Aurora (24 page)

On this day Euan and his companions first walked over to the river canyon. The rapids at the top of the canyon began with two short falls off the burren, followed by two taller falls in the canyon, after which a quick tilted rush of white water spilled onto the valley floor. There the river was split in two by a giant boulder, and after that several channels meandered across a broad flat of sorted gravel, sand, and mud flats: a braided stream. The delta created by this braided stream had a triangular shape when seen from above, like many Terran deltas (origin of phrase delta v?).

Euan stood at the foot of the lowest falls and watched the white water pour down and smash into a foamy brilliance of bubbles. In the late-morning light the water looked as if diamonds had been crushed into a cream. From time to time mist swept over him, and his helmet camera clouded, or streamed with lines of water drops. The rattle and rush of the water was loud, and if his companions spoke, as it sounded like they did, it was not possible for those on the ship listening to Euan’s feed to understand them. Nor was it clear that Euan himself heard them, or was trying to.

After a while the four walkers trooped down the estuary in a ragged line, Euan ahead of the rest. By now the settlers had thoroughly explored the braided streams of the valley, placed a little aluminum footbridge across one channel, and pushed boulders around in the shallows of others to make stepping-stones, so that they could get onto the central islands of the delta, in a more or less straight trail to the south end of the beach lagoon, where they could cross one more aluminum footbridge to get to the beach.

The islands between the braided streams were variously sand, mud, gravel, or talus; tough hiking no matter which, unless they walked on curving natural ramps and mounds of hardened mud, which resembled what Terran sources called eskers. By now their bootprint trails crossed many of these ramps, and thus connected many of the triangular or lemniscate islands in the delta.

Euan led the way along one of these paths, appearing to be
headed for the sea. From the beach at the south end of the lagoon they had established a switchbacked trail up a beveled section of the sea cliff; on this day they were planning to ascend these switchbacks and then walk back on the burren around to Hvalsey. It was a popular loop walk.

Then came a cry for help from one of Euan’s companions and he looked back, his helmet camera’s view swinging with his head. Only two companions were in sight, both charging down to the bank of one of the braided streams. The fourth one had left their path, apparently, and was now waist deep in what appeared to be some kind of quicksand. Luckily she seemed to have hit a harder layer and was not immediately sinking any farther. She was about three meters from higher ground; this ground looked about the same as the sand she had wandered onto, but by the evidence of her own bootprints, it was firmer underfoot.

Euan hurried over to them and said, “Clarisse, why did you go out there?”

“I wanted to look at a rock. It looked like it might be a hematite.”

“Where’s the rock?”

“It turned out to be a reflection of the sun off a puddle.”

Euan didn’t reply at first. He was looking around, surveying the terrain.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Lie down toward us, and I’ll lie down toward you, and we’ll hold each other’s wrists, and Nanao and Kher will pull us both out.”

“I feel pretty stuck. What if they can’t do it?”

“Then we’ll call for help. But we might as well see if we can do it by ourselves first.”

“You’re going to get very muddy.”

“I don’t care. Are you on something hard, do you think, or have you just stopped sinking?”

“I don’t feel anything really hard under my feet.”

“All right. Lay your upper body flat on the surface. Here we go.”

Clarisse leaned forward until her chest was on the mud before her. She kept her eyes on Euan’s, and he knelt and stretched out to her. They reached out and held on to each other’s wrists, and Nanao and Kher gripped Euan by the ankles and began to pull back up the slope. At first nothing happened, and Euan laughed.

“I’m going to be taller when this is over!”

Clarisse said, “I’m sorry.” Then: “Maybe we should have strapped our wrists together.”

“I’ve got a good grip on you,” Euan said.

“I know, it hurts.”

“Straps would hurt more. I won’t squeeze any harder than this.”

“Good.”

“Here we go again,” Nanao said. “Hold on.”

Again there appeared to be nothing happening, but then Clarisse exclaimed, “I can feel my feet moving! All of me, really.”

“Best it be all of you,” Euan said. Nanao and Kher laughed, then resumed their tugging.

“Not a steady pull,” Euan said to them. “Do it in pulses. Start and stop, but don’t completely stop.”

Soon they could see that Clarisse was coming up out of the mud, and Euan being dragged back. The farther out she came, the faster the process went. Soon she was only knee deep in the mud. Then, as they were finishing the pull, she said, “Ow, my shin.”

Nanao and Kher stopped pulling.

“My leg ran into something hard.”

“Got to get you out anyway,” Euan said. “Twist that foot up and to the side as we pull.”

“Okay. Go again.”

She winced as they continued. Then she was skidding across the surface of the mud, and the four of them were all crawling away from the flat, then seated on harder ground. Their exterior suits
were muddied around the feet and hands especially, and for Euan, all across his front side; and Clarisse was completely covered with mud from the waist down, also across her chest.

She pointed to her left shin, where a streak of blood marred the brown mud. “I told you I hit something. There must have been a rock in the mud there.”

“Let’s get that taped up,” Euan said.

“We broke her seal,” Nanao said.

“It was bound to happen,” Euan replied. “It’ll be all right.”

Kher took a roll of suit tape from his thigh pocket, and while the others washed Clarisse’s shin down with water scooped from the river, he cut off a length of it with the scissors on his thigh pack knife. When the break was clean and they had dried it with a cloth in her thigh pack, Kher applied the length of tape to the break and held it against Clarisse’s leg until it had bonded.

“Okay, now we need to get back.”

“Which way is fastest at this point?”

“I think going down to the beach and up the cliff trail to the overlook, don’t you?”

“Not sure. Let’s see what the maps say.”

They consulted their wristpads and decided it would be better to turn around and go back the way they had come.

They hiked back in silence. It was the first time that the physical barrier between Aurora and their bodies had been breached. It did not seem an auspicious way to do it, but it was done, and now there was nothing more they could do except return quickly, and attend to Clarisse’s cut. She said it didn’t hurt but only stung, and so they walked fast. In less than two hours they were back in Hvalsey.

Social or psychological pressure was building inside the ship, as so many people wanted more and more urgently to get down onto Aurora. Images of people walking around in suits, getting thrown
to the ground by the force of the wind, to many were not a caution but an incentive. Also the vistas of the ocean from the sea cliffs, the crosshatched textures of the beach sand, the skies at sunrise, the low hums, little shrieks, and otherworldly howls of the wind over the rocks, the occasional storms with their clouds, lashing rains, sea fogs: all these sights and sounds called to the people on the ship, and not a few began to demand passage down. Ten greenhouses in Hvalsey were in operation, the bamboo plants were growing a meter a day, the atmosphere had been confirmed as safe for direct breathing, and a lot more construction was waiting to be done. Really the moment had come to begin mothballing the ship, instituting their plan to keep it operational by way of the deployment of a small maintenance crew of 125 people, who would rotate annually, so that everyone aboard could live on Aurora most of the time. This was their desire; only a few (207, in fact) expressed the wish to stay within the ship’s familiarity, and those who did were often regarded as anxious, fearful, even craven. Although some of these supposedly fearful people were in fact bold in their declarations, despite being in the minority; and this rallied a little bit of support for their view and quietened their critics. “This is my home,” said Maria, Freya’s host in Plata. “I’ve lived all my life in this town, I’ve farmed this land. This biome is the place I love. That Greenland down there is a black rock in a perpetual gale. You’ll not be able to farm it with those long nights, you won’t be able to do much of anything outdoors. You’ll live indoors like we do up here, but not as well. Why shouldn’t I stay here and live out my days and take care of this place? I volunteer to stay! And I won’t be surprised if a fair number of you all who are clamoring to go down there now will eventually ask to come back up and join me. I’ll be happy to welcome you back, and take care of the place in the meantime.”

Median age of those declaring they would prefer to stay was 54.3 years. Median age of those clamoring to go down to Hvalsey
was 32.1 years. Now, after Maria’s declaration went around the rings, there were 469 who declared a preference to stay in the ship. For purposes of maintenance of the ship, also to avoid crowding the new settlement on Aurora, this shift was felt to be a good thing. A sense of anxiety created by the various social pressures of aggregated individual desires lessened. Average blood pressure dropped.

Despite the variety of opinions and feelings, the sense grew in those still on the ship that it was time for all those who wanted to, to descend. Now the ones most urging patience, and a measured pace of immigration, were people already on the ground, who were worried about a sudden influx of newcomers. In saying this they had to be careful not to offend those still in the ship—careful not to sound as if they had any rights in the matter, or were trying to protect what many felt was simply luck of the draw, an unearned privilege. It had to be presented as simply a matter of logistics, of not overwhelming the systems established. There was a protocol to be followed, and they had set it up with good reasons; there was not yet enough shelter in Hvalsey to accommodate everyone who wanted to descend. It was going to take some time for all that infrastructure to get built and established. Food also was a factor; if too many people came down, they could neither grow enough food on Aurora, nor keep growing it on the ship to send down to Aurora, having to an extent abandoned the farms on the ship. Without a careful transition they could inadvertently create food shortages in both places. And they didn’t have the means to get people back up to the ship very quickly. Return was not easy; Aurora’s gravity well and atmosphere meant their spiral launch tube assembly, now built and working well, could only launch so many ferries, as they had to split water and distill the fuels, and also smelt and print the ablation plates for them to
deal with the rapid launch up through the atmosphere. Return to the ship was a choke point in the process of settlement, there was no doubt of that. It had not been planned for.