When that grim task was accomplished, the ferry’s door was closed, and the ferry ejected from the dock into space. In the midst of the arguments, a group of people barged into the dock’s operation room, and tele-operated robots in the open chamber of the dock, moving all the bodies that were still floating free in the chamber back into the doomed ferry. The confrontation in the spine continued, its floating crowds still angrily denouncing or defending what had occurred in the dock. It was an interrelated process of disaggregation, which one night Aram named codevolution. They were not fully aware of this fact, possibly because they themselves were growing sick, as one aspect of their home’s breakdown. In other words, their only home was breaking down. As a supra-organism they would perforce remain a totality, but one that could become markedly less hospitable to certain of its elements, including its human component. Of course, every life form in the little ecosystem was in a process of co-evolution with all the rest, so they could only grow apart so far. Ineluctably, the occupants of the ship were growing apart. Evolution of the many species on board continued to occur at different rates, with the fastest speciations occurring at the viral and bacterial level, but at slower speeds in every phylum and order.

Various unequal inputs and outputs of the ecological cycles in the ship, the imbalances that Devi had called metabolic rifts, were now causing dysfunctions.

At the same time, the ship was overfull of certain other substances, mainly salts and corroded metal surfaces. Seventy-seven had died in the dock decompression.īecause the plan had been to relocate most of the human and animal population of the ship down to Aurora, they were now somewhat low in supplies of certain volatiles, rare earths, and metals, and to a certain extent, food. One hundred twenty-three people had perished, either on Aurora, or in the ferry in the ship’s stern dock. Now there were 1,997 people on board, ranging in age from one month to eighty-two years. So there they were: in the ship, in orbit around Aurora, which was in orbit around Planet E, which orbited Tau Ceti, 11.88 light years away from Sol and Earth.

Excerpted from Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel Aurora, published July 7, 2015, by Orbit Books.

Aurora stanley robinson