Aurora

3 IN THE WIND

And went down in the ships, standing on tongues of fire, down to the west coast of the island they called Greenland. Its tip pointed at Aurora’s north pole, but the shape of the landmass was very like, they said. Actually the match was approximate at best, a .72 isomorphy on the Klein scale. Nevertheless, Greenland it was.

Its rock was mostly black dolerite, smoothed flat by the ice of an ice age. The ferries carrying people landed near its west coast without incident, close to the robotic landers they had sent down previously.

In the ship almost everyone gathered in their town squares and watched the landings on big screens, either in silence or raucously; it was different town by town. Whatever the reaction, almost everyone’s attention was fixed on the screens. Soon they would all be down there, except for a rotating maintenance crew that would keep the ship running. Other than those people, everyone was to live on Aurora. This was good, because almost everyone who expressed an opinion said they wanted to go down. Some confessed they were afraid; a few even said they had no interest in going down, that they were content in the ship. Who needed bare rock, on a lifeless moon, on the shore of an empty sea, when they already had this world they had lived in all their lives?

Some asked this, but most then answered, I do.

And so they watched the landings on their town screens with an intensity nothing else had ever inspired. Median heart rate, 110 beats a minute. A new world, a new life, a new solar system they intended to inhabit, to terraform and give to all the generations that would follow. Culmination of a voyage that had begun on the savannah more than a hundred thousand years before. New beginning of a new history, new beginning of time itself: Day One, Year Zero. A0.1.

In ship time, 170.040.

Freya’s friend Euan was in the first landing crew, and Freya watched for him on the screens, and listened to his feed as he talked his way around the little shelter already there on the surface next to the landed ferries. Everyone in the landing party was transmitting to family, friends, town, biome, ship. Euan’s voice was lower in tone than when he was a boy, but otherwise he sounded just as he had when they were kids in Nova Scotia: excited, knowing. It was as if he expected to see more than anyone else down there. The sound of his voice made Freya smile. She didn’t know how he had gotten into the first crew to go down, but on the other hand, he had been good at getting into things he wanted to get into. Crews had been selected by lottery from among those trained to the various landing and setup jobs, and he had no doubt passed the tests to determine who was competent to the tasks involved. Whether he had rigged the lottery too, she could not be sure. She kept her earbud tuned to his voice-over in particular. All in the landing party were talking to people up in the ship.

Planet E’s orbit was .55 AU in radius, closer to Tau Ceti than Venus was to Sol, but Tau Ceti emits only 55 percent of the luminosity of Sol, so E and E’s moon were receiving 1.71 times as much stellar radiation as Earth, while Venus receives 1.91 times as much. E’s moon, now called Aurora by everyone, orbited in a tidally locked, nearly circular orbit of E, at an average distance of 286,000 kilometers. E’s mass created a gravity of 3.58 g; Aurora’s was .83 g. This was the main reason they were going to try to occupy Aurora rather than E, which, though it fell in the class called “large Earth,” was too large, or to put it more precisely, had too strong a gravitational pull at the surface, for their rockets to launch off it, let alone for them to feel comfortable or even to survive.

Aurora received light both directly from Tau Ceti and by way of a powerful reflection of Tau Ceti’s light from the surface of E. This reflected sunlight (taulight?) was significant. Jupiter, for comparison, reflects about 33 percent of the solar radiation that hits it, and E’s albedo was almost as great as Jupiter’s. The sunlit part of E was therefore quite bright in Aurora’s sky, whether seen by day or night.

The surface of Aurora therefore experienced a complicated pattern of illumination. And because it was tidally locked to E, as Luna is to Earth, the pattern was different for the E-facing hemisphere and the hemisphere always facing away from E.

The hemisphere facing away from E had a simple pattern: its days and nights lasted nine days each, the day always full sunlight, the night fully dark, being starlit only; and never a sighting of E at all.

The hemisphere facing E had a more complicated pattern: its nine-day-long solar night included a very considerable amount of reflected sunlight from E, which always hung in the same spot in the sky, different spots from different parts of Aurora, but always fixed, while going through its phases. Nights on the E-facing hemisphere of Aurora saw E go from quarter phase (circle half illuminated) to full moon around midnight, waning to quarter phase again near dawn. Thus there was always significant E light during this side of Aurora’s solar night. The darkest time in this hemisphere actually came at noon during its solar day, when E eclipsed Tau Ceti, so there was neither taulight nor E light on the part of Aurora that was eclipsed, which was a very broad band across the middle latitudes.

There were also narrow libration lunes at the border of the two hemispheres of Aurora, in which E, while it went through its phases, rose and dipped just above or below the horizon. This libration rocking happened everywhere of course, but it was not so easy to see when it was high in the sky against the always shifting background of stars.

Possibly a diagram would make this regime clearer, but the analogy of Luna to Earth may help to make things comprehensible, as long as it is kept in mind that from Aurora, E seemed much larger in the sky, bulking about ten times larger than Earth seen from Luna; and because its albedo was high and it received 1.71 of Earth’s insolation, it was much brighter as well. Big, bright, and from wherever one stood on the E-facing hemisphere of Aurora, always fixed in the same spot in the sky, granting a slight libration shift. At their landing site, this spot was almost directly overhead, only a bit south and east of the zenith: a big glowing ball of a planet, waxing and waning slowly. “When we learn the phases, we’ll be able to use it like a clock,” Euan said to Freya. “A clock or a calendar, I don’t know which to call it. The day and the month are the same thing here. Whatever we end up calling it, it’s not a unit of time we had on the ship.”

“Yes we did,” Freya said to him. “Women’s periods. We brought the months with us.”

“Ah yes, I guess we did. Well, now they’re back in the sky again. But only eighteen days long. Wonder if that’s going to mess things up.”

“We’ll find out.”

They had chosen to land on Greenland partly because it was in the hemisphere facing E. Someone said that if one were standing on E looking up at Aurora, Greenland would have been located on the disk of Aurora about where a tear would leave the left eye of the man in the moon, on Luna as seen from Earth. A nice analogy.

The complicated regime of light on Aurora created very strong winds in its atmosphere, and the waves on its ocean surface were therefore often very large too. These waves had a very long fetch, indeed in some latitudes they never encountered land at all, but ran around the world without obstruction, and always under the pull of .83 g, so that they often reached a very large amplitude, well over 100 meters trough to crest, with the crests a kilometer apart. These waves were bigger than any that ever occurred on Earth, except in tsunamis. And since they never went away, during the nine-day nights the ocean surface froze over only in certain bays, and in the lee of various islands. When the time came for people on Aurora to take to the ocean, a time many spoke of enthusiastically, the seafaring would involve considerable challenges.

“So, now we’re about to go outside the station,” Euan said into his helmet speaker. Within the ship, 287 people were listening to his feed, while 1,814 people listened to other members of the landing expedition now leaving the station. 170.043, A0.3.

“Suited up, the suits are pretty flexible and light. Good heads-up display in the faceplate, and the helmet’s a clear bubble, at least all of it I can see, so it feels fine to have it on. The g feels just like on the ship, and the air outside is clear. Looks like it might be windy, although I don’t know why I say that. I guess I’m hearing it pass over the station buildings, maybe the rocks too. We’re far enough from the sea that it isn’t visible from here, but I hope we’ll be taking the car west until we get to the bay west of here and can have a look at the ocean. Andree, are you ready to go? All right, we’re all ready.”

Six of them were going out, to check on the robotic landers and the vehicles that were ready to drive. If the cars were good, they would take a drive west to the coast, five kilometers away.

“Ha-ha,” Euan said.

Freya settled down to listen to him and watch the view from his helmet cam.

“Now we’re outside, on the surface. Feels the same as in the ship, to tell the truth. Wow, the light is bright!”

He looked up, and the camera view of the sky flared with Tau Ceti’s light, then reduced it with filters and polarization to a round brilliance, big in the royal blue sky—

“Oh wow, I looked at it too long, I’ve got an afterimage, it’s red, or red and green both at once, swimming around. Hope I didn’t hurt my retinas there! I won’t do that again. I thought the faceplate would do better at filtering. It’s going away a little. Good. All right, lesson learned. Don’t look at the sun. Better to look at E, wow. What a giant round thing in the sky. Right now the lit part is a thick crescent, although I can see the dark side of it perfectly well too, I wonder if that comes through in the camera. I can see cloud patterns too, just as easy as can be. It looks like a big front is covering most of the dark part, sweeping into the part that’s lit. I’ve got a double shadow under me, although the shadow cast by E light is pretty dim—

“Wow, that was really a gust! It’s very windy. There’s nothing to show it here, the rocks are just sitting there, and I’m not seeing any dust blowing. The horizon is a long way off.”

He turned in a circle, and his audience saw flat ground in every direction. Bare black rock with a reddish tint, striated with shallowly etched lines. Like the burren, someone said, a part of Ireland where an ice cap had slid over flat rock and stripped anything loose away, leaving long, narrow troughs that crisscrossed the rock.

“It’s never this windy on the ship. Do these suits gauge wind speeds? Yes. Sixty-six kilometers an hour, it says. Wow. It’s enough to feel like you’re getting shoved by an invisible person. Kind of a rude person at that.”

He laughed. The others with him started laughing too, falling into each other, holding on to each other. Aside from their shenanigans, there were no visible signs of the wind. Cirrus clouds marked the sky, which was either a royal blue or a dark violet. The cirrus clouds seemed to hold steady in place, despite the wind. Atmospheric pressure at the surface was 736 millibars, so approximately equivalent to around 2,000 meters above sea level on Earth, though here they were only 34.6 meters above Aurora’s sea level. The wind was stronger than any they had experienced in the ship by at least 20 kilometers per hour.

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.

Then it was just midday again, and it would be for four more days, with E waxing overhead, dark gray again rather than black, the mottling of its own cloudscapes clearly visible, the crescent on its west side slowly fattening.

Up in the ship, Freya and Badim, watching mostly Euan’s helmet-camera feed on their screen throughout this event, banging around their apartment doing other things but returning time after time to the kitchen to look at it, stared at each other in their kitchen.

“I want to get down there!” Freya said again.

“Me too,” Badim said. “Ah, God—how I wish Devi had lived to see that. And not just from here, but from down there with Euan. She would really have enjoyed that.”

Then the wind came back, hard from the east. But now they knew that there might come a few hours of windlessness during eclipses. And there would surely be other such hours; on this world of constantly shifting light, the winds too would surely have to shift. They might be almost always strong, but as they changed from onshore to offshore, being so near the coast, there would surely be periods that would be still, or at least swirling. They were still learning how that worked, and no doubt would be for a long time to come; the patterns were not yet predictable. That was aerodynamics, Euan remarked: the air moving around a planet was always in flux, supersensitive, well beyond any modeling they were capable of.

So: wind. It was back, it would seldom go away. It would be a hard thing to deal with. It was the hard part of life on Aurora.

The good part, the glorious part, they all agreed, was the look of the land under the double light of Tau Ceti and E, especially early in the long mornings, and now, they were finding again, in the slanting light of the long afternoons. Possibly the experience of the eclipse had sprung something in their ability to see. In the ship they saw only the near and the far; this middle distance on Aurora, what some called planetary distance, others simply the landscape, at first had been hard for them to focus on, or even to look for, or to comprehend when they did see it. Now that they were properly ranging it, and grasping the spaciousness of it, it was intoxicating. It was enough to make them happy just to go outside and walk around, and look at the land. The wind was nothing compared to that.

One day an exploring party came back from the north, excited. Seventeen kilometers to the north of their landing site, there was an anomaly in the generally straight and cliffed coast, a small semicircular valley that opened onto the sea. This was a feature that had been visible from the ship, of course, and people still on the ship had reminded the surface party about it, and now this group had hiked up to visit it, and having seen it, had come back to base exclaiming its virtues.

It was either an old impact crater or an extinct volcanic feature, but in any case, a semicircular depression in the burren, with the straight side of the semicircle a beach fronting the sea. The explorers called it Half Moon Valley and said its beach was composed of sand and shingle, backed by a lagoon. In the low land behind the lagoon an estuary cut through the valley, then rose through a break in the low cliff of the burren, first as a braided, gravel-bedded river, then as a set of swift tumbling rapids. And the entire valley, they said, was floored with soil. From space this soil appeared to be loess. The explorers’ closer inspection had indicated it was a combination of loess, sea sand, and river silt. Calling it soil was perhaps inaccurate, as it was entirely inorganic, but at the very least it was a soil matrix. It could quickly be turned into soil.

This was such promising news that the settlers quickly decided that they should move there. They freely admitted that one powerful attraction was the possibility of getting out of the wind. But there were other advantages as well: access to the ocean, a good supply of fresh water, potential agricultural land. The prospect was so enticing that some of them even wondered why they hadn’t landed there in the first place, but of course they were reminded by people in the ship (who had been reminded by the ship) that the robotic landers had had to give the valley a wide berth, to be sure they came down on flat rock.

Now they were safely down, and in exploration mode, and their settlement was still quite mobile, being almost entirely composed of landers; they had built their wind wall but not yet started on buildings. So they could make the move fairly easily.

Over the next few days, therefore, everyone in the station walked up to see the sea valley, and agreed the moment they did that the move should be made. This kind of unanimity was said to have happened so infrequently on the ship (in fact it had never happened) that the people still on the ship were happy to accede to the plan on the ground.

“As if we could stop them,” Freya remarked to Badim.

Badim nodded. “Aram says they are acting ominously autonomously. But it’s okay. We’ll all be down there soon. And it looks like a good place.”

At this point, people from the ship were being ferried down to the moon in modules that then served as their living quarters. Nothing was going as quickly as many on the ship would have liked, but everyone had to agree that nothing more could be done to speed the process. They only had so many ferries, and then some had to be refueled and launched back up to ship. Now that they were going to move the settlement to Half Moon Valley, all the work to expand their living space would be delayed. But a brief delay was felt to be well worth it, given the many advantages that would follow the move.

So the settlers got to work moving, a task that seemed easy until they began to do it, when the little declivities and breaks in the burren turned out to be more obstructive to moving their living modules than had been foreseen. The shallow little grabens were easy to walk down small ravines into and out of, and so they had hiked to the valley and back without impediment, but moving their modules on wheeled frames, and their construction robot vehicles, and even their rovers, across them was not so easy. And the grabens were all so long, and trending east-west, that they often could not be flanked.

A best route was found that crossed as few of these troughs as possible, using the algorithm that solves the traveling salesman problem, notorious to all those worried about errors endemic to certain greedy algorithms. But even after extensive cross-checking, the minimum number of graben crossings turned out to be eleven. Each trough had to be bridged, and this was not easy, given the dearth of bridge materials and the weight of the loads on the wheeled carts.

So it was a slow and ponderous trek, and soon after they began, sunset came again. They did not let this stop them, having decided they could make their trip by the light of E. It hung up there in its usual spot, half illuminated—what on Earth they called a quarter moon, an unusually logical name, it must be said. Just after sunset was as dark as the nights got, as E waxed to full and then waned to the other quarter moon before sunrise. The light cast by quarter E was around 25 lux, which was 25 times the illumination of the full moon on Earth; and though it was four thousand times less than direct sunlight on Earth, and six thousand times less than full taulight on Aurora, it was still about the same illumination as a nicely lit room at night in the ship, which was certainly enough to see by. So they worked in this light, and formed a long caravan of their vehicles, and headed north over the burren. In the end they declared the E light quite beautiful, easy on the eyes, things slightly drained of color but extremely distinct.

Euan and the rest of the bridge-building team went into action when they came to the edge of the first trough. One of them drove a stone-cutting vehicle to the edge of the trough, well away from where they intended to cross, and put to work a rock saw attachment at the end of the vehicle’s backhoe. Cubes of rock were cut from the side of the graben, then lifted and conveyed hanging from the backhoe to a steep-walled section of graben, where the opposite side was both close and as vertical as could be found. The first cube was hard to get loose, but with some knocking with the side of the backhoe they managed it. Cubes three meters on a side were as large as the vehicle could safely lift. When they got them to the edge of the graben they lowered them into the trough, all very slowly, especially if the wind was gustier than usual. Every four or five cubes, they had to stop and swap out the saw blades they were using, both the circular blades and the thin up-and-down saws that Euan called dental floss. Their printer refurbished worn blades with new synthetic diamond edges, and they attached these and continued cutting cubes and depositing them in the trough to make a rough ramp. When the ramp extended far enough into the trough that the vehicle arm couldn’t reach out far enough to place new cubes, they filled the gaps between cubes with gravel that other teams had crushed, then unrolled by hand an aluminum mesh carpet to provide a bridge surface smooth enough to drive onto. Euan then drove the cutter vehicle out onto this ramp, another cube dangling heavily from its front end, everything looking precarious, especially when swaying in hard gusts of wind, until he reached the leading edge of the new ramp and could lower the next cube of rock into place.

They were nearly done with this first ramp when Eliza dropped a new cube into place without realizing the trough bottom was not smooth. This was perhaps a result of them working in E light, but in any case, the new cube tilted into another cube already in place in a way that meant their vehicle could neither lift it nor move it, without dangerously tipping the vehicle.

Euan took over the controls from Eliza to give it a try, but he couldn’t move it either, though he rocked the vehicle dangerously to the side. So it lay there blocking their way, making the ramp impassable, and tilted as it was, it looked like they would have to abandon the entire ramp and start over.

“Let me try something,” Euan said, and used the rock saw to cut a trapezoidal segment off the top of the tilted cube, then carefully wedged the segment into the gap left under the tilted cube. After attaching the pile-driver tip and doing some hard tamping with the crane, they concluded the combination was going to be stable enough to drive over, and so they continued cutting cubes and placing them in the trough, more carefully than ever, often with Euan given the controls to make the final drops.

“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.

E’s year was 169 Terran days long. The Auroran month, 17.96 Terran days long, therefore divided into the solar year of 169 days to create about 9.2 months a year, and thus the usual problem of trying to reconcile lunar months to solar years.

They did not worry about that now.

With the town walls under robotic construction, and the platting of the town finished and building sites being prepared, Euan frequently joined the teams going out to explore the sea valley. And he wanted to take off his helmet and breathe the ambient air.

This came as no surprise to Freya. The data from the monitoring stations were making it clear that Aurora’s atmosphere was breathable by humans, that indeed Aurora’s atmosphere was the most Earthlike aspect of their new home, and the main reason it scored so high in Earth analog rubrics. So as he joined all the scouting expeditions he could, Euan pushed harder and harder for official permission to take off his helmet. “It’s going to happen sooner or later,” he said. “Why not now? What’s keeping us from it? What are we afraid of?”

Of undetected toxins, of course. This was what he was told, and to Freya the caution was obvious and justified. Poisonous chemical combinations, unseen life-forms: the precautionary principle had to guide them. The Hvalsey council insisted on it, and also referred the question to the ship’s executive council, who said the same thing.

Euan and others of his opinion pointed out that their atmospheric and soil and rock studies had now gone right down to the nanometer level, and found nothing but the same volatiles they had detected from space, plus dust and fines as expected. The atmospheric gases were much like the air in the ship, except slightly less dense. Studies on the ground had confirmed the abiologic explanation for the oxygen in the atmosphere; they could even estimate its age, which was about 3.7 billion years. Tau Ceti, brighter then, had split Aurora’s hot ocean water into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen had escaped to space, leaving the oxygen behind. The chemical signatures of that action were unambiguous, a finding that had reassured the biology group that they did indeed have the place to themselves, as indicated by everything else they had seen.

Euan wanted to start that part of their new history, the first moment of going outdoors and breathing the open air. Freya said this to him during one of their conversations, and he replied, “Of course! I want to feel that big wind fill my lungs!”

The executive council continued to ignore the biology group and to refuse permission, to Euan or anyone else. Once the seal was broken between themselves and Aurora, there would be no going back. They needed to wait; to experiment on plants and animals first; to be patient; to be sure.

Freya wondered what Devi would have said about it, and asked Badim what he thought, but he only shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “She was both cautious and bold. What she would say about this, I just don’t know.”

The executive council asked the security council to consider the matter and make a recommendation, and the security council asked Freya to join their meeting. Badim said the invitation was because of her friendship with Euan. The committee members were worried about him in particular.

The security council met to take up the question. Freya said to them, “I’ve been trying to imagine what Devi would have said about this, and I think she would have pointed out that the people on Aurora have had to take shelter in buildings they constructed by cutting stone. They’ve faced the stone with diamond sprays and aluminum, but there have been periods in the construction process when they’ve been exposed to cut stone. That isn’t exactly the same as going out into the open air, or jumping in the ocean, but it is exposure of a sort. So is going outside in suits and afterward going back inside still wearing the suits, and taking them off. What I mean to say is, inevitably they are already in contact with the planet. As soon as they landed, exposure was inevitable. And when they went out onto the surface in suits, even more so. They couldn’t stay inside a hermetically sealed chamber, they’re in contact with the place. And that’s good, right? That’s where we all hope to be. And nothing has happened to them, and they’ve been down there for over forty days. So keeping them confined indoors or in their suits is a conservatism that doesn’t conserve anything. It doesn’t acknowledge the reality of the situation. And it’s always better to acknowledge the reality of the situation. This is what Devi would have said, I think.”

Aram nodded at this; Song too nodded. If their system of governing had been a direct democracy, it was likely that the people on the surface would have been allowed to go out and open their suits and let the wind fill their lungs. But their government was made up of councils that for many years had often selected their own members, in effect. The ship’s computer was advisory only, and the ship tended to be conservative in matters of risk assessment and risk management, in ways everyone had seemed to want from it. So its programming seemed to indicate.

Now the security council again voted to keep the settlement closed off from the ambient environment, and those voting for this included even Aram and Song. The executive council did the same. But the time seemed near when that might change.

Down in Hvalsey, they were having more trouble dealing with the winds. Through the long morning of the daymonth there was a steady offshore wind of about fifty kilometers per hour, with gusts as strong as a hundred. There was a slight katabatic effect coming off the sea cliff that made the river canyon particularly windy. At middaymonth, during the strange darkness of the solar eclipse, there was a period of slackening winds, and then of comparative calm, and everyone on the surface (126 people now) wanted to get out in this calm time, which could last past the end of the eclipse for as much as twenty or thirty hours, but seldom more. There were limits on how many people could leave the shelters at once, so there was a scramble for spots on the schedule during this slack time, because at some point in the early afternoon of the daymonth, the onshore wind would begin, a hard flow of air barreling in off the sea into the interior of Greenland, as the land got hotter than the ocean and its air rose and vacated a space that cooler sea air rushed in to fill, the wind arriving in puffs and faltering breezes, then in a steady gentle push, which strengthened through the afternoon of the daymonth until sunset. This was generally the time of strongest onshore winds, although that varied of course, as storm systems swirled around Aurora in the usual fractal nautiloid motions that occur when gases move around the exterior of a rotating sphere. Although Aurora’s day was also its month, it was still rotating once in that daymonth, and that slow rotation caused the air in the atmosphere to drag a little in relation to both hydrosphere and lithosphere, creating winds that curled and mixed to create the usual trades, polar swirls, and so on.

So: almost always windy. When it wasn’t, they left the shelters and walked around, enjoying the ability to do so without bending over into the gusts, without being thrown to the ground. Even in the dark of the eclipse they enjoyed being out in the still air, the beams from their headlamps lancing and crisscrossing to illuminate their sea valley and its backing cliffs.

Jochi had his name drawn in the lottery to go down, and he descended in the next group, and as soon as he could, got on the list to go out of Hvalsey town in a suit, and Freya watched with him as he went out and immediately was knocked off his feet by a katabatic gust. Everyone in his group was knocked over but one, and they all cried out in surprise or fear, as did Freya up in the ship. Jochi crawled around for a while, laughing, and got in the lee of the city wall and stood again, still laughing. He danced around in the shelter of the wall as if he were a winter lamb let out of the barn for the first time in spring. He gamboled.

Euan’s particular pleasure now was to hike a trail he had helped to establish along the south side of the river, exploring the estuary and then the beach between the lagoon and the ocean. The sand on the riverside and down on the beach was often hard-packed, under a loose layer that got lifted in the winds and deposited in miniature dunes that scalloped the packed sand under it. Near the water there were also very fine crosshatchings of sand, sometimes cut by watercourses so that many layers of this weave of layers was revealed. At first they said that Aurora had no tides, being tidally locked to Planet E and thus always tugged by it in the same direction, but now there were some people in the settlement who thought that the combination of Tau Ceti and Planet E might tug a bit harder on Aurora in the direction of Planet E, while when Tau Ceti was on the other side of Aurora, the contrary tugs of Planet E and the star would shift the water covering most of Aurora in ways that could be seen. And there were slight libration tides as well, created when Aurora rocked a little in its facing toward E. Thus there were two kinds of slight tides, both moving at the pace of the daymonth, but in different rhythms. And indeed on the beaches there was often a fine crosshatching that was perhaps evidence of these tides. They had not been able to measure changes in the height of the ocean, however, and so there were others who argued that the crosshatching resulted not from the two little tides, but from the steady inflow of big wave after big wave, each large one leaving a mark across and slightly at an angle to the previous waves. Most of the scientists still on the trip doubted that waves could leave such regular marks; some of them postulated they were sandstone layers exposed to the sea, and the residue of changing sea levels in different eras of Aurora’s history.

“So to sum up,” Euan said, “they’re either the marks of individual waves, or daymonth tides, or geological eons. Thanks for that clarification!”

He laughed at this. Looking closely at the beach and the oncoming waves was one of the great pleasures of his shore walks, he told Freya in one of their private conversations, and he spent many an excursion walking up and down the strand to the south of the river mouth, often stopping to inspect certain sections from his knees, or even while lying down.

Most of his time out of the town was spent in gathering sand and loess to add to their soil-building greenhouses. He brought back samples he thought were promising, one backpack at a time. The farmers were pleased to have new soil matrices to extend some experiments. If they liked certain samples Euan brought in, he would drive out in a rover and dig up larger quantities. They were getting good results in certain fields, including some newly engineered plants that produced a harvest of edible seeds in the nine days of the daylit part of the daymonth. These fast plants would likely remain unusual, but could supplement crops grown in their greenhouses to a more normal rhythm. Between greenhouse and altered plants grown outdoors, it seemed as if they were going to be able to provide themselves with enough food, and this was exciting to them all, both settlers on Aurora and those in the ship still waiting to come down.

One day, 170.139, Euan went out with three friends, Nanao, Kher, and Clarisse. As always when people went out on hikes like this, many of those still up in the ship sat before their screens and watched what the walkers’ helmet cameras showed them.

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.

The only solution was to hurry every project in Hvalsey, and be patient on the ship. Those in both places most aware of the logistical problems talked to the rest, reassured them, encouraged them; and hurried more.

Badim and Freya were among those counseling patience on the ship, although Freya also said she was on fire with the desire to descend. She watched Euan’s adventures on Aurora during most of her spare time, clutching Badim’s arm in the evenings before the screen and swaying a little, as if dizzy. She was in fact a little feverish compared to her normal temperature. She wanted down. But she spent her days doing what needed doing to keep Nova Scotia going, focusing on problems the way Devi would have, trying to deal with each problem in order of a priority of needs that ship helped her establish. She worked on the Gantt programs that Devi had left for her, stacking priorities like houses of cards. Risks averted, problems dodged, enough food grown to keep them all fed. It was never a simple calculation. But the Gantt programs were displayed on the screens in blocks of color, and she found she could manipulate the problems well enough to keep things going.

By working with this system, she saw that although they were losing volatiles in every launch of the ferries down to Aurora, now this problem could be solved by shipping compressed gases back from the moon up to the ship, and even water. What a relief to have relief at hand, after so many years of interstellar isolation! The resources of the Tau Ceti system were lovely to contemplate. Every meter of bamboo grown in Hvalsey was another plank in the floor they were now building under themselves.

This was the comfort Devi had never had.

One night as they watched the photos from Hvalsey on Badim’s screen, they discussed this aspect of their new situation, and Aram stood to recite one of their kitchen couplets:

On the morning of 170.144, A0.104, Euan came on Freya’s screen and asked her to get Badim to join their conversation. Freya called to Badim to come into the kitchen, and after seven minutes he blundered in, looking asleep on his feet, and sat next to her and slumped against her, looking curiously at the screen. “What?”

After a few seconds, it was clear he had appeared on Euan’s screen, and Euan nodded and said, “That woman we got out of the quicksand, Clarisse? She’s sick. She’s running a fever.”

Badim sat up straight. “Get her under the hood,” he said.

“We did.”

“She’s in the isolation clinic?”

“Yes.”

“How fast did you get her in there?”

“As soon as she mentioned that she felt bad.”

Badim’s mouth was pursed tight. How often Freya had seen this look. It was not Devi’s look, exactly; somewhat like it, but calmer, more sympathetic. It was as if he were imagining what he would do if he were in Euan’s place.

“Is she cooperating? Is she being monitored?”

“Yes.”

“Can you show me her readouts?”

“Yes, I’ve got them up here on my monitor. Have a look.”

Euan shoved his room camera sideways, and then Freya and Badim were looking at the isolation clinic’s medical screen, with Clarisse’s vital signs bumping and trembling as they trolled left to right, with flickering red numbers arrayed below. Badim leaned closer to their screen and pushed his lips this way and that as he read.

He took a deep breath.

“How do you feel?” he asked Euan.

“Me? I feel fine.”

“You and the others who were out there with her should also isolate yourselves, I feel. Also anyone who tended to this woman when she got back into your shelter.”

“Because she cut her shin?”

“Because she cut her suit. Yes.” Badim’s lips were a tight knot. “I’m sorry. But it makes sense to take every precaution. Just in case.”

No reply from Euan. His camera stayed trained on the monitor.

“She’s got quite a fever,” Badim said quietly, as if to Freya. “Pulse fast and shallow, a little a-fib, T cell counts high in the bloodstream. Cerebellum working hard. Looks like she’s fighting something off.”

“But what?” Freya said, as if for Euan.

“I don’t know. Maybe something a little toxic, there in the mud. Some accumulation of some metal or chemical. We’ll have to analyze for that.”

“Or maybe there’s some bug going around in Hvalsey that she caught,” Freya said. There were, of course, many viruses and bacteria in the ship, and therefore in Hvalsey too.

“Yes, maybe so.”

“Or maybe she’s gone into shock,” Euan said from off his screen.

“It’s slow for a shock reaction to that cut,” Badim said. “But you’re right, we should look at that. You should look at all that, but keeping her in iso. Do it by extensions. And really, the rest of you who came in contact with her should get into iso as well. Just to be safe.”

Again no reply from Euan.

Well, it was rubbish news, no doubt of that. Anyone would be disturbed. But for Euan, taking such obvious delight in his excursions on the surface, arguing vehemently for the opening of their helmets and the breathing of the open air of Aurora, it hit particularly hard. One could feel it in his silence.

When their call ended, Badim stood and shuddered, then just stood there for a long time, his head down.

“Better call Aram,” he said at last. “And Jochi. He should probably be in iso too. The problem is, they all should be isolated from all the rest, and they can’t do that.”

As it turned out, Jochi had been out in one of the expedition cars when the news of Clarisse’s fever came, and when he heard the news, he stayed in the car, locked inside. He acknowledged to the others in Hvalsey he was there, but refused to discuss his situation any further. There was air, water, food, and battery power to keep him out there for three weeks. People in Hvalsey spoke angrily to him, but he didn’t reply. The people up in the ship didn’t know what to say. Badim just shook his head when Freya asked him what he thought.

“He might be right,” Badim said. “I wish there was a car for everyone. But there isn’t. And no one person can stay isolated for long, there or anywhere.”

It was the middle of the night on 170.153, A0.113, and Freya was sleeping restlessly, when her screen spoke to her, quietly at first, so that Freya first muttered things, in what sounded like a dream conversation with her mother; but as the voice from the screen repeated “Freya… Freya… Freya,” in a way that Devi never would have, she finally woke, groggily.

It was Euan, in Hvalsey. “Euan?” Freya said. “What is it?”

“Clarisse died,” he said.

He didn’t have his camera on, or was sitting in the dark; it was just his voice, the screen was dark.

“Oh no!”

“Yes. Last night.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know. Looks like she had some kind of anaphylactic shock. As if she ran into something she was allergic to.”

“But what is there to be allergic to?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. She had asthma, but that was controlled. They gave her epinephrine four times, but her blood pressure dropped, her throat seems to have closed up on her, the ventral part of her heart went arrhythmic. The scans are showing empty heart…”

Long pause.

“She was still in isolation?”

“Yes. But of course she wasn’t when we brought her back in.”

“But you were all in your suits.”

“I know. But we took them off inside. We all helped her.”

He didn’t say more, and Freya didn’t speak either. They were in trouble down there, if what had happened to Clarisse had been caused by her accident. They wouldn’t be able to go out on the surface until they understood what it was. And if they determined that some local life-form had infected and killed her, they wouldn’t be able to go out ever again without massive precautions.

Nor would they be able to associate with each other freely, until it was demonstrated that whatever had killed her wasn’t contagious.

Nor could they come back up to the ship and risk infecting it.

So now they were confined to a biome much smaller than any on the ship, and maybe an infected one at that. Maybe a poisoned building, in which everything alive in it was already doomed.

All these possibilities were no doubt occurring to Freya, as they must have already to Euan. Thus the long silence.

Finally she said, “Is there anything I can do?”

“No. Just… be there.”

“I’m here. I’m sorry.”

“Me too. It was… It was beautiful down here. We were… I was having fun.”

“I know.”

She woke Badim and told him, then lay down on the couch in their living room, while Badim sat at their kitchen table making calls.

In between his calls she said to him, “I miss Devi. If she were alive, none of this would have happened. She would have insisted that we test the surface of the planet completely before anyone landed.”

“Hard to do by robot,” Badim remarked absently.

“I know. Years would have passed, everyone would have been furious with her. She would have been furious with them. But this wouldn’t have happened.”

Badim shrugged.

Later Euan called them again.

“I’m going out again,” he said.

“What!” Freya cried. “Euan, no!”

“Yes. Look. We all have to go sometime. So, maybe we’ve been fatally poisoned, maybe not. We’ll know soon enough. In the meantime, as long as your suit integrity is good, there isn’t any difference between staying in the compound or going outside. So I’m going to damn the torpedoes and go. I don’t see why not. Either way it’ll be okay. I mean, either I’m already infected, and I might as well spend my last days having fun, or I’m not, and I won’t be, as long as I don’t cut my suit open. Silly woman, I wish she hadn’t gone off the path, that was obviously quicksand she went off into, I don’t know what she could have been thinking, what she was going after. A blink on the water, she said. But really? Well, we’ll never know now. And it doesn’t matter. I’ll stay on hard ground. Maybe I’ll stay out of the estuary and up on the sea cliffs, that’s the best views anyway. Go out and see the dawn. No one here will stop me. We’re all sequestered anyway. Everyone’s locked in a room somewhere. No one could stop me without endangering themselves, right? And no one wants to anyway. So I’m going out to see the dawn. I’ll call you back in a little while.”

Life in the ship went silent, and took on the nature of a vigil, or a death watch, or even a wake. People murmured about the situation down on the surface, in theory speaking hopefully, in fact frightened and assuming the worst. Of course the woman could have died from shock, or asthmatic attack, or from an opportunistic growth of bacteria she already carried in her, part of the bacterial stock from the ship itself, which was by no means entirely benign, as they had often learned. As Aurora was or seemed to be inert, this last was even the likeliest explanation.

But was Aurora inert? Was it a dead moon, as it seemed to be? Was the oxygen in the atmosphere a result of abiologic processes, as had been assumed by the chemical signatures, and the lack of evident life on the moon? Or was there some kind of life they weren’t seeing, perhaps there in the mud of Half Moon Valley’s estuary?

But if it was in one place, it would be in more. So the ship’s biologists shook their heads, in frustration and ignorance. Euan went back out into the field, and since he was willing to do it, there were people who wanted him to bring back samples of mud from the region where Clarisse had fallen, to get as close to that quicksand as he dared, dig down and secure some mud in a safe flask, then bring it back to Hvalsey for study under the hoods. They already had the mud from Clarisse’s suit, of course, and they had her body, so the extra samples weren’t absolutely necessary, but some of the microbiologists wanted them anyway, to be able to check the local matrix uncontaminated by all that had happened since Clarisse had fallen into it.

Euan was happy to do this. Some of the other people in Hvalsey were also, and they went out in little groups, staying on trails and descending to the estuary in short expeditions, very unlike their previous trips. They hiked in silence, as if walking across a minefield, or making descents into hell. Raids on the inexpressible. Euan alone among them sang little ditties to himself, including a tune with the refrain “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego”—an old spiritual or faux spiritual, ship determined, with a biblical reference to prisoners of Babylon, surviving time in a fiery furnace by way of a protective intervention from Jehovah.

Euan sang these songs off the public channels, speaking only to Freya on their private channel. Some of the other explorers were behaving similarly, speaking only to people they knew well. On the ship, word of their various expeditions then spread by word of mouth. Those on the surface seemed to feel a new distance from those on the ship. It was all different than it had been before.

Jochi stayed in his car, sealed away from all the rest of the settlers, eating dried and frozen food. One night he suited up and went to one of the other expedition cars and took all the food and portable air tanks in it back to his car.

He had requested permission to return to the ship; every day’s communication from him to the ship began with the same request. So far the ship’s governing council had only refused his request once, and after that, left their refusal unspoken. No one was to be returned for now. The settlers were under quarantine.

So Jochi spent his time in his car, looking at his screen. He was able to operate some of the robotic medical devices under the hoods in the clinic lab where Clarisse had died, and he spent some of his time investigating the mud Euan and the rest had brought back in, making use of the clinic’s electron microscope. His training with Aram and the math team had been in mathematics, but as part of that team he had sometimes worked with the biophysicists, and in any case he was now investigating as much as he could, so Aram expressed the hope that he might find something helpful. Aram was sick with worry that Jochi was down there; he spent many hours in Badim and Freya’s kitchen, hunched over and wan, looking at the screens like everyone else.

For a long time Jochi said nothing about what he was finding. When Freya asked him about it, he only shrugged and looked out at her from her screen.

Once he said, “Nothing.”

Another time he said, “Mathematics is not biology. At least not usually. So, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Should I send you more of the medical archives from the solar system feed?” Freya asked.

“I’ve looked at the index. I don’t see anything that will help.”

A week later, more than half the people in Hvalsey had fevers. Jochi stayed in his car. He didn’t ask to return to the ship anymore.

Euan started going out into the estuary again, or the sea cliffs. He slept out there, and seldom came in to eat. Everyone in Hvalsey behaved a little differently, and it wasn’t clear they were talking to each other very much. One day a few of them arranged a dance, and they all wore something red to it.

Jochi called Aram one morning and said flatly, “I think I may have found the pathogen. It’s small. It looks a little like a prion, maybe. Like a strangely folded protein, maybe, but only in its shape. It’s much smaller than our proteins. And it reproduces faster than prions. In some ways it’s like the viris that live inside viruses, or the v’s, but smaller. Some seem to be nested in each other. The smallest is ten nanometers long, the largest fifty nanometers. I’m sending up the electron microscope images. Hard to say if they’re alive. Maybe some interim step toward life, with some of the functions of life, but not all. Anyway, in a good matrix they appear to reproduce. Which I guess means they’re a life-form. And we appear to be a good matrix.”

“Why us?” Aram asked. He had linked Badim into the call, given its significance. “We’re alien to the place, after all.”

“We’re made of organic molecules. Maybe it’s just that. Or we’re warm. Just a good growth medium, that’s all. And our blood circulation moves it around in us.”

“So they’re in that clay from the estuary?”

“Yes. That’s the highest concentration. But now that I’ve found them, I’ve seen a few almost everywhere. In the river water. In seawater. In the wind.”

“They must need more than water.”

“Yes. Sure. Maybe salts, maybe organics. But we’re salty, and organic. And so is the water down here. And the wind rips the salts right into the air.”

When three more of the people in Hvalsey died in the same way as Clarisse, of something like anaphylactic shock, and then Euan came down with a fever too, he went out by himself, around the estuary’s edge to the beach under the short cliffs, at the south end of the lagoon.

It was windy as always, the offshore wind of the midmorning of the daymonth. So once he got onto the beach and under the sea cliffs, he was mostly out of the wind. The katabatic gusts came barreling down the gap of the estuary and hit the incoming waves, holding up their faces for a time as they rose up in the shallows, also flinging long plumes of spray back from the crests. These arcs of spray were barred by fat little rainbows, called ehukai in the Hawaiian language. Planet E was a thick crescent in its usual spot in the sky, very bright in the dark blue, so that the light in the salt-hazed air over the sea seemed to come from all directions, and suffuse everything. The double shadows there on the ground were faint, and every rock and wave seemed stuffed with itself.

“This would have been a nice place to live,” Euan said.

He was talking only to Freya now, on their private channel. She was sitting on the chair by her bed, hunched over her stomach, looking at the screen. Euan was looking here and there, and her screen showed whatever he was looking at.

“A beautiful world, for sure. Too bad about the bugs. But I guess we should have known. That stuff about the oxygen in the atmosphere being abiologic—I guess you’ll have to rethink that one. I suppose it could still be true. But if these things Jochi found exhale oxygen, then probably not.”

Long silence. Then Freya heard him heave a breath, in and out.

“Probably they’re like archaea. Or a kind of pre-archaea. You’ll have to keep an eye out for that. There might be other chemical signals in oxygen that would reveal its origins. The ratio of isotopes might be different depending on how it got expressed into the air. I wouldn’t be surprised. I know they thought they had a rubric there, but they’ll have to recalibrate. Life might be more various than they thought. That keeps happening.

“Not that you’ll have much of a chance to test it here,” he went on after a while. He was walking on the beach now. The wind was scraping across his exterior mike, and rolling sand grains down the tilted beach into the foam surging up at his feet.

“I guess you’ll have to try to do something with F’s moon now. Presumably it’s dead. Or even try E.” He looked up at it, big in the blue sky. “Well, no. It’s too big. Too heavy.”

Two minutes later: “Maybe you can just keep living on the ship, and stock up on whatever you run out of, from here and from E. Terraform F’s moon if you can. Or maybe you can resupply and get to another system entirely. I seem to recall there’s a G star just a few more light-years out.”

Long silence.

Then:

“But you know, I bet they’re all like this one. I mean, they’re either going to be alive or dead, right? If they’ve got water and orbit in the habitable zone, they’ll be alive. Alive and poisonous. I don’t know. Maybe they could be alive and we live with them and the two systems pass each other by. But that doesn’t sound like life, does it? Living things eat. They have immune systems. So that’s going to be a problem, most of the time anyway. Invasive biology. Then on the dead worlds, those’ll be dry, and too cold, or too hot. So they’ll be useless unless they have water, and if they have water they’ll probably be alive. I know some probes have suggested otherwise, like here. But probes never stop and test thoroughly. They might just as well be running their tests from Earth, if you think about it. Bugs like these we’ve got here, you aren’t going to find those unless you slow down and hunt really hard. Live nearby for a while and look. At which point it’s too late, if you get a bad result. You’re out of luck then.”

Long silence as he walked south along the beach.

Then:

“It’s too bad. It really is a very pretty world.”

Later:

“What’s funny is anyone thinking it would work in the first place. I mean it’s obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it’s alive it’s going to be poisonous, if it’s dead you’re going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you’ve got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work, it would take thousands of years. So what’s the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you’ve got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the fuck were they?”

This sounded much like Devi, and Freya put her head in her hands.

Later:

“Although it is a very pretty world. It would have been nice.”

Later:

“Maybe that’s why we’ve never heard a peep from anywhere. It’s not just that the universe is too big. Which it is. That’s the main reason. But then also, life is a planetary thing. It begins on a planet and is part of that planet. It’s something that water planets do, maybe. But it develops to live where it is. So it can only live there, because it evolved to live there. That’s its home. So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It enjoys its home. As why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t even bother to try to contact anyone else. Why would you? You’ll never hear back. So that’s my answer to the paradox. You can call it Euan’s Answer.”

Later:

“So, of course, every once in a while some particularly stupid form of life will try to break out and move away from its home star. I’m sure it happens. I mean, here we are. We did it ourselves. But it doesn’t work, and the life left living learns the lesson, and stops trying such a stupid thing.”

Later:

“Maybe some of them even make it back home. Hey—if I were you, Freya? I would try to get back home.”

Later:

“Maybe.”

Later, still walking south, Euan passed a ravine cleaving the sea cliff. The cliff was a little lower to each side of this cleft, and the cleft ran back and up into the burren at a steep angle, such that there was a clattering creek running down it, which pooled in the sand of the beach, under the cliffs to each side. Where the pool was closest to the sea, a shallow broad flow of water cut through wet sand and poured down to the swirling foam.

The wind whistled down the cleft. Higher up the cleft narrowed, and the walls to each side steepened, looked impassable. Rather than climb up there and investigate, Euan walked right through the beach stream, splashing fearlessly, though at its middle it was knee deep. His fever was quite high at this point. The numbers from his suit were there at the bottom of his screen, glowing red.

Freya hunched over, arms across her stomach, in a position she had often taken when Devi had been ill. She got up and went to their kitchen and got some crackers to eat. She chomped on the crackers, drank a glass of water. She inspected the water in her glass, swallowed some more of it, returned to her chair and the screen.

Euan continued south and came to a broader part of the beach, with some wind-sculpted dunes sheltered under the cliff. He scrambled to the top of the tallest dune. Tau Ceti was a blaze too bright to look at, pouring its light over the top of the cliff and onto the ocean. Euan sat down.

“Nice,” he said.

The wind was still at his back. As one looked down at the waves, it was clear that the wind held them up for a time as they tried to break; they swept in toward the land, then reared up and hung there with a vertical face as they moved onshore, trying to fall but getting held up by the wind; then finally the steepest section would pitch down in a roiling burst of white spray, some of which whiteness launched upward and was caught on the wind and hurled back over the wall of white water. Quick fat ehukai crossed these tails of spray.

“I’m feeling hot,” Euan said. He walked off the edge of the dune and glissaded down the sand facing the sea.

Freya clutched her stomach under both forearms, put her mouth down on the back of one fist.

Euan looked out at the waves for a long time. The dark gray strand between beach pool and ocean was crosshatched with black sand streaks, far to each side of the shallow runnel of water pouring down into the breakers.

Freya watched him silently. His fever was really very high.

He lay down on the sand. His helmet cam now mostly showed the sand under him, rumpled and granular, flecked with streamers of foam. Broken waves swept up the strand, stalled, retreated in a pebbly rush, leaving a line of foam. The water hissed and grumbled, and occasionally waves offshore cracked dully. Tau Ceti had separated from the sea cliff now, and all the water between the beach and the horizon was a bouncing mass of blue and green. The broken waves were an intense tumbling white. The waves as they were about to break turned translucent. Euan sounded like he might be asleep. Freya herself nodded over her arms, put her forehead on the table.

Much later something caused her to raise her head. She watched as Euan stood up.

“I’m hot,” he croaked. “Really hot. I guess it’s got me.”

He dug around in his little backpack.

“Well, I’m out of food anyway. Water too.”

He tapped away at his wristpad. There was a whirring noise.

“There you go,” he said. “Now I can drink from the stream. From the pool here too, I’m sure. It must be mostly fresh.”

“Euan,” Freya croaked. “Euan, please.”

“Freya,” he replied. “Please yourself. Look, I want you to turn your screen off.”

“Euan—”

“Turn your screen off. Wait, I guess I can do it myself from here.” He tapped again at his wristpad. Freya’s screen went dark.

“Euan.”

“It’s all right,” he said out of the dark screen. “I’m done for. But we’re all done for sometime. At least I’m in a beautiful place. I like this beach. I’m going to go for a swim now.”

“Euan.”

“It’s all right. Turn your sound off too. Turn it down anyway. These waves are loud. Wow, this water is cold. That’s good, eh? Colder the better.”

Water sounds enveloped his voice. He was saying “Ah, aah,” as if getting into a bath that was too hot. Or too cold.

Freya held her hands over her mouth.

The watery sounds got louder and louder.

“Aah. Okay, big wave coming! I’m going to ride it! I’m going to stay under if I can! Freya! I love you!”

After that there were only water sounds.

Several of the people in Hvalsey disappeared into the surrounding countryside. Some went off in silence, suit GPSs disabled; others stayed in communication with their friends on the ship. A few broadcast their ends to anyone who cared to watch and listen. Jochi stayed in his car and refused to speak to anyone, even Aram, who grew silent himself.

Then all of the Hvalsey survivors except for Jochi ignored instructions from the ship to stay on Aurora and prepped one of the ferries to return them to orbit. Doing this without help from the ship’s ferry technicians was difficult, but they looked up what they had to know in the computers they had, and fueled the little craft with liquid oxygen and crammed into the ferry, and used the spiral sling and rocket boost to achieve a rendezvous with the ship in its orbit.

As they had been forbidden reentry into the ship, and told that no quarantine was going to last long enough for them to be judged safe to reenter, it was an awkward question what to do when their ferry arrived to dock with the ship. Some in the ship said that if those in the ferry survived for a certain period of time, say a year (some said ten), then it would be obvious that they were not vectors for the pathogen, and could be allowed to reenter. Others disagreed with that. When the committee that was hastily convened by the executive council and charged with making the decision announced that they did not think there was any quarantine period long enough to prove the settlers were safe, many were relieved to hear it; others loudly disagreed. But the question still remained what to do about the landing party, now approaching the ship in its orbit.

The emergency committee spoke to the Greenlanders by radio, telling them to keep a physical distance from the ship, to remain near it as a kind of small satellite of it. The Greenlanders agreed to that, at first; but when they were running out of food, water, and air, and resupplies did not appear when promised from the ship, due to a technical problem with the ferry being used for the task, as was explained to them, they nevertheless powered their ferry in and approached the main lock in the ferry dock, at the stern end of the spine. From there they proposed to occupy Inner Ring A’s rooms at Spoke One, with the rooms permanently sealed off from the spine and the biomes. They would remain in those rooms and become as self-sufficient as possible, for as long a quarantine period as the people on the ship required. After that the question of reintegration could be reconsidered, and if people on the ship had become comfortable with the idea, the settlers might be able to rejoin the larger life of the ship.

After a brief meeting, permission to pursue this plan was expressly denied by the committee, as representing too much of a danger of infection to all the life on the ship. A small crowd of people, mostly men from Patagonia and Labrador, the two biomes at the end of Spoke One, gathered outside the ferry dock’s lock door and exhorted each other to resist any incursion by what they called the infected party. Others were alarmed when they saw on screens that this group was gathering, and some of them began to get on the trams and head for the spine to intervene in some poorly defined manner. In Labrador and the Prairie the tram stops began to fill with people, many angrily arguing with other groups they ran into. Fights broke out, and some young men levered the tram tracks off their piste in the Prairie, stopping traffic from moving around Ring B.

Hanging just outside the docking port, the settlers in their ferry reported that overcrowding in their little vehicle had caused something in it to malfunction in such a way that they were quickly running out of breathable air, and they were therefore going to enter the ship’s dock as proposed. They warned those in the ship that they were coming in, and the people inside the dock’s main lock door told them not to do it. People on both sides were shouting angrily now. Then lights on the operations console inside the dock showed that the settlers were coming in, and at that point some of the young men inside the operations room rushed the security council members there operating the lock, knocking them down and taking over the console. By now the shouting was such that no one could understand anyone else. The ferry entered the docking port, which automatically secured it in position. The outer door of the dock closed, the dock was aerated, and the dock’s entry walktube extended to connect the ferry hatch to the inner lock door, all automatically. The settlers in the ferry opened their hatch and began to leave the ferry by way of the walktube, but at the same time, the people now in charge of the dock’s operations console locked the inner lock door and opened the outer lock door, which in three seconds catastrophically flushed the dock and the walktube and the opened ferry of their air. All the seventy-two people in the ferry and walktube then died of decompression effects.

Surely the bad times had come again.