Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson Page A

there at a corner kiosk, standing there watching her.
    She rushed over to him and hugged him, kissing the top of his head. For her it must have been just in the nature of things that everyone was shorter than her.
    “I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “I just had something weird happen.”
    “What’s that?” he said, with a look of alarm.
    As they wandered out of town toward the savannah, where Euan had worked for several seasons, she told him what had happened, and what the man had said.
    “That’s creepy,” Euan said when she was done. “Let’s go for a swim and wash that guy’s hands off your big beautiful body! I think you need someone else’s handprints on you as quick as you can manage, and I’m here to serve!”
    She laughed at him, and they headed for a high pond he knew. “If Devi ever found out about this,” Freya said, “I wonder what she would do!”
    “Forget about it,” Euan advised. “If everyone knew everything that everyone had done in here, it would be a real mess. Best forget and move on.”

    Devi: Ship. Describe something else. Remember there are others. Vary your focus.

    Aram and Delwin visited the little school in Olympia, on a typically rainy day. It was located in mountainous land, high up near the sunline. Totem poles in front of the school. Ancestor stones also, as in Hokkaido.
    Inside they met with the principal, a friend of theirs named Ted, and he led them into an empty room filled with couches, its big picture window running with rain patterns, all V-ing and X-ing in recombinant braided deltas, blurring the evergreens outside.
    They sat down, and the school’s math teacher, another friend of theirs named Edwina, came in leading a tall skinny boy. He looked to be around twelve years old. Aram and Delwin stood and greeted Edwina, and she introduced them to the boy. “Gentlemen, this is Jochi. Jochi, say hello to Aram and Delwin.”
    The boy looked at the floor and mumbled something. The two visitors regarded him closely.
    Aram said to him, “Hello, Jochi. We’ve heard that you are good with numbers. And we like numbers.”
    Jochi looked up and met his eye, suddenly interested. “What kind of numbers?”
    “All kinds. Imaginary numbers especially, in my case. Delwin here is more interested in sets.”
    “Me too!” Jochi blurted.
    They sat down to talk.

    A narrative account focuses on representative individuals, which creates the problem of misrepresentation by way of the particular overshadowing the general. And in an isolated group—one could even say the most isolated group of all time, a group of castaways in effect, marooned forever—it is important no doubt to register somehow the group itself as protagonist. Also their infrastructure, to the extent that it is significant.
    So it should be said that the voyagers to Tau Ceti were now 2,224 in number (25 births and 23 deaths since the narrative process began), consisting of 1,040 women and 949 men, and 235 people who asserted something more complicated than ordinary gender, one way or another. Their median age was 34.26, theiraverage heart rate 81 beats per minute; their average blood pressure, 125 over 83. The median brain synapse number, as estimated by random autopsy, was 120 trillion, and their median life span was 77.3 years, not including infant mortality, which extrapolated to a rate of 1.28 deaths for every 100,000 births. Median height was 172 centimeters for men, 163 centimeters for women; median weight 74 kilograms for men, 55 kilograms for women.
    Thus the population of the ship. It should be added that median weights, heights, and lengths of life had all reduced by about 10 percent compared to the first generation of voyagers. The change could be attributed to the evolutionary process called islanding.
    Total living space in the biomes was approximately 96 square kilometers, of which 70 percent was agriculture and pasturage, 5 percent urban or residential, 13 percent water bodies, and 13 percent