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.