Aurora (22 page)

“He’s an artist,” Badim said to Freya as they watched from the ship.

“That’s why he’s down there and I’m not,” Freya said. “They don’t need Good For Anythings down there.”

“They do,” Badim said. “They will. It was a lottery, remember.”

After three days of work, the ramp across the trough was finished. They sent across a robot truck first to test it, and it ground over the aluminum carpet without incident. All was well, and they drove or directed all the other vehicles over the ramp. There were thirty-seven vehicles in their caravan, ranging in size from four-person rovers to mobile containers that were the modular parts of their buildings. All crossed without incident. But that was only the first of eleven grabens.

However, they now had their method, and because of that, the subsequent ramps went a little faster. Even the so-called Great Trench, a graben three times wider and twice as deep as the rest, was ramped and crossed in a day. Stopping to swap out the rock-cutting blades became the biggest delay. In this task, both the versatility and the unreliability of humans doing mechanical work was revealed. The operator would set the vehicle arm on the ground with the nut holding the blade to the rotor facing up, and someone would fit the power wrench to the nut and zip it off with a pneumatic blast. Off came the nut and washers, after which they spun the circular saw blade carefully off the short spindle, being careful not to damage its screw threads. Then they carried the blade to the machine truck, where printers would have readied a newly sharpened blade. Go back and spin a refurbished blade
down onto the spindle, put the washers on, then the nut; last, apply the power drill and tighten the nut. This was the moment where humans were not as good as a robot would have been, and their tools not adequate to compensate for their inexperience. The problem was they could not tell how tight the nuts were being screwed on by the power drill, and very often, in the attempt to be sure they were tight enough, they drilled them too tight. Threads were stripped, and then there was no grip at all, and the spindle had to be replaced, which took many hours of delicate work; or washers were fused together, or fused into the nut or the blade, such that they could not be separated afterward, even with the power drill at full power.

This kind of mistake happened so often that eventually they allowed only Euan and Eliza to use the power drills for this task, as they were the only ones who had the touch to do it right. Anyone listening to Euan’s feed to the ship, including Freya and Badim and a few score others, got used to the heavy airy
blat
of the power drill working, and they also got used to his various favorite curses as he lamented one action or another.

The settlers rolled slowly across the land, averaging 655 meters a day, with their longest day only three kilometers, and that between two troughs, over flat burren. It took them twenty-three days to move their settlement to the sea cliff overlooking Half Moon Valley, on the shore of the western sea. They had traveled by the light of Planet E as it went through its full phase, a huge sight; they noted the lunar eclipse in the middle of that, the shadow of Aurora diffusely crossing the face of E, dimming it somewhat, but not too much, because E was so much bigger than Aurora, and the two so close together, and both with thick atmospheres, which diffused Tau Ceti’s light around Aurora and meant E was not very shaded by it. After that they had scarcely noticed the dimming of E’s slow wane, which brought back in the lambent night more blurry stars. These stars slowly shifted overhead, and the phases
of E also shifted, but E stayed always fixed in place over them, a bit south and east of the zenith. Some settlers said this felt strange; others shrugged.

Near the end of their trek, they waited out a hard rainstorm, when it got too dark and wet to travel safely. And they stopped work to witness the sunrise of Tau Ceti, painfully bright over the burren to the east. Like a nuclear explosion, some said, in what was perhaps a false or mistaken metaphor, as it was in fact a kind of nuclear explosion.

Though they could see down into their ocean valley, they were still on the cliff above it, and so had to bulldoze a ramp road down the side of the river canyon that formed the largest break in the sea cliff. This tilted curving road was the work of another eight days. When it was finished, they drove all the vehicles down to the valley floor and located them near the bottom of the cliff, on an alluvial floodplain near the river. This was clearly going to be the spot in the valley best protected by the cliff from the winds. At least the offshore winds.

As they quickly found, there were times when the winds poured up and down the river canyon even faster than they had out on the burren, as the gusts were channelized by the canyon. Once this became clear they moved their caravan farther from the river, and got some protection at the foot of the cliffs about two kilometers from the canyon mouth. This was a relief to all. Their new location seemed the best they were going to be able to find in this region of Greenland, all things considered. So they began to settle in at the foot of the curving cliff, and later in some steep, short gulleys that ran up the cliff to the burren. These ravines were transverse to the prevailing winds, and therefore well protected, but mostly steep-walled, with narrow floors.

To aid the wind break of the cliff, they began to build what they
called city walls out from it. One would encircle their residential complex, and another one, longer still, would enclose the first fields they hoped to plant in the open air.

Every day there was more to be done than they could do, and they welcomed the regular infusion of people who started coming down again from the ship. They jammed these newcomers into the shelters as tightly as they could manage. Everyone ate food sent down from the ship. They kept the printers on both Aurora and the ship working continuously, making all the parts they required to assemble their new world. In this process their feedstocks and simply time itself were the only limiting factors. They couldn’t make more time, but they could send mining expeditions out onto the burren to locate metal ores and replenish their feedstocks, and they did.

More people descended, bringing them to just over one hundred total. Greenhouses now became crucial. They hoped eventually to grow crops out in the open air, and the chemical composition of the air was adequate for this, indeed nearly Terran; but during the nine-day nights, despite the waxing and waning light of E overhead, the temperature dropped to well below freezing. It wasn’t obvious how they were going to solve that, in regard to their agriculture. There were winter-tolerant plants that cold-hardened and went dormant, and survived freezes; the farm labs on both ship and Aurora were investigating how these plants accomplished that, and whether the genes for that ability could be transported to other plants. Also they were looking into genes that could help plants adapt to the daymonth cycle rather than annual seasons, but the outcome of this effort was not clear. For now, whatever they ended up planting, greenhouses were necessary.

At first most of the greenhouse space was given over to growing soil itself. Soil as opposed to dirt was about 20 percent alive
by weight, and plants were very much happier growing in it than they were in dirt like the valley’s dead loess. When they had viable soil, which fortunately grew in tanks filled with loess at nearly the speed of bacterial reproduction itself, they spread it in the greenhouses and planted crops. These were mostly fast bamboos at first, bamboos they had nursed throughout the long voyage to Tau Ceti without much needing them; now they came into their own, as they were a crucial building material, providing strong beams at a growth rate of a meter a day. Meanwhile the settlers’ food still came mostly from the ship and was flown down to them.

This created another supply problem. They had robot ferries capable of flying down from the ship to Aurora, then refueling and launching to get back up to the ship, but they needed fuel. One of the factories in the valley was entirely devoted to splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, the main components of their rockets’ fuel. The factory itself had to be powered, however, and splitting water was very energy-intensive. They had two powerful nuclear reactors with them on the surface, providing 400 megawatts total, but the uranium and plutonium in the reactors would not last forever, and the ship’s supply was only adequate for the ship. Was there uranium on Aurora? According to standard theories of planetary formation, there had to be some; but the entire Tau Ceti system was less metallic than the solar system, and heavy metals only accumulated well on planetary bodies with a steady churn of tectonic action or tidal flexing. It wasn’t clear Aurora had ever had either, and given the uncertainty on this point, it was felt that they were going to have to devote a good deal of their manufacturing capability to building wind power generators on the burren. For sure there was going to be enough wind.

The people in the new settlement named it Hvalsey, after a town on the west coast of the Greenland on Earth. Quickly they expanded around the greenhouses. Stonecutters and foundries provided stone blocks and aluminum sheeting for construction,
also glass windows for greenhouse roofs and walls. The city wall helped solve the wind problem. Some said Hvalsey looked like a little medieval walled town.

They were finding that the winds shifted in a somewhat predictable way through the course of the daymonths. When the air above a region was lit by Tau Ceti for nine days straight, it heated and rose, creating low pressures on the surface that cold air from the night side rushed in to fill. Then when sunset arrived, and a region was in night for nine days, it cooled down so drastically that snow and ice appeared on all the islands, and sea ice covered the calmer bays and reaches of the ocean, but not usually on the open sea, which was too buffeted by waves and wind to freeze over. The cold air in falling created pressures that shot out to the sides, filling the relative gap under the rising air on the sunlit side. So the winds were always swirling, mostly from night to day. Midday and midnight appeared to be the calmest times.

The long nights over the inner hemisphere never became quite as cold as those over the outer hemisphere, but they still dropped to well below freezing. If they were going to do agriculture in the open air, they were going to have to adapt their Terran plants from an annular to a monthly temporality. Watching their fast bamboo grow a meter a day, it seemed possible that they could engineer crops to grow to harvest in nine days, but no one could be sure how that would work, or even if it was possible. If they had to confine their agriculture entirely to greenhouses, it seemed like a fairly serious constraint. But they would cross that bridge when they built it, as Badim put it.

Meanwhile, in terms of the wind, which kept forcing itself to the forefront of their attention, the monthly air flows were regular, but not entirely consistent. They had a very sensitive dependence on conditions that were always changing. But as they learned more about Aurora’s weather, they began to identify certain patterns. One thing was perfectly obvious: on most days it was going to be windy.