standard time

Thoughts in transit to New Bombay.

I shouldn't sample the cargo. Its mighty unprofessional. Cuts into profit, gives us headaches, and makes me a touch bitter.

He used to say to me "What are you doing as a Runner? You might have been a professor somewhere. A poet."
I would always respond, "You might have been a Circus act. The both of us are defying our destinies."

But he was serious, and sometimes I believe those words.

I bring up a chart to find out the time. Each planet has its own rotation and revolution, there is no other place that has the 24-hour day, like Earth. We judge a year is 365 of those sunrises, though it means so little out here. I have been floating in the void for some five thousand of those terran sunsets, and what is there to show of it? Still, Earth time remains standard time, at least until some other planet takes over, or until our brain tides rearrange themselves to the patterns of space.
There is good money to be made in the manufacture and sale of clocks and calendars that convert from standard time to planetary time. Any good trader has some sort of chart on hand and won’t have to rely on shipboard Comweb connection. I have most of the chart in my head.

I still run on standard time.

Sometimes I wake in the dark just as the sun is rising on Earth. Free of moon and tides, there is nothing to pull me along save the relentless hum of trackless time and the clanking machinery of exploration.