“I think you should just do what you want! And I’d like to jump you right here and now.”
“I don’t know. You could get in trouble.” He peers up at her. “Besides, how old are you?”
“I don’t know.”
He laughs. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I don’t know. Do you mean how long I’ve lived, or how long since I was born?”
“Well, how long you’ve lived, I guess.”
“One day,” she says promptly. “Actually about two hours. Since I got out in that water.”
He laughs again. “You’re funny. You do seem kind of new to this. But hey, I’m warmed back up, I’m going to go back out for another session.” With a quick darting kiss to her cheek he jumps up. “See you out there. I’ll check you out, I’ll stay right outside from here and keep an eye on you.”
He runs down to the waves, splashes through the shallows stepping absurdly high, jumping as he runs, then leaps into the waves and turns to get his fins on, then swims farther out at speed, stroking smoothly, ducking under broken waves right before they reach him. It looks effortless.
She follows him in. It’s a bit colder than last time; her skin feels taut and warm, more sensitive to the water. But soon she’s back in it and comfortable, and the lift of a wave pulls her back into the sun, and she’s off to the races.
The waves are a little bigger, a little steeper in their faces; Kaya says it’s because the tide is now going out. The sun is higher now, and the ocean is simply ablaze with long banks of liquid light, heaving slightly up and down, up and down, lined by the incoming waves, which as they rise before her turn a deep translucent green. Now as she floats she can look down and see through clear water to the sandy bottom, yellow and smooth. Strands and even big clumps of seaweed float below the surface in masses. Once she sees a big fish swim between the strands, a fish with a spotted tawny back, the sight of which gives her a jolt of fear; it disappears, she calls out about it to Kaya when he swims by, he laughs and says it was a leopard shark, harmless, mouth too small, not interested in people.
She’s getting used to her fins, and finds she can kick from her hips, and swim along at what feels like a great speed. She’s a mermaid. Duck under the broken waves, feel the tug of the wave’s underturn, shoot up out the back through green water. Or over waves just about to break, swim fast at them, breast up them rising fast, crash through their crests and fall down their backsides, laughing. Crack of a wave’s first fall right ahead of her. Swim in with a swell trying to break, she can keep up with it, it picks her up and she’s sliding down the face again, this time at an angle ahead of the break, sliding sideways ahead of the break and across the surface of the wave, which keeps rising up before her, steepening at just the right speed to keep her falling down across it. Holding herself stiff and doing nothing else, and yet flying, flying so fast she emerges from the water from her waist up, she can even put her hands down on the water like the other bodysurfers and plane on her hands, and fly more!
Delicious.
Now there’s an old man out here, with what looks to be a granddaughter or great-granddaughter on a short rounded board, and as the waves rise he launches her on the waves like throwing a paper airplane, both of them grinning like maniacs. The mermen and mermaids spin down the faces sometimes, rise back up on them, dance with the wave’s particular shape and tempo.
The waves get bigger, steeper. Then there’s a shout and everyone is swimming hard out to sea, trying to catch a big set. As she crests one wave she sees what they have seen, and her breath catches: a really big swell, and it hasn’t even hit the shallows and begun to rise. Looks like it will break far outside her. She swims as fast as she can, just like everyone else.
The rest of them crest the big wave before it breaks, but she’s inside still, and has to dive under it. Go right to the bottom, clutch the sand down there, feel the breaking wave push her, lift her and push her down again, flapping her like a flag, and in the midst of that one of her fins comes off. She keeps on the bottom, comes up with a hard kick off the sand, reaches the surface just in time for the next wave to break right on her, it throws her down and then back up again, and without having to do a thing she is tossed back up to the surface, onto a hissing field of bubbles infused with sand that has been ripped off the bottom, she’s in a slurry of sand and seawater now. Immense roar. And here comes the third wave, outside and building, she tries to get out to it before it breaks, swims as hard as she can but she’s still out of breath, still gasping hard, and the wave’s top pitches toward her and suddenly she has the sickening realization that she is going to be at just the wrong spot, that it’s going to fall right on her, she takes in a deep breath and ducks her head into her chest—
Wham. It hits her so hard the air is driven out of her lungs, and then she is being flailed about, her whole body tumbling, no way to tell up from down, a wild tumble, the washing machine for sure, but so much bigger than those little ones that she’s utterly helpless, a rag doll, when will it let her up? Will it let her up? She’s running out of air, feeling an emptiness in her head she has never felt before, a desperate need for breath, she’s never felt that before and she panics, she simply has to breathe right now! And yet she’s down there swirling with the sand torn off the bottom, eyes clamped shut, whirling about, she’s going to have to give up and breathe water, damn, she thinks, after all that, to get home and drown a month later. Star girl killed by Earth how stupid—
And then she’s cast back up into the air, gulps it in, alas some water in the gulp, chokes, coughs, gasps in more air, in and out.
And then she sees there’s a fourth wave breaking. Not fair! she thinks, and crash, she is slammed right to the bottom again, hard tumbling impact. Unbelievable force. No air in her, just have to hold on. Now she really will drown. Life flashing before eyes, the classic sign. Stupid star girl, done in at last.
She opens her eyes, fights toward the light. Light-headed, empty inside, blood burning, desire to breathe so great she can’t stop herself, must breathe even if she breathes water, simply must! Must! Doesn’t. Holds on somehow as she tumbles, light above, dark below, try to get up toward the light, but helpless in the tumble, just a rag doll tumbling.
She comes up again, gasps out and in again, careful this time not to breathe in water. Quick lessons here, she looks around to see if another wave coming—there is. What is this? It’s trying to kill her!
But it seems smaller. Still, she is too far inside now to get over it before it breaks, too weak to swim out to it, can only breathe in and out in quick gasps, breathe hugely, desperately, the wave rises up, breaks outside of her, comes at her as a gigantic tumbling white wall, chaos, no way to get under it, just take one more breath and wham it hits her and again she’s tumbling, pinwheeling, no control, just holding on, just holding her breath. Only this time there just isn’t enough to last, impossible to hold your breath when you can’t, when you’re suffocating, she’s going to have to breathe water. Damn. What a way to go. Then she’s back on the surface and gasping again. Gasps in and out, turns to look, yes, another fucking great wall coming, streaked with foam and bubbles, but it takes its first fall and leap back to the sky, its first rush at her, and by the time it reaches her the white chaos is just a little calmed down. She lets it take her and roll her in toward shore. She’s holding her breath. She’ll either black out and die, or get rolled in to shore.
She hits the bottom, struggles around to relocate it. Can’t feel her feet, no fins at all anymore, pushes up wildly, shoots up into the air, comes down again, another wave knocks her under, but the bottom is there, she pushes off again, she’s tumbling, but some part of every somersault thrusts her head up into the air briefly and she breathes. Tumbling, hitting the sand on the bottom. If it were a rocky bottom she’d be killed, but it’s sand and she shoves up from it. Appears she’s only about chest deep here, but another broken wave smashes her down again. Damn! Hold breath, tumble without resistance, find the botto
m, stand, breathe, knocked over, hold breath, tumble. This time when she stands she falls over because there’s no water to hold her up, she’s thigh deep, knee deep, she falls at another massive shove from behind, but fuck it, just roll with it, hold breath, come up, breathe.
Comes a moment when she finds herself on hands and knees in water sluicing backward under her toward the waves. Then another shove from behind, but she’s in the shallows, it’s where she was grunioning, there are the kids up there shrieking as the big waves have overrun their sand castles, instantly melting them to smooth nubbins in the sand, holes streaming water back down. No one paying the slightest attention to her. Good. She crawls up the beach. The next wave to strike her can’t even knock her over, just runs under her whitely hissing, bubbles everywhere, air full of salt mist, the backwash trying hard to sweep her back into the sea, she digs her hands into the wet flowing sand, water leaps up around her forearms and knees, she’s settling into sand that flows down under her, until another swell smacks her from behind. But she can’t be moved. A few more waves flow up past her and back, she sinks farther into the wet sand. She pulls her hands out, lifts her knees and feet out, crawls on hands and knees up the strand a little. One wave washes a blue fin right by her, she reaches for it and misses. The sand castles are too far. She stops there on hands and knees, resting. Everything brilliantly lit but also stuffed with blackness. Catching her breath, gasping in and out, retching a little, spitting out salt water.
Kaya runs up to her, puts his hand on her back. “Hey, are you all right?”
She nods. “Gah,” she says. “Gakk.”
“Good! That was a big set!” He runs back out.
Sun beats on her back, the wet strand gleams. Everything is sparking and glary, too bright to look at. A broken wave rushes up the strand, stops, leaves a line of foam. Big slab of water sheets back down the slope at her, crashes into her wrists and knees, sinks her farther into wet sand. Bubbling water swirls the sand under her to the sea, black flecks forming V patterns in tumbling blond grains, sluicing new deltas right before her eyes. Delta v’s, she thinks, now those are delta v’s. What a world. She lets her head down and kisses the sand.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks this time to:
Terry Bisson, Michael Blumlein, Ron Drummond, Laurie Glover, Olympios Katsiaouni, James Leach, Beth Meacham, Lisa Nowell, Christopher Palmer, Mark Schwartz, Francis Spufford, Sharon Strauss, Ken Wark.
At NASA/Ames, thanks also to Harry Jones, Larry Lemke, Creon Levitt, John Rask, Carol Stoker, and especially Chris McKay, who has been helping me with space questions now for over twenty years.
A special thanks to Carter Scholz.
Also by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Memory of Whiteness
Icehenge
THREE CALIFORNIAS
The Wild Shore
The Gold Coast
Pacific Edge
The Planet on the Table
Remaking History
Escape from Kathmandu
A Short, Sharp Shock
THE MARS TRILOGY
Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars
The Martians
Antarctica
The Years of Rice and Salt
SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL
Forty Signs of Rain
Fifty Degrees Below
Sixty Days and Counting
Galileo’s Dream
2312
Shaman
Aurora
COPYRIGHTS
“The City” from Justine by Lawrence Durrell, copyright © 1957, renewed © 1985 by Lawrence George Durrell. Use by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
“The City” from Justine by Lawrence Durrell, reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Lawrence Durrell, copyright © The Estate of Lawrence Durrell, 1969
“The City” by C. P. Cavafy, translation copyright © Olympios Katsiaouni, 2015
Extract from “The City” from Justine by Lawrence Durrell, © Estate of Lawrence Durrell and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd
“Simplicity” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
“Tyrannies” by William Bronk © The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
1. Starship Girl
2. Land Ho
3. In the Wind
4. Reversion to the Mean
5. Homesick
6. The Hard Problem
7. What Is This
Acknowledgments
Also by Kim Stanley Robinson
Copyrights
Orbit Newsletter
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 by Kim Stanley Robinson
See additional copyright notices for poem excerpts here.
Cover design by Kirk Benshoff
Cover copyright © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
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ISBN 978-0-316-37874-1
E3
Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora
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