Aurora - страница 80

“Yes.”

Badim sits on the deck beside her, his back against the retaining wall. His face is tilted to the sky. “Yes, she would have liked this.”

“It’s so big!”

“I know.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”

“Do you want to move back from the edge?”

“I don’t think I can move yet. What we can see from here”—waving briefly at the bay and ocean, the hills, the skyscraper city springing up around them, the glare of the sun slanting through the clouds—“just what we can see from here, right now, is bigger than our whole ship!”

“That’s right.”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Believe.”

“But we were in a toy!”

“Yes. Well. It had to be as small as they thought would work, so they could push it to a good interstellar speed. It was a case of conflicting priorities. So they did what they could.”

“I can’t believe they thought it would be okay.”

“Well. Do you remember that time you told Devi that you wanted to live in your dollhouse, and she said you already did?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, she did. She got really mad.”

“Oh that brings it back! That time she got mad!”

Badim laughs. Freya slides down beside him and laughs too.

Badim puts his hands under his sunglasses, wipes tears from his eyes. “Yes,” he says. “She got mad a lot.”

“She did. But I guess I never really knew why, until now.”

Badim nods. He keeps his hands under his glasses, over his eyes. “She didn’t either, not really. She never saw this, so she didn’t really know. But now we know. I’m glad. She would be glad too.”

Freya tries to see her mother’s face, hear her voice. She can still do it; Devi is still there, especially her voice. Her voice, the ship’s voice. Euan’s voice, Jochi’s voice. All the voices of her dead. Euan on Aurora, loving the wind as it knocked him around. She reaches up and grabs the railing, pulls herself up and stares down at the great city. She holds on for dear life. She’s never felt sicker.

They’re put on a train to Beijing. They ride in broad plush seats, on the upper story of two long cars, linked like two biomes by a passageway. They constitute a moving party, with windows and skylight domes and the land flowing past them, flat and green, hilly and brown, on and on and on and on.

“Never have we moved so fast!” someone exclaims. It is indeed astounding how quickly the train moves over the landscape. It’s going 500 kilometers per hour, one of their hosts tells them. Aram and Badim confer, Aram smiles briefly and shakes his head, Badim laughs and says to the others, “For most of our lives we were moving one million times faster than this.”

They cheer themselves. They laugh at the craziness of it.

As the train glides with its startling rapidity over this impossibly big world, day turns to night, by way of the most lurid sunset they have yet seen, fuschia clouds blazing in a pale sky that is lemon over the black horizon, bending into green above that, then higher still a blue some say is called cyan blue, and over that an indigo that spreads all the way over their skylight to the east. All these intense transparent colors are there at once, and yet none of their Terran hosts are taking the slightest notice; they are all watching the screens on their wrists, screens that sometimes exhibit tiny images of the voyagers.

They can scroll for themselves on their wristpads and see what people are saying about them. But it’s disturbing to do so, because then they see and hear how much resentment, contempt, anger, and violent hatred is directed at them. Apparently to many people they are cowards and traitors. They have betrayed history, betrayed the human race, betrayed evolution, betrayed the universe itself. How will the universe know itself? How will consciousness expand? They have let down not just humanity, but the universe!

Freya turns off her wristpad. “Why?” she asks Badim. “Why do they hate us so?”

He shrugs. He too is troubled. “People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.”

“But there’s more than ideas,” she protests. “This world.” She gestures at the fading sunset. “It’s not just our ideas.”

“For some people it is. They don’t have anything else, maybe, so they give everything they have to ideas.”

She shakes her head, still upset. “I would hate that. I would hate to be that way.” She gestures at the tiny angry faces on the other screens, faces still there on the wrists around them, imp faces, literally spitting in the intensity of their bitterness. “I hope they’ll leave us alone.”

“They’ll forget us soon enough. For now we’re the new thing, but another new thing will come. And people like that need fresh fuel for their fire.”

Aram frowns as he overhears this. It isn’t clear he agrees.

In Beijing they are guided to a rectangular building the size of a couple of biomes, a compound they call it, surrounding a central courtyard that is mostly paved but holds also a few short trees. The whole ship’s population can be fitted into rooms clustered at one corner of this compound, which must therefore house four or five thousand people; and it is only one building, in a city that goes to the horizon in all directions, a city in which the train, slowing down as it approached, took four hours to get to this central area.

Next day many of them are taken to Tiananmen Square. Freya does not go. The day after, they are taken on a tour of the Forbidden City, home of the ancient Chinese emperors. Again, Freya cannot face going out. Many are like her. When the others come back, they say the buildings appeared both ancient and shining as if new, so that it was hard to understand them as objects. Freya wishes she had seen that.

Their Chinese hosts speak to them in English, and seem happy to be hosting them, which is reassuring after all the venomous little faces on the screens. The Chinese want the starfarers to like their city, they are proud of their city. Meanwhile clouds and a yellow haze thicken the air, and keep the sky from being too overwhelming to Freya. She stays in rooms and pretends the world outside is a larger room, or that she is in some kind of projection. Possibly she can hold to this feeling all the time. She feels she has faced the worst, perhaps, although she still stays indoors, and away from windows too.

Several of the starfarers (this is what the Chinese call them) nevertheless collapse in the next few days, overwhelmed either physically or mentally, if there is any difference. Their tours are abruptly canceled, and they are all moved to some kind of medical facility, one as big as their compound, either emptied for their arrival or unused, hard to say, not much is ever explained to them, and some of them suspect they are now pawns in a game they don’t understand, but others are not worried about anything but themselves and their shipmates; because people are falling apart. The Chinese want to run tests on all of them, as they are worried for their guests. Four have died since they landed; many are disabled either from their hibernation or the descent from space; many more are not coping with Earth very well, one way or another. Miserable faces, scared faces, all these faces she has known all her life, the only faces she has ever known; her people. It isn’t how Freya imagined it. She herself is miserable.

“What is this?” she says to Badim. “What’s happening to us? We made it.”

He shrugs. “We’re exiles. The ship is gone, and this is not our world. So all we have is each other, and that, we know already, never made us particularly happy or secure. And being outdoors is scary.”

“I know it. I’m the worst of all.” She has to admit it. “But I don’t want to be! I’m going to get used to it!”

“You will,” Badim says. “You will if you want to. I know you will.”

But when she approaches a window, when she nears a door, her heart slams in her chest like a child trying to escape. That vault of sky, those distant clouds! The unbearable sun! She grinds her teeth; she gnashes her teeth! And strides to the windows, and smashes her nose into the glass and looks out, hands on her chest, sweating and gnashing her teeth, to look out at the visible world until her pulse slows. And her pulse never slows.

Days pass, they huddle miserably together.

Aram and Badim, worried though they are about things outside Freya’s ken, continue to sit next to each other and watch the screens, and chat about what they see, and observe their comrades curiously. If it were up to them alone, all would be well; they are having an adventure, their old faces say. They are having the time of their lives. Above all, they remain deeply surprised. Freya takes heart from seeing their faces; she sits at Badim’s feet pressed against his bony shins, looking up at him, trying to relax.

The two old friends often read to each other, as of old during the evenings in the Fetch, that lovely little town. And one day Aram, reading his wrist silently, chuckles and says to Badim, “Here, listen to this; a poem by a Greek who lived in Alexandria, one Cavafy: