Free Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

They’re strange. But they think they’ve got the best way, so…”
    “I want to see them,” Freya declared.
    Soon she was introduced to one of the adults who came in for supplies, and after a time she was invited out to the circle of yurts next to the glacier, having promised to keep her distance from the yurt where the children of the settlement lived. From a distance they seemed like any other kids to Freya. They reminded her of herself, she said to her hosts. “Whether that’s good or bad I don’t know,” she added.
    The adults in the yurt village defended the upbringing. “When you’ve grown up like we do it,” one of them told Freya, “then you know what’s real. You know what we are as animals, and how we became human. That’s important, because this ship can drive you mad. We think most of the people around the rings
are
mad. They’re always confused. They have no way to judge anything. But we know. We have a basis for judging what’s right from wrong. Or at least what works for us. Or what to believe, or how to be happy. There are different ways of putting it. So, if we get sick of the way things work, or the way people are, we can always go back to the glacier, either in our head or actually in Labrador. Help bring up the new kids. Live with them, and get back into the real real. You can return to that space in your head, if you’re lucky. But if you didn’t grow up there, you can’t. So, some of us always keep it going.”
    “But isn’t it a shock, when you learn?” Freya asked.
    “Oh yes! That moment when they cleared my spacesuit’s faceplate, and I saw the stars, and then the ship—I almost died. I could feel my heart beating inside me like an animal trying to get out. I didn’t say a word for about a month. My mom worried that I had lost my mind. Some kids do. But later on, I started to think, youknow, a big surprise—it’s not such a bad thing. It’s better than never being surprised at all. Some people on this ship, the only big surprise in their life comes when they die without ever knowing anything real. They get an inkling of that right at the very end. Their first real surprise.”
    “I don’t want that!” Freya said.
    “Right. Because then it’s too late. Too late to do you much good, anyway. Unless one of the five ghosts greets you after you’ve died, and shows you an even bigger universe!”
    Freya said, “I want to see one of your initiations.”
    “Work with us some more first.”
    After that, Freya worked on the taiga with the yurt people. She carried loads; farmed potatoes in fields mostly cleared of stones; herded caribou; watched children. On her off days she went with people up onto the glacier, which loomed over the taiga. They clambered up the loose rocks of the moraine, which were stacked at the angle of repose, and usually stable. From the top of the moraine they could look back down the whole stretch of the taiga, which was treeless, rocky, frosted, green with moss, and crossed by a long gravel-braided estuary running to their salt lake, which was flanked by some hills. The ceiling overhead was shaded a dark blue that was seldom brushed by high clouds. Herds of caribou could be seen down on the flats by the river, along with smaller herds of elk and moose. In the flanking hills sometimes a wolf pack was glimpsed, or bears.
    In the other direction the glacier rose gently to the biome’s east wall. Here, Freya was told, you used to be able to see the effect of the Coriolis force on the ice; now that their deceleration was pushing across the Coriolis force, the ice had cracked extensively, creating new crevasse fields, which were blue shatter zones the size of entire villages. The creamy blue revealed in the depths of these new cracks was a new color to Freya. It looked as if turquoise had been mixed with lapis lazuli.
    These were not cracks one could fall into without suffering grave injury or death. But they appeared static in any given moment, and most