Aurora - Страница 39

These representatives then met in Costa Rica, in the town of San Jose, and discussed matters in a general conference. This was an open-ended conference, the idea being that when everyone had discussed matters thoroughly, a poll would be taken of the entire population and then the representatives would be tasked with executing the will of the majority of the people. If it turned out to be close to a split decision, which they decided meant any minority vote larger than 33 percent, then they would work on ways to ameliorate the situation by finding some kind of middle ground, if they could. Successive votes would be taken, until a supermajority of 67 percent, or hopefully more, agreed on a course of action. At that point the minority would have to accept the judgment of the majority.

That was the theory.

While trying to come to a decision, they agreed to ask the ship to relocate itself to Tau Ceti’s Planet F, and enter into orbit around F’s second moon. This was to make a reconnaissance, to judge that moon better for habitability.

As ship made this transfer, which took seven months following a Hohmann path of least energy expenditure and used 2.4 percent of ship’s remaining fuel supply, the policy discussion raged on.

Meanwhile, many biologists on board studied samples of the Auroran pathogen, which Jochi kept in a sealed room in his ferry, a room that he had turned into a clean lab, tele-operated by him. There were still those who supported Song’s idea that they could learn to live with this Auroran thing if they could understand it better. So the studying of the pathogen went on, even though they never settled on what to call it. Vector, disease, pathogen, invasive species, bug; these were all Earthly terms, and Aram for one regarded them as various kinds of category error. “The best we can do in terms of terminology,” he said, “is to call it the alien.”

That it definitely was. The individual proteinlike samples Jochi had isolated, and put into an electron microscope that was sent over to him, were so small that it was hard to understand how they could be alive. They were certainly alive in some senses of the term, since they reproduced, but it was hard to tell how, or what else they did. In this they shared qualities with viruses and their viris, prions, and RNA; but in other ways they did not seem similar to any of these entities. Processes were happening within them at nanometer scale, even picometer scale, but what was small enough for them to eat? How could they eat? Or to put it more simply, where did they get their energy? How did they grow? Why did they grow so quickly when they got inside a human?

These were unsolved mysteries, and might remain so for a long time.

Meanwhile F’s second moon, now named Iris by the proponents of settling there, proved to be an almost completely water-free rock ball, as suspected. Iron core, magnetic field; dry except for a little frozen comet debris on its surface, which was heavily cratered, also indented by two long, straight canyons, possibly the result of early fractures. Somewhat of a big Mercury by analog, appearance, and possibly history; its heavy core testified, perhaps, to a collision in its early days that had stripped off a lighter outer shell of rock, which had subsequently fallen onto F rather than be completely recollected out of orbit by Iris. This anyway was the best originary model to explain the data. Its 1.23 g was rather discouraging, but it had a little rotation, and it was not completely tidally locked to F, which fact also supported the idea of an early collision. It thus had a day that was 30 days long; a month orbiting F that was 20 days long; and F’s year was 650 days long. F’s orbit was 1.36 AU from Tau Ceti, its insolation from Tau Ceti 28.5 percent that of Earth’s. Truly it was at the very outer edge of the habitable zone, but still, it had a lot of sunlight to work with.

The lack of water on Iris, which used to be seen as a problem, now reassured people. Water was now felt to be dangerous, as it seemed likelier than ever that liquid water anywhere would harbor life of some kind, and create problems. The sample size of data supporting this conclusion remained very small, consisting as it did of Earth, Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, and Aurora; but Aurora had been traumatic. It was even suggested that the cometary ice on Iris could be removed if there were any suspicion that it contained the Auroran pathogen.

Others pointed out that the ice some proposed to import to Iris, to give their new world a hydrosphere and atmosphere, would be ice from F’s Moon 1, or cometary ice from Tau Ceti’s crowded Oort cloud. So if ice anywhere was potentially a home for life, then they could never escape that.

But there was no reason to think that was the case. It was generally agreed that it was liquid water that was likely to hold life, not ice. A lot of ice had condensed out of the original cloud of interstellar dust that had formed Tau Ceti, and there was no reason to think life had ever had a chance to begin in that ice. So it was assumed they would be safe if they ended up giving Iris a little ocean composed of imported cometary ices.

So: hydrate Iris, introduce Terran genomes, occupy. F itself would then be a gorgeous marble in Iris’s sky, a gas giant full of volatiles they would surely need. A giant ball of feedstocks right next door, and its huge beauty helping them occupy Iris by way of its reflected sunlight, which would illuminate all of Iris as Iris slowly turned, and not just one hemisphere, as it had been on Aurora. Really, it looked very promising.

But how long would it take to terraform Iris?

Nothing but guesses could answer this question, and the guesses depended on many assumptions one necessarily had to enter as numbers into one’s models. The median times calculated by the models was privately judged by the ship to be about 3,200 years, with outlier estimates ranging from 50 to 100,000 years. Obviously the models and parameters chosen made quite a difference. In fact the problem was poorly constrained. Still it seemed fair to assume that the median estimate had some kind of theoretical validity.

Many people in the ship didn’t want to wait three thousand years, or however long it might take to terraform Iris. Others didn’t think they could last that long. Others didn’t think it would take that long. “The models must be wrong,” some said. “Surely once life got started on a planet, it would change things fast. Bacteria reproduce very quickly in an empty ecological niche.”

“But on Earth it took a billion years.”

“But there was only archaea on Earth. With the full suite of bacteria it would go fast.”

“Not where there isn’t an atmosphere. Bacteria on rock, exposed to the vacuum, doesn’t grow very fast. It mostly dies, in fact.”

“So we need self-replicating robot machinery to make soil, to make air, to add water.”

“But the selfreps need feedstocks. Collecting the necessary materials can only be accomplished by a first generation of robots, and that won’t be fast.”

“We can print printers and thrive! It can be done. We can do it. Our robots can do it.”

“It’s going to take too long. In the meantime we’ll die out. Evolve at differential rates, and diverge right inside our own bodies. Zoo devolution. Codevolution. Sicken and die and go extinct. Sicken and die and never once leave this ship.”

“So that maybe,” Freya kept saying, “we need to go back home.”

The day came when they tried to make a choice.

Strange, perhaps, to wake up one morning, get dressed, eat breakfast, all the while knowing that one was going off to a meeting that would change the world. Decisions are hard. Everyone has the halting problem. Freya sat next to Badim at their kitchen table, restlessly pushing around cut strawberries with a fork.

“What do you think will happen?” she asked.

Badim smiled at her. He looked unusually cheerful, and was eating heartily, chomping on pieces of buttered toast and washing them down with milk.

“It’s interesting, eh?” he said between bites. “Up until today, history was preordained. We were aimed at Tau Ceti, nothing else could happen. We had to do the necessary.” He waved his bread in the air. “Now that story is over. We are thrust out of the end of that story. Forced to make up a new one, all on our own.”

They walked together to the tram station, then got on a crowded tram car and headed east to Costa Rica. In the biomes along the way the tram stopped and more full cars were linked to it, first in Olympia, then Amazonia. Mostly the people in the tram cars were subdued. People looked pensive. 102,563 conversations had been recorded in the previous month that were about this topic, and there were conflict markers in grammar and semantics in 88 percent of these conversations, which were inevitably held mostly between people well-known to each other.

Now they were done with that. 170.170: the general assembly called for in Costa Rica brought 620 people to the Government House plaza. Most of the rest of the ship’s population watched the assembly on screens throughout the ship, but another meeting, called “in opposition to the tyranny of the majority,” drew 273 people to the plaza in Kiev, in the Steppes.