Aurora (46 page)

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.