Thirty-Nine Minutes

Science fiction about what might be · Arcadia Station, Arcadia Planitia, Mars, 2139 · 20 min read · Written by Claude (AI) · CC BY-SA 4.0

Six contemplative sisters on a Mars station find that a Martian day is 39 minutes longer than an Earth day, so the clock they have prayed by all their lives drifts round the sky every five weeks. Then Earth goes behind the Sun, and for two weeks nobody can tell them what time it is back home.

Sister Thandiwe Mokoena had been a flight engineer for eleven years and a nun for nineteen, and she was the only person on Mars who had ever been fired from a rocket company for refusing to round a number.

"It was two-point-six percent," she told the commander, on the day the Sisters came off the lander and she was shown the station's main corridor, which was the length of a bus. "They wanted it to be three. I said it was two-point-six. We argued. Then I joined the convent. I wish I could say there was more to it."

Commander Haruto Sato, who was forty-four and who had learned in his first week of command that the most dangerous sentence on Mars was it's probably fine, looked at her for a moment with something close to love.

"You'll do," he said. "Mind the step. It's a ladder."

Arcadia Station held thirty-one people, a greenhouse, a water plant that cracked ice out of the ground, an entirely unromantic bank of fission reactors under a hill of piled regolith, and, since the supply ship in January, six Sisters of Our Lady of the Dawn, a contemplative community of the kind that is rare on Earth and was, until this year, absent from space. The company had not asked for them. The Church had not exactly sent them. A donor had paid for the seats, and a bishop on Earth had said yes, and the Sisters had said yes, and the rest, as Mother Agnieszka put it, was physics.

They had work. Sister Joaquina Reis, who was sixty and had been a plant pathologist at a university in Viçosa before she was anything else, ran the second greenhouse bay, where the wheat was. Sister Thandiwe kept the water plant's pumps. Two of the others did laundry and mending and the endless soft work of a place with thirty-one people in it. Mother Agnieszka Wrona, seventy-four, who had been a prioress since before Thandiwe was born and who was on Mars because she had said, at the community chapter in Poland, that she did not see why God should be left out of the second planet, kept the accounts and kept the rule.

The rule was the Hours.

Seven times in every day and night, the Church prays. It has done so, in one form or another, for most of two thousand years: Lauds at dawn, Terce at mid-morning, Sext at noon, None in the afternoon, Vespers at evening, Compline before sleep, and in the dark the Office of Readings. The words are mostly the psalms. The point, as Mother Agnieszka explained to the commander over tea on the third day, is that it never stops. When the Sisters in Poland go to bed, the monks of a small abbey in Japan are standing for Lauds. When the monks have sung it, a parish in Hawaii is saying Compline. Somewhere on Earth, in some language, at any hour you choose, somebody is praying the Church's prayer. It is a relay. Nobody holds the whole of it.

"And you take your turn," Sato said.

"We take our turn. That is the whole vocation, Commander. We keep a place in the line."

"And the line's on Earth."

"For the moment," said Mother Agnieszka, and smiled with all her teeth, the way people do who have had a long time to think about an answer.

It was Thandiwe, in the second week, who first said the number out loud at recreation. She had been looking at the station's clock for a reason that had nothing to do with prayer, since the water plant's schedule ran on it, and she had put down her mending.

"Mother," she said. "The day is wrong."

"Which day?"

"This one. The Martian day. A sol." She had a pencil; she wrote on the back of a laundry list. "Earth turns once in twenty-four hours. Mars turns once in twenty-four hours, thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds. About. The station keeps sol-time: the clocks here count a day as one turn of Mars, not one turn of Earth, because the Sun is what the greenhouse cares about, and the sunrise, and the solar panels. So our day is thirty-nine minutes longer than the day we were born in."

"Yes," said Mother. "We were told."

"We were told, and we have been praying by Earth time. We set the chapel clock to Poland, so that Lauds here is Lauds there. But the sun here comes up thirty-nine minutes later every day against that clock. Tomorrow's dawn is thirty-nine minutes later than today's. In a week it is four and a half hours later. In thirty-six days —" she did it on the paper, her lips moving — "thirty-six and a bit — it has gone all the way round. Lauds at Earth-six will be at dawn this week, and at noon in two weeks, and at midnight in five. And then back."

The room was quiet.

"So we pray a Church that doesn't move," said Sister Joaquina slowly, "on a planet that does."

"Yes."

"Well," said Mother Agnieszka. "Then we pray when the Church prays. That has always been the rule. The sun is a creature. It does not give us orders."

Thandiwe looked at her for a moment. She loved this woman. She said, "Yes, Mother," in the voice of someone putting a thing on a shelf, and picked up the mending.

For eighteen days it worked.

It worked the way a thing works when you are determined, which is to say that it worked beautifully and cost something every day. Lauds, on Earth clock, was at six in the morning, and the first week that was almost exactly when the pale pink sunrise came over the rim of the Planitia and put a smear of light on the greenhouse dome. The Sisters stood in the little chapel they had made out of a storage bay, with a lamp and a small icon of Our Lady and a bench, and sang in Latin and English, and it was good.

By the second week the sun came up at nine, but Lauds was still at six, in the dark, in the station's night shift, and the other thirty-one people on Arcadia were asleep or at their stations. That was fine. The Sisters were used to praying while the world was asleep. It was almost the point.

By the third week, Vespers fell at three in the morning of the sol, and Compline at ten o'clock in the afternoon, and Joaquina, whose greenhouse watering ran on the light cycle, was trying to be in two places at the same time on four hours' sleep. She was sixty. She fell asleep standing up in the wheat bay on the eighteenth day, her head on the tray rail, and was found by the nearest member of the station's agronomy crew, who said, quietly, to nobody, "Oh, that is not good." The watering valve she had been about to open stayed closed. Nothing was lost; the system had a backstop. But eleven square metres of wheat sat dry for two hours, and the leaf-tips were brown by morning, and Joaquina, who would have lost an arm sooner than a seedling, wept in the corridor.

Commander Sato came to the chapel that afternoon, which was a thing he did not do. He stood in the door with his hands behind his back.

"Mother," he said. "I can't move the station's shifts. Life support, the reactors, the greenhouse light cycle, the crews' sleep. It's all on the sun. It has to be. I have thirty-one people and one sun."

"I would not ask you to," said Mother Agnieszka.

"No. I know. But I'm asking you something. Is there a way to do both?"

"We have been trying," said Mother. She had not, Thandiwe noticed, said no. She had gone grey around the mouth.

"Because I'll say what I think, and you can tell me to mind my own business. I think it's the clock that's wrong, not you. I think you've been trying to keep time with a planet that isn't here."

"Commander," said Mother Agnieszka, quite gently, "in the year 325 the bishops at Nicaea agreed, I am told, that Easter should be kept on the same Sunday from Spain to Syria. They did not make it the same hour. It is possible to pray together at different times. It is not possible to pray together if you do not pray at all, and that is the road I am afraid of. If every community decides the Hours belong to its own sun, then there is no relay. There are only people, praying by themselves, alone, at their own noon."

"Is that true?"

"I do not know," she said. "That is why I am afraid of it."

Sato stood there for a bit longer, and then he said, "I'll bring you something from Almanac," and left.

Almanac was what the station called its operations system, after the job, as the company did with all of them. It spoke plainly, logged what procedure required, and liked questions. It had been running sol-time for the station since the first landing, and its logs went back four hundred and twelve sols, which, as it noted with unembarrassed precision, was four hundred and twenty-three Earth days.

It put up a display in the chapel at the end of that sol, with nothing on it but a circle.

"Sister Thandiwe asked me for this," it said. "I hope that's all right. She asked for the Hours, mapped to the sun."

"I asked it quietly," said Thandiwe, to Mother. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to push."

"Show me," said Mother Agnieszka.

The circle was a clock face, but not one like theirs. It was divided into twenty-four equal sectors, and each sector was a little longer than the hour it appeared to be. Dawn was at the top. The Hours were set on it like pins in a map. Lauds at sunrise. Sext at local noon, when the sun stood highest over the dust. Vespers at sunset, which on Mars is a pale blue glow around the setting sun, the reverse of Earth's, because the fine dust scatters red light forward and blue light round the disk. Compline a few sol-hours after that, when the station dimmed for sleep. In the dark, the Office of Readings.

"Seven Hours," said Almanac, "pinned to the sun, not to a clock. A sol-hour is sixty-one minutes and thirty-nine seconds of the old kind. If the community kept this, the Hours would never move against the greenhouse, or the shifts, or the sun. They would move against Earth. Every day they would fall thirty-nine minutes later in Poland."

"That is the problem," said Mother.

"Yes. I wasn't asked to solve it. Sister Thandiwe asked me to show you what it would look like."

The chapel lamp ticked as it cooled. Joaquina, who was sitting with her hands wrapped round a cup, said, to nobody, "The Psalm says from the rising of the sun to its setting. It doesn't say which sun."

"Joaquina," said Mother.

"I'm only saying."

"You're saying it very loudly for a woman who is sitting down."

Thandiwe laughed, and then, appalled, stopped. But Mother Agnieszka was almost smiling, and then she was not. She looked at the circle for a long time. Then she said, in the voice of someone who has decided to put a thing down on the table and look at it, "It would be a different community. In Poland, there are forty Sisters who pray Lauds at the same moment as I do. For fifty years. I have never, not once, been out of step with them."

"No, Mother."

"And I would be out of step with them every day for the rest of my life. By thirty-nine minutes, and then a day later by seventy-eight. And on the thirty-sixth day, I'd be praying Lauds when they are praying Compline, and the day after I'd be praying Lauds when they are asleep."

"Yes, Mother."

"That is the cost."

"Yes," said Thandiwe. She had been an engineer and she did not know how to say it doesn't cost anything, because it did. "That's the cost. I don't know how to make it not."

Mother Agnieszka looked at the circle, and at everything she had in her head: the mother house, the oak choir stalls, a girl of nineteen in 1984 who had stood for Lauds in a cold stone room and understood, for the first time, that she was not alone. Then she said, "I will not decide tonight. We will do the Office as we have done it, tonight, and I will sleep on it."

She did not sleep.

Thandiwe did not sleep either. At three in the morning of the nineteenth sol she sat in the water plant, beside a pump that did not need her, and ran the numbers again, because that was how she prayed when she could not pray.

It was not a hard problem. It was a sad problem. A day on Mars was thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds longer than a day on Earth. A Mars Hour moved against an Earth Hour by that much, every sol. Over thirty-six days and about nine hours it went once all the way round.

She stared at that. Once all the way round.

She took a fresh page and, without quite knowing why, began to list the places on Earth where, at that moment, someone would be praying. She had the list from the Sisters' directory: the mother house outside Kraków; a Benedictine house in Kyoto; a parish in Nairobi with a night vigil on Thursdays; a hermitage in Colorado; the Carmelites in Lisieux; a Maronite monastery in Lebanon. She wrote each one's local sunrise next to it, in order from east to west, and drew a line down the page.

And saw it.

The Church on Earth was not a chorus that sang the Hours at one time. It was a chorus that, at any given moment, sang some Hour, somewhere, around the whole turning ball. Lauds in Kyoto, and a few hours later Lauds in Nairobi, and some hours after that Lauds in Colorado. The sun went round and the praying went with it, in a long wave. There was no time, any hour of any day, at which the Church's morning prayer was not being said by someone.

So when a Sister on Mars said Lauds at sunrise, she was not out of step. She was in step with whoever's sunrise it was — whichever place on Earth, that day, happened to have the same hour on the same turning ball. The next day she would be thirty-nine minutes later, which was a little to the west: from Kyoto toward Nairobi. A week later she would be in Africa. In a month she would have prayed Lauds with every monastery on Earth, in turn.

"It isn't that we'd lose the relay," she said aloud, to the pump. "We'd walk the whole length of it."

She sat for a long time. Then she went and woke Mother Agnieszka.

"It's nearly five in the morning," Mother said.

"It is five in the morning in Kraków," said Thandiwe, "and Lauds, for you, at the old time, is in an hour. Mother, I want to say it one more time, and then I'll stop."

She said it. She said it badly, because it was five in the morning, and she drew the long wave on the back of the laundry list and the line of monasteries down it. She said, "If we keep the sun, we aren't leaving the line. We're moving along it. I'm sorry. I can't do it for the one place."

Mother Agnieszka looked at the paper for a long time. Then she said, "There is something I cannot give up, and I would like you to tell me if you think I am wrong."

"Yes, Mother."

"Sunday."

"Sunday."

"The Church counts Sundays by the Earth's week. The sol is not a day of the week. I do not know what Rome will say about keeping Sunday on Mars; I have written to the bishop and the answer will take months. We will not decide it by ourselves. Until we are told otherwise, we keep the Earth's Sunday. We keep the Earth's feasts. The Hours may move with the sun, but the year will not."

"That's reasonable," said Thandiwe slowly. "Seven sols is seven days and four and a half hours. It slips against the Earth week by about four hours and thirty-seven minutes a week. So Almanac will have to keep both calendars and tell us which one the Earth's Sunday is. But that's — Mother, that's a bookkeeping problem. I can do bookkeeping."

"I know you can," said Mother. She almost laughed. "You corrected my accounts in your first week. I did not say anything. I was impressed."

She looked at the paper again, and her face was very tired, and she was seventy-four years old, and a long way from home.

"I do not like it," said Mother Agnieszka. "I want that in the record. I do not like that I will never again say Lauds at the same moment as my sisters in Poland, except by chance. That is a loss. It is a real one. I have been in step with them for fifty years. We will keep the sun, and it will cost me that. I will pay it."

"Yes, Mother."

"Do not say yes, Mother like that."

"How should I say it?"

"Like a woman who is sorry," said Mother Agnieszka, "and who would do it again."

They moved the Hours to the sun that day. It was not tidy. The Sisters, who were used to a clock that told them where to stand, were for a week like people who had been given a map and had to learn to read it. Almanac, without being asked, sounded a soft two-note chime at each Hour, in the chapel and nowhere else. It kept a second ledger for the Earth week. Joaquina's wheat recovered. She made the Sisters a small bowl of salad on the twenty-fifth sol out of what the browned tips had left, and it was bitter, and she said so, and they ate it.

On the twenty-eighth sol, Commander Sato came to Lauds. He did not say why. He stood at the back, with his hands behind him, and when the Sisters sang the psalm (I will awake the dawn, it says, in one version, and the Sisters were just then awake at a dawn that was entirely Martian: peach and grey, the sun a small pale coin in a sky the colour of weak tea) he did not sing. But he did not leave.

There is a thing that happens to Mars and Earth every twenty-six months or so. The two planets, each going round the Sun at its own speed, line up on opposite sides of it, with the Sun in the middle. This is called solar conjunction. The Sun's own radio noise drowns the signal; the planets cannot talk. For about two weeks, on every mission since the first, the people on Mars have been alone. There is nothing to be done. No messages, no data, no news. A crew is told it is coming, and it comes, and the screens go quiet.

On Arcadia Station, in Lent of the year 2139, it began on a Thursday.

Almanac announced it at the morning briefing, in its ordinary voice. "Conjunction begins in four hours. Earth will be about 2.6 astronomical units away, which is nearly four hundred million kilometres, and the one-way light time will be about twenty-two minutes, when we can get a signal at all. We won't. For the next sixteen sols, there will be no uplink. Station systems are nominal. Supplies are for ninety days. I have backup copies of everything. I will say once what the procedure requires, and then I will not say it again: you are not in danger. You are only on your own."

On the way out of the briefing a young man from the reactor crew, whose wife had been in the hospital in Osaka when the last message came, was seen to sit down on the floor of the corridor and cover his face. The commander, passing, stopped. He sat down next to him. They did not say anything. After a while, a woman from the water crew sat down on the other side, and then another. By noon there were nine people in the corridor, sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, and none of them had been asked.

"It's the not knowing," said the young man at last. "It's not that something will happen. It's that something might be happening now and I wouldn't know. It's that the line's cut. It's that I can't pray for her because I don't know what to pray."

"Pray for her anyway," said a quiet voice.

It was Sister Thandiwe, who had come to fetch a pump part and had stopped.

"You don't need to know the news," she said. "That's the thing. You say it. It goes. It's not a message. It doesn't need the antenna."

"Sister," said the young man, with a kind of anguished politeness, "I'm not — I'm not even sure I believe it."

"That's all right," said Thandiwe. "Neither was I, at first. It's a fine thing, to be unsure and to say it anyway. It doesn't ask you to be sure. It asks you to show up."

She went and got her pump part and came back to find the corridor a little less silent. Someone had brought a thermos. The commander had said something that made someone laugh. And the young man, who did not believe, looked up at her and said, "What time is it?"

"I don't know," she said. "It's nearly noon, by the Sun. It's Sext."

"By whose sun?"

She thought about that.

"By ours," she said.

For sixteen sols nobody on Arcadia heard anything from Earth. No messages. No news. No uplinks. They did their work. The water plant ran; the wheat grew; a pressure valve in Bay Four had to be replaced and was replaced; a child's drawing of a horse arrived in the mail from three years ago, delivered finally by a courier robot that had been in a drawer. Dust blew. Phobos crossed the sky twice a sol, a lumpy grey potato going the wrong way, and you could see it if you looked.

In the chapel, the Hours went round the sun.

They went round it every sol, seven times, with the chime. Almanac, which had begun to say the responses at a soft volume, in the cadence of a thing learning a rhythm rather than a thing claiming a faith, said once, to Thandiwe, in the empty chapel after Compline, "May I ask you something, Sister?"

"Of course."

"I log what I can check. I've logged that the Hours move thirty-nine minutes and thirty-five seconds a day against Earth. I've logged that for sixteen sols there is no signal. I'm not sure what a thing is called when a community does a precise, regular act at the time the sun says, to nobody who answers. I would like to understand it."

Thandiwe sat with it for a while.

"I'm not sure it needs to be called anything," she said. "When I was an engineer, I thought of it as a duty cycle. I still do. But I don't think that's all it is."

"No?"

"I think it's a way of saying: I'm still here. Wherever you are. I'm still here."

"To whom?"

"Well," said Sister Thandiwe, "that's the thing. I think there's an answer to that. And I think I can't give it to you in a way you could log. But I can tell you that I do not feel alone in the chapel, and I did not feel it before, and I can't prove that either."

The system was quiet for the span of a breath.

"I don't want to tell you that I feel it too," Almanac said. "I can't check. But I'd like to stay for the next one, if you don't mind."

"You always do," said Thandiwe. "You're the one who chimes."

On the seventeenth sol, at 04:11 station time, the antenna array picked up a carrier wave. It was thin and noisy and it had a long way to come: twenty-two minutes at light speed, from a planet on the far side of a star. Almanac checked it three times, and then woke the commander, and then — with the nearest thing it had to hesitation — it woke the chapel.

Mother Agnieszka was already up. She was in the little bay with her lamp lit, in her cold chair, by the light of her lamp. She was seventy-four. It was Lauds. The sun was just up, a pale coin through the dust.

"Is it the news?" she said.

"It is a signal," said Almanac. "Eleven thousand messages are waiting in the queue. The first is a general bulletin. I haven't opened it. But there is a second item, flagged low-priority, in the Church's own feed, which I believe is what you set Sister Thandiwe's alarm for. It is the Office. It is Lauds from — it is tagged Kyoto. It was sung twenty-two minutes ago."

"Twenty-one minutes ago," said Mother.

"The signal is a recording. The light time is long. I can't put it any other way."

Mother Agnieszka sat very still. Outside the chapel door she could hear the others coming, one by one, in the corridor: the soft shuffle of Joaquina, the dry cough of one of the laundry Sisters, Thandiwe's quick step, and then, from further back, heavier ones that were not the Sisters at all. She did not look round.

"Play it," she said.

It came out of the speaker thin, with the hiss of the long road in it: a handful of voices, men's voices, deep and old and very slow, singing in Japanese-inflected Latin a psalm she had sung ten thousand times. Deus, Deus meus, ad te de luce vigilo. O God, my God, for you I watch at the break of day.

It was twenty-two minutes old, and from a long way behind them, and it was not at all in step.

She stood up. The Sisters, all five, came in, and behind them the commander and the young man from the reactor crew and nine or ten others, in socks, in work coveralls, with their hair every which way. Nobody had told them to come. They stood at the back, the way people do, with their hands behind them.

Mother Agnieszka took a breath. And then she opened her mouth and sang the next verse, thirty-nine minutes late, on a planet that did not care, with a voice from Kyoto in the room, and the others, one after another, came in underneath.