Tevun-Krus #11 - Holiday Extravaganza

7B

7B

By: @CarolinaC

The words were so unexpected that Tecla, alone in the dark, needed to have them repeated. To have an out-of-place transmission from the Rex Gentium was baffling. The Gentium was a regular around these parts, passing through 7B's control once every 150 hours or so. She was a cargo ship, making endless rounds between the planet and the ring of inhabited artificial satellites that orbited beyond the moon. Until now, messages from the Gentium had always been polite but formal, with no wasted words. Tecla watched the small ship slide silently over a sprinkling of stars, and thumbed the button for the transmitter.

"Gentium, this is Farside 7B. Say again?"

An instant later, the familiar voice of Gentium's pilot crackled over the open channel. For once, his message lacked all semblance of protocol. "I acknowledged your instructions," he paused for a moment before continuing, "and then I wished you a happy Christmas, 7B."

“Oh,” Tecla replied, letting out a long, slow breath.

“I didn't offend you, did I, 7B?”

"What? Oh, no, no,” Tecla could feel a blush warming her cheeks. She was glad she was alone in the control room. “It's just -” she tried to cover her confusion, “- isn't it a bit early?"

"Early?" the man's voice was quiet, almost soft, across the relay. "Don't you have a chronometer down there, 7B? Midnight, coordinated time was five minutes ago. It's Christmas."

Tecla managed to maintain a professional demeanour until she had handed off Gentium to Planetside control. Then, as soon as she was sure the channel was closed, she threw her head back and laughed. She laughed so hard she was left feeling slightly nauseated, tears streaming down her face. Midnight! The man had said it was midnight! As if his method of timekeeping had any meaning, here. Planetside, they actually did use the coordinated calendar, but not here. Farside, the sun had set a mere 25 hours ago, and there were still more than 300 hours to go before it would rise again. If she kept time like they did Planetside, Tecla might have said that midnight wouldn't be for days.

But Tecla didn’t keep time the way they did Planetside – after all, she wasn’t on the planet side. So long as her instructions to the ships in her segment were clear, and her colleagues knew when their shifts ended and hers began, she could keep time however she pleased. Basing her schedule on the movements of a planet she couldn't even see? That seemed awfully arbitrary.

When she was a child, living on the Planetside, she had thought differently. There, the eponymous white-streaked blue jewel traced lazy harmonic curves in the sky, a near-constant companion. During the long hours when the sun did not grace the sky, the light reflecting off the not-so-distant planet was enough to illuminate the gray, dusty surface outside the domes. It was never really dark. Tecla could remember pulling aside the heavy, black curtains in her childhood bedroom, staring at the distant orb when she should have been sleeping. She had wondered about the people living there, so close and yet so far. She had dreamed about living on the planet. She'd imagined standing in the rain, cool water running deliciously behind her ears and between her fingers. She'd tried to understand how life might work, defined by the planet's natural cycles – day and night, summer and springtime. All of it was foreign to her, living this austere, beautiful little sphere. Foreign and fascinating. And then she had grown up, and set aside childish things.

Sighing, Tecla ran a hand over the control console. Her touch was gentle – she didn't want to accidentally depress any of the buttons – and the plastic was cool beneath her fingertips. She was soothed by a sense of familiarity, and stared up into the sky. A colleague, a man who had grown up on-planet, often talked about how the atmosphere made stars twinkle Without it, he said, the stars looked cold and sharp, like the jewelled teeth of an enormous dragon. Tecla disagreed. The stars were clear, and they were bright; during a night that lasted hundreds of hours, they were the only source of light that could always be trusted.

And light was what was important, wasn't it? All this other stuff about time – minutes, seconds, hours - felt artificial. Light and darkness, though, Tecla knew those were real. Even the people who set the date of the holiday originally, Tecla mused, knew that light and dark were real. Why else would they pick the time when, where they lived, the days started growing longer again, when light and warmth returned? Not that any of that made any difference here. The stars here were different, and any warmth they carried was metaphorical, rather than physical. Warmth was important, too, as real and important as the light. It was one of things that the dusty surface outside the domes lacked, along with oxygen, water, and most everything else one could want.

Tecla sighed, flexing her fingers. She ran them over the console again. She could feel the plastic warming to her touch, and she smiled up at the stars. Warmth. Light. Those were the first two things you needed, if you wanted to stay alive. They were valuable, whether it was after midnight, or before, whether or not midnight was even real.

When the relay crackled again, it was Farside 7A, wanting to complete the handover of a passenger freighter, the Oriens. After all the formalities were done, Tecla spoke over the channel, imagining her voice as the clear, warm light of a friendly star.

“Oriens?” she said, “and you, too, 7A. This is 7B. Merry Christmas.”