Thrive Gandhi Requiem (Thrive Colony Corps Space Adventures Book 7) by Ginger Booth

Author:Ginger Booth [Booth, Ginger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

Mumbi, Gandhi, 2223 C.E.

+8 months, universe A

Fraz and her Valkyrie trio flew to a landing in Veena’s front yard, close to the gates of the immense compound.

The time was just before noon, as requested. This was actually 11:20 by Gandhi time reckoning. Tiktok had issued a new three-world simultaneous clock to everyone on the expedition. Gandhi’s solar day was 25.5 Earth hours long. This they called 25 hours, each with 4 quarters, 10 minutes to the quarter, and 100 seconds to the minute, for the first rational decimal clock in widespread use. Eli and Darren were delighted. After Fraz performed some arithmetic, she realized that the Gandhi minute lasted about 1.5 Mahina minutes, so that the worlds’ quarter hours almost matched. And having gone digital, 11:21 meant the 11th hour, 2nd quarter hour, first minute. The minute after 11:29 was 11:30, or quarter to noon.

Tiktok was a cad, but he wrote a clear memo.

Fraz tugged down her Colony Corps uniform, which she had designed to impress, rather than aerial acrobatics. Celeste matched her captain, while Cali incorporated all the winding sheets and scarves. Keitha tied one sheet as a sarong, a second as a shawl, and used a scarf to mask her bald scalp. Those two wore extensive makeup. Fraz and Celeste went easy on the eyeliner, with sedate lipstick, as befit officer and noncom at a social function.

Veena, flanked by two younger women, fluttered through the air to offer prayer fingers and bows of welcome. “Oh, very nice, how lovely!” Her fingers clawed slightly toward Keitha, but she relented.

Fidget translated her words silently into their earbuds without trouble, but spoke aloud to translate Fraz’s vapid inquiry. “Is this correct? We weren’t sure whether to land outside the gate and knock.”

“Oh, yes, very proper!” Veena’s diagonal head-bob looked like a ‘No’, but she seemed sincere, and the younger women were beaming. “Come, into my home!”

One of the younger women offered, “Most people fly into the airport and walk from there.”

Veena laughed and swatted at her. “Never mind! This is fine! My daughter, such a shrew!”

“You must have been a child when she was born!” Celeste cried. “She is old, and you so young!”

Veena cackled at her daughter’s expense. The daughter harrumphed off ahead of them, hiking up her skirts to swish away faster. “It’s true. I was twelve when she was born, my eldest daughter.”

The Gandhi year was a half month shorter than an Earth year.

“You marry so young!” Fraz exclaimed. “Not a body birth?”

“No, of course not!” Comparing notes, both Mahina and Gandhi harvested a girl’s eggs for safekeeping in infancy. Puberty was triggered by injections at age eleven and ten respectively. Secondary sex characteristics developed over the next couple years, breasts and wider hips, but all of humanity dispensed with menstrual cycles.

“My sister Shyla,” apparently the one who left in a huff, “is mama’s second child, yes? A boy is first, to lead the family. Boy-girl, boy-girl. I am the third girl, Divya, of twenty-five years. The shrew is thirty-one.

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