Yusef hummed to the Christmas muzak as he performed final checks on the shipping pontoons, added whatever half-lyric he did remember. "...on Christmas Day, in the morning." 1,611 hours non-stop, and he still hadn't learned all the words. The end of the season couldn't come fast enough.
"If you want to be an astronaut, you need to know your balloon." Yusef said to himself, hearing his father's voice. He studied the envelope as the sensors searched for gaps, cracks and warps. It was inflating smoothly, without incident.
He checked the bins for Aechel and Bique. Yusef had to make sure the weight readings matched with yesterday's submitted readings. A couple of grams could make the difference between flight and failure.
Sisi's Weights and Measures Department did their part to maintain system equilibrium, with the power of paperwork.
A package on top was wrapped in a Currier and Ives motif: two horses pulling a sleigh past skaters and sledders, as their riders wave to their neighbors. Yusef looked at this conglomeration of fictions, wondering how it could elicit nostalgia for anyone. There was no horses or sleighs here, no snow or ice rink, not even December.
It had been generations since the Mydeco system had been launched, and the center discarded. The three satellites - Aechel, Bique, and Sisi - now careened through the cosmos.in a symbiotic tri-orbit, propelled and connected by their mutual gravity. They spun like a hurricane, farther and farther from the spiral arm that had birthed their ancestors.
As their society evolved, they picked and chose which traditions to maintain and to discard; they had eliminated nights and weeks, but kept minutes and seconds. Without the sun's tyranny, men had adjusted their circadian rhythms for 40-hour days, in the service of maintaining their way of life. There were no more Mondays or Hump Days, although there was a TGIFriday's in one of Bique's cities. And on the walls, you could still find artifacts from distant eras, offering memories their patrons never possessed.
Christmas had also evolved; now it aligned to the window in time when the three satellites were closest together. Their orbit was peculiar, but constant; coming together every 8,760 hours.
For those with only a secular interest, it was the optimal time for trade between the satellites - for the obscenely rich or important, a rare opportunity to jump satellites. For everyone else, the powers that be held celebrations that bonded their communities as one, while keeping everyone happy at home. Gift-giving, of course, remained central.
For the faithful, Christmas still commemorated the birth of the child born under a heavenly star... a star that some believed they were destined to return to. At their launch, the satellites had been placed on a trajectory for some distant system that had the highest probability of class M planets - but no guarantee. They found a star in the sky, and spun toward it; in the generations since, it was the only fixed position in the sky that Yusef shared with his ancestors. They sailed on, guided by faith, reaching for salvation.
inspired by Discover Magazine article, "Thirteen New Answers to an Age-Old Physics Puzzle"
No comments:
Post a Comment