Aurora (49 page)

“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.