Meanwhile, up in the spine, the permanent closing of the fatal dock continued. The group in charge there applied a thick layer of sealants to its inner lock doors, then covered those with a layer of diamond spray sheathing. It was excessive, some kind of ritual action—an erasure of the scene of the crime, or an excision of infected flesh.
Back in the Fetch, Badim and Aram watched the screens anxiously, switching around to a number of different cameras to see it.
“They’ve gone crazy at the dock,” Aram said at one point as they left for a meeting. “It’s a mess. I don’t see what we can do.”
A meeting of the councils had been called in Yangtze to discuss the situation. Some felt they needed to discuss what to do now that Aurora was revealed to be poisonous to them. Discord would continue until they had a plan, these people said. Aram and Badim weren’t so sure, but they went and listened.
When the meeting in Yangtze began, the people in charge of the sealed dock floated back to the A spokes, and at Freya’s urging, they and everyone else in the spine descended to the biomes. Most of them went down Spoke Three and headed directly to the meeting in Yangtze, so it seemed that calling the meeting had indeed helped to clear the spine. Even if it did nothing else, Badim remarked, it had been good for that.
Thus in a continuing tumult of the spirit, with many still grief-stricken, still furious, all actions possible to them at this point were in effect dumped on the table and inspected at length. It did not seem like the right time for this, but there was no stopping it either. It was the only thing worth talking about, given their situation.
Freya’s proposal was one of the actions discussed. That it was Devi’s daughter proposing the idea gave it a certain weight that it might not have had otherwise. Devi was missed, her death a wound that had not healed; often people wondered what she would have done in the situations they now found themselves in. There was a kind of slippage in which since Freya had suggested the plan, it seemed to be Devi’s plan. And though Freya was the first to speak the idea out loud, she hadn’t been the first to think it. They had to do something, go somewhere. And it was undeniable that the solar system was at least a destination they could trust to sustain them, if they could get there.
Still, this was only one plan among several now discussed.
One faction, including their old friend Song, argued for sterilizing Aurora and proceeding there as originally planned. As the pathogen on Aurora was so poorly understood (Aram was coming to feel that Jochi had not actually identified it), this group was small, and its arguments seemed not to persuade many, especially among those who had been involved with the deaths of the returning settlers. Part of their justification for the dock disaster now lay in claiming that Aurora was irredeemably poisonous.
Speller and his faction continued to argue for going on in the ship to RR Prime. Heloise and a large group advocated inhabiting F’s second moon. And quite a few began to assert that they could simply stay on the ship and use the various planetary bodies of the Tau Ceti system to resupply whatever they might lack, filling the metabolic rifts as they occurred. From the ship they could consider their options, and perhaps work on both Aurora and F’s second moon.
In all the arguing, there were some people attempting to model the options. Unfortunately, their modeling work led most of the modelers to conclude that no plan available to them was likely to succeed. They had very few options; and none were good; and for the most part, they were mutually exclusive.
Bitterness and anger grew in people as the modelers’ conclusions became known. The spine was emptied now, and under guard by people who had agreed to enforce the security council’s edicts. The stern dock was physically sealed off. Jochi was sequestered in his ferry, held magnetically inside Inner Ring A. On one level the situation seemed calm; people had returned to their biomes and resumed their lives there, and were dealing with crops that had been neglected, and now had to be planted or harvested. Animals had to be cared for, machines had to be tended. But things were not well with them. Now more than ever before in the history of the ship, their isolation began to press on them. No one could help them govern themselves, nor make the decisions they now had to make. They were alone with all that. It was up to them.
So habitation, reproduction, education, work: all expressed ecological necessities. They had to attend to these or go extinct; that was just the way it was, that was reality. Everyone was taught that in childhood. There were limits, there were needs. Every person in the ship was part of the team, integral to society, necessary to the survival of the group. Everyone was equal in that respect, and had to be treated the same as everyone else.
Only within that set of first principles, after fulfilling the necessities, could they find and exercise what liberties were still left. Some said that what remained was trivial. But no one had any suggestions as to how to give themselves more liberties than what they had, given their constraints. Duty first.
This lasted for two weeks, after which a series of polls and votes were held. They polled themselves to get an accurate count on the questions at hand. Who preferred what course of action? How many for each, and how strongly did they feel about it?
Then in most biomes there was a vote for representatives, one representative for every hundred people. In most towns there was no campaigning. People voted anonymously. Those elected who also agreed to serve then spoke to their neighbors about what they should say in the general assembly. In other biomes they chose representatives by lottery, and those selected had to promise to speak for the majority opinion in their biome; or, in some, merely to do what they thought right.