Synod

0h00

Every child in Descent learns one piece of arithmetic before any other. Take the length of your day and the length of your friend’s. Subtract the smaller from the larger. Divide a whole day by the difference. The answer, in days, is your synod: how long before the two of you next wake into the same morning.

Rhona’s day is twenty-four hours, nine minutes and thirteen seconds long. Mine is twenty-four hours, seven minutes and forty-one seconds. The difference is ninety-two seconds — less than it takes a kettle to boil — and so our synod is nine hundred and thirty-nine days. Two years, six months and change.

We were married at conjunction, as everyone is, on a morning we both woke into. Her father gave the toast. He was a registry man his whole working life and could not help himself: he had done the sum before the wine was poured. Twenty-two mornings, he said, raising his glass. Twenty-two, if you keep your health. Waste none of them. Everyone laughed. I wrote the number on the inside of my wrist that night, and kept writing it there for years, minus one each time, until Rhona asked me to stop.

5h44

I teach Year Three, which is the year the arithmetic is taught, because seven is the age at which it begins to hurt.

Aya’s day is twenty-four hours and three minutes. Her friend Odile’s is twenty-four hours and twelve minutes. I set the sum and watched Aya work it: nine minutes of difference, a hundred and sixty days of synod. Odile would come round to her twice a year, roughly, forever. Aya looked at the answer for a long time and then asked the question one of them always asks.

Why don’t we all just use the same day?

So I told them, as I tell them every year. That Descent is bored into the ice of a moon that never sees its sun. That light here is not given, it is made, and what is made can be chosen. That the founders chose: they ran the Common Day, every corridor blazing bright and dark on a twenty-four-hour wheel, the way the books from Earth said a sky behaves. And most bodies settled into that wheel the way filings settle to a magnet. But a body’s day is set somewhere below asking, and a light can only pull a day so far. Entrainment is a well with sloping sides. If your own day lies near the light’s, you are drawn in and held. If it lies too far out, no lamp we could live under will capture you: you slide past the Common Day over and over, dragged at but never held, waking each cycle a little further from everyone, then a little nearer, then further again, and this is not freedom but towing. One in five of the founders lived towed. The infirmary records from those years make dismal reading — the errors, the accidents, the hearts. The towed fifth died younger, and everyone could see it, and the Common Day shone on regardless, because it was working for the other four.

The second generation put it to a vote, and by a margin the histories call narrow the great lights went out. The minutes of that assembly survive. We are not losing the day, the motion’s author said. We are setting it down.

Now every household keeps its own lamps on its own wheel, and the corridors are lit to a constant civil dusk, too dim to take hold of anyone. The colony still keeps a common count of hours, for scheduling — but it is a number line, not a wheel. Nothing anywhere in it is morning.

The children always ask, next, whether it is better to have a short synod with someone or a long one. I tell them the registry publishes every measured day in the colony and has no opinion about any of them.

12h00

At full counter, Rhona wakes as I am going down. We keep sixteen waking hours each, so even now we share eight — four at each edge, her mornings laid against my evenings. But shared hours at counter are not shared hours at phase. We meet at the wrong energies: she crests as I am spending the last of myself; half a season on, the reverse. Whole quarrels have lived and died in our house on the strength of one person being at their best against the other’s worst. The registry counsellors know this so well that they will not book a mediation for a couple at counter. Come back at phase, they say. Most couples, come the conjunction, no longer want the appointment.

At counter the house talks in notes. Hers wait for me on the table like frost that has formed overnight: the pump filter, the school forms, a joke about my snoring with a drawing attached. You learn what you sound like asleep from the person who lives counter to you. You learn what you look like, too. There is no one I have watched sleep so much, or been watched by, and I no longer think this is the lesser half of a marriage. It is the half from which you can see the other person whole.

My parents were what the registry calls a true pair. Two seconds of difference. Their synod was a hundred and eighteen years: their next shared morning lay beyond both their lives, and they knew it when they married, and thought — as every true pair thinks — that it would never matter, because two seconds a day is nothing. It is twelve minutes a year. It is an hour of drift every five years, accumulating in a direction that never comes back.

In my earliest memories they wake together, and I believed all houses woke together. By my twentieth year they were four hours apart and pretending otherwise — my mother holding herself up later and later, grey with it, because a body can be argued with but not persuaded. The pretending stopped eventually. The drift did not.

19h12

Mercy’s day, measured across her first year the way every child’s is, came out at twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes. Shorter than the standard day — a widdershins child, running against the colony’s slow average. Her difference from me is nine minutes and forty-one seconds; her synod with her own father is a hundred and forty-nine days. She laps us like a runner on an inside track. As an infant she was uncatchable, her sleep arriving ninety minutes earlier each week, and Rhona and I handed her back and forth between our two days like a watch changing at sea.

Children’s friendships here have seasons, and the seasons are short. When Mercy was seven, Odile’s younger sister rotated away from her towards counter, and Mercy cried the fierce arithmetic-proof tears of Year Three. We did not tell her it would be all right. We cut a tally into the doorframe instead, and when the girl came round again, a hundred-odd days later, Mercy cut the next one herself. There are nine tallies on the frame now. She checks the registry tables without help and budgets her friendships like a harbourmaster reading tides.

0h00

My mother died forty-seven years married, nine and a half hours out of true. My father sat with her through her last mornings, which his body took for the deep middle of the night, and he did not once fall asleep. At the funeral he told me their synod — a hundred and eighteen years, said once, in the voice of a man reporting a distance — and he has never said it since. Their shared morning is still out there, sixty-some years downstream of them, and it will arrive on schedule, and nothing will be awake in their house to meet it.

I understood something at that funeral that I had failed to understand in thirty years of teaching it. The founders did not divide us when they set the Common Day down. The difference was always in us, seconds deep, below asking. All the vote did was stop pretending otherwise — stop dragging the towed, stop calling the drift a fault in the person drifting. What we lost was the pretence. What we kept was each other, on honest terms: everyone circling at their own true rate, and every distance between any two of us temporary, provided the wheel has room to turn.

This morning is our seventeenth. Rhona woke before me by nothing at all — by seconds — and I heard her fill the kettle, and lay still a moment to listen to a sound happening in a morning that was also mine. Her father’s number stands at five now, if we keep our health. We do not speak of it. We had breakfast at one table at one hour like the extravagance it is, and she read out the school forms, and made the joke about my snoring, aloud this time, no drawing needed.

Tomorrow she will wake ninety-two seconds later than me, and the day after that three minutes, and the wheel will take her again, out through the edges of my evenings, round through the far side of my nights. I begrudge it nothing. It has always brought her back.