Aurora by David A. Hardy

that she found him quite attractive, but he never appeared more than orthodoxly friendly towards her, and her own inexperience in romantic matters meant that she never felt able to make a first move. In any case, she rationalized, that kind of thing was all much too difficult in the close confines of the base.
    As Aurora passed him one day she stopped in her tracks. For a moment she stood frozen to the spot, goose-flesh rising on her back and neck as the memories came flooding back. He was playing the Gas Giants’ album!
    Beaumont looked round at her curiously.
    â€œAnything wrong, Anne?”
    Aurora pulled herself together. “No, I—I just realized I’d forgotten something. By the way, I’ve meant to ask you before: why do you always play that old music? You can’t even have been born when that stuff was around.”
    â€œOh, I was practically weaned on it. My old man had a great record collection, and I’ve always found it more interesting than the sterile mush that passes for music nowadays. Or neopunk—that seems to be an excuse for anyone who can play three discords on a synguitar! No, you take the disc that’s playing now. Can you believe it, my parents met at that concert, in London, England! They said it was the most incredible gig they ever went to. Yet the group—the Gas Giants, they were called—was only a support act, and they just vanished soon afterward. Weird, isn’t it? They....”
    He was obviously all set to go into more detail, but Aurora made to move on. Before she could, Beaumont picked up the flat plastic case which had held the disc and peered closely at it. It held a smaller reproduction of the original album sleeve.
    â€œHey, d’you know something? That girl—Aurora, she called herself—looks just like you , Anne, except her hair is much longer. See?”
    Aurora pretended to look at it. “Mmm, I suppose she does, a bit. Anyway—gotta go.” She swung away abruptly, Bryan’s gaze boring into her back like a laser beam.
    Why was she always being reminded of that damned concert? Against her will, her head was again filled with those strange images. To take her mind off them, she decided to make a painting of Noctis Labyrinthus, based on the overhead video view, and see how accurate it turned out when she got there. She loaded the disc and found the image she wanted.
    It would be the first time she had painted since the accident, and she took up the light-brush with some trepidation. But she need not have worried; very soon she was applying deft strokes. She had unhesitatingly chosen a spot among the complicated intersecting rifts, and the scene which took shape was so real that she might have been there in person, right now. She used the airbrush effect subtly, and fog swirled over the lip of the canyon and softened the outlines of the broken cliffs beyond.
    The air in the Hut was stuffy, heavy with odors of cooking and bodies and the acrid smell of electrical apparatus, plus of course the ever-present Martian dust. One of the Apollo astronauts had said that moon dust, inside the module, smelled like gunpowder. Mars dust, Aurora thought, was like a combination of damp dog and paprika. She yawned, closed her paintscreen, and decided to take a look at Mars in real time. She reached out to switch over to the orbiting cameras, then changed her mind and decided to use the big high-definition flatscreen on the far wall of the Hut. As she passed Beaumont he looked round almost guiltily and blanked his computer screen. Secretive, she thought.
    As was normal, the big screen showed the outside view. It had not been considered worth the technical problems or expense of fitting actual windows to the converted fuel tank. She watched a large, rather dim star raise itself blearily from the western horizon. As it rose higher it revealed a misshapen disc. Phobos. She knew the inner moon would pass through more than half of its cycle of