Aurora by David A. Hardy Page B

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