“I suppose the oldest of us could stay behind,” Aram said, frowning; it was likely he was among the oldest.

“No,” Freya said. “All of us have to fit. All of us. Let me look at the ferry’s plans. We’ll find room.”

She punched at her wristpad. “Look, see? Cut out the interior doors, throw out the couches, and cut out these interior walls here.” She poked the wristpad repeatedly. “It makes enough room, and saves more than enough mass.”

“Without the couches,” we said, “you may be injured by the decelerations involved in the descent to Earth.”

“No, we won’t. Make one big group couch on the floor, for God’s sake. All of us are going.”

“Not me,” Jochi said.

“You too!”

“No. I know you could fit me in. But I’m not going. I was on Aurora, and I know it seems now like I got away with that, but there’s no way to be certain. I don’t want to risk infecting Earth. They don’t want that either. I’ll stay with the ship. We’ll keep each other company. Also, the biomes still need a keeper. There’s a chance the whole thing might make the pass and stay in the system. There’s a lot of animals now, doing quite nicely. We’ll orbit Saturn and you can come get us.”

“But—”

“No. But me no buts. Don’t waste any more time on this. We don’t have any time to waste. The lander has to be readied. There’s no flex in this schedule. Ship, how long have we got?”

“Twenty-four days.”

We had perhaps waited too long to wake them up, their silence seemed to suggest. But it had taken a while to halt the problem. The consideration of the problem.

Jochi said, “Let’s get to work then.”

“What about the other people?” we asked.

“Wake everyone up,” Freya said. “We all need to do this together, starting now. We’ll eat all the remaining food, you’ll burn all the rest of the fuel. We need to stick together right to the end.”

Waking up proceeded differently with different people, as the literature would lead one to expect. It entailed a change in the drug infusion from the hibernation cocktail to diuretics and other system flushers, followed by stimulants mild or powerful, depending; also physical massage and manipulation, shifted positions, slow warming, voices. Physical contact, massage, slapping of face. The first round of awakenings were perforce executed by the medbots, under our oversight, as we ran the alertness tests and did our best to orient those returned to consciousness to the situation they were now in. Some grasped it immediately, others took hours, still others could not seem to emerge from a confused state. Six people woke up and within ninety minutes died, two of strokes, four of heart attack. Gurumarra, Jedda, Payu, Regina, Sunny, Wilfred. Something similar to toxic shock killed another eight, before an appropriate counteractive drug cocktail was printed and added to the mix of the awakened. Borys, Gniew, Kalina, Mascha, Sigei, Songok, Too, and Arne.

Lastly, forty-three people suffered from neuropathies, mostly of the feet, some of the hands, some of both feet and hands; a few reported they could not feel their heads. Cause or causes of this disorder were unknown to us, but they had been in hibernation for 154 years and 90 days. Consequences were to be expected.

The people gathered in San Jose’s plaza, and Aram and Freya spoke to the assembly, describing the situation and the plan. Plan was approved unanimously on a voice vote.

There was no time to be lost, as the pass-by of Earth was now two weeks away. Many of the people felt extremely hungry, and what prepared food remained on the ship was eaten on the run as people worked. Conversion of the largest ferry into a lander that would survive the heat of the descent through the Earth’s atmosphere included the attachment of a thick ablation plate, but we had prepared for this work well before arrival in the solar system. Parachutes and retro-rockets were all already assembled, and programmed according to protocols established over centuries of use, and the probability of success seemed high.

Messages had been sent to Earth informing the populace there of our pass-by and the plans for the lander to descend, and there were many responses, including some expressly denying official permission and threatening actions ranging from imprisonment to being “shot out of the sky.” This seemed to be a popular phrase. Other responses were more welcoming, but the local situation was clearly fraught. No one on the ship felt they wanted to change plans now. They would cross that bridge when they came to it. It would be the last bridge.

Jochi radioed to Earth’s Global Good Governance Group (GGGG) that he was the only one on board the ship who had actually landed on Aurora, and was therefore going to stay with the ship and not land on Earth. He explained further that he had never come into contact with any of the other people on the ship, that he had been quarantined in a separate vehicle, and that no one else on the starship had ever had contact with him or had descended to Aurora. They were therefore no different from any humans returned to Earth from a spaceflight, so there should be no objection or impediment to their landing; indeed it was one of their rights as defined by the charter of the GGGG. GGGG radioed back agreeing with this assertion. From other quarters threats continued to pour in.

The ferry was designed to carry a maximum of a hundred human passengers, so fitting in 616 people (deaths continued to occur) was going to be difficult. The interior was stripped of all interior walls and bulkheads, and several floors were built into the large central space remaining, and these floors were padded and provided with belts similar to those used in medical gurneys. Each person occupied a space just a little larger than their body, and they were lined up so that each of the new floors was packed with people lying side by side in rows. There was just enough room in the newly constructed floors for them to walk while ducking down, and it took a fair bit of work with wheelchairs and gurneys to get disabled people into position.

Eventually, and with only an hour to spare, the entire population of the ship aside from Jochi was lying down on one of six floors, occupying only ten vertical meters, with ten rows of ten on each floor.

At this point most of them had been awake for just over a month. There was still a fair amount of disorientation and confusion; some on lying down fell asleep, as if hibernation were now their default mode; others laughed at the sight of their fellows arrayed around them, or wept. It was easy for them to reach out and hold hands or otherwise touch each other, as they were packed in so tightly. It was as if they were kittens in a litter.

As we approached Earth, warning messages increased, but the speed of approach was such that no physical obstruction to the ferry was going to have time to get in place, while any lasers aimed at it would strike the ablation shield and only help it to decelerate. Deceleration was going to be intense, starting from very soon after detaching from ship; first a firing of retro-rockets, which would max at a 5-g equivalent for those in the lander, a force that earlier experience taught would almost certainly kill some of them; then the lander would hit the troposphere, and if the angle was right, come down at a continuous 4.6-g equivalent, until deceleration got the lander to a speed at which it could jettison the ablation shield, which would have lost many centimeters of thickness, and then fire retro-rockets again before deploying the first of the parachutes. Landing was planned in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Philippine Islands. A GGGG force was deployed in the area and had promised to pick up and protect the travelers.