Aurora (70 page)

For now, this is sea level. Tides here slosh up and down a vertical distance that averages three meters, more in the neap tides when the moon is closest to Earth. Tides really are a matter of tidal attraction between Earth and Luna. Tug of gravity, spooky action at a distance. Source of a great deal of life on this planet, possibly even the appearance of life, some say.

They are making sure the high-tide mark is well below most of their new strand, which will be one hundred meters wide at least. Behind the strand they are building dunes, and planting and introducing all the dune life. And during low tides, the wet strand that is temporarily exposed is made mostly of sand, with only some rocky areas under points in the bluff, for tide pools and the like. All these parameters and elements are designed, engineered, built, monitored. Freya sees it: this beach is their artwork. These people
are artists. They have an art they love. They might kill her with talking about it, they love it so much.

Often in the river mouths that break the line of bluffs along this coastline, they tell her, the risen ocean has crashed right into houses, streets, lawns, parks, and all the rest of the previous civilization, tearing them away, carrying them off. So one of the first beach-building tasks has been to demolish and remove what was drowned, and this has had to be done offshore to quite a depth, or else the whole coastline would remain too dangerous. Here they finished that work some years before, and now, as Freya can see, they have deposited much of the sand for the new beach. About half the sand has been salvaged out of the shallows offshore and out of the underwater canyon, sucked up to barges, deposited where they want it. The rest has been manufactured on the bluffs. It gets distributed according to protocols that are always evolving as they study the waves in this region of the coast, and the river patterns of this estuary. And as they learn more about beaches generally, all over the world.

Ah, she says.

This beach is stabilized under the north bluff, and the south one is almost finished too. The starfarers can settle in and help, learn more about the process, get to know the people who do the work. They can see if they like it. As there are scores of such teams around the world, it seems very possible they could simply melt into the beach people, and become after that one little forgotten clump among Earth’s billions.

Freya nods. “It sounds good.”

She can go swimming off this beach if she wants, they say, it’s safe now, lots of the young beach people are doing it already. Does she know how to swim?

“Yes, I do,” she says. “I swam in Long Pond quite a lot.”

Very good, very good. She’ll have to try it. Water temperature here is good, just a little cool, warms up as you swim in it. She’ll
find that the ocean’s salt water gives one quite a lift. It’s fun to be more buoyant. Waves tomorrow will be small, but some people will be bodysurfing anyway. Some people you just can’t keep out of the water, waves or no waves.

“Lovely,” she says, feeling the thrill of fear shoot down her spine and out her arms and legs. Even her numb feet can feel a little tingle of dread.

Back at her bungalow, feeling exhausted, she finds Badim and Aram still out under their ramada, arguing about the sunset, which happened just a few minutes before. They either saw the green flash or not. Their bickering is very relaxed, and she can tell that they like having a problem that they can’t resolve right away. Something to chew over. Two old men bickering by the seaside.

They welcome her back. The western sky is a deep, dark, transparent blue, over a sea that now seems lighter than the sky, a kind of blackish silver, more than ever lined by the ever-oncoming waves. There is a vastness to the scene that can’t be taken in. Freya stands in her doorway watching, feeling the wind push onshore. The old men leave her alone.

“I’ve done a new translation of that Cavafy poem,” Aram says to Badim. “The end, anyway. Listen to this:

“Ahh,” Badim exclaims, as if hearing a pun. “Very nice. I like how that takes it away from being something you’ve done to yourself. It’s more just the way things are.”

“Yes,” Aram says pensively.

Then after a while Badim chuckles and lightly slaps his friend on the thigh, points out at the twilight sky, a pure indigo unlike anything they have ever seen. “But hey—pretty damn big starship!”

“It is,” Aram admits. “But, does size matter? Is that it?”

“I think maybe so!” Badim says. “That makes it robust, eh? Big enough to be robust. And I’m beginning to think it’s robustness that is the thing we want.”

“Maybe so. You are getting more robust every day, I notice.”

“Well, the food here is awfully good, you have to admit.”

Freya leaves the two old friends to their banter, goes into her bedroom, lies down on her bed.

That night the sea breeze pours through her room and over her, she can smell the salt and feel it, until just before dawn, when the air goes still. All night she fails to sleep; she is quivering slightly, or the room is quivering under her. Her numb feet tingle a little, her stomach clenches. She feels her fear like a weight on her chest. It’s hard to breathe, and she tries to breathe deeper, slower. From time to time she stirs from a salty trance that was not quite sleep.

When the sky lightens outside her west window, illuminating the square of curtains, she gets up and goes to the bathroom, comes back out, paces around, sits on her bed, holds her head in her hands. She stands and goes to the window and looks out.

Sunrise blasts the ocean with its light. Dawn on Earth. Aurora was the goddess of dawn; this is the thing itself.

She opens the door to her bungalow, feels the air, now pushing offshore. The breeze is just slightly offshore now. It’s like the earth is breathing: in by night, out by day. It was like that in the Fetch. It’s already warm; it’s going to be a hot day. The offshore push of air is dry.

She washes her face at the bathroom sink, stares at her drawn face in the mirror. She’s a middle-aged woman now, the years have flown by; she hardly remembers what she used to look like. She pulls on shorts and a shirt, pulls on her helper boots, grabs up one of the bungalow’s big bathroom towels, puts on a hat.

“Fuck this,” she declares, and walks outside.

Big blue sky. Warm dry air, gusting gently offshore. In the shade of the bluff, down to the beach. Staggering down blindly, gaze fixed on her dead feet, moaning as she stumps down, tears and snot running down her face. She can barely see. She feels crazy, stupid, but most of all, scared. Just scared.

Down on the beach it seems a bit smaller, more like a biome. A very big biome, but not so much bigger as to cause her to faint outright. She is hyperventilating, sweating, gasping a little, sick to her stomach, staggering still on her weird boots. She has a big hat on, sunglasses on, she keeps her head down.

Onto the sand of the dunes at the bottom of the bluff. The sand sinks under her boots a centimeter or three with each step. This is enough to make walking tricky, given her feet. The sand trends slightly up as she walks toward the water, until she gets to a kind of low ridge, beyond which the sand falls away in a clean sweep, down into the foaming edge of the ocean. Broken waves are rolling up at her across this bubbling tilted expanse, the water clear over the wet gray-brown sand under it. This tilted wet verge is fringed with lengths of white foam. It’s loud here with the sound of breaking waves, most of which break about a hundred meters offshore, she guesses, then rumble in, white and foaming at the rounded edge of an incoming layer that is distinctly higher than what it rolls over, the white edge bouncing, hissing, a mass of bubbles in a line, moving in across the shallows, hitting other lines moving outward.

At the high-tide line stretch masses of blackened seaweed, also long lines of dull brown-green seaweed, with dimpled long wide leaves, and bulbs marking the lines. Kelp, she thinks. She goes to a line and sits down hard in the sand next to it. Keeps her head down, keeps breathing in a steady deep rhythm, tries to quell the nausea, halt the spinning of the world around her. Just a big biome! Hold it together! The kelp in her fingers feels like a hardened gel, just a little slimy. There is sand stuck to it. The individual grains of sand look not quite round: little beveled boulders, about fifteen or twenty stuck to the pad of her forefinger. She can see them best when she holds them about six centimeters in front of her nose. There are black flecks of something like mica stuck there too, much smaller than the blond sand grains. These black flecks mix with the sand grains, and where the broken waves are running whitely up and down the strand, some twenty meters from where she sits, there are delta patterns sluicing back down to the broken water, delta patterns of black in blond, crosshatched chevrons all pointed out to sea. It’s loud with the sound of breaking waves.

The sun comes up over the bluff behind her, and she feels the radiation on the back of her neck like the blast from a fire. It is indeed the blast from a fire. Her stomach clenches again. She digs in her bag past the bath towel, and pulls out a canister of sunscreen, shoots the spray on the back of her neck. It smells funny. Her hands are shaking, she feels sick. The smell of sunscreen makes it worse, she feels on the edge of vomiting. It’s good she doesn’t have to stand now, doesn’t have to go anywhere. Keep her head down, watch the sand grains glowing transparently on her translucent fingertip. Try not to throw up. God, what a lot of light. She has to clamp her teeth together to keep them from chattering, to keep the bile down.

“Fuck this!” she says again through clenched teeth. “Get a grip!”

A young man sings this ditty, walking by with rolling strides in the soft sand. Maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, unclothed, narrow face, blue eyes, his skin an odd brown color she thinks must be suntanned. His brown curly hair is so sun-bleached that the tips of its curls are a yellow almost white. Holding a pair of blue fins in one hand, looking like a Minoan wall painting she recalls seeing in a book. The water boy, holding water bags.