Some asked this, but most then answered,
“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.
“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.