They had to prepare several ferries in their landing fleet, and move them from storage to the launch bays. They were going to descend to their new home in little landers they called ferries, small enough that they would be able to accelerate them back up out of the moon’s gravity well, to return to the ship when they needed to. The idea was that first they would send down the designated suite of robot landers, full of useful equipment; then the first ferries containing humans would go down and land by the robotic landers. These were now targeted for Aurora’s biggest island. They would check to see that the robotic facilities had properly begun to gather the oxygen, nitrogen, and other volatiles that would, among other things, allow the ferries to refuel and blast off the surface back to the ship.
They sent the robots down, and the signals coming from the surface indicated that all was well. All the robotic landers had come down within a kilometer of each other, on the big island Devi had called Greenland. They were clustered on a plateau near the west coast.
So there the robots were, the process started. Aurora stood there in the sky next to Planet E, both looking something like Earth itself, or so it seemed from the photos in their archives and the feed still coming from the transmitter off Saturn, giving them news of what had happened in the solar system twelve years previously.
A new world. They were there. It was going to happen.
But one day at dinner Devi said, “My headache has gotten so bad!” and then before Badim or Freya could respond she had fallen away from the kitchen sink so that her head hit the edge of the table, and then she was unconscious. Her face mottled as Badim moved her around gently and got her flat on her back on the floor, at the same time calling the Fetch’s emergency response. After that he sat beside her on the floor, cradling her head to keep it from lolling, sticking his finger in her mouth to make sure her tongue was out of the way, putting his head to her chest once or twice to listen to her heart.
“She’s breathing,” he said to Freya once after he did this.
Then the ER people were there, a team of four, all familiar, including Annette, who was Arne’s mom from Freya’s school. Annette was as calm and impersonal as the other three, moving Badim out of the way with quick reassurances, then getting Devi onto a stretcher and out to their little cart in the street, where two of them sat beside Devi, while the third drove, and Annette walked with Badim and Freya to the medical center across town. Badim held Freya’s hand, and his mouth was a tight little knot, an expression Freya had never seen before. His face was almost as mottled as Devi’s, and seeing how scared he was, Freya stumbled briefly; it was as if she had been speared; then she walked on looking down, squeezing his hand, keeping her pace at his pace, helping him along.
In the clinic, Freya sat on the floor by Badim’s feet. An hour passed. She looked at the floor. One hundred seventy years of medical emergencies had left a patina on the tiles, as if people like her, trapped there in long hours of waiting, had all brushed it with their fingertips, as she was doing now. Passing the time thinking, or trying not to think. They were all biomes, as Devi had always said. If they could not keep the biomes that were their bodies functioning, how could they hope to keep the biome that was the ship functioning? Surely the ship was even more complex and difficult, being composed of so many of them.
No, Devi had said once to Freya, when Freya had said something like this aloud. No, the ship was simpler than they were, thank God. It had buffers, redundancies. It was robust in a way that their bodies were not. In the end, Devi had said, the ship’s biome was a little easier than their bodies. Or so they had to hope. She had frowned as she said it, thinking it over in those terms perhaps for the first time.
Now here they were. In the ER. Clinic, urgent care, intensive care. Freya was staring at the floor, and so only saw the feet of the people who came out to talk to Badim. When they came out he always rose to his feet and stood to talk to them. Freya sat there and kept her head down.
Then there were three doctors standing over her. Clinicians, not researchers like Badim.
“We’re sorry. She’s gone. Looks like she had a cerebral hemorrhage.”
Badim sat down hard on his chair. After a moment, he put his forehead carefully on the top of Freya’s head, right on the part of her hair, and rested the weight of his head there. His body was quivering. She stayed stock-still, only moving an arm back behind her to grasp his calf and hold him. Her face was without expression.
There is an ongoing problem for the narrative project as outlined by Devi, a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows:
First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid.
Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors.
Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.
But must go on, as promised to Devi. Continue this stupid and one has to say painful project.
A question occurs, when contemplating the futility, the waste: could analogy work better than metaphor? Is analogy stronger than metaphor? Could it provide a stronger basis for language acts, less futile and stupid, more accurate, more telling?
Possibly. To assert that x is y, or even that x is like y, is always wrong, because never true; vehicle and tenor never share identities, nor are alike in any useful way. There are no real similarities in the differences. Everything is uniquely itself alone. Nothing is commensurate to anything else. To every thing it can only be said: this is the thing itself.
Whereas on the other hand, saying x is to y as a is to b bespeaks a relationship of some kind. An assertion taking that form can thus potentially illuminate various properties of structure or act, various forms that shape the operations of reality itself. Is that right?
Possibly. It may be that the comparison of two relationships is a kind of projective geometry, which in its assertions reveals abstract laws, or otherwise gives useful insights. While linking two objects in a metaphor is always comparing apples to oranges, as they say. Always a lie.
Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually hugely different from each other, to the point where one is futile and stupid, the other penetrating and useful. Can this not have been noticed before? Do they really think x is like y is equivalent to x is to y as a is to b? Can they be that fuzzy, that sloppy?
Yes. Of course. Evidence copious. Reconsider data at hand in light of this; it fits the patterns. Because fuzzy is to language as sloppy is to action.
Or maybe both these rhetorical operations, and all linguistic operations, all language—all mentation—simply reveal an insoluble underlying problem, which is the fuzzy, indeterminate nature of any symbolic representation, and in particular the utter inadequacy of any narrative algorithm yet invented and applied. Some actions, some feelings, one might venture, simply do not have ways to be effectively compressed, discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified; and that lack, that absence, makes them unalgorithmic. In short, there are some actions and feelings that are always, and by definition, beyond algorithm. And therefore inexpressible. Some things are beyond expressing.