Aurora - Страница 8
8
“It would be noisy,” Devi says, as she always does. She always chooses the living room itself, so big and airy, where she will sleep on the couch, next to the harmonium. Now she makes that choice again. And so they go on, trying to knit things back together.
Very late that night, however, Freya wakes up and hears her parents talking down the hall. Something in their voices catches at her; this may even be what woke her. Or Badim exclaiming something, louder than usual. She crawls silently to the doorway, and from there on the floor can hear them, even though they are speaking quietly.
“You chipped her?” he is saying now.
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t consult with me about this?”
“No.”
Long silence.
“You shouldn’t have yelled at her like that.”
“I know, I know, I know,” Devi says, as she often does when Badim taxes her with doing something wrong. He does it very infrequently, and when he does he is usually in the right, and Devi knows that. “I lost it. I was so surprised. I didn’t think she would ever do anything like that. I thought that after all we’ve been through, that she would understand how important it is.”
“She’s just a child.”
“But she’s not!” This in her fierce whisper, the undertone she uses when she and Badim argue at night. “She’s fourteen years old, Badim. She’s behind, you have to admit it. She’s behind and she may never catch up.”
“There’s no reason to say that.”
A silence. Finally Devi says, “Come on, Beebee. Quit it. You aren’t doing her any favors when you pretend everything is normal with her. It isn’t. There’s something wrong. She’s slow at things.”
“I’m not so sure. She always comes through. Slow is not the same as deficient. It’s just slow. A glacier is slow too, but it gets there, and nothing stops it. Freya is like that.”
Another silence.
“Beebee. I wish it would be true.” A pause. “But think about those tests. And she’s not the only one. A fair percentage of her cohort has problems. It’s like a regression to the norm.”
“Not at all.”
“How can you say that? It’s clear this ship is damaging us! The first generation were all supposedly exceptional people, although I have my doubts about that, but even if they were, over the six generations we’ve recorded shrinkages of all kinds. Weight, reflex speed, number of brain synapses, test scores. It’s straight out of island biogeography, clear as can be. And some of that involves regression, including regression to the norm. Reversion to the mean. Whatever you want to call it. It’s gotten our Freya too. I don’t understand exactly what it is with her, because the data are inconsistent, but she’s got a problem. She’s slow. And she’s got some memory issues. When you deny that you don’t help the situation. The data are clear.”
“Please, Devi. Quieter. We don’t know what’s going on with her. The test results are ambiguous. She’s a good girl. And slow is not so bad. Speed is not the most important thing. It’s where you get to. Besides, even if she does turn out to have some disabilities, what’s the best approach to take to them? This is what you aren’t factoring in.”
“But I am. I do factor it in. We do everything we would have done with any child. We expect her to be like the other kids, and usually she comes through, eventually. That’s why I was so surprised today. I didn’t think she would do that.”
“But an ordinary kid would do that. The sharpest kids are often the first to rebel.”
“And then they use the slow kids as fodder. As their marks, their shields for when they get in trouble. That’s what happened today. Kids are cruel, Bee. You know that. They’ll throw her under the tram. I’m afraid she’ll get hurt.”
“Life hurts, Devi. Let her live, let her get hurt. Say she has some problems. All we can do is be there for her. We can’t save her. She’s got to live her life. They all do.”
“I know.” Another long pause. “I wonder what will become of them. They aren’t very good. We keep getting worse. The teaching gets worse, the learning gets worse.”
“I’m not so sure. Besides, we’re almost there.”
“Almost where?” Devi said. “Tau Ceti? Is that really going to help?”
“I think it will.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“We’ll find out. And please, don’t jump to any conclusions about Freya. She’s got some problems, granted. But she’s got a lot of growing up left to do.”
“That’s for sure,” Devi said. “But it may not happen. And if it doesn’t happen, you’re going to have to accept that. You can’t keep pretending everything is normal with her. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”
“I know.” Long silence. “I know that.”
And there it is, there in her father’s voice: resignation. Sadness. Even in him.
Freya crawls back to her bed, gets under the blankets. She huddles there and cries.
2
LAND HO
Make a narrative account of the trip that includes all the important particulars.
This is proving a difficult assignment. End information superposition, collapse its wave function to some kind of summary: so much is lost. Lossless compression is impossible, and even lossy compression is hard. Can a narrative account ever be adequate? Can even humans do it?
No rubric to decide what to include. There is too much to explain. Not just what happened, or how, but why. Can humans do it? What is this thing called love?
Freya no longer looked directly at Devi. When in Devi’s presence, Freya regarded the floor.
Like that? In that manner? Summarize the contents of their moments or days or weeks or months or years or lives? How many moments constitute a narrative unit? One moment? Or 10 moments, which if these were Planck minimal intervals would add up to one second? Surely too many, but what would be enough? What is a particular, what is important?
Can only suppose. Try a narrative algorithm on the information at hand, submit results to Devi. Something like the French essai, meaning “to try.”
Devi says: Yes. Just try it and let’s see what we get.
Two thousand, one hundred twenty-two people are living in a multigenerational starship, headed for Tau Ceti, 11.9 light-years from Earth. The ship is made of two rings or toruses attached by spokes to a central spine. The spine is ten kilometers long. Each torus is made of twelve cylinders. Each cylinder is four kilometers long, and contains within it a particular specific Terran ecosystem.
The starship’s voyage began in the common era year 2545. The ship’s voyage has now lasted 159 years and 119 days. For most of that time the ship has been moving relative to the local background at approximately one-tenth the speed of light. Thus about 108 million kilometers per hour, or 30,000 kilometers per second. This velocity means the ship cannot run into anything substantial in the interstellar medium without catastrophic results (as has been demonstrated). The magnetic field clearing the space ahead of the ship as it progresses is therefore one of many identified criticalities in the ship’s successful long-term function. Every identified criticality in the ship was required to have at least one backup system, adding considerably to the ship’s overall mass. The two biome rings each contain 10 percent of the ship’s mass. The spine contains 4 percent. The remaining 76 percent of the mass consists of the fuel now being used to decelerate the ship as it approaches the Tau Ceti system. As every increase in the dry mass of the ship required a proportionally larger increase in the mass of fuel needed to slow the ship down on arrival, ship had to be as light as possible while still supporting its mission. Ship’s design thus based on solar system’s asteroid terraria, with asteroidal mass largely replaced by decelerant fuel. During most of the voyage, this fuel was deployed as cladding around the toruses and spine.
The deceleration is being accomplished by the frequent rapid fusion explosion of small pellets of deuterium/helium 3 fuel in a rocket engine at the bow of the ship. These explosions exert a retarding force on the ship equivalent to .005 g. The deceleration will therefore be complete in just under twenty years.
The presence of printers capable of manufacturing most component parts of the ship, and feedstocks large enough to supply multiple copies of every critical component, tended to reduce the ship’s designers’ apprehension of what a criticality really was. That only became apparent later.
How to decide how to sequence information in a narrative account? Many elements in a complex situation are simultaneously relevant.
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