Aurora (20 page)

The surface vehicle they had had charged batteries as expected, so they climbed into it and rolled off west. The light from Tau Ceti blazed off the rock ahead of them. From time to time they had to make a detour around shallow troughs (grabens?), but by and large their route was straightforwardly westward, as most of the troughs also ran east and west. Their helmet-camera views jounced only a little from time to time, as their vehicle had shock absorbers. The explorers laughed at the occasionally bumpy ride. There was nothing like this on the ship either.

Maybe there was nothing on the ship that was quite like what they were experiencing now. As a gestalt experience it had to be new. The horizon from their vantage point, about three meters above the ground, was many kilometers off; it was hard for them to say how many, but they guessed about ten kilometers away, much the same as it would have been on Earth, which made sense. Aurora’s diameter was 102 percent Earth’s; its gravity was only .83 g because Aurora was less dense than Earth.

“Ah look at that!” Euan cried out, and everyone else in the car exclaimed something also.

They had come within sight of Aurora’s ocean. Lying to the west in the late afternoon light, it looked like an immense bronze plate, lined by waves that were black by contrast. By the time they reached a short cliff over the sea’s edge, the plate of ocean had shifted in color from wrinkled bronze to a silver-and-cobalt mesh, and the lines of waves were visibly white-capped by a fierce onshore wind. They exclaimed at the scene, their cacophony impossible to understand. Euan himself kept saying, “Oh my. Oh my. Will you look at that. Will you look at that.” Even in the ship many people cried out in amazement.

The explorers got out of the car and wandered the cliff’s edge.
Fortunately, when the wind caught them and threw them off balance, it was always inland and away from the cliff.

The cliff’s edge was about twenty meters above the ocean. Offshore, waves broke to white crashing walls, which came rolling in with a low roar that could be heard through the explorers’ helmets, always there under the keening of the wind over the rocks. The waves crashed into the black cliff below them, flinging spray up into the air, after which masses of white water surged back out to sea. The wind dashed most of the spray into the rocks of the cliff, although a thick variable mist also rose over the cliff’s edge and was immediately thrown over them to the east.

The explorers staggered around in the wind, which was now so very visible because of the flying spray and the ocean’s torn surface. Wave after wave broke offshore and was flatted to white as it rolled in, leaving trails of foam behind each broken white wall. The backwash from the cliffs headed back out in arcs that ran into the incoming breakers; when they crashed together, great plumes of spray were tossed up into the wind, to be thrown again in toward the land. It was a big and complex view, brilliantly lit, violently moving, and, as everyone could hear by way of the microphones on the explorers’ helmets, extremely loud. Here at this moment, Aurora roared, howled, boomed, shrieked, whistled.

One of the explorers was bowled over, crawled around, got onto hands and knees, then stood up, carefully balancing, facing into the wind and stepping back quickly four or five times, swinging arms, ducking forward to hold position. They were all laughing.

It was a question what they would be able to do on such a windy world, Freya remarked to Badim, if it stayed that windy all the time. She added that it was more the ghost of Devi worrying in
her than she herself. She herself wanted to get down there as soon as possible and feel that wind.

Meanwhile, down on Aurora, they were getting the construction robots started in their various tasks. A very slow sunset gave way to a night illuminated by the waxing light of E, always overhead. E’s light diffused to a glow in the air somewhat like a faint white mist, which the settlers found they could see well in. The sky did not go black but rather stayed a lambent indigo, and only a few stars were visible.

The dolerite of Greenland was obdurate and uniform, containing not much in the way of other more useful minerals. They would have to hunt for those, but in the meantime, it was dolerite they had to work with. Many construction vehicles grumbled around cutting blocks of dolerite from the side of grabens, and stacking them in a wind wall to shield their little collection of landers. There was an almost continuous whine of diamond-edged circular saws. Meanwhile a smelter was extracting aluminum from crushed dolerite, which in this area proved to be about half a percent aluminum in composition. Other robotic factories were sheeting this extracted aluminum for roofs, rodding it for beams, and so on. A few of the robot excavators were set to drilling in a graben with a gravitational bolide under it, in the hope of locating some iron ore to mine. But for the most part, until they found some areas of different mineral composition, they were going to have to work with aluminum as their metal.

Aurora had a good magnetic field, ranging from .2 to .6 gauss, and that plus its atmosphere was enough to protect the settlers from Tau Ceti’s UV radiation. So the surface was well protected in that regard, and really the moon’s surface was quite a benign environment for humans, except for the wind. Every day explorers came in from their trips exclaiming at the force of the gusts, and one of them, Khenbish, came in with a broken arm after a fall.

“People are beginning to hate this wind,” Euan remarked to Freya during one of their personal calls. “It’s not horrible or anything, but it is tedious.”

“Are people scared of it?” Freya asked him. “Because it looks scary.”

“Scared of Aurora? Oh hell no. Hell no. I mean, it’s kicking our butts a little, but no one comes back in scared.”

“No one going to go crazy and come back up here and beat people up?”

“No!” Euan laughed. “No one is going to want to go back up there. It’s too interesting. You all need to get down here!”

“We want to! I want to!”

“Well, the new quarters are almost ready. You’re going to love it. The wind is just part of it. I like it, myself.”

But for many of the others it was the hard part; that was becoming clear.

A slow sunrise brought dawn on Aurora, and just over four of their clock days later, the high noon of their month came. During this time the lit crescent of E had shrunk to a brilliant sliver, up there in the royal blue daytime sky, and the blazing disk of Tau Ceti had been closing on that lit side of E as it rose. A time came when the star was too close to E for them to be able to look at either one without strong filters to protect their eyes.

Then, because Aurora orbited E almost in the plane of Tau Ceti’s ecliptic, and E too orbited very close to that plane; and Greenland lay just north of the Aurora’s equator; and E was so much bigger than Aurora, and the two so relatively close together, there came the time for their monthly midday full eclipse. Their first one was arriving. 170.055, A0.15.

The sun stood almost directly overhead, the lit crescent of Planet E right next to it. Most of the settlers were outside to watch
this. Standing on small dark shadows of themselves, they set the filters in their face masks on high and looked up. Some of them lay on their backs on the ground to see without craning their necks the whole time.

The side of E about to cut into the disk of Tau Ceti went dark at last, just as the blazing disk of Tau Ceti touched its edge. E was still quite visible next to it, looking about twice as large as Tau Ceti: it blocked a large circle of stars. The very slow movement of the sun made it obvious the eclipse would last for many hours.

Slowly E’s mottled dark gray circle seemed to cut into the smaller circle of Tau Ceti, which was very bright no matter which filter was used; through most of them it appeared a glowing orange or yellow ball, marred by a dozen or so sunspots. Slowly, slowly, the disk of the sun was covered by the larger dark arc of E. It took over two hours for the eclipse to become complete. In that time the watchers sat or lay there, talking. They reminded each other that back on Earth, Sol and Luna appeared to be the same size in the sky, an unlikely coincidence that meant that in some Terran eclipses, the outer corona of Sol appeared outside the eclipsing circle of Luna, ringing the dark disk with an annular blaze. In other eclipses, either more typical or not, they couldn’t recall, Luna would block Sol entirely, but only for a short while, the two being the same size, and the sun moving eighteen times faster in the Terran sky than Tau Ceti did in theirs.

Here, on Aurora, during this first eclipse of Tau Ceti ever to be observed, the movement was slower, bigger; possibly therefore more massive in impact, more sublime. They thought this had to be true. As the dark circle of E slowly covered most of Tau Ceti, everything got darker, even the disk of E itself, as what illumination it had was coming from Aurora, which was itself growing darker in E’s growing shadow. The light from Tau Ceti that was bouncing off Aurora and hitting E and bouncing off E and coming back to Aurora, was lessening to nearly nothing. They
marveled at the idea of this double bounce that some photons were making.

Over the next hour, the landscape completed its shift from the intense light of midday to a darkness much darker than their usual night. Stars appeared in the black sky, fewer than when seen from the ship during its voyage, but quite visible, and bigger it seemed than when seen from space. In this spangled starscape the big circle of E appeared darker than ever, like charcoal against obsidian. Then the last sliver of Tau Ceti disappeared with a final diamond wink, and they stood or lay in a completely black world, a land lit by starlight, the starry sky containing a big black circle overhead.

Off on the horizons to all sides of them, they could see an indigo band, curiously infused with a golden shimmer. This was the part of Aurora’s atmosphere still lit by the sun, visible off in the distance well beyond their horizon.

The wind still rushed over them. The blurred stars twinkled in the gusts. Over their eastern horizon the Milky Way stood like a tower of dim light, braided with its distinct ribbons of blackness. The wind slowly lessened, and then the air went still. Whether this was an effect of the eclipse or not, no one could say. They talked it over in quiet voices. Some thought it made sense, thermodynamically. Others guessed it was a coincidence.

About thirteen hours were going to pass in this deep, still black. Some people went back inside to get out of the chill, to eat a meal, to get some work done. Most of them came out again from time to time to have a look around, feel the absence of wind. Finally, when the time for the reappearance of Tau Ceti came, most roused themselves, as it happened to be in the middle of their clock night, and went back outside to watch.

There to the east, the sky now glowed. Though it was still dark where they were, indigo filled much of the eastern sky. Then the infusion of gold in the indigo strengthened in intensity, and the whole eastern sky turned a dark bronze, then a dark green; then
it brightened, until the blackish green was shot with gold, and brightened again until it was a gold infused with greenish black, or rather a mix or mesh of gold and black, shimmering like cloth of gold seen by twilight, perhaps. An uncanny sight, clearly, as many of them cried out at it.

Then the burren off on the eastern horizon lit up as if set on fire, and their cries grew louder than ever. It looked as if the great plateau were burning. This strange fiery dawn swept in vertically, like a gold curtain of light approaching them from the east. Overhead the charcoal circle of E winked on its westernmost point, a brilliant wink of fire that quickly spilled up and down the outer curve of the black circle. And so Tau Ceti reemerged, again very slowly, taking a bit over two hours. As it emerged the day around them seemed to dawn with a strange dim shade, as if clouded, though there were no clouds. Gradually the sky turned the usual royal blue of Aurora’s day; everything brightened, as if invisible clouds were now dispersing; and finally they were back in the brilliant light of the ordinary midday, with only the sky off to the west containing a remaining dark shape in the air, a shaded area, again as if invisible clouds were casting a shadow over there, a shadow that in fact was that of Planet E, which moved farther west and finally disappeared.