to tell others what to do in reproductive matters, or they were afraid of what might happen to them when they did. Many a biome had tried in the past to shift responsibility for this function over to an algorithm of the ship’s AI, but this had never been successful.

  “What I hope for when we reach Tau Ceti,” one handsome young man said with drunken earnestness to Freya, “is that we’ll get out of this fascist state we live in now.”

  “Fascist?”

  “We’re not free! We’re told what to do!”

  “I thought that was totalitarian. Like a dictatorship. You know.”

  “Same thing! Council control over personal lives! That’s what it means in the end, no matter what words you use. They tell us what we have to learn, what we can do, where we can live, who we can be with, when we can have kids.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m hoping we’ll get out of! Not just out of the ship, but out of the system.”

  “I’m recording this,” Freya said, “and taking notes,” tapping on her pad. “You aren’t the first to say this.”

  “Of course not! It’s obvious stuff. This place is a prison.”

  “Seems a little nicer than that.”

  “It can be nice and still be a prison.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  Every night she sat with different people who came into the café, and asked her questions. Then, if the night had not flown past, she sat with the people she already knew, and when the place closed down, helped with the final cleanup. Prep and cleanup were her specialties in the café, taking up morning and night. By day she went with a herd of sheep, or sometimes the little cows, out to a pasturage west of town. Soon she claimed to know almost everyone in that biome, although she was wrong about this, committing a common human cognitive error called ease of representation. In fact, some people avoided her, as if they did not approve of wanderers generally, or her personally. But certainly everyone in the town knew who she was.

  She was by this point the tallest person in the ship, two meters and two centimeters tall, a strong young woman, black-haired, good-looking; quick on her feet, and graceful for her size. She had Badim’s smoothness of speech, Devi’s quickness. Men and boys stared at her, women cosseted her, girls clung to her. She was attractive, it was clear from the behavior of others; also unpretentious and unassuming. I don’t know! she would say. Tell me about that. I don’t get that kind of stuff, I’m stupid about things like that. Tell me. Tell me more.

  She wanted to help. She worked all day every day. She looked people in the eye. She remembered what they said to her. There were indeed things she did not appear to understand, and people saw that too. Her eyes would slightly cross as if she were looking inward, searching for something. There was perhaps some kind of simplicity there, people said about her. But possibly this was part of why they loved her. In any case, she was much beloved. This is what people said, when she was not there. At least most of them. Others felt otherwise.

  One day when she was out on the pampas, just her and two sheepdogs and a herd of sheep, Euan appeared before her, emerging from the tall bunch grasses down by the marshy river that ran sluggishly through the biome.

  She hugged him (he was still only chin high to her) and then tossed him away from her. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “I could ask the same of you!” His smile was almost a smirk, but perhaps too cheerful to be a smirk. “I was passing by, and I thought you might like to see some parts of the ship that your wander won’t show you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can get into Spoke Two from the west lock,” he explained. “If you come with me and we go up it, I can show you all kinds of interesting places. I’ve gotten past the locks in the inner ring. I could even take you down Spoke Three into Sonora, so you
could skip the Prairie. That would be a blessing. And I can get you out from under the eyes a little.”

  “I like these people. And we’re always chipped,” Freya said. “So I don’t know why you keep saying you can get away.”

  “You’re always chipped,” Euan replied. “I’m never chipped.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you do or don’t, I can still show you things no one else can.”

  This was true, as he had proved before.

  “When I’m ready to leave,” Freya said.

  Euan waved at the pampas around them. “You mean you aren’t?”

  “No!”

  “All right, I’ll come back in a while. You’ll be ready by then, I bet.”

  Actually Freya loved Plata and its people, gathering in the plaza every dusk to eat out in the open air and then stay there into the night, at tables under strings of white and colored lights. A little band played in the far corner of the plaza, five old ones sawing their fiddles and squeezing their squeezeboxes in spritely mournful tunes, which some couples danced to, intricate in their footwork, lost to everything.

  But she was curious to see more, she admitted to her hosts, and when Euan showed up again during one of her excursions into the hills, she agreed to go with him, but only after making a proper good-bye in the village, which proved much more sentimental and wrenching than it had been in the taiga. Freya wept as they closed the doors of the café, and she said to her boss and her boss’s husband, “I don’t like this! Things keep happening, and people, you get to know them and love them, they’re everything to you and then you’re supposed to move on, I don’t like it! I want things to stay the same!”

  The two elderly people nodded. They had each other, and their village, and they knew what Freya meant, she could tell; they had everything, so they understood her. Nevertheless she had to go, they told her; this was youth. Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. “Just keep learning,” the old woman said.

  “This gets you into parts of the ship where no one can track you,” Euan said as he tapped away at the keypad next to a small door in the end of the spoke.

  Not actually true. It was not clear if Euan believed this or was just saying it. Possibly the ship’s extensive camera and microphone systems, which had been designed from the start to keep a very full record of what occurred in the ship, and then been extensively expanded after the Year 68 events, were hidden from view well enough to escape the attention even of those people who might be looking for them. Certainly from generation to generation people forgot things that some of them had learned. So it was difficult to assess the nature of Euan’s assertion: mistaken? Lying?

  Be that as it may, he had the code to open the spoke door, and was able to lead Freya up into Spoke Two.

  They ascended the big spiral stairs running up the inner walls of the spoke. The open space was four meters across, with occasional windows giving them views of black starry space. Freya stopped before all of these to have a look out, exclaiming at the stars crowding the blackness, and the faintly gleaming curves of the ship where it was visible. It made for a slow ascent, but Euan did not rush her. Indeed he too peered out the windows to see what could be seen.

  Above them, the spine extended forward toward Tau Ceti. The fusion explosions slowing them down were not visible, which was no doubt lucky for their retinas. They came to another lock door above them, like the one by which they had entered the spoke, and again Euan had the code.

  “Now this is interesting,” he said to Freya as the door unlocked and he pushed it up like a trapdoor, and they ascended into a small cubical room. “This is where the inner ring intersects this spoke, before you get to the spine proper. The inner ring was mostly used for storing fuel, it looks like. So the chambers have emptied as we slowed down, and there are more routes opening up for us than there were when we used to come up here. So we’ve been exploring the inner rings, and we found ways to get into the struts connecting the inner rings directly to each other. They don’t have recording devices in them—”

  Again, this was wrong.

  “—and you can get to the other inner ring without going all the way up to the spine. That could be useful. The spine itself is really locked down—”

  This was true.

  “—in ways we can’t figure out. So it’s good to have the inner rings, and the struts connecting them. You have to know where the crawl spaces and utilidors go, and which rooms and containers are empty. But we keep checking. In fact that’s what we’re doing now.”

  He led her off through the little door into the inner ring, which did not have a hallway proper, but was rather a sequence of rooms, some empty, some stuffed full of metal containers such that there was barely a crawl space left to get through to the next door. Each door was locked; each time Euan had the code. The inner ring was small enough that Freya remarked that they were going in a circle.

  “No, a hexagon,” Euan said. “There are six spokes, so the inner ring is a hexagon. The outer ones are a dodecahedron, but it’s less obvious because of the locks.”

  “It’s like running a maze,” Freya said.

  “It is.”

  They agreed that the mazes set up in Long Pond had been among their favorite games when they were children. They tried to establish why they had not met before they had. Each biome supported on average 305 people, and Nova Scotia was near the average. Most people felt that they knew everyone who lived in their biome. This wasn’t entirely the case, as they were now learning. So often this tendency or habit had repeated itself through the years: every face in a biome might be recognized by an individual resident, but only about fifty people were known. This was the human norm, at least as established in the ship over the seven generations of the voyage. Some sources said it had been the norm on the savannah, and in all cultures ever since.

  They came to an empty room with four doors, one in each wall. This, Euan said, was the connector to Spoke Three, and their way back down to Ring B, where they would come out in Sonora.

  “Can you remember numbers?” Euan asked her as he punched out the code for this door.

  “No!” Freya exclaimed. “You should know that!”

  “I only suspected.” He cackled. “Okay, you’ll have to remember the idea. In this ring, we’ve programmed it so that it’s a sequence of prime numbers, but you skip up through them by primes. So, the second prime, third prime, fifth prime, and so on until you’ve done seven of them. Remember that and you can figure it out.”

  “Or someone can,” Freya said.

  Euan laughed. He turned to her and kissed her, and she kissed back, and they kissed for a long time, then took their clothes off and lay on them, and mated. They were both infertile, they both knew that. They squeaked and cooed, they laughed.

  Afterward, Euan led her down the long corridor of Spoke Three, back out into Sonora. They held hands, and stopped at every window along the way to look out at the views, laughing at the ship, laughing at the night. “The city and the stars,” Euan proclaimed.

  In Sonora, Freya heard about how Devi had reengineered their salt extraction system, which had allowed them to strip the excess salts out of their fields. Everyone in Sonora wanted to meet Freya because of Devi’s interventions, and as the weeks and months there passed, she felt she had not only met but become close to every single person in the main town, Modena. She had not, but again, 98 people out of a group of 300 often gets referred to as “everyone.” This is probably the result of a combination of cognitive errors, especially the ones called ease of representation, probability blindness, overconfidence, and anchoring. Even those aware of the existence of these genetically inherited cognitive errors cannot seem to avoid making them.

  By day Freya worked in a laboratory that bred and grew mice for use in the medical research facility next door. There were some thirty thousand white or hairless mi
ce living out their lives in this lab, and Freya became very fond of them, their bright black or pink eyes, their twitchy relations with each other and even with her. She said she recognized them individually, and knew what they were thinking. Many in the lab said similar things. This was quite an example of probability blindness combined with ease of representation.

  Again she spent many evenings asking her questions about people’s hopes and fears. It was much the same in Sonora as it had been in the Pampas. As in Plata, she worked the last cleanup in the dining hall, which she explained was one of the best ways to meet lots of people. Again she made friends, was warmly received; but now, perhaps as a result of her earlier experiences, she seemed more reserved. She avoided throwing herself into the lives of these people as if she were going to become family and stay there forever. She told Badim that she had learned that when the time came to move on, it would hurt more if she had been thinking she was there forever, and hurt not just her, but the people she had come to know.

  On the screen Badim nodded as she said this. He suggested she could keep a balance by in effect doing both; he said the kind of hurt she was talking about was not a bad hurt, and should not be avoided. “You get what you give, and not only that, the giving is already the getting. So don’t hold back. Don’t look back or forward too much. Just be there where you are now. You’re always only in the day you’re in.”

  In the Piedmont Freya was told how Devi had once saved their crops from a quick decline that she had traced to a certain kind of aluminum corrosion’s reaction with the biome’s rich soil. Devi had arranged for them to coat all exposed aluminum with a diamond spray, so that the surfaces had ceased to be a problem. So here too Devi was popular, and again many people wanted to meet Freya.