‘What of it? We breathe, drink, and eat them - to an extent - right here. We can't keep them out of the Dome altogether. For that matter, there are bacteria on Rotor that we breathe, drink, and eat, too.’
‘Yes, but we're adapted to Rotor's life. These are alien bits of life.’
‘All the safer. If we're not adapted to them, neither are they to us. There are no signs they can possibly parasitize us. They would simply be so many innocuous dust particles.’
‘And the Plague.’
‘That's the real difficulty, of course, even in the case of something as simple as letting Marlene go outside the Dome. We will, of course, take precautions.’
‘What kind of precautions?’
‘She would wear a protective suit, for one thing. For another, I'll go out with her. I'll serve as her canary.’
‘What do you mean, “canary”?’
‘It was a device they had on Earth some centuries back. Miners carried canaries - you know, little yellow birds - into mines. If the air went bad, the canary died before the men were affected, but the men, knowing there was a problem, would get out of the mine. In other words, if I begin to act queerly, we'll both be brought in at once.’
‘But what if it affects her before it affects you?’
‘I don't think it will. Marlene feels immune. She's said that so many times that I have begun to believe her.’
55Eugenia Insigna had never before watched the New Year approaching with such a painful concentration on the calendar. There had never been reason before. For that matter, the calendar was a vestigial hangover, twice removed.
On Earth, the year had begun by marking the seasons, and the holidays that related to the seasons - midsummer, midwinter, sowing, harvest - by whatever names they were called.
Crile (Insigna remembered) had explained the intricacies of the calendar to her, and had reveled in them in his dark and solemn way, as he did in everything that reminded him of Earth. She had listened to him with a mixture of ardor and apprehension; ardently because she wished to share his interest, as that might draw them closer together; apprehensively because she feared his interest in Earth might drive him away from her, as eventually it did.
Strange that she still felt the pang - but was it dimmer now? It seemed to her that she could not actually remember Crile's face, that she remembered only the remembering now. Was it only the memory of a memory that stood between her and Siever Genarr now?
And yet it was the memory of a memory that held Rotor to the calendar now. Rotor had never had seasons. It had the year, of course, for it (and all the Settlements in the Earth-Moon system, which left out only those few that circled Mars or that were being built in the asteroid belt) accompanied Earth on its path around the Sun. Still, without seasons, the year was meaningless. Yet it was kept together with months and weeks.
Rotor had the day, too, fixed artificially at twenty-four hours during which sunlight was allowed to enter for half the time and blocked off for the other half. It could have been fixed for any length of time, but it was fixed at the length of an Earth day and divided into twenty-four hours of sixty minutes each, with each minute consisting of sixty seconds. (The days and nights were at least uniformly twelve hours long.)
There had been occasional movements among the Settlements to adopt a system of merely numbering days and grouping them into tens and multiples of tens; into dekadays, hectodays, kilodays, and, in the other direction, decidays, centidays, millidays; but that was really impossible.
The Settlements could not set up each their own system for that would have reduced trade and communications to chaos. Nor was any unified system possible save that of Earth, where 99 per cent of the human population still lived, and to which ties of tradition still held the remaining 1 per cent. Memory held Rotor and all the Settlements to a calendar that was intrinsically meaningless for them.
But now Rotor had left the Solar System and was a world that was isolated and alone. No day, or month, or year in the Earthly sense existed. It was not even sunlight that marked day from night, for Rotor gleamed with artificial daylight and darkened to a light whisper twelve hours on and twelve hours off. The harsh precision was not even broken by the gradual dimming and brightening at the boundaries that might simulate twilight and dawn. There seemed to be no need. And within this all-Settlement division, individual homes kept their illumination on and off to suit their whims or needs, but counted the days by Settlement time - which was Earth time.
Even here at the Erythro Dome, where there was a natural day and night that was casually used as such by those in occupation, it was the not-quite-matching Settlement day length, still tied to that of Earth (the memory of a memory), that was used in official calculations.
The movement was now stronger to leave the day as the only basic measure of time. Insigna knew for a fact that Pitt favored the decimalization of time measure, and yet even he hesitated to suggest it officially, for fear of rousing wild opposition.
But perhaps not for ever. The traditional disorderly units of weeks and months seemed less important. The traditional holidays were more frequently ignored. Insigna, in her astronomical work, used days as the only significant units. Someday the old calendar would die, and, in the far unseen future, new methods of agreed-upon time marking would surely arise - a Galactic Standard calendar, perhaps.
But now she found herself marking off the time to a New Year that began arbitrarily. On Earth, at least the New Year began at the time of a solstice - winter in the northern hemisphere, summer in the southern. It had a relationship to Earth's orbit around the Sun that only the astronomers on Rotor remembered clearly.
But now - even though Insigna was an astronomer - the New Year had to do only with Marlene's venture on to the surface of Erythro - a time chosen by Siever Genarr only because it involved a plausible delay, and accepted by Insigna only because she was officiously concerning herself with a teenager's notion of romance.
Insigna came out of her roaming through the depths of thought to find Marlene regarding her solemnly. (When had she entered the room so silently, or was Insigna so tied into an inner knot as to be unaware of footsteps?)
Insigna said in half a whisper, ‘Hello, Marlene.’
Marlene said solemnly, ‘You're not happy, Mother.’
‘You don't have to be superperceptive to see that, Marlene. Are you still determined to step out on Erythro?’
‘Yes. Entirely. Completely.’
‘Why, Marlene, why? Can you explain it so I can understand?’
‘No, because you don't want to understand. It's calling me.’
‘What's calling you?’
‘Erythro is. It wants me out there.’ Marlene's ordinarily glum face seemed suffused with a furtive happiness.
Insigna snapped, ‘When you talk like that, Marlene, you simply give me the impression that you are already infected by the - the-’
‘The Plague? I'm not. Uncle Siever has just had another brain scan taken of me. I told him he didn't have to, but he said we had to have it for the record before we left. I'm perfectly normal.’
‘Brain scans can't tell you everything,’ said Insigna, frowning.
Marlene said, ‘Neither can a mother's fears.’ Then, more softly, ‘Mother, please, I know you want to delay this, but I won't accept a delay. Uncle Siever has promised. Even if it rains, even if it's bad weather, I'm going out. At this time of the year, there are never real storms or temperature extremes. There are almost never at any time of the year. It's a wonderful world.’
‘But it's barren - dead. Except for germs,’ Insigna said spitefully.
‘But someday we'll put life of our own upon it.’ Marlene looked away, her eyes lost in dreaming. ‘I'm sure of it,’ she said.
56‘The E-suit is a simple suit,’ said Siever Genarr. ‘It doesn't have to withstand pressure. It's not a diving suit or a a spacesuit. It has a helmet, and it has a compressed air supply that can be regenerated, and a small heat-exchange unit that keeps the temperature comfortable. And it's airtight, obviously.’