Aurora: A Child of Two Worlds: A Science Fiction Novel. David A. Hardy
* * *
Anne Pryor, Aurora, came out of her reverie, suddenly dazzled by low evening sunlight blazing through a cleft between two lava outcrops. Near the shrunken Sun the sky was a washed-out blue, but the color shaded through deep pink to a deep indigo only a few degrees higher.
It must be time to return to the Hut—an empty propellant tank which had been parachuted down and landed on small retro-rockets and inflation bags. Sectioned into two halves, the Hut contained living and sleeping quarters plus a laboratory and an admin and communications center.
A rising plume of ochre dust showed that the rover was approaching on its daily round to pick up crew-members who’d been left at various locations.
Aurora packed up her equipment and walked a few meters to where she would be easily visible to the driver.
* * * *
The next day was a rest day for Aurora. Recreational activities were very important on such a long mission, to avoid boredom and the stress of working continuously in close proximity with the same people day after day. Some of the crew spent hours recording messages that were squirted in one short burst on the radio link to their loved ones on Earth, or composing e-mails. Others read, watched video films, wrote, played chess, listened to or played music, or engaged in various games—the physical ones being made more interesting by the low gravity and, when played out of doors, by the thin atmosphere.
Golf was a favorite, out on the desert. Players used a ball which was less massive than its Earth equivalent and made of a plastic material full of holes, like a sponge, so that in the one-third gravity it travelled about the same distance as a normal ball back home. The Martian golf ball was fluorescent green so it would show up against the reddish terrain. Even so, lost balls were common. Since the supply of balls was not inexhaustible, each also contained a microminiaturized radio transmitter, similar to those sometimes used on Earth to tag birds and small animals.
Aurora enjoyed a game of golf herself, but had decided to become the first artist on Mars. (Not the first in space, for Alexei Leonov and Alan Bean had long ago beaten her to that landmark.) Before leaving Earth she had tried to inveigle a friend who worked in the laboratories of a paint company (had she but known it, a distant, multinational descendant of Dobson & Dart, next door to which she had lived as a small child) to produce pigments and a medium which would work in sub-zero temperatures and a carbon dioxide/nitrogen atmosphere with a pressure only one per cent of Earth’s. All attempts had failed. A polymeric paint with an electrically heated palette and “brush” had been the most likely contender, but even with it the results had been lumpy and unsatisfactory. Chalks or pastels could be made to work, but she never felt that they produced “real” art.
So instead she used a device which had become popular with avant-garde artists on Earth: a “canvas” which combined computer graphics and the latest flat-screen technology. It was less than a centimeter thick. The brush was a type of light-pen which could be adjusted by touching a key-pad to produce wide, flat strokes, thin pen-like lines, or gradated airbrush effects—or anything in between. With a virtually infinite range of colors, the resulting image could be saved and its crystal matrix finally fixed so that no further changes could be made, accidentally or even deliberately. Once the key-pad unit was unplugged and detached, the image became a one-off, permanent work of art, ready for hanging.
So now she was back on the southern flank of Arsia, sitting on a light metal stool just inside the entrance to a lava tube, the tube’s opening serving as a natural frame for the terrain which she was attempting to capture. As she had done many times before, she marveled at the realness of the scene before her. At times it was easy to forget that she was on an alien world and to find herself thinking that she was back in Iceland or Kamchatka. Then, with an overwhelming wave of emotion, she would realize where she actually was. She had seen space art back on Earth, of course—had even tried her hand at imaginary planetary scenes herself—and of course she had seen the photographs taken by the unmanned rovers and airprobes which had preceded the manned mission. But observing the landscape for hours made her see minute details—textures, veins, cracks, color differences, qualities of light and shadow, reflections—which would otherwise have gone unobserved. No artist based back on Earth, and no photograph, could hope to capture these in the way that she could. Yet some scientists wanted to send only robots to this world, she thought. How absurd! Those scientists must be as soulless as the robots they thought we should send. And as lacking in imagination....
Against the dark cave entrance the sky was a luminous lavender. Below it an intersecting network of small crevasses was proving difficult to sketch. She had already blocked in some weird formations of twisted lava that formed the foreground.
To the east, against the slope of the volcano, a pale plume rose. She glanced at the watch built into the sleeve of her silvered suit. Surely it was too early for the rover? Yes, of course it was. The angle of sunlight was telling her that it was only early afternoon. And surely, anyway, that plume was too white to be dust?
Intrigued, she got up and, in an astronaut’s slow-motion steps, picked her way across the rugged ground to where the haze was still visible, over a kilometer away. By the time she was within a few meters from the spot her pulse was racing. From a deep pit surrounded by a rough cone of tumbled lava, a nebulous mist rose, dissipating quickly in the thin air.
Aurora tongued her radio-mike on. “Pryor to Base. Pryor to Base? I think I have an anomaly here.”
“Anomaly!” The unemotional language of science.
“Roger, Pryor, Base here—Vitali speaking. What do you have, Anne?”
She was glad that it was Vitali Orlov who was on duty, as she had formed quite a friendship with the bluff but genial Russian engineer. Of course, like the rest of the team she was grateful to him, too, for having got them down to the surface safely: he had been the pilot of the conical Lander. A genuine democracy existed among the crew, since each was an expert in at least two fields, and took his or her responsibility to the rest very seriously, but Orlov was nominally in command of the landing party, having seniority because of his much greater experience of space travel. He had helped build and had served in the International Space Station, and had flown many Soyuz flights to and from that.
“I suggest that you get some of the geology team out here, a.s.a.p., Vitali. I’ve got some sort of activity coming from what looks like a hornito.”
“Activity? Have you got your water-bottle filled with vodka—or is it bourbon?”
“If it wasn’t full of water, which it is, it would be a good single malt whisky! No, listen, I’m quite sober, and dead serious. Now move your ass and get someone out here right away with instruments and cameras—especially video.”
There was a beep and a second voice broke in: “Rover 1 here, Claude speaking. We’re already on our way over in your direction, Anne. Our seismometers picked up a small quake—only about two on the Richter Scale—about an hour ago, but we hadn’t been able to pinpoint it. So, thanks for your input; you can go back to your daubing now!”
“Anne here. You have to be joking! I’m not about to miss this, rest day or not!”
Twenty minutes later the rover appeared over a low scarp, bouncing across the uneven lava on its metal-mesh “tires”. But, by the time it had drawn up and its own dust cloud had dispersed, the white mist had disappeared apart from a few fitful puffs. The funnel-like walls of the little cone were crusted with a rime of ice crystals, glittering like tiny diamonds.
French geologist Claude Verdet was the first to give his opinion. His choice as a crew member had been a masterpiece of political diplomacy. To be sure, France had a big stake in the mission, but so had Germany, and the Germans had provided much of its ground support. Claude, although French, had been on attachment via ESA to the Sänger company in Germany for some years, and was thought of as part of their establishment. In addition, he was of Creole ancestry and black enough to satisfy the vociferous organizations on Earth who insisted on the inclusion of minorities in just about every undertaking. Such political considerations might have had to be overruled on the Mars mission, where everyone’s lives might at any moment depend on one or