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 welclass="underline" 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.