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.