Arthur Clarke - The Songs of Distant Earth

To Loren’s relief, Brant suddenly excused himself and hurried away. Loren quickly discovered the reason.

“Commander Lorenson!” Mayor Waldron said. “I hope Tarna’s been treating you well.”

Loren groaned inwardly. He knew that he was supposed to be polite to the mayor, but the social graces had never been his strong point.

“Very well, thank you. I don’t believe you’ve met these gentlemen — ”

He called, much more loudly than was really necessary, across the patio to a group of colleagues who had just arrived. By good luck, they were all lieutenants; even off duty, rank had its privileges, and he never hesitated to use it.

“Mayor Waldron, this is Lieutenant Fletcher — your first time down, isn’t it Owen? Lieutenant Werner Ng, Lieutenant Ranjit Winson, Lieutenant Karl Bosley…”

Just like the clannish Martians, he thought, always sticking together. Well, that made them a splendid target, and they were a personable group of young men. He did not believe that the mayor even noticed when he made his strategic withdrawal.

Doreen Chang would have much preferred to talk to the captain, but he had made a high-velocity token appearance, downed one drink, apologized to his hosts, and departed.

“Why won’t he let me interview him?” she asked Kaldor, who had no such inhibitions and had already logged several days’ worth of audio and video time.

“Captain Sirdar Bey,” he answered, “is in a privileged position. Unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t have to explain — or to apologize.”

“I detect a note of mild sarcasm in your voice,” the Thalassa Broadcasting Corporation’s star newsperson said.

“It wasn’t intended. I admire the captain enormously, and even accept his opinion of me — with reservations, of course. Er — are you recording?”

“Not now. Too much background noise.”

“Lucky for you I’m such a trusting person since there’s no way I could tell if you were.”

“Definitely off the record, Moses. What does he think of you?”

“He’s glad to have my views, and my experience, but he doesn’t take me very seriously. I know exactly why. He once said, “Moses — you like power but not responsibility. I enjoy both.” It was a very shrewd statement; it sums up the difference between us.”

“How did you answer?”

“What could I say? It was perfectly true. The only time I got involved in practical politics was — well, not a disaster, but I never really enjoyed it.”

“The Kaldor Crusade?”

“Oh — you know about that. Silly name — it annoyed me. And that was another point of disagreement between the captain and myself. He thought — still thinks, I’m sure — the Directive ordering us to avoid all planets with life-potential is a lot of sentimental nonsense. Another quote from the good captain: “Law I understand. Metalaw is bal — er, balderdash”.”

“This is fascinating — one day you must let me record it.”

“Definitely not. What’s happening over there?”

Doreen Chang was a persistent lady, but she knew when to give up.

“Oh, that’s Mirissa’s favourite gas-sculpture. Surely you had them on Earth.”

“Of course. And since we’re still off the record, I don’t think it’s art. But it’s amusing.”

The main lights had been switched off in one section of the patio, and about a dozen guests had gathered around what appeared to be a very large soap bubble, almost a metre in diameter. As Chang and Kaldor walked towards it, they could see the first swirls of colour forming inside, like the birth of a spiral nebula.

“It’s called “Life”,” Doreen said, “and it’s been in Mirissa’s family for two hundred years. But the gas is beginning to leak; I can remember when it was much brighter.”

Even so, it was impressive. The battery of electron guns and lasers in the base had been programmed by some patient, long-dead artist to generate a series of geometrical shapes that slowly evolved into organic structures. From the centre of the sphere, ever more complex forms appeared, expanded out of sight, and were replaced by others. In one witty sequence, single-celled creatures were shown climbing a spiral staircase, recognizable at once as a representation of the DNA molecule. With each step, something new was added; within a few minutes, the display had encompassed the four-billion-year odyssey from amoeba to Man.

Then the artist tried to go beyond, and Kaldor lost him. The contortions of the fluorescent gas became too complex and too abstract. Perhaps if one saw the display a few more times, a pattern would emerge —

“What happened to the sound?” Doreen asked when the bubble’s maelstrom of seething colours abruptly winked out. “There used to be some very good music, especially at the end.”

“I was afraid someone would ask that question,” Mirissa said with an apologetic smile. “We’re not certain whether the trouble is in the playback mechanism or the program itself.”

“Surely you have a backup!”

“Oh, yes, of course. But the spare module is somewhere in Kumar’s room, probably buried under bits of his canoe. Until you’ve seen his den, you won’t understand what entropy really means.”

“It’s not a canoe — it’s a kayak,” protested Kumar, who had just arrived with a pretty local girl clinging to each arm. “And what’s entropy?”

One of the young Martians was foolish enough to attempt an explanation by pouring two drinks of different colours into the same glass. Before he could get very far, his voice was drowned by a blast of music from the gas-sculpture.

“You see!” Kumar shouted above the din, with obvious pride, “Brant can fix anything!”

Anything? thought Loren. I wonder… I wonder…

From: Captain

To: All Crew Members

CHRONOLOGY

As there has already been a great deal of unnecessary confusion in this matter, I wish to make the following points:

1. All ship’s records and schedules will remain on Earth Time — corrected for relativistic effects — until the end of the voyage. All clocks and timing systems aboard ship will continue to run on ET.

2. For convenience, ground crews will use Thalassan time (TT) when necessary, but will keep all records in ET with TT in parentheses.

3. To remind you:

The duration of the Thalassan Mean Solar Day is 29.4325 hours ET. There are 313.1561 Thalassan days in the Thalassan Sidereal Year, which is divided into 11 months of 28 days. January is omitted from the calendar, but the five extra days to make up the total of 313 follow immediately after the last day (28th) of December. Leap days are intercalated every six years, but there will be none during our stay.

4. Since the Thalassan day is 22 % longer than Earth’s, and the number of those days in its year is 14 % shorter, the actual length of the Thalassan year is only about 5 % longer than Earth’s. As you are all aware, this has one practical convenience, in the matter of birthdays. Chronological age means almost the same on Thalassa as on Earth. A 21 — year-old Thalassan has lived as long as a 20-year old Earth-person. The Lassan calendar starts at First Landing, which was 3109 ET. The current year is 718TT or 754 Earth years later.

5. Finally — and we can also be thankful for this — there is only one Time Zone to worry about on Thalassa.

Sirdar Bey (Capt.)

3864.05.26.20.30 ET

718.00.02.1 5.00 TT

“Who would have thought anything so simple could be so complicated!” laughed Mirissa when she had scanned the printout pinned up on the Terra Nova Bulletin Board. “I suppose this is one of the famous Beybolts. What sort of man is the captain? I’ve never had a real chance of talking to him.”