Aurora (73 page)

And then she sees there’s a fourth wave breaking. Not fair! she thinks, and crash, she is slammed right to the bottom again, hard tumbling impact. Unbelievable force. No air in her, just have to hold on. Now she really will drown. Life flashing before eyes, the classic sign. Stupid star girl, done in at last.

She opens her eyes, fights toward the light. Light-headed, empty inside, blood burning, desire to breathe so great she can’t stop herself, must breathe even if she breathes water, simply must! Must! Doesn’t. Holds on somehow as she tumbles, light above, dark below, try to get up toward the light, but helpless in the tumble, just a rag doll tumbling.

She comes up again, gasps out and in again, careful this time not to breathe in water. Quick lessons here, she looks around to see if another wave coming—there is. What is this? It’s trying to kill her!

But it seems smaller. Still, she is too far inside now to get over it before it breaks, too weak to swim out to it, can only breathe in and out in quick gasps, breathe hugely, desperately, the wave rises up, breaks outside of her, comes at her as a gigantic tumbling white
wall, chaos, no way to get under it, just take one more breath and wham it hits her and again she’s tumbling, pinwheeling, no control, just holding on, just holding her breath. Only this time there just isn’t enough to last, impossible to hold your breath when you can’t, when you’re suffocating, she’s going to have to breathe water. Damn. What a way to go. Then she’s back on the surface and gasping again. Gasps in and out, turns to look, yes, another fucking great wall coming, streaked with foam and bubbles, but it takes its first fall and leap back to the sky, its first rush at her, and by the time it reaches her the white chaos is just a little calmed down. She lets it take her and roll her in toward shore. She’s holding her breath. She’ll either black out and die, or get rolled in to shore.

She hits the bottom, struggles around to relocate it. Can’t feel her feet, no fins at all anymore, pushes up wildly, shoots up into the air, comes down again, another wave knocks her under, but the bottom is there, she pushes off again, she’s tumbling, but some part of every somersault thrusts her head up into the air briefly and she breathes. Tumbling, hitting the sand on the bottom. If it were a rocky bottom she’d be killed, but it’s sand and she shoves up from it. Appears she’s only about chest deep here, but another broken wave smashes her down again. Damn! Hold breath, tumble without resistance, find the bottom, stand, breathe, knocked over, hold breath, tumble. This time when she stands she falls over because there’s no water to hold her up, she’s thigh deep, knee deep, she falls at another massive shove from behind, but fuck it, just roll with it, hold breath, come up, breathe.

Comes a moment when she finds herself on hands and knees in water sluicing backward under her toward the waves. Then another shove from behind, but she’s in the shallows, it’s where she was grunioning, there are the kids up there shrieking as the big waves have overrun their sand castles, instantly melting them to smooth nubbins in the sand, holes streaming water back down.
No one paying the slightest attention to her. Good. She crawls up the beach. The next wave to strike her can’t even knock her over, just runs under her whitely hissing, bubbles everywhere, air full of salt mist, the backwash trying hard to sweep her back into the sea, she digs her hands into the wet flowing sand, water leaps up around her forearms and knees, she’s settling into sand that flows down under her, until another swell smacks her from behind. But she can’t be moved. A few more waves flow up past her and back, she sinks farther into the wet sand. She pulls her hands out, lifts her knees and feet out, crawls on hands and knees up the strand a little. One wave washes a blue fin right by her, she reaches for it and misses. The sand castles are too far. She stops there on hands and knees, resting. Everything brilliantly lit but also stuffed with blackness. Catching her breath, gasping in and out, retching a little, spitting out salt water.

Kaya runs up to her, puts his hand on her back. “Hey, are you all right?”

She nods. “Gah,” she says. “Gakk.”

“Good! That was a big set!” He runs back out.

Sun beats on her back, the wet strand gleams. Everything is sparking and glary, too bright to look at. A broken wave rushes up the strand, stops, leaves a line of foam. Big slab of water sheets back down the slope at her, crashes into her wrists and knees, sinks her farther into wet sand. Bubbling water swirls the sand under her to the sea, black flecks forming V patterns in tumbling blond grains, sluicing new deltas right before her eyes. Delta v’s, she thinks, now those are delta v’s. What a world. She lets her head down and kisses the sand.

Thanks this time to:

Terry Bisson, Michael Blumlein, Ron Drummond, Laurie Glover, Olympios Katsiaouni, James Leach, Beth Meacham, Lisa Nowell, Christopher Palmer, Mark Schwartz, Francis Spufford, Sharon Strauss, Ken Wark.

At NASA/Ames, thanks also to Harry Jones, Larry Lemke, Creon Levitt, John Rask, Carol Stoker, and especially Chris McKay, who has been helping me with space questions now for over twenty years.

A special thanks to Carter Scholz.

“The City” from
Justine
by Lawrence Durrell, copyright © 1957, renewed © 1985 by Lawrence George Durrell. Use by permission of Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

“The City” from
Justine
by Lawrence Durrell, reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Lawrence Durrell, copyright © The Estate of Lawrence Durrell, 1969

“The City” by C. P. Cavafy, translation copyright © Olympios Katsiaouni, 2015

Extract from “The City” from
Justine
by Lawrence Durrell, © Estate of Lawrence Durrell and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

“Simplicity” from
The Poems of Emily Dickinson
, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

“Tyrannies” by William Bronk © The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2015 by Kim Stanley Robinson

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ISBN 978-0-316-37874-1

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