Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “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:

  “Our sidewalk over the abyss

  We build ahead of us as we go,

  Give us the planks and we’ll make it work

  Until a time we don’t want to know.”

  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.