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.