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.
As we became more aware of this uncertainty about the situation in the solar system, we wondered if we should halt the acceleration of the ship a bit earlier than had been planned, to save some fuel for later.
Birth weights for the new generation were a bit lower than the average established on the voyage out, and there was a higher percentage of stillbirths and problem births, and birth defects. The medical team couldn’t explain any of this, and some of them said there was no explanation, that the sample size was too small for it to be statistically significant. But it was emotionally significant, and there were a lot of upset new parents, and this distress moved out through the entire population by a kind of conversational or emotional osmosis. There was no difficulty in detecting a change in mood. People were apprehensive. Average blood pressure, heart rate, sleeping time: all shifted in the direction of increased stress, of increased apprehension and fear.
“Why is it happening?” people asked. “What’s different?”
They often asked Freya, as if, she said to Badim, she could channel Devi and give them an answer. Inasmuch as she had none of Devi’s flair for forensic investigation, she could only reply, “We need to find out.” This she knew Devi would have said. After that of course came the moment when things got harder, the moment when Devi in her time had so often led the way. There was no one like Devi alive in the ship now, they said to each other. This we could confirm unequivocally, though we did not.
For a period of about three months they experienced a series of electrical shorts in the tropical biomes, and teams went in search of the problem but found nothing, until they went up into the spine, where, inside an electrical cabinet the size of a closet, which was always kept locked to prevent tampering and sabotage, they found a floating water droplet over a meter in circumference, its water white with unidentified bacterial life. On examination the bacteria turned out to be a form of Geobacter, a kind of bacteria that in large measure fed directly on electrons. After further investigation, strands of this strain of Geobacter were found elsewhere in the electrical systems of the ship.