Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 6 by Paul Preuss

Author:Paul Preuss [Preuss, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780743444705
Publisher: I Books
Published: 2002-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

year and the seasons are twice as long. Just now the cool Martian spring is slowly lengthening into the long Martian summer. Marianne was dressed only in a tapa chiton, enjoying the sun on her bare limbs. Like all of us, her skin was deeply tanned and there were lines around her still-young eyes from staring into bright distances.

She was crying—she cries easily—but not from sadness. She told me, after we had talked about this and that while the small sun set in a moonless sky, that she is pregnant.

So the last roles are filled; we truly have our Adam and Eve.

00.22.29.19

In a little more than a month we will have been a year here—a Martian year, which is a little less than two Earthly years. (The Martian days, on the other hand, are not much more than twenty-four hours long.) We have devised a twenty-four-month calendar, alternating twenty-nine-day months with twenty-eight-day months and tacking on a couple of extra days at year's end. It is not the system they use on Mars in the era we came from, when dates throughout the solar system refer to standard dates on Earth, but ours works better for us. It reminds us that we really are on Mars—that that other Earth, and the times of our origin, are inaccessible.

The names of our months will come later—we've decided not to hurry tradition, or impose artificial order on what should be a spontaneous process. It makes little difference that New Year's Day does not happen to fall in midwinter in the north of Mars (in fact it falls in the northern summer), for our base camp is not far from the equator.

Troy occasionally favors us with one of her comm-link bulletins, but otherwise we see little of her or Redfield. She keeps us in mind—we never seem to need to remind her when goods and supplies that only the aliens can provide are low; we have been able to contact her as we wish, even to have

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