“Yes, but what happens when it runs out?” Aram replied.
The plant pathologists worked hard to understand the failures fast enough to invent new integrated pest management strategies, and they tried an array of new chemical and biological pesticides, discovered either in the ship’s labs, or by way of studying the feeds from Earth. They introduced genetically modified plants that would better withstand whatever pathogens were found to be infecting the plants. They converted all the land in all the biomes to farmland. They gave up on winters, creating speeded-up spring-summer-fall cycles.
With all these actions performed together, they had created a multivariant experiment. They were not going to be able to tell which actions caused whatever results they got.
As new crops were planted in the newly scheduled springtimes, it began to seem that fear could be thought of as one of the infectious diseases striking them. People were now hoarding, a tendency that badly disrupts throughput in a system. Loss of social trust could easily lead to a general panic, then to chaos and oblivion. Everyone knew this, which added to the level of fear.
At the same time, in spite of the growing danger, there were still no security officers on the ship, nor any authority but what the populace exerted over itself through the executive council, which was now in effect the security council as well. Despite Badim’s earlier insistence on governance over anarchism, they still had no sheriff. In that sense they were always on the edge of anarchy. And the perception of this reality of course also added to their fear.
One day Aram came into their apartment with a new study by the plant pathologists. “It looks like we may have started this voyage a bit short on bromine,” he said. “Of the ninety-two naturally occuring elements, twenty-nine are essential for animal life, and one of those is bromine. As bromide ions it stabilizes the connective tissues called basement membranes, which are in everything living. It’s part of the collagen that holds things together. But the whole ship appears to have been a bit short of it, right from the start. Delwin is guessing they tried to lower the total salt load on board, and this was an accidental result.”
“Can we print some of it?” Freya asked.
Aram gave her a startled look. “You can’t print an element, my dear.”
“No?”
“No. That only happens inside exploding stars and the like. The printers can only shape whatever feedstock materials we give them.”
“Ah yes,” Freya said. “I guess I knew that.”
“That’s all right.”
“I don’t recall hearing much about bromine,” Badim said.
“It’s not an element one hears about much. But it turns out to be important. So, that could explain some things we haven’t been understanding.”
People began to go hungry. Food rationing was instituted, by a democratic vote taken on the recommendations of a committee formed to make suggestions concerning the emergency. The vote was 615 to 102.
One day Freya was called to Sonora, asked to address some kind of undefined emergency. “Don’t go,” Badim called by phone to ask her.
This was truly a strange request, coming from him, but by that time she was already there; and when she saw the situation, she sat on the nearest bench and hunched over miserably. A group of five young people had put plastic bags over their heads and suffocated themselves. One had scrawled a note: Because we are too many.
“This has to stop,” she said when she managed to stand back up.
But the next week, a pair of teenagers broke the lock code and launched themselves out of the bow dock of the spine, without tethers or even spacesuits. They too had left a note behind: I am just going out for a while, and may be some time.
Appeal to tradition. Roman virtue. Sacrifice of the one for the many. A very human thing.
They called a general assembly, and met on the great plaza of San Jose, where so much had already happened. On the other hand, by now only about half of them were old enough to have been alive during the crisis on Aurora, and the schism that followed. The older people present therefore looked at the younger people with spooked expressions. You don’t know what happened here, the old people said. The younger people tended to look quizzical. Don’t we? Are you sure? Is that bad?
When everyone who was going to come was there, a complete account of their food situation was made. Silence fell in the plaza.
Freya then got up to speak. “We can make it through this,” she said. “There are not too many of us, it’s wrong to say that. We only have to hold together. In fact we need all of us here, to do the things we need to do. So there can’t be any more of these suicides. We need all of us. There’s food enough. We only have to take care, and regulate what we eat, and match it to what we grow. It will be all right. But only if we take care of each other. You’ve all heard the figures now. You can see that it will work. So let’s do that. We have an obligation to all the others who made it work in this ship, and to those yet to come. Two hundred and six years so far, one hundred thirty years to go. We can’t let the generations down—our parents, our children. We have to show courage in the hard time. I wouldn’t want ours to be the generation that let all the others down.”
Faces flushed, eyes bright, people stood up and faced her, their hands raised overhead, palms facing her, like sunflowers, or eyes on stalks, or yes votes, or something we could not find an analogy to.
The ship is sick, people said. It’s too complex a machine, and it’s been running nonstop for over two hundred years. Things are going wrong. It’s partly alive, and so it’s getting old, maybe even dying. It’s a cyborg, and the living parts are getting diseased, and the diseases are attacking the nonliving parts. We can’t replace the parts, because we’re inside them, and we need them working at all times. So things are going wrong.
“Maintenance and repair,” Freya would say to these sentiments. “Maintenance and repair and recycling, that’s all. It’s the house we live in, it’s the ship we sail in. There’s always been maintenance and repair and recycling. So hold it together. Don’t get melodramatic. Let’s just keep doing it. We’ve got nothing else to do with our time anyway, right?”
But the missing bromine was seldom discussed, and their attempts to recapture some of it by recycling the soil, and then the plastic surfaces inside the ship, were only partly successful. And there were other elements that were bonding to the ship in difficult ways as well, creating new metabolic rifts, important shortages. This was not something they could ration their way out of. And though it was seldom discussed, almost everyone in the ship was aware of it.
When they ran out of stored food, and a nematode infestation killed most of the new crop in the Prairie, they called another assembly. Rationing was established in full, as per the advice of the working committee, and new rules and practices outlined.
Rabbit hutches were expanded, and tilapia ponds. But as it was pointed out, even the rabbits and tilapia needed food. They could eat these creatures the very moment they got to a certain size, but they wouldn’t get to that size unless they were fed. So despite their amazing reproductive capacity, these creatures were not the way out of the problem.
It was a systemic agricultural problem, of feedstocks, inputs, growth, outputs, and recycling. Controlling their diseases was a matter of integrated pest management, successfully designed and applied. There was an entire giant field of knowledge and past experiences to help them. They had to adjust, adapt, move into a new and tighter food regimen. Cope with the missing elements as best they could.