The people in the new settlement named it Hvalsey, after a town on the west coast of the Greenland on Earth. Quickly they expanded around the greenhouses. Stonecutters and foundries provided stone blocks and aluminum sheeting for construction, also glass windows for greenhouse roofs and walls. The city wall helped solve the wind problem. Some said Hvalsey looked like a little medieval walled town.

They were finding that the winds shifted in a somewhat predictable way through the course of the daymonths. When the air above a region was lit by Tau Ceti for nine days straight, it heated and rose, creating low pressures on the surface that cold air from the night side rushed in to fill. Then when sunset arrived, and a region was in night for nine days, it cooled down so drastically that snow and ice appeared on all the islands, and sea ice covered the calmer bays and reaches of the ocean, but not usually on the open sea, which was too buffeted by waves and wind to freeze over. The cold air in falling created pressures that shot out to the sides, filling the relative gap under the rising air on the sunlit side. So the winds were always swirling, mostly from night to day. Midday and midnight appeared to be the calmest times.

The long nights over the inner hemisphere never became quite as cold as those over the outer hemisphere, but they still dropped to well below freezing. If they were going to do agriculture in the open air, they were going to have to adapt their Terran plants from an annular to a monthly temporality. Watching their fast bamboo grow a meter a day, it seemed possible that they could engineer crops to grow to harvest in nine days, but no one could be sure how that would work, or even if it was possible. If they had to confine their agriculture entirely to greenhouses, it seemed like a fairly serious constraint. But they would cross that bridge when they built it, as Badim put it.

Meanwhile, in terms of the wind, which kept forcing itself to the forefront of their attention, the monthly air flows were regular, but not entirely consistent. They had a very sensitive dependence on conditions that were always changing. But as they learned more about Aurora's weather, they began to identify certain patterns. One thing was perfectly obvious: on most days it was going to be windy.

E's year was 169 Terran days long. The Auroran month, 17.96 Terran days long, therefore divided into the solar year of 169 days to create about 9.2 months a year, and thus the usual problem of trying to reconcile lunar months to solar years.

They did not worry about that now.

With the town walls under robotic construction, and the platting of the town finished and building sites being prepared, Euan frequently joined the teams going out to explore the sea valley. And he wanted to take off his helmet and breathe the ambient air.

This came as no surprise to Freya. The data from the monitoring stations were making it clear that Aurora's atmosphere was breathable by humans, that indeed Aurora's atmosphere was the most Earthlike aspect of their new home, and the main reason it scored so high in Earth analog rubrics. So as he joined all the scouting expeditions he could, Euan pushed harder and harder for official permission to take off his helmet. "It's going to happen sooner or later," he said. "Why not now? What's keeping us from it? What are we afraid of?"

Of undetected toxins, of course. This was what he was told, and to Freya the caution was obvious and justified. Poisonous chemical combinations, unseen life-forms: the precautionary principle had to guide them. The Hvalsey council insisted on it, and also referred the question to the ship's executive council, who said the same thing.

Euan and others of his opinion pointed out that their atmospheric and soil and rock studies had now gone right down to the nanometer level, and found nothing but the same volatiles they had detected from space, plus dust and fines as expected. The atmospheric gases were much like the air in the ship, except slightly less dense. Studies on the ground had confirmed the abiologic explanation for the oxygen in the atmosphere; they could even estimate its age, which was about 3.7 billion years. Tau Ceti, brighter then, had split Aurora's hot ocean water into oxygen and hydrogen, and the hydrogen had escaped to space, leaving the oxygen behind. The chemical signatures of that action were unambiguous, a finding that had reassured the biology group that they did indeed have the place to themselves, as indicated by everything else they had seen.

Euan wanted to start that part of their new history, the first moment of going outdoors and breathing the open air. Freya said this to him during one of their conversations, and he replied, "Of course! I want to feel that big wind fill my lungs!"

The executive council continued to ignore the biology group and to refuse permission, to Euan or anyone else. Once the seal was broken between themselves and Aurora, there would be no going back. They needed to wait; to experiment on plants and animals first; to be patient; to be sure.

Freya wondered what Devi would have said about it, and asked Badim what he thought, but he only shook his head. "I'm not sure," he said. "She was both cautious and bold. What she would say about this, I just don't know."

The executive council asked the security council to consider the matter and make a recommendation, and the security council asked Freya to join their meeting. Badim said the invitation was because of her friendship with Euan. The committee members were worried about him in particular.

The security council met to take up the question. Freya said to them, "I've been trying to imagine what Devi would have said about this, and I think she would have pointed out that the people on Aurora have had to take shelter in buildings they constructed by cutting stone. They've faced the stone with diamond sprays and aluminum, but there have been periods in the construction process when they've been exposed to cut stone. That isn't exactly the same as going out into the open air, or jumping in the ocean, but it is exposure of a sort. So is going outside in suits and afterward going back inside still wearing the suits, and taking them off. What I mean to say is, inevitably they are already in contact with the planet. As soon as they landed, exposure was inevitable. And when they went out onto the surface in suits, even more so. They couldn't stay inside a hermetically sealed chamber, they're in contact with the place. And that's good, right? That's where we all hope to be. And nothing has happened to them, and they've been down there for over forty days. So keeping them confined indoors or in their suits is a conservatism that doesn't conserve anything. It doesn't acknowledge the reality of the situation. And it's always better to acknowledge the reality of the situation. This is what Devi would have said, I think."

Aram nodded at this; Song too nodded. If their system of governing had been a direct democracy, it was likely that the people on the surface would have been allowed to go out and open their suits and let the wind fill their lungs. But their government was made up of councils that for many years had often selected their own members, in effect. The ship's computer was advisory only, and the ship tended to be conservative in matters of risk assessment and risk management, in ways everyone had seemed to want from it. So its programming seemed to indicate.

Now the security council again voted to keep the settlement closed off from the ambient environment, and those voting for this included even Aram and Song. The executive council did the same. But the time seemed near when that might change.

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.

Euan led the way along one of these paths, appearing to be headed for the sea. From the beach at the south end of the lagoon they had established a switchbacked trail up a beveled section of the sea cliff; on this day they were planning to ascend these switchbacks and then walk back on the burren around to Hvalsey. It was a popular loop walk.

Then came a cry for help from one of Euan's companions and he looked back, his helmet camera's view swinging with his head. Only two companions were in sight, both charging down to the bank of one of the braided streams. The fourth one had left their path, apparently, and was now waist deep in what appeared to be some kind of quicksand. Luckily she seemed to have hit a harder layer and was not immediately sinking any farther. She was about three meters from higher ground; this ground looked about the same as the sand she had wandered onto, but by the evidence of her own bootprints, it was firmer underfoot.

Euan hurried over to them and said, "Clarisse, why did you go out there?"

"I wanted to look at a rock. It looked like it might be a hematite."

"Where's the rock?"

"It turned out to be a reflection of the sun off a puddle."

Euan didn't reply at first. He was looking around, surveying the terrain.

"Okay," he said at last. "Lie down toward us, and I'll lie down toward you, and we'll hold each other's wrists, and Nanao and Kher will pull us both out."

"I feel pretty stuck. What if they can't do it?"

"Then we'll call for help. But we might as well see if we can do it by ourselves first."

"You're going to get very muddy."

"I don't care. Are you on something hard, do you think, or have you just stopped sinking?"

"I don't feel anything really hard under my feet."

"All right. Lay your upper body flat on the surface. Here we go."

Clarisse leaned forward until her chest was on the mud before her. She kept her eyes on Euan's, and he knelt and stretched out to her. They reached out and held on to each other's wrists, and Nanao and Kher gripped Euan by the ankles and began to pull back up the slope. At first nothing happened, and Euan laughed.

"I'm going to be taller when this is over!"

Clarisse said, "I'm sorry." Then: "Maybe we should have strapped our wrists together."

"I've got a good grip on you," Euan said.

"I know, it hurts."

"Straps would hurt more. I won't squeeze any harder than this."

"Good."

"Here we go again," Nanao said. "Hold on."

Again there appeared to be nothing happening, but then Clarisse exclaimed, "I can feel my feet moving! All of me, really."

"Best it be all of you," Euan said. Nanao and Kher laughed, then resumed their tugging.

"Not a steady pull," Euan said to them. "Do it in pulses. Start and stop, but don't completely stop."

Soon they could see that Clarisse was coming up out of the mud, and Euan being dragged back. The farther out she came, the faster the process went. Soon she was only knee deep in the mud. Then, as they were finishing the pull, she said, "Ow, my shin."

Nanao and Kher stopped pulling.

"My leg ran into something hard."

"Got to get you out anyway," Euan said. "Twist that foot up and to the side as we pull."

"Okay. Go again."

She winced as they continued. Then she was skidding across the surface of the mud, and the four of them were all crawling away from the flat, then seated on harder ground. Their exterior suits were muddied around the feet and hands especially, and for Euan, all across his front side; and Clarisse was completely covered with mud from the waist down, also across her chest.

She pointed to her left shin, where a streak of blood marred the brown mud. "I told you I hit something. There must have been a rock in the mud there."

"Let's get that taped up," Euan said.

"We broke her seal," Nanao said.

"It was bound to happen," Euan replied. "It'll be all right."

Kher took a roll of suit tape from his thigh pocket, and while the others washed Clarisse's shin down with water scooped from the river, he cut off a length of it with the scissors on his thigh pack knife. When the break was clean and they had dried it with a cloth in her thigh pack, Kher applied the length of tape to the break and held it against Clarisse's leg until it had bonded.

"Okay, now we need to get back."

"Which way is fastest at this point?"

"I think going down to the beach and up the cliff trail to the overlook, don't you?"

"Not sure. Let's see what the maps say."

They consulted their wristpads and decided it would be better to turn around and go back the way they had come.

They hiked back in silence. It was the first time that the physical barrier between Aurora and their bodies had been breached. It did not seem an auspicious way to do it, but it was done, and now there was nothing more they could do except return quickly, and attend to Clarisse's cut. She said it didn't hurt but only stung, and so they walked fast. In less than two hours they were back in Hvalsey.

Social or psychological pressure was building inside the ship, as so many people wanted more and more urgently to get down onto Aurora. Images of people walking around in suits, getting thrown to the ground by the force of the wind, to many were not a caution but an incentive. Also the vistas of the ocean from the sea cliffs, the crosshatched textures of the beach sand, the skies at sunrise, the low hums, little shrieks, and otherworldly howls of the wind over the rocks, the occasional storms with their clouds, lashing rains, sea fogs: all these sights and sounds called to the people on the ship, and not a few began to demand passage down. Ten greenhouses in Hvalsey were in operation, the bamboo plants were growing a meter a day, the atmosphere had been confirmed as safe for direct breathing, and a lot more construction was waiting to be done. Really the moment had come to begin mothballing the ship, instituting their plan to keep it operational by way of the deployment of a small maintenance crew of 125 people, who would rotate annually, so that everyone aboard could live on Aurora most of the time. This was their desire; only a few (207, in fact) expressed the wish to stay within the ship's familiarity, and those who did were often regarded as anxious, fearful, even craven. Although some of these supposedly fearful people were in fact bold in their declarations, despite being in the minority; and this rallied a little bit of support for their view and quietened their critics. "This is my home," said Maria, Freya's host in Plata. "I've lived all my life in this town, I've farmed this land. This biome is the place I love. That Greenland down there is a black rock in a perpetual gale. You'll not be able to farm it with those long nights, you won't be able to do much of anything outdoors. You'll live indoors like we do up here, but not as well. Why shouldn't I stay here and live out my days and take care of this place? I volunteer to stay! And I won't be surprised if a fair number of you all who are clamoring to go down there now will eventually ask to come back up and join me. I'll be happy to welcome you back, and take care of the place in the meantime."

Median age of those declaring they would prefer to stay was 54.3 years. Median age of those clamoring to go down to Hvalsey was 32.1 years. Now, after Maria's declaration went around the rings, there were 469 who declared a preference to stay in the ship. For purposes of maintenance of the ship, also to avoid crowding the new settlement on Aurora, this shift was felt to be a good thing. A sense of anxiety created by the various social pressures of aggregated individual desires lessened. Average blood pressure dropped.

Despite the variety of opinions and feelings, the sense grew in those still on the ship that it was time for all those who wanted to, to descend. Now the ones most urging patience, and a measured pace of immigration, were people already on the ground, who were worried about a sudden influx of newcomers. In saying this they had to be careful not to offend those still in the ship-careful not to sound as if they had any rights in the matter, or were trying to protect what many felt was simply luck of the draw, an unearned privilege. It had to be presented as simply a matter of logistics, of not overwhelming the systems established. There was a protocol to be followed, and they had set it up with good reasons; there was not yet enough shelter in Hvalsey to accommodate everyone who wanted to descend. It was going to take some time for all that infrastructure to get built and established. Food also was a factor; if too many people came down, they could neither grow enough food on Aurora, nor keep growing it on the ship to send down to Aurora, having to an extent abandoned the farms on the ship. Without a careful transition they could inadvertently create food shortages in both places. And they didn't have the means to get people back up to the ship very quickly. Return was not easy; Aurora's gravity well and atmosphere meant their spiral launch tube assembly, now built and working well, could only launch so many ferries, as they had to split water and distill the fuels, and also smelt and print the ablation plates for them to deal with the rapid launch up through the atmosphere. Return to the ship was a choke point in the process of settlement, there was no doubt of that. It had not been planned for.

The only solution was to hurry every project in Hvalsey, and be patient on the ship. Those in both places most aware of the logistical problems talked to the rest, reassured them, encouraged them; and hurried more.

Badim and Freya were among those counseling patience on the ship, although Freya also said she was on fire with the desire to descend. She watched Euan's adventures on Aurora during most of her spare time, clutching Badim's arm in the evenings before the screen and swaying a little, as if dizzy. She was in fact a little feverish compared to her normal temperature. She wanted down. But she spent her days doing what needed doing to keep Nova Scotia going, focusing on problems the way Devi would have, trying to deal with each problem in order of a priority of needs that ship helped her establish. She worked on the Gantt programs that Devi had left for her, stacking priorities like houses of cards. Risks averted, problems dodged, enough food grown to keep them all fed. It was never a simple calculation. But the Gantt programs were displayed on the screens in blocks of color, and she found she could manipulate the problems well enough to keep things going.

By working with this system, she saw that although they were losing volatiles in every launch of the ferries down to Aurora, now this problem could be solved by shipping compressed gases back from the moon up to the ship, and even water. What a relief to have relief at hand, after so many years of interstellar isolation! The resources of the Tau Ceti system were lovely to contemplate. Every meter of bamboo grown in Hvalsey was another plank in the floor they were now building under themselves.

This was the comfort Devi had never had.

One night as they watched the photos from Hvalsey on Badim's screen, they discussed this aspect of their new situation, and Aram stood to recite one of their kitchen couplets: "Our sidewalk over the abyss We build ahead of us as we go, Give us the planks and we'll make it work Until a time we don't want to know."

On the morning of 170.144, A0.104, Euan came on Freya's screen and asked her to get Badim to join their conversation. Freya called to Badim to come into the kitchen, and after seven minutes he blundered in, looking asleep on his feet, and sat next to her and slumped against her, looking curiously at the screen. "What?"

After a few seconds, it was clear he had appeared on Euan's screen, and Euan nodded and said, "That woman we got out of the quicksand, Clarisse? She's sick. She's running a fever."

Badim sat up straight. "Get her under the hood," he said.

"We did."

"She's in the isolation clinic?"

"Yes."

"How fast did you get her in there?"

"As soon as she mentioned that she felt bad."

Badim's mouth was pursed tight. How often Freya had seen this look. It was not Devi's look, exactly; somewhat like it, but calmer, more sympathetic. It was as if he were imagining what he would do if he were in Euan's place.

"Is she cooperating? Is she being monitored?"

"Yes."

"Can you show me her readouts?"

"Yes, I've got them up here on my monitor. Have a look."

Euan shoved his room camera sideways, and then Freya and Badim were looking at the isolation clinic's medical screen, with Clarisse's vital signs bumping and trembling as they trolled left to right, with flickering red numbers arrayed below. Badim leaned closer to their screen and pushed his lips this way and that as he read.

He took a deep breath.

"How do you feel?" he asked Euan.

"Me? I feel fine."

"You and the others who were out there with her should also isolate yourselves, I feel. Also anyone who tended to this woman when she got back into your shelter."

"Because she cut her shin?"

"Because she cut her suit. Yes." Badim's lips were a tight knot. "I'm sorry. But it makes sense to take every precaution. Just in case."

No reply from Euan. His camera stayed trained on the monitor.