Aurora

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Badim agrees. “Strange to be as old as we are, and see it for the first time.” He turns and calls to Freya. “Girl, come see this green flash that may occur!”

  “You’re not that old,” she says to him. “You’re like the hundredth-oldest person in the ship.”

  “Well, even that would be old, but in fact I think I’m down to about fifteenth now. But let’s stay focused on the sunset. I’m told when the sun is three-quarters gone, you can look at it without damaging your eyes. Not for long, mind you, but long enough to see the green flash when it comes.”

  She stands just inside her big ocean-facing double doorway and looks out, clenching her fists at her sides. The estuary is just visible beyond the point of the bluff to the left, a wave-creased bay. Where there used to be a beach at the river mouth, stretching between two points of bluff, there is now a white line of broken surf. They are building their beach out from the bluffs on each side, on top of the drowned one.

  Waves slide in inexorably from the west, out of the slant sun mirrorflaking the ocean’s steely surface. Low but distinct lines of waves, visible as changes in the blue of the water, always approaching land. A strange thing to see. Out on the horizon is the faint gray bump of an island, poking over the clean line where sky meets ocean: light blue over dark blue, everything steely and dark in the late afternoon. Mild salty onshore breeze pouring in her doorway, seagulls planing by at eye level, their heads tilted down and off to the side. A line of pelicans below them passes north to south, a sudden vision out of the Jurassic, black silhouettes against the sun’s glare, slow flap of wings, though mostly they glide. The panic rises in Freya again, like a tide following its own mysterious pulls. She wants so badly to walk out into the open air, under the sky, but a clutch squeezes her heart, there’s nothing she can do about it, she can’t move. Even joining Badim and Aram under their ramada is too much for her. Nothing for it but go inside and try again later.

  Even though it’s late, her hosts call her room, they want to show her more of how their project works, and as they will stay in the cab of a big earthmover of some kind, she figures she can just handle it. Jet lag has her quivering.

  Out they go, room to room to cab. The earthmover moves sand from the giant piles of it in their receiving area, out onto the strand itself. In the horizontal light of late day they rumble and bounce down a long ramp to the new beach, now covered with vehicle tracks. Past smaller vehicles of various kinds, some plowing smaller and smaller piles of sand into flat surfaces, or pushing up dunes at the back of the beach. The important thing is to accept the new sea level and work with it, the people operating the earthmover tell her; it won’t go back down for centuries at best, and may never recede at all. But they are confident it won’t go any higher either; all the ice in the world that is likely to melt has already melted. There’s still a considerable ice cap in eastern Antarctica, but with temperatures stabilized at last, that one is likely to stay there. If not, well, too bad! More beaches to build!

  For now, this is sea level. Tides here slosh up and down a vertical distance that averages three meters, more in the neap tides when the moon is closest to Earth. Tides really are a matter of tidal attraction between Earth and Luna. Tug of gravity, spooky action at a distance. Source of a great deal of life on this planet, possibly even the appearance of life, some say.

  They are making sure the high-tide mark is well below most of their new strand, which will be one hundred meters wide at least. Behind the strand they are building dunes, and planting and introducing all the dune life. And during low tides, the wet strand that is temporarily exposed is made mostly of sand, with only some rocky areas under points in the bluff, for tide pools and the like. All these parameters and elements are designed, engineered, built, monitored. Freya sees it: this beach is their artwork. These people are artists. They have an art they love. They might kill her with talking about it, they love it so much.

  Often in the river mouths that break the line of bluffs along this coastline, they tell her, the risen ocean has crashed right into houses, streets, lawns, parks, and all the rest of the previous civilization, tearing them away, carrying them off. So one of the first beach-building tasks has been to demolish and remove what was drowned, and this has had to be done offshore to quite a depth, or else the whole coastline would remain too dangerous. Here they finished that work some years before, and now, as Freya can see, they have deposited much of the sand for the new beach. About half the sand has been salvaged out of the shallows offshore and out of the underwater canyon, sucked up to barges, deposited where they want it. The rest has been manufactured on the bluffs. It gets distributed according to protocols that are always evolving as they study the waves in this region of the coast, and the river patterns of this estuary. And as they learn more about beaches generally, all over the world.

  Ah, she says.

  This beach is stabilized under the north bluff, and the south one is almost finished too. The starfarers can settle in and help, learn more about the process, get to know the people who do the work. They can see if they like it. As there are scores of such teams around the world, it seems very possible they could simply melt into the beach people, and become after that one little forgotten clump among Earth’s billions.

  Freya nods. “It sounds good.”

  She can go swimming off this beach if she wants, they say, it’s safe now, lots of the young beach people are doing it already. Does she know how to swim?

  “Yes, I do,” she says. “I swam in Long Pond quite a lot.”

  Very good, very good. She’ll have to try it. Water temperature here is good, just a little cool, warms up as you swim in it. She’ll find that the ocean’s salt water gives one quite a lift. It’s fun to be more buoyant. Waves tomorrow will be small, but some people will be bodysurfing anyway. Some people you just can’t keep out of the water, waves or no waves.

  “Lovely,” she says, feeling the thrill of fear shoot down her spine and out her arms and legs. Even her numb feet can feel a little tingle of dread.

  Back at her bungalow, feeling exhausted, she finds Badim and Aram still out under their ramada, arguing about the sunset, which happened just a few minutes before. They either saw the green flash or not. Their bickering is very relaxed, and she can tell that they like having a problem that they can’t resolve right away. Something to chew over. Two old men bickering by the seaside.

  They welcome her back. The western sky is a deep, dark, transparent blue, over a sea that now seems lighter than the sky, a kind of blackish silver, more than ever lined by the ever-oncoming waves. There is a vastness to the scene that can’t be taken in. Freya stands in her doorway watching, feeling the wind push onshore. The old men leave her alone.

  “I’ve done a new translation of that Cavafy poem,” Aram says to Badim. “The end, anyway. Listen to this:

  “There’s no new world, my friend, no

  New seas, no other planets, nowhere to flee—

  You’re tied in a knot you can never undo

  When you realize Earth is a starship too.”

  “Ahh,” Badim exclaims, as if hearing a pun. “Very nice. I like how that takes it away from being something you’ve done to yourself. It’s more just the way things are.”

  “Yes,” Aram says pensively.

  Then after a while Badim chuckles and lightly slaps his friend on the thigh, points out at the twilight sky, a pure indigo unlike anything they have ever seen. “But hey—pretty damn big starship!”

  “It is,” Aram admits. “But, does size matter? Is that it?”

  “I think maybe so!” Badim says. “That makes it robust, eh? Big enough to be robust. And I’m beginning to think it’s robustness that is the thing we want.”

  “Maybe so. You are getting more robust every day, I notice.”

  “Well, the food here is awfully good, you have to admit.”

  Freya leaves the two old friends to their banter, goes into her bedroom, lies down on her bed.

  That ni
ght the sea breeze pours through her room and over her, she can smell the salt and feel it, until just before dawn, when the air goes still. All night she fails to sleep; she is quivering slightly, or the room is quivering under her. Her numb feet tingle a little, her stomach clenches. She feels her fear like a weight on her chest. It’s hard to breathe, and she tries to breathe deeper, slower. From time to time she stirs from a salty trance that was not quite sleep.

  When the sky lightens outside her west window, illuminating the square of curtains, she gets up and goes to the bathroom, comes back out, paces around, sits on her bed, holds her head in her hands. She stands and goes to the window and looks out.

  Sunrise blasts the ocean with its light. Dawn on Earth. Aurora was the goddess of dawn; this is the thing itself.

  She opens the door to her bungalow, feels the air, now pushing offshore. The breeze is just slightly offshore now. It’s like the earth is breathing: in by night, out by day. It was like that in the Fetch. It’s already warm; it’s going to be a hot day. The offshore push of air is dry.

  She washes her face at the bathroom sink, stares at her drawn face in the mirror. She’s a middle-aged woman now, the years have flown by; she hardly remembers what she used to look like. She pulls on shorts and a shirt, pulls on her helper boots, grabs up one of the bungalow’s big bathroom towels, puts on a hat.

  “Fuck this,” she declares, and walks outside.

  Big blue sky. Warm dry air, gusting gently offshore. In the shade of the bluff, down to the beach. Staggering down blindly, gaze fixed on her dead feet, moaning as she stumps down, tears and snot running down her face. She can barely see. She feels crazy, stupid, but most of all, scared. Just scared.

  Down on the beach it seems a bit smaller, more like a biome. A very big biome, but not so much bigger as to cause her to faint outright. She is hyperventilating, sweating, gasping a little, sick to her stomach, staggering still on her weird boots. She has a big hat on, sunglasses on, she keeps her head down.

  Onto the sand of the dunes at the bottom of the bluff. The sand sinks under her boots a centimeter or three with each step. This is enough to make walking tricky, given her feet. The sand trends slightly up as she walks toward the water, until she gets to a kind of low ridge, beyond which the sand falls away in a clean sweep, down into the foaming edge of the ocean. Broken waves are rolling up at her across this bubbling tilted expanse, the water clear over the wet gray-brown sand under it. This tilted wet verge is fringed with lengths of white foam. It’s loud here with the sound of breaking waves, most of which break about a hundred meters offshore, she guesses, then rumble in, white and foaming at the rounded edge of an incoming layer that is distinctly higher than what it rolls over, the white edge bouncing, hissing, a mass of bubbles in a line, moving in across the shallows, hitting other lines moving outward.

  At the high-tide line stretch masses of blackened seaweed, also long lines of dull brown-green seaweed, with dimpled long wide leaves, and bulbs marking the lines. Kelp, she thinks. She goes to a line and sits down hard in the sand next to it. Keeps her head down, keeps breathing in a steady deep rhythm, tries to quell the nausea, halt the spinning of the world around her. Just a big biome! Hold it together! The kelp in her fingers feels like a hardened gel, just a little slimy. There is sand stuck to it. The individual grains of sand look not quite round: little beveled boulders, about fifteen or twenty stuck to the pad of her forefinger. She can see them best when she holds them about six centimeters in front of her nose. There are black flecks of something like mica stuck there too, much smaller than the blond sand grains. These black flecks mix with the sand grains, and where the broken waves are running whitely up and down the strand, some twenty meters from where she sits, there are delta patterns sluicing back down to the broken water, delta patterns of black in blond, crosshatched chevrons all pointed out to sea. It’s loud with the sound of breaking waves.

  The sun comes up over the bluff behind her, and she feels the radiation on the back of her neck like the blast from a fire. It is indeed the blast from a fire. Her stomach clenches again. She digs in her bag past the bath towel, and pulls out a canister of sunscreen, shoots the spray on the back of her neck. It smells funny. Her hands are shaking, she feels sick. The smell of sunscreen makes it worse, she feels on the edge of vomiting. It’s good she doesn’t have to stand now, doesn’t have to go anywhere. Keep her head down, watch the sand grains glowing transparently on her translucent fingertip. Try not to throw up. God, what a lot of light. She has to clamp her teeth together to keep them from chattering, to keep the bile down.

  “Fuck this!” she says again through clenched teeth. “Get a grip!”

  “Let me take you to the beach!

  Na na na na na na na na na-na!

  Let me take you to the beach!

  Na na na na na na na na na-na!”

  A young man sings this ditty, walking by with rolling strides in the soft sand. Maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, unclothed, narrow face, blue eyes, his skin an odd brown color she thinks must be suntanned. His brown curly hair is so sun-bleached that the tips of its curls are a yellow almost white. Holding a pair of blue fins in one hand, looking like a Minoan wall painting she recalls seeing in a book. The water boy, holding water bags.

  “Are you going out swimming?” Freya asks him.

  He stops. “Yes, gonna ride some waves. There’s a great point break right out from here, called Reefers.”

  “Point break?”

  “Big reef out there about two hundred meters, easy to see at low tide. Most of the breaks will be rights, but it’s a south swell today, so there’ll be some lefts too. Are you going to go out?”

  “I can’t really feel my feet,” Freya says, desperate for an excuse. “I have these shoes that kind of walk for me. I don’t know what it would be like to swim.”

  “Hmm.” He frowns at this, stares at her as if he’s never heard of such a thing, and maybe he hasn’t. “How did that happen?”

  “Long story,” she says.

  He nods. “Well, if you had fins on, those you kind of swing from the knees anyway. Might help. And actually, if you just stand in the shallows, the water will mostly float you. You can use your arms, and shove off the bottom and catch the little waves.”

  “I’d like to try that,” she lies, or maybe it’s the truth. She swallows deeply. Her face is on fire, her fingers and lips are tingling, buzzing. Her big toes are hot.

  “Here come my friends; there might be another pair of fins in Pam’s bag, usually is.”

  Young man and woman, again naked, brown-skinned, tightly muscled, sun-bleached hair. Young gods and goddesses, naiads or whatever, she can’t remember the name for sea fauns, but these are them. Beach kids. They greet the youth talking to Freya, calling him Kaya. “Kaya, hey Kaya!”

  “Pam, have you got that extra pair of fins?” Kaya asks.

  “Yeah sure.”

  “Can you lend them to this lady? She wants to go out and ride.”

  “Yeah sure.”

  Kaya turns to her. “So, try it and see.”

  The three young people stare at her.

  “You do know how to swim?” Kaya asks.

  “Yes,” Freya says. “I swam in Long Pond all the time when I was a kid.”

  “Just stay in the shallows then, and you’ll be all right. Small swell today.”

  “Thanks.”

  Freya takes blue fins offered to her by the young woman. The three young ones run off into the surf, kicking arcs of white spray ahead of them, and when they get out thigh deep, falling over into a broken wave. After that they seem to be floating around to put on their fins, then they shove off into the approaching white walls of broken waves, which are breaking about thirty more meters out from them. Only then are they really swimming. They make it look easy.

  Freya pulls off her boots, stands, strips off her clothes, sprays herself all over with the sunscreen, picks up the blue fins they have left her, walks very carefully down into the broken
waves sloshing up the strand. Her feet are still numb, it’s like walking on short stilts, but there seems to be some new traction there in her big toes. The water is cool at first, she can feel that in the bones of her feet, but she quickly gets used to it. Not that cold. A surge runs up the beach over her ankles, then slides back down. The water under her is white with bubbles, more bubbles than water, and the bubbles hiss out their lives as they burst, throwing a fine spray calf high into the air. The water of an incoming wave suddenly loses momentum going up the tilt of the sand, then runs back down swiftly to a triple ripple, which is exposed only when the waves are farthest out. Maybe that’s true sea level. Here where she stands, water sloshes back and forth, therefore up and down, but mostly just back and forth. Waves breaking on a beach, this is how it looks, this is how it feels! Something loosens a little inside her, and she shivers now, feeling less sick than hot. Hot and yet shivering.

  She keeps her gaze down, but even so she can see or feel that overhead the sky is blue, mixed with a lot of white around the horizon. It’s really loud down here, all water sounds, mainly the crashing of waves; sometimes it’s a clean crack when a blue wave folds over and falls, then explodes into white spray and bounces in toward her. Mostly the sound is an ever-shifting, grumbling wet roar, water falling and breaking on itself, a zillion bubbles bursting. The whole ocean’s edge is a kind of low waterfall, falling on itself over and over. Glare of sunlight breaking in a million places on the water, bouncing in her eyes. With her sunglasses off it’s too bright to do anything but squint till her eyes are almost closed. It’s so bright that things are somehow dark.