Those who remained stood and watched, weeping or not. A peaceable schism was being enacted. It was an unusual achievement, as far as we could judge from the historical record; and maybe it was partly our achievement; but it appeared that it came at the cost of some kind of pain, a quite considerable pain, social rather than physical, and yet fully felt, quite real. Social animals, in distress. This was what we saw at this moment of parting. Divorce. A successful failure.
When Speller came to the lock door and looked back, Freya raised her hand and waved good-bye. It was the same wave as the one she had made when they were youths, and she had left Olympia for the first time. The same gesture, separated by thirty years. A persistence of bodily memory. Whether Speller remembered it or not was not possible to determine.
Soon the stayers were in their ferry, and the ferry detached and began its descent to Iris.
Those remaining in the ship were left on their own. They looked around at each other. Almost everyone aboard was in the plaza: 727 people, with a few elsewhere in the ship maintaining various functions, or avoiding the parting of the ways. It was quite visible now, how much smaller a population the ship now had. Of course ship itself was smaller now, with Ring A and about a third of the spine removed, and orbiting now on the other side of Iris.
Some looked heartened in this moment of schism, others frightened. There was a general silence. A new moment in history had come on them. It was time to head home.
We began burning the new stock of fuel, and soon left the orbit of Iris, left F’s gravity well; not that long after, we left the Tau Ceti system. Sol was a small yellow star in the constellation Boötes.
As the communications feed from the solar system had never ceased, it was straightforward to lock on to this signal and use it to calculate our proper course back, at an angle that would aim us where Sol would be in two centuries. The resupply of deuterium and helium 3 would burn at a rate that would accelerate the ship for twenty years, at which point we would be moving toward Sol at one-tenth the speed of light, just as we had left it. Most of the fuel would then have been burned, but we would save some for maneuvering when we closed in on our destination.
We transmitted a message from our people, sent back to Soclass="underline"
We’re coming back. We’ll be approaching in about one hundred and thirty years. In seventy-eight years from your reception of this message, we’ll need a laser beam similar to the one that accelerated us from 2545 to 2605 to be aimed at our capture plate, to slow us down as we return to the solar system. Please reply as soon as possible to acknowledge receipt of this message. We will be in continuous communication as we approach. Thank you.
We would hear back in a little under twenty-four years, therefore around our year 214, depending, of course, on how quickly our correspondents or interlocutors replied.
Meanwhile, it was time to accelerate.
5
HOMESICK
On the first night after ignition, all but thirty-three of the 727 aboard the ship gathered in the Pampas, just outside Plata, and danced around a bonfire. The fire was a one-time indulgence, and mostly burned clean gases. Laughter, drumming, and dancing, the glossy reflective brilliance in their firelit eyes: they were off again! And back to Earth at that! It was as if they were drunk. Indeed many of them were drunk. Some of those who were not drunk remarked that the fire reminded them of the time of rioting. Not everyone approved of it.
In the weeks that followed there were many signs of happiness and even exhilaration as the ship accelerated out of the Tau Ceti system. The accelerant fuel would burn until the ship was moving at its target interstellar speed of .1 c. During these first months the entire 727 members of the crew often gathered on the pampas for festivals. In these their carnival spirits were unleashed again, even though there were no more bonfires. Average sleep time dropped by eighty-four minutes a night. By the time the ship had cleared Tau Ceti’s thick Oort cloud, 128 of the 204 women of childbearing age were pregnant. All twelve biomes of their remaining ring were being tended with a devotional intensity. People spoke of a quiet euphoria, a sense of purpose. They were returning to a home they had never seen, but their nostalgia was at the cellular level, they said, encoded in their genome. Which may even have been true, in some sense more than metaphorical.
Freya and Badim settled back into their apartment in the Fetch, behind the corniche at the end of Long Pond, with Aram next door. They did not go sailing as in the days of Freya’s childhood, but lived in a quiet style, working in the Fetch’s medical clinic. Some of the doctors there were unhappy that so many women were going to have children around the same time. “It’s the only normal situation where either patient could die,” Badim explained to Freya. She herself was nearly past childbearing age, something she sometimes regretted. Badim told her she was the parent of everyone aboard, that that would have to be enough for her. She did not respond to this.
In any case, the issue of reproductive regulation once again came to everyone’s attention. At this point they could afford to increase their population, and possibly needed to, in order to fulfill all the jobs necessary to keep their society functioning through the decades and generations to come. Farming, education, medicine, ecology, engineering: all these and more were crucial occupations. No one aboard felt they could hold the population much below a thousand and still get the jobs done. But not too fast! the doctors said.
During this year of pregnancy they reestablished their governance system by holding town meetings in every biome, and gathering a new assembly and executive council, which Freya was asked to join, it seemed to her as a kind of ceremonial figure. She was forty-six years old.
Soon, analysis of their situation caused them to begin to farm intensively throughout all the biomes, to rebuild their food reserves. They agreed that all the young people should attend school full-time, and the students were given the aptitude tests with a rigor that the adults on board had never faced. A large team attended to the communication feed from Earth, recording and studying everything that these contained. This was perhaps premature, as significant historical and even biophysical changes would very likely occur in the 170 years before they got back, and no one in the ship would be alive when the ship reentered the solar system. Nevertheless, interest was high.
What they could gather concerning events in the solar system gave them reasons to worry. In the time the feed had been sent out, almost twelve years before, in what had been the common era year 2733, political turmoil appeared to be more or less continuous. Their feed did not include any basic system-wide background data, so the facts of the situation had to be inferred from the various strands of the feed, but it looked certain that on Earth the sea level was many meters higher than it had been when their ship had started its voyage, and the carbon dioxide level in Earth’s atmosphere was around 600 parts per million, having been brought down significantly from the time the ship had left, when it had been close to 1,000 ppm. That suggested carbon drawdown efforts, and there were sulfur dioxide distributions over the north polar region of Earth, indicating geoengineering was being attempted. Several hundred names for Terran nations had been collated from the news feed, and yet the list did not seem complete. There were many scientific stations on Mars, also in the asteroids; thousands of asteroids had been hollowed out and made into little spinning terraria. There were also many stations and even tented cities on the larger Jovian and Saturnian moons—all but Io, not surprising given its radiation levels. There was a mobile city on Mercury, rolling always westward to stay in the dawn terminator. Luna, though dotted by stations and tented cities, and the source of many of the information feeds sent to the ship, was not being terraformed. Some in the ship declared that very little had advanced in the solar system during the time the ship had been gone, and no one had a ready explanation for this plateauing of effort or achievement, if indeed that was what it was. Of course there was the standard S-curve of the logistic function, charting the speed of growth seen in so many physical phenomena; whether human history also conformed to this pattern of diminishing returns, no one could say. In short, no one could analyze the feed from Earth and explain what was going on there. Theories in the ship were widespread, but really the feeds constituted only about 8.5 gigabytes of data per day, so the information stream was thin. It left a lot of room for speculation.