Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

But she was curious to see more, she admitted to her hosts, and when Euan showed up again during one of her excursions into the hills, she agreed to go with him, but only after making a proper good-bye in the village, which proved much more sentimental and wrenching than it had been in the tundra. Freya wept as they closed the doors of the café, and she said to her boss and her boss’s husband, “I don’t like this! Things keep happening, and people, you get to know them and love them, they’re everything to you and then you’re supposed to move on, I don’t like it! I want things to stay the same!” The two elderly people nodded. They had each other, and their village, and they knew what Freya meant, she could tell; they had everything, so they understood her. Nevertheless she had to go, they told her; this was youth. Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. “Just keep learning,” the old woman said.

Again she spent many evenings asking her questions about people’s hopes and fears. It was much the same in Sonora as it had been in the Pampas. As in Plata, she worked the last cleanup in the dining hall, which she explained was one of the best ways to meet lots of people. Again she made friends, was warmly received; but now, perhaps as a result of her earlier experiences, she seemed more reserved. She avoided throwing herself into the lives of these people as if she were going to become family and stay there forever. She told Badim that she had learned that when the time came to move on, it would hurt more if she had been thinking she was there forever, and hurt not just her, but the people she had come to know. On the screen Badim nodded as she said this. He suggested she could keep a balance by in effect doing both; he said the kind of hurt she was talking about was not a bad hurt, and should not be avoided. “You get what you give, and not only that, the giving is already the getting. So don’t hold back. Don’t look back or forward too much. Just be there where you are now. You’re always only in the day you’re in.”

‘sick ship syndrome.’

‘sick organism syndrome,’

pathetic fallacy,

Winograd Schema,

cut to the chase