Aurora - Страница 16

“What do you mean?”

“Without me you wouldn’t exist. That’s what I mean.”

“But how so?”

“I was with Devi, when we were young. We were a couple, in the Himalayas, where we were both working and climbing the cliffs. We were going to get married. And as it happened, I wanted to have children. I thought that was the point of being married, and I loved her and wanted to see what we would make in that way. And I had all my approvals ready, I had done my time in the courses and all. I’m a little older than her. But she kept saying she wasn’t ready, that she didn’t know when she would be ready, that she had a lot of work to do, that she wasn’t sure if she would ever be ready. So we fought over that, even before we got married.”

“Maybe that was the right time,” Freya said.

“Maybe so. Anyway we were fighting when she left to go back to Bengal, and by the time I got there myself, she told me it was over between us. She had met Badim, and they got married the next year, and soon after that, I heard you had been born.”

“So?”

“So, I think I gave her the idea. I think I put the idea in her head.”

“That’s strange,” Freya said.

“Do you think so?”

“I do. I’m not sure you should have slept with me too. That’s the strange part.”

“It was a long time ago. You’re different people. Besides, I thought to myself, no me, no you. So I kind of wanted to.”

Freya shook her head at this. “That’s strange.”

The man said, “There’s a lot of pressure on all the women in this ship, to have at least one child, and better two. The classic replacement rate is two point two kids per woman, and the policy here is to hold the population steady. So if a woman declines to have two, some other woman is going to have to have three. It causes a lot of stress.”

“I haven’t felt that,” Freya said.

“Well, you will. And when it happens, I want you to think about me.”

Freya moved his hand aside, got up and got dressed. “I will,” she said.

Out in the morning light she said good-bye to the man, and walked to Constitution Square in Athens, and took the tram to Nairobi.

When she got off the tram, Euan was there at a corner kiosk, standing there watching her.

She rushed over to him and hugged him, kissing the top of his head. For her it must have been just in the nature of things that everyone was shorter than her.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “I just had something weird happen.”

“What’s that?” he said, with a look of alarm.

As they wandered out of town toward the savannah, where Euan had worked for several seasons, she told him what had happened, and what the man had said.

“That’s creepy,” Euan said when she was done. “Let’s go for a swim and wash that guy’s hands off your big beautiful body! I think you need someone else’s handprints on you as quick as you can manage, and I’m here to serve!”

She laughed at him, and they headed for a high pond he knew. “If Devi ever found out about this,” Freya said, “I wonder what she would do!”

“Forget about it,” Euan advised. “If everyone knew everything that everyone had done in here, it would be a real mess. Best forget and move on.”

Devi: Ship. Describe something else. Remember there are others. Vary your focus.

Aram and Delwin visited the little school in Olympia, on a typically rainy day. It was located in mountainous land, high up near the sunline. Totem poles in front of the school. Ancestor stones also, as in Hokkaido.

Inside they met with the principal, a friend of theirs named Ted, and he led them into an empty room filled with couches, its big picture window running with rain patterns, all V-ing and X-ing in recombinant braided deltas, blurring the evergreens outside.

They sat down, and the school’s math teacher, another friend of theirs named Edwina, came in leading a tall skinny boy. He looked to be around twelve years old. Aram and Delwin stood and greeted Edwina, and she introduced them to the boy. “Gentlemen, this is Jochi. Jochi, say hello to Aram and Delwin.”

The boy looked at the floor and mumbled something. The two visitors regarded him closely.

Aram said to him, “Hello, Jochi. We’ve heard that you are good with numbers. And we like numbers.”

Jochi looked up and met his eye, suddenly interested. “What kind of numbers?”

“All kinds. Imaginary numbers especially, in my case. Delwin here is more interested in sets.”

“Me too!” Jochi blurted.

They sat down to talk.

A narrative account focuses on representative individuals, which creates the problem of misrepresentation by way of the particular overshadowing the general. And in an isolated group—one could even say the most isolated group of all time, a group of castaways in effect, marooned forever—it is important no doubt to register somehow the group itself as protagonist. Also their infrastructure, to the extent that it is significant.

So it should be said that the voyagers to Tau Ceti were now 2,224 in number (25 births and 23 deaths since the narrative process began), consisting of 1,040 women and 949 men, and 235 people who asserted something more complicated than ordinary gender, one way or another. Their median age was 34.26, their average heart rate 81 beats per minute; their average blood pressure, 125 over 83. The median brain synapse number, as estimated by random autopsy, was 120 trillion, and their median life span was 77.3 years, not including infant mortality, which extrapolated to a rate of 1.28 deaths for every 100,000 births. Median height was 172 centimeters for men, 163 centimeters for women; median weight 74 kilograms for men, 55 kilograms for women.

Thus the population of the ship. It should be added that median weights, heights, and lengths of life had all reduced by about 10 percent compared to the first generation of voyagers. The change could be attributed to the evolutionary process called islanding.

Total living space in the biomes was approximately 96 square kilometers, of which 70 percent was agriculture and pasturage, 5 percent urban or residential, 13 percent water bodies, and 13 percent protected wilderness.

Although there were of course locks for smaller maintenance vehicles to exit the main body of the starship, all located on the inner rings, with the biggest docking ports at the stern and bow of the spine, it was still true that each such excursion outside the ship lost a very small but ultimately measurable amount of volatiles from the opened locks. As there was no source of resupply before arrival in the Tau Ceti equivalent of an Oort cloud, these losses were avoided by the voyagers, who did not leave the body of the ship from the ferry docks except in extraordinary circumstances. One small triple lock in Inner Ring B was regularly used for excursions by individuals in spacesuits, including the paleo culture in Labrador.

Within the various parts of the ship there were 2,004,589 cameras and 6,500,000 microphones, located such that almost every internal space of the ship was recorded visually and aurally. The exterior was monitored visually. All recordings were kept permanently by the ship’s operating computer, and these recordings were archived by the year, day, hour, and minute. Possibly one could call this array the ship’s eyes and ears, and the recordings its personal or life memory. A metaphor, obviously.

Freya continued her wanderjahr travels, returning to Ring B, then again to Ring A. In every biome she visited, she spent a month or two, depending on her accommodations, and the needs of her hosts and friends. She “met everybody,” meaning she met about 63 percent of any given biome’s population, on average. That was enough to make her one of the best-known individuals in the ship.

Fairly often Euan met up with her and they took off into the infrastructure of the ship, exploring in a more and more systematic fashion the twelve spokes, the twelve inner ring rooms, the four struts connecting the inner rings, and the two outer struts that connected Costa Rica and Bengal, and Patagonia and Siberia. They sometimes joined other people, many of whom were unaware of each other, who were making efforts to explore every nook and cranny of the ship. These people often called themselves ghosts, or phantoms, or trail phantoms. Devi too had been one of these people, though she had not met the same people Freya and Euan did. Ship calculated there were 23 people alive who had made this their project, and through the course of the voyage, there had been 256 of them, but fewer as the voyage went on. It had been thirty years since Devi had made her own explorations. Most phantoms did their exploring when they were young.

Freya continued asking people questions, and as a result of this habit her knowledge of the population, although anecdotal, was very extensive. Nevertheless, she could not perform the quantitative calculations that were involved in any statistical analyses that might have given her investigations any social science rigor or validity. She still made no hypotheses.