Free Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson Page A

of the surface of the glacier was pitted, bubbled, and knobbed, so that it was not at all slippery. Thus it was possible to walk around on the ice, and approach, sometimes holding hands, a crevasse field’s edge, and look down into the blue depths. They said to each other that it looked something like a ruined street, with jagged blue buildings canted away to each side.
    Down below, the only town in Labrador nestled in a little knot of hills, on the shore of the cold salt lake that lay at the western end of the estuary. The lake and estuary were home to salmon and sea trout. The town was made of cubical buildings with steep roofs, each one painted a bright primary color that through the long winters was said to be cheering. Freya helped with building repairs, stocking, and canning salmon taken from the lake and estuary. Later she helped to take inventory in the goods dispensary. When she was out in the yurt settlement, she always helped take care of the cohort of children, sixteen of them, ranging from toddlers to twelve-year-olds. She had sworn to say nothing to them of the ship, and the adults of the village believed her and trusted her not to.
    At the end of autumn, when it was getting cold and dark, Freya was invited to join one of the children’s initiations. It was for a twelve-year-old girl named Rike, a bold and fierce child. Freya said she would be honored to take part.
    For the event Freya was dressed as Vuk, one of the five ghosts, and at midnight of the day of the ceremony, after everything else they did to celebrate, Rike was helped into a spacesuit, and the faceplate of her helmet was blocked with a black cloth glued to it. They walked together to Spoke One, holding her by the arms. Up at the inner ring lock they led her into the exterior lock, where they were all clipped into tethers. The air in the lock was sucked out, the outer lock door opened. They walked up a set of stairs andpushed off into the void of interstellar space, hanging there just sternward of the inner ring. The seven adults arranged themselves around Rike, and one of them pulled off the black cloth covering her faceplate. And there she was, in space.
    Humans in interstellar space can see approximately a hundred thousand stars. The Milky Way appears as a broad white smear across this starry black. The starship has a silvery exterior that gleams faintly but distinctly with reflected starlight. It is lit by the Milky Way more than by the other stars, so that the parts of the ship facing the Milky Way are distinctly lighter than parts facing away from it. People say that under the faint spangle of reflected starlight, the ship itself seems also to glow. Despite its great speed relative to the local backdrop, the only motion is of the entire starscape appearing to rotate around the ship, which is how the rotation of the ship is usually apprehended, the ship appearing still to the human observers as they move with it. At the time of Rike’s initiation, Tau Ceti was by far the brightest star around them, serving as their polestar ahead of the bow of the spine.
    As she saw all this Rike cried out, and then had to be held as she began flailing and screaming. Freya, dressed as Vuk, the wolf man, held her right arm in both hands and felt her tremble. Her parents and the other adults from the yurt village explained to her what she was seeing, where they were, where they were going, what was happening. They chanted a chant they traditionally used to tell it all. Rike groaned continuously through this chant. Freya was weeping, they all were weeping. After a while they pulled themselves back in the lock; then when the outer doors closed and air hissed back in, they got out of the spacesuits and clomped down the stairs back into the spoke, and helped the traumatized girl walk home.
    Soon after this, Freya arranged to move on.
    The whole town came out for her farewell party, and many urged her to come back in the spring. “Lots of young people circlethe