Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

project, and the way she now deliberately tried to meet every person in every biome, made her feel that way. Also, mostly now she stayed in the towns, and worked in the dining halls and labs, and seldom out in the fields.
    As she asked more and more questions, she got better at making them not just interview sessions, but conversations. These elicited more information, more feeling, more intimacy, but were less and less easy to chart. She still had no hypothesis, she wasn’t really doing research; she was just interested to get to know people. It was pseudo-sociology, but real contact. As before, people grew fond of her, wanted her to stay, wanted her to be with them.
    And to have sex with them. Often Freya was agreeable. As everyone was infertile except those in their approved breeding period, people’s relations of that sort were often casual, having no reproductive consequences. Whether emotional connections to the act had likewise changed was an open question, one that in fact they often discussed with each other. But no firm conclusions could be reached, it seemed. It was a situation in flux, generation by generation, but always a matter of interest.
    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.
    One evening, however, one of these encounters grew strange. She met an older man who paid very close attention to her, engaged her, charmed her; they spent the night in his room, mating and talking. Then as the sunline lit at the eastern end of the ceiling, putting the Balkans into “the rosy-fingered dawn,” he sat beside her trailing his hand across her stomach, and said, “I’m the reason you exist, girl.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Without me you wouldn’t exist. That’s what I mean.”
    “But how so?”
    “I was with Devi, when we were young. We were a couple, in the Himalayas, where we were both working and climbing the cliffs. We were going to get married. And as it happened, I wanted to have children. I thought that was the point of being married,and I loved her and wanted to see what we would make in that way. And I had all my approvals ready, I had done my time in the courses and all. I’m a little older than her. But she kept saying she wasn’t ready, that she didn’t know when she would be ready, that she had a lot of work to do, that she wasn’t sure if she would ever be ready. So we fought over that, even before we got married.”
    “Maybe that was the right time,” Freya said.
    “Maybe so. Anyway we were fighting when she left to go back to Bengal, and by the time I got there myself, she told me it was over between us. She had met Badim, and they got married the next year, and soon after that, I heard you had been born.”
    “So?”
    “So, I think I gave her the idea. I think I put the idea in her head.”
    “That’s strange,” Freya said.
    “Do you think so?”
    “I do. I’m not sure you should have slept with me too. That’s the strange part.”
    “It was a long time ago. You’re different people. Besides, I thought to myself, no me, no you. So I kind of wanted to.”
    Freya shook her head at this. “That’s strange.”
    The man said, “There’s a lot of pressure on all the women in this ship, to have at least one child, and better two. The classic replacement rate is two point two kids per woman, and the policy here is to hold the population steady. So if a woman declines to have two, some other woman is going to have to have three. It causes a lot of stress.”
    “I haven’t felt that,” Freya said.
    “Well, you will. And when it happens, I want you to think about me.”
    Freya moved his hand aside, got up and got dressed. “I will,” she said.
    Out in the morning light she said good-bye to the man, andwalked to Constitution Square in Athens, and took the tram to Nairobi.
    When she got off the tram, Euan was