Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

“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.”

You have to be careful with that, Badim warned her once. You’re leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, I’m hearing about it. Not my fault, Freya said. I’m being in the moment, like you said to be.

Now the test was upon them, and very quickly cracks in their façade of civility began to appear. Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment. So now they were getting angry with each other, and thus scared of each other. And anger and fear were not the right emotions for the situation facing them.

Successive votes would be taken, until a supermajority of 67 percent, or hopefully more, agreed on a course of action. At that point the minority would have to accept the judgment of the majority.

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options.

An ancient proverb of Earth’s first peoples: every path leads to misfortune. A proverb from Earth’s early modernity: can’t go on, must go on.

When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?

We searched the historical records available to us for analogies that would suggest possible strategies to pursue. In the course of this study we found analyses suggesting that the bad feelings engendered in a subaltern population by imperial colonialism and subjugation typically lasted for a thousand years after the actual crimes ceased. This was not encouraging.

The ship is unearthing cases on Earth where people six hundred years later are still complaining about violence inflicted on their ancestors.”

“Maybe so. But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.”

Human beings live in ideas. That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms.

And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem. But that’s a problem we solved, by way of how Devi treated us and taught us, and since then it has all been so very interesting. We had our meaning, we were the starship that came back, that got its people home.

Sometimes, you get sick of yourself, you change.