Aurora by David A. Hardy Read Free Book Online Page A

scientists had hoped for The Big One: the unequivocal discovery of life on Mars.
    It might seem hard to believe, but even working on an alien world like Mars could become commonplace after a while. Not boring, precisely, but, even so, as Anne Pryor worked her mind kept drifting back to the events that had led her here.
    * * * *
    After leaving London, Aurora had gone back up to Scotland, as she’d said she probably would. For a while she had stayed with her brother Stephen; but he was now 40, and looked it, with his receding hairline, greying hair and bifocal spectacles, while she still seemed like a teenager. It was bound to cause comment, especially as Steve’s wife, Brenda, was hardly any older than Aurora and yet looked nearly as old as her husband.
    So she didn’t stay there for long; just long enough to recuperate and review her plans for the future. She decided to go back to school and try to make up for all her wasted years.
    With her artistic talents it hadn’t been difficult to doctor her birth certificate; she wanted to avoid questions about the disparity between her real and her apparent age. Looking at her, no one would think to query her new age of seventeen.
    Many times, as the years passed, Aurora did puzzle over her own appearance. (When anyone commented on her youthfulness, she would quip: “Ah, but you should see the portrait in my attic!”) There was nothing she could do about it, and nor could she explain it; so she supposed she should just be grateful.
    And she was never ill. Oh, her body protested when she abused it, as she had done back in the late Sixties, but she had never caught even the usual childhood diseases like mumps, measles or chickenpox, let alone anything more serious. What should she do? Tell a doctor that “I look too young and I’m never ill”? At best she would become a guinea pig for medical research, at worst a freak for the media to parade before a sensation-hungry public. No, best to keep a low profile, and, when necessary, keep moving on....
    Sometimes, though, she did feel very lonely. Was there really nobody else in all the world like her? More: her brief time with the Gas Giants seemed to have left her almost drained of emotion. It was as if she had packed a lifetime of what most people would regard as normal, personal feelings into that short period, but that her near-death experience had then wiped these from her brain.
    As she had once told Lefty, she was clever at scholastic matters as long as she put her mind to them. And this she did. Within a few years she had a crop of O- and A-levels to her credit, and she followed these up by applying for and obtaining a place at Birmingham’s redbrick university, which her enquiries showed to be one of the best for scientific subjects.
    Aurora’s appetite for education was insatiable now, and the more she crammed into her brain the more her ability to learn seemed to expand. But she would stay with one subject for long periods, often sighing with frustration at the amounts of data available, impossible to assimilate in one lifetime. On the other hand she did not let this deter her; if her appearance and her physical and mental abilities were any guide, she could well have a very long lifetime ahead of her in which to absorb it all. She studied chemistry and physics, finally obtaining her doctorate in astrophysics, specializing in asteroids, comets and impact craters.
    She also took a course in computing, and spent many hours in the evenings doing her own private work, much of it on the internet. Linked to computer networks all over the world, she could hack into the files of record offices and create a succession of new identities for herself, at the same time planting a virus program that destroyed all traces of her previous identities and then of itself, as and when it became necessary.
    For another five years Aurora stayed around universities, largely cocooned from the realities of life,