Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,54

amount of time. Work work work, day after day!

One evening, just before sunset, Nadia trudged across torn-up dirt to the trailer park, feeling hungry and beat and extremely relaxed, totally at ease, not that you didn’t have to be careful at the end of a day, she had torn a centimeter hole in the back of a glove the other evening being careless, and the cold hadn’t been so bad, about minus 50 degrees Centigrade, nothing compared to some Siberian winter days—but the low air pressure had sucked out a blood bruise instantly, and then that had started to freeze up, which made the bruise smaller no doubt, but slower to heal as well. Anyway, you had to be careful, but there was something so fluid about tired muscles at the end of a day’s construction work, the low rust sunlight slanting across the rocky plain, and all of a sudden she could feel that she was happy. Arkady called in from Phobos at just that moment, and she greeted him cheerily. “I feel just like a Louis Armstrong solo from 1947.”

“Why 1947?” he asked.

“Well, that was the year he sounded the most happy. Most of his life his tone has a sharp edge to it, really beautiful, but in 1947 it was even more beautiful because it has this relaxed fluid joy, you never hear it in him before or after.”

“A good year for him, I take it?”

“Oh yes! An amazing year! After twenty years of horrible big bands, you see, he got back to a little group like the Hot Five, that was the group he headed when he was young, and there it was, the old songs, even some of the old faces—and all of it better than the first time, you know, the recording technology, the money, the audiences, the band, his own power…. It must have felt like the fountain of youth, I tell you.”

“You’ll have to send up some recordings,” Arkady said. He tried to sing: “I can’t give you anything but love, baby!” Phobos was about over the horizon, he had just been calling to say hi. “So this is your 1947,” he said before he went.

Nadia put her tools away, singing the song correctly. And she understood that what Arkady had said was true; something had happened to her similar to what had happened to Armstrong in 1947—because despite the miserable conditions, her youthful years in Siberia had been the happiest of her life, they really had. And then she had endured twenty years of big-band cosmonautics, bureaucracy, simulations, an indoor life—all to get here. And now suddenly she was out in the open again, building things with her hands, operating heavy machinery, solving problems a hundred times a day, just like Siberia only better. It was just like Satchmo’s return!

Thus when Hiroko came up and said, “Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position,” Nadia sang to her, “That’s the only thing I’m thinking of—baby!” and took the crescent wrench and slammed it against a table like a hammer, and twiddled the dial to show Hiroko it was unstuck, and laughed at her expression. “The engineer’s solution,” she explained, and went humming into the lock, thinking how funny Hiroko was, a woman who held their whole ecosystem in her head, but couldn’t hammer a nail straight.

And that night she talked over the day’s work with Sax, and spoke to Spencer about glass, and in the middle of that conversation crashed on her bunk and snuggled her head into her pillow, feeling totally luxurious, the glorious final chorus of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” chasing her off to sleep.

But things change as time passes; nothing lasts, not even stone, not even happiness. “Do you realize it’s ell ess one-seventy already?” Phyllis said one night. “Didn’t we land at ell ess seven?”

So they had been on Mars for half a Martian year. Phyllis was using the calendar devised by planetary scientists; among the colonists it was becoming more common than the Terran system. Mars’s year was 668.6 local days long, and to tell where they were in this long year it took the Ls calendar. This system declared the line between the sun and Mars at its northern spring equinox to be O°, and then the year was divided into 360 degrees, so that Ls = 0°-90° was the northern spring, 90°-180° the northern summer, 180°-270° the fall, and 270°-360° (or 0° again) the winter.

This simple situation was complicated by the eccentricity of the