Voyage From Yesteryear Part 2

"Who said anything about them? Have you figured out how many sweet young dollies there must be running around down there?" Sirocco chuckled lasciviously over the intercom. "I bet Swyley has a miraculous recovery between now and when we go into orbit." Color-blind or not, Corporal Swyley had seen the present situation coming in time to report sick with stomach cramps just twenty-four hours before D Company was a.s.signed two weeks of Bomb Factory guard duty. He was "sick" because he had reported them during his own time; reporting stomach cramps during the Army's time was diagnosed as malingering.

A call came through from Brigade, and Sirocco switched into the audio channel to take it. Colman sat back and looked around. The indicators and alarms on the console in front of him had nothing to report.

n.o.body was creeping about under the floor, worming their way between the structure's inner and outer skin, tampering with any doors or hatches, cutting a hole through from the booster compartments, crawling down from the accelerator level above, or climbing furtively across the outside. n.o.body, it seemed, wanted any thermonuclear warheads today. He rose and moved round behind the chair. "Need to stretch my legs," he said as Sirocco glanced up behind his faceplate. "It's time to do a round anyhow."

Sirocco nodded and carried on talking inside his helmet. Colman shouldered his M32 and left the guardroom.

He took a side door out of the corridor that n.o.body ever came along and began following a gallery between the outer wall of the Factory and a bank of cable-runs, ducts, and conduits, moving through the 15 percent of normal gravity with a slow, easy-going lope that had long ago become second nature.

Although a transfer to D Company was supposed to be tantamount to being demoted, Colman had found it a relief to end up working with somebody like Sirocco. Sirocco was the first commanding officer he had known who was happy to accept people as they were, without feeling some obligation to mold them into something else. He wasn't meddling and interfering all the time. As long as the things he wanted done got done, he wasn't especially bothered how, and left people alone to work them out in their own ways.

It was refres.h.i.+ng to be treated as competent for once-respected as somebody with a brain and trusted as capable of using it. Most of the other men in the unit felt the same way. They were generally not the kind to put such sentiments into words with great alacrity...but it showed.

Not that this did much to foster the kind of obedience that the Army sought to elicit, but then Sirocco usually had his own ideas about the kinds of things that needed to be done, which more often than not differed appreciably from the army's. Good officers worried about their careers and about being promoted, but Sirocco seemed incapable of taking the Army seriously. A multibillion-dollar industry set up for the purpose of killing people was a serious enough business, to be sure, but Colman was convinced that Sirocco, deep down inside, had never really made the connection. It was a game that he enjoyed playing. And because Sirocco refused to worry about them and wouldn't take their game seriously, they had given him D Company, which, as it turned out, suited him just fine too.

Colman had reached the place where a raised catwalk joined the gallery from a door leading through a bulkhead into one of the booster-pump compartments, where tritium bred in the stem bypa.s.s reactors was concentrated to enrich the main-drive fusion plasma before it was hurled away into s.p.a.ce. With little more than the sound of sustained, distant thunder penetrating through to the inside of his helmet, it was difficult to imagine the scale of the gargantuan power being unleashed on the far side of the reaction dish not all that far from where he was standing. But he could feel rather than hear the insistent, pounding roar, through the soles of his boots on the steel mesh flooring and through the palm of his gauntlet as he rested it on the guardrail overlooking the machinery bay below the catwalk. As always, something stirred deep inside him as the nerves of his body reached out and sensed the energy surging around him-raw, wild, savage energy that was being checked, tamed, and made obedient to the touch of a fingertip upon a b.u.t.ton. He gazed along the lines of super conducting bus bars with core maintained within mere tens of degrees from absolute zero just feet from hundred million-degree plasmas, at the accelerator casing above his head, where pieces of atoms flashed at almost the speed of light along paths controlled to within millionths of an inch, at the bundles of data cables marching away to carry details of everything that happened from microsecond to microsecond to the ever-alert control computers, and had to remind himself that it had all been constructed by men. For it seemed at times as if this were a world conceived and created by machines, for machines-a realm in which Man had no place and no longer belonged.

But Colman felt that he did belong here-among the machines. He understood them and talked their language, and they talked his. They were talking to him now in the vibrations coming through his suit. The language of the machines was plain and direct. It had no inverted logic or double meanings. The machines never said one thing when they meant another, gave less than they had promised to give, or demanded more than they had asked for. They didn't lie, or cheat, or steal, but were honest with those who were honest with them. Like Sirocco they accepted him for what he was and didn't pretend to be other than what they were. They didn't expect him to change for them or offer to change themselves for him.

Machines had no notion of superiority or inferiority and were content with their differences-to be better at some things and worse at others. They could understand that and accept it. Why, Colman wondered, couldn't people?

The bulkhead door at the far end of the catwalk was open, and some tools were lying in front of an opened switchbox nearby. Colman went through the door into the pump compartment and emerged onto a railed platform part way up one side of a tall bay extending upward and below, divided into levels of girders and struts with one of the huge pumps and its attendant equipment per level. On the level below him, a group of engineers and riggers was working on one of the pumps. They had removed one of the end-casings and dismantled the bearing a.s.sembly, and were attaching slings from an overhead gantry in preparation for withdrawing the rotor. Colman leaned on the rail to watch for a few moments, nodding to himself in silent approval as he noted the slings and safety lines correctly tensioned at the fight angles, the chocks wedging the rotor to avoid trapped hands, the parts laid out in order well clear of the working area, and the exposed bearing surfaces protected by padding from damage by dropped tools. He liked watching professionals.

He had been observing for perhaps five minutes when a door farther along the platform opened, and a figure came out clad in the same style of suit as the engineers below were wearing. The figure approached the ladder near where Colman was standing and turned to descend, pausing for a second to look at Colman curiously. The nametag on the breast pocket read "B. FALLOWS". Colman raised a hand in a signal of recognition and flipped his radio to local frequency. "Hey, Bernard, it's me-Steve Colman. I don't know if you're heard yet, but that transfer didn't go through. Thanks for trying anyway."

The features behind the other's visor remained unsmiling. "Mister Fallows to you, Sergeant." The voice was icy. "I'm sorry, but I have work to do. I presume you have as, well. Might I suggest that we both get on with it." With that he clasped the handrails of the ladder, stepped backward off the platform to slide gently down to the level below, and turned away to rejoin the others.

Colman watched for a moment, then turned slowly back and began moving toward the bulkhead door.

He didn't feel resentful, nor particularly surprised. He'd seen it all too many times before. Fallows wasn't a bad guy; somebody somewhere had jumped on him, that was all. "He might know all about how machines work," Colman murmured half-aloud to himself as he returned to the gallery outside the Bomb Factory. "But he doesn't understand how they think."

CHAPTER FOUR.

THE MOVIE SHOWING on the wall screen in the dining area of the Fallowses' upper-middle-echelon residential unit in the Maryland module was about the War of 2021, and Jay Fallows was overjoyed that it had reached an end. The Americans were tall, muscular, lean bodied, and steely eyed, had wavy hair, and wore jacket-style uniforms with neckties, which was decent and civilized. The Soviets were heavy jowled, s.h.i.+fty, and unscrupulous, had short-cropped hair, and wore tunics that b.u.t.toned to the throat, which meant they wanted to conquer the world. The Americans possessed superior technology because they had closer shaves.

"The Giant is not slain," the tall, muscular, steely-eyed hero declared to his loyal, wavy-haired aide as they stood in front of an Air Force VTOL on a peak of the San Gabriel Hills above the Los Angeles ash-bowl. "It must sleep a while to mend its wounds now its task is done. But it will rise again, hardened and tempered from the furnace. This will not have been for naught." The figures and the mountain shrank as the view widened to include the setting sun that would see another dawn, and the music swelled to a rousing finale of bra.s.s and drums backed by what sounded like a celestial choir.

Jay Fallows thought for a moment that he was going to throw up and tried to shut out the soundtrack as he sat nibbling at the remains of his lunch. An astronomy book lay propped open on the table in front of him. Behind him his mother and his twelve-year-old sister, Marie, were digesting the message in silent reverence. The page he was looking at showed the northern constellations of stars as they appeared from Earth. They looked much as they did from the Mayflower II, except in the book Ca.s.siopeia was missing a star-the Sun. On the page opposite, the Southern Cross included Alpha Centauri as one of its pointers, whereas from the s.h.i.+p it had separated and grown into a brilliant orb s.h.i.+ning in the foreground.

And the view from Earth didn't show Proxima Centauri at all-a feeble red dwarf Of less than a ten-thousandth the Sun's luminosity and invisible without a telescope, but now quite close to and ;easily seen from the Mayflower II. Always imperceptible from one day to the next and practically so from month to month, the changes in the stars were happening ever more slowly as the main drive continued to fire and steadily ate up the velocity that had carried the s.h.i.+p across four light-years of s.p.a.ce.

Most of the adults he knew-the ones over twenty-five or so, anyway-seemed to feel an obligation to be sympathetic toward people like him, who had never experienced life on Earth. From what he had seen he wasn't sure that he'd missed all that much. Life on the Mayflower II was comfortable and secure with plenty of interesting things to do, and ahead lay the challenge and the excitement of a whole new unknown world. Certainly that was something no one back on Earth could look forward to.

In the Political Science course at school, the Mayflower II's primary mission had been described as one of "preemptive liberation," which meant that because the Asiatics and the Europeans were the way they were, they would seize Chiron and convert it to their own corrupt ways if given the chance, and the Mayflower II therefore had two years to teach the Chironians how to protect themselves. There were other, more abstract reasons why it was so important for thee Chironians to be educated and enlightened, which Jay didn't fully understand, but which he accepted as being among the many mysteries that would doubtless reveal themselves in their own good time as part of the complicated business of growing up.

Whatever the answers might turn out to be, he couldn't fathom what they might have to do with making model steam locomotives and his father's solemn p.r.o.nouncement that it really wouldn't be a good idea for him to continue his friends.h.i.+p with Steve Colman. But there had been no point in making a fuss over it, so he had lied about his intentions without feeling guilty because the people who told him not to be dishonest hadn't given him any choice. Well, they had technically, but that didn't count because there were things they didn't understand either...or had forgotten, maybe. But Steve would understand.

"I'm glad I wasn't alive then," Marie said from behind him. "I can't imagine whole cities burning. It must have been horrible."

"It was," Jean agreed. "It's a lesson that we an have to remember. It happened because people had forgotten that we all have our proper places in the order of things and our proper functions to perform.

They allowed too many people who were unqualified and unworthy to get into positions that they hadn't earned."

"Pay our debt, collect our due/Each one proud/or what we do," Marie recited.

"Very good," her mother said.

Little snot, Jay thought to himself and turned the page. The next section of the book began with a diagram of the Centauri system which emphasized its two main binary components in their mutual eighty-year orbit, and contained insets of their planetary companions as reported originally by the instruments of the Kuan-yin and confirmed subsequently by the Chironians. Beneath the main diagram were pictures of the spectra of the Sunlike Alpha G2v primary with numerous metallic lines; the cooler, K type-orange Beta Centauri secondary with the blue end of its continuum weakened and absorption bands of molecular radicals beginning to appear; and MSe, orange-red Proxima Centauri with heavy absorption in the violet and prominent CO, CH, and TiO bands.

"There won't be a war on Chiron, will there?" Marie asked.

"Of course not, dear. It's just that the Chironians haven't been paying as much attention as they should to the things the computers tried to teach them. They've always had machines to give them everything they want, and they think life is all one long playtime. But it's not really their fault because they're not really people like us." The conviction was widespread even though the Mayflower II's presiding bishop was carrying a special ordinance from Earth decreeing that Chironians had souls. Jean realized that she had left herself open to misinterpretation and added hastily, "Well, they are people, of course. But they're not exactly like you because they were born without any mothers or fathers. You mustn't hate them or anything. Just remember that you're a little better than they are because you've been luckier, and you know about things they've never had a chance to learn. Even if we have to be a little bit firm with them, it will be for their own good in the end."

"You mean when the Chinese and the Europeans get here?"

"Quite. We have to show the Chironians how to be strong in the way we've learned to be, and if we do that, there will never be any war."

Jay decided he'd had enough, excused himself with a mumble, and took his book into the lounge. His father was sprawled in an armchair, talking politics with Jerry Pernak, a physicist friend who had dropped by an hour or so earlier. Politics was another mystery that Jay a.s.sumed would mean something one day.

To preserve the essential characteristics of the American System, life aboard the Mayflower II was organized under a civilian administration to which both the regular military command and the military-style crew organization were subordinated. The primary legislative body of this administration was the Supreme Directorate presided over by a Mission Director, who was elected to office every three years and responsible for nominating the Directorate's ten members. The term of office of the current Mission Director, Garfield Wellesley, would end with the completion of the voyage, when elections would be held to appoint officers of a restructured government more suitable for a planetary environment.

"Howard Kalens, no doubt about it," Bernard Fallows was saying. "If we've only got two years to knock the place into shape, he's just the kind of man we need. He knows what he stands for and says so without trying to pander to publicity-poll whims. And he's got the breeding for the position. You can't make a planetary governor out of any rabble, you how."

Pernak didn't seem overeager to accept the implied invitation to agree. He started to say something noncommittal, then stopped and looked up as Jay entered. "Hi, Jay. How was the movie"

"Aw, I wasn't watching it." Jay waved vaguely with the book and returned it to its shelf. "Usual stuff."

"What are the girls still talking about in there?" Bernard asked.

"I'm not sure. I guess I couldn't have been listening that much."

"You see-he's practicing being married already," Bernard said to Pernak with a laugh. Pernak grinned momentarily. Bernard looked at his son. "Well, it's early yet. Figured out what you're doing this afternoon?"

"I thought maybe I'd go over to Jersey and put in a few hours on the loco."

"Fine." Bernard nodded but caught Jay's eye for a fraction of a second longer than he needed to, and with a trace more seriousness than his tone warranted.

"How's it coming along?" Pernak asked.

"Pretty good. I've got the boiler tested and installed, and the axle linkages are ready to a.s.semble. Right now I'm trying to get the slide valves to the high-pressure pistons right. They're tricky."

"Got far with them?" Pernak asked.

"I had to sc.r.a.p one set." Jay sighed. "I guess it's hack to square one on another. That's what I reckon I'll start today."

"So when are you going to show it to me?". Jay shrugged. "Any time you like."

"You going to Jersey fight now?"

"I was going to. I don't have to make it right now." Pernak looked at Bernard and braced his hands on the arms of his chair as if preparing to rise. "Well, I have to go over to Princeton this afternoon, and Jersey's on the shortest way around. Jay and I could share a cab."

Bernard stood up. "Sure...don't let me keep you if you have things to do. Thanks for letting me have the cutter back." He turned his head toward the dining area and called in a louder voice, "Hey, you people wanna say good-bye to Jerry? He's leaving." Pernak and Jay waited by the door for lean and Marie to appear.

"On your way?" lean asked Pernak.

"Things won't do themselves. I'm stopping off at Jersey with Jay to see how his loco's coming along."

"Oh, that locomotive!" lean looked at Jay. "Are you working on it again?"

"For a few hours maybe."

"Well, try not to make it half the night this time, won't you." And to Pernak: "Take care, Jerry. Thanks for dropping by. Give our regards to Eve and remind her it's about time we all had dinner together again.

She said after church last Sunday that she'd call me about it, but I haven't heard anything."

"I'll remind her," Pernak promised. "Ready, Jay? Let's go."

Pernak had short, jet-black hair, a broad, solid frame, and rubbery features that always fascinated Jay with their seemingly endless variety of expressions. He had lectured on physics topics several times at Jay's school and had proved popular as much for his entertainment value as for his grasp of the subject matter, which he always managed to make exciting with tantalizing glimpses inside black holes, mind-bending accounts of the first few minutes of the universe, and fantastic speculation about living in twisted s.p.a.cetimes with unusual geometries. On one occasion he had introduced Feynman diagrams, which represented particles as "world lines" traversing a two-dimensional domain, one axis representing s.p.a.ce and the other time. Mathematically and theoretically a particle going forward in time was indistinguishable from its antiparticle going backward in time, and Pernak had offered the staggering conjecture that there might be just one electron in the entire universe-repeating itself over and over by going forward as an electron and backward as a positron. At least, Pernak had pointed out, it would explain why they all had exactly the same charge and ma.s.s, which was something that n.o.body had ever been able to come up with a better reason for.

Pernak had a surprisingly long stride for his height, and Jay had to hurry to keep up as they walked a couple of blocks through densely packed but ingeniously secluded interlocking terraces of Maryland residential units. It wasn't long before Pernak was talking about phase-changes in the laws of physics and their manifestation through the process of evolution. One of the refres.h.i.+ng things about Pernak, Jay found, was that he stuck to his subject and didn't burden it with moralizing and unsolicited adult advice. He had never been able to make up his mind whether Pernak was secretly a skeptic about things like that or just believed in minding his own business, but he had never found a way of leading up to the question.

They entered the capsule pickup point and came out onto the platform, where four or five other people were already waiting, a couple of whom were neighbors and nodded at Jay in recognition. The next capsule around the Ring was due in just over a minute, and they stopped in front of an election poster showing the austere, aristocratic figure of Howard Kalens gazing protectively down on the planet Chiron like some benign but aloof cosmic G.o.d. The caption read simply: PEACE AND UNITY.

"Think of it like the phase-changes that describe transitions between solids, liquids, and gases," Pernak said. "The gas laws are only valid over a certain limited range. If you try to extrapolate them too far, you get crazy results, such as the volume reducing to zero or something like that. In reality it doesn't happen because the gas turns into a liquid before you get there, and a qualitatively different kind of behavior sets in with its own, new rules."

"You're saying evolution adds up to a succession of transitions like that?"

"Yes, Jay. Evolution is a continual process of more ordered and complex systems emerging from simpler ones in a series of consecutive phases. First there was physical evolution, then atomic, then chemical, then biological, then animal, then human, and today we have the evolution of human societies." Pernak's face writhed to take on a different expression for each cla.s.s as he spoke. "In each phase new relations.h.i.+ps and properties come into being which can only be expressed in the context of that higher level. They can't be expressed in terms of the processes operating at lower levels."

Jay thought about it for a few seconds and nodded slowly. "I think I get it. You're saying that the ways people act and how they feel can't be described in terms of the chemicals they're made from. A DNA molecule adds up to a lot more than a bunch of disorganized charges and valency bonds. The way you organize it makes its own laws."

"Exactly, Jay. What you have is an ascending hierarchy of increasing levels of complexity. At each level, new relations.h.i.+ps and meanings emerge that are functions of the level itself and don't exist at all in the levels beneath. For instance, there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. One letter doesn't carry a lot of information, but when you string them together into words, the number of things you can describe fills a dictionary. When you a.s.semble words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and so on up to a book, the variety is as good as infinite, and you can convey any meaning you want. Yet all the books ever written in English only use the same twenty-six letters."

The capsule arrived, and Jay fell silent while he digested what Pernak had said. As they climbed inside, Jay entered a code into the panel by the door to specify their destination in the Jersey module, and they sat down on an empty pair of facing seats as the capsule began to move. After a short run up to speed, it entered a tube to exit from Maryland and pa.s.sed through one of the spherical intermodule housings that supported the Ring and contained the bearings and pivoting mechanisms for adjusting the module orientations to the s.h.i.+p's state of motion. For a brief period they were looking out through a transparent outer sh.e.l.l at the immensity of the Spindle, seemingly supported by a web of structural booms and tie-bars three miles above their heads, with the vastness of s.p.a.ce extending away on either side, and then they entered the Kansas module where the scene outside changed to animal grazing enclosures, level upon level of agricultural traits, fish farms, and hydroponics tanks.

"Okay, so you track it all back to the Big Bang," Jay said at last. "Then where do you go?"

"Cla.s.sically, you can't go anywhere. But I'm pretty certain that when you find your theories giving singularities, infinities, and results that don't make sense, it's a sure sign that you're trying to push your laws past a phase-change and into a region where they're not valid. I think that's what we're up against."

"So where do you go?" Jay asked again.

"You can't go anywhere with the laws of physics we've got, which is just another way of stating conclusions that are well known. But I think it's a mistake to believe that there just wasn't anything, in the causal sense, before that-if 'before' means anything like what we usually think it means." Pernak sat forward and moistened his lips. "I'll give you a loose a.n.a.logy. Imagine a flame. Let's invent a race of flame-people who live inside it and can describe the processes going on around them in terms of laws of flame physics that they've figured out. Okay?" Jay frowned but nodded. "Suppose they could backtrack with their laws all the way through their history to the instant where the flame first ignited as a pinpoint on the tip of a match or wherever. To them that would be the origin of their universe, wouldn't it."

"Oh, okay," Jay said. "Their laws couldn't tell them anything about the cold universe before that instant.

Flame physics only came into existence when the flame did."

"A phase-change, evolving its own new laws," Pernak confirmed, nodding.

"And you're saying the Big Bang was something like that?"

"I'm saying it's very likely. What triggers a phase-change is a concentration of energy-energy density-like at the tip of a match. Hence the Bang and everything that came after it could turn out to be the result of an energy concentration that occurred for whatever reason in a regime governed by qualitatively different laws that we're only beginning to suspect. And that's what my line of research is concerned with."

Another flash of stars and they were in Idaho, one of the two fixed modules that carried the main support arms to the Spindle. The inside was a confusion of open and enclosed s.p.a.ces, of metal walls and latticeworks, tanks, pipes, tunnels, and machinery. They stopped briefly to take on more pa.s.sengers, probably newly arrived from the Spindle via the radial shuttles. Then the capsule moved away again.

"It could open up possibilities that'll blow your mind," Pernak resumed. "Suppose, for instance, that we could get to understand those laws and create our own concentrations on a miniature scale to inject energy from...let's call it a hyperrealm, into our own universe-in other words make 'small bangs'-mini white holes. Think what an energy source that would be; it'd made fusion look like a firecracker." Pernak waved his hands about. "And how about this, Jay. It could turn out that what we're living in lies on a gradient between some kind of hypersource that feeds ma.s.s-energy into our universe, and some kind of hypersink that takes it out again-such as black holes, maybe. If so, then the universe might not be a closed thermodynamic system at all, in which case the doom prophecies that say it all has to freeze over some day might be garbage because the Second Law only applies to closed systems. In other words we might find we're flame people living in a match factory."

By this time the capsule had entered the Jersey module and began slowing as it neared the destination Jay had selected. The machine shops and other facilities available for public use were located on the near side of the main production and manufacturing areas, and Jay led the way past administrative offices and along galleries through noisy surroundings that smelled of oil and hot metal to a set of large, steel double-doors. A smaller side door brought them to a check in counter topped by a gla.s.s part.i.tion behind which the attendant and a watchman were playing cribbage across a scratched and battered metal desk.

The attendant stood and shuffled over when Jay and Pernak appeared, and Jay presented a school pa.s.s which ent.i.tled him to free use of the facilities. The attendant inserted the pa.s.s into a terminal, then returned it with a token to be used for drawing tools from the storekeeper inside.

"There's something for you here," the attendant noted as Jay was turning away. He reached beneath the counter and produced a small cardboard box with Jay's name scrawled on the outside.

Puzzled, Jay broke the sealing tape and opened the box to reveal a layer of foam padding and a piece of folded notepaper. Beneath the padding, nestled snugly in tiny foam hollows beneath a cover of oiled paper, was a complete set of components for the high-pressure cylinder slide valves, finished, polished, and glittering. The note read: Jay, I thought you might need a hand with these so I did them last night. If my hunch is right, things have probably gotten a bit difficult for you. There's no sense in upsetting people who don't mean any harm.

Take it from me, he's not such a bad guy.

STEVE.

Jay blinked and looked up to find Pernak watching him curiously. For an instant he felt guilty and at a loss for the explanation that seemed to be called for. "Bernard told me about it," Pernak said before Jay could offer anything. "I guess he's under a lot of pressure right now, so don't read too much into it." He stared at the box in Jay's hand. "I don't see anything-not a d.a.m.n thing. Come on, Jay. Let's take a look at that loco of yours."

CHAPTER FIVE.

CHIRON WAS ALMOST nine thousand miles in diameter, but its nickel-iron core was somewhat smaller than Earth's, which gave it a comparable gravitational force at the surface. It turned in a thirty-one-hour day about an axis more tilted with respect to its...o...b..tal plane than Earth's, which in conjunction with its more elliptical orbit-a consequence of perturbations introduced by the nearness of Beta Centauri-produced greater climatic extremes across its lat.i.tudes, and highly variable seasons.

Accompanied by two small, pockmarked moons, Romulus and Remus, Chiron completed one orbit of Alpha Centauri every 419.66 days.

Roughly 35 percent of Chiron's surface was land, the bulk of it distributed among three major continental ma.s.ses. The largest of these was Terranova, a vast, east-west sprawling conglomeration of every conceivable type of geographic region, dominating the southern hemisphere and extending from beyond the pole to cross the equator at its most northerly extremity. Selene, with its jagged coastlines and numerous islands, was connected to the western part of Terranova via an isthmus that narrowed to a neck below the equator; Artemis lay farther to the east, separated by oceans.

Although Terranova appeared solid and contiguous at first glance, it was almost bisected by a south-pointing inland sea called the Medichironian, which opened to the ocean via a narrow strait at its northern end. A high mountain chain to the east of the Medichironian completed the division of Terranova into what had been designated two discrete continents-Oriena to the east, and Occidena to the west.

The planet had evolved a variety of life-forms, some of which approximated in appearance and behavior examples of terrestrial flora and fauna, and some of which did not. Although several species were groping in the general direction of the path taken by the hominids of Earth two million years previously, a truly intelligent, linguistic, tool-using culture had not yet emerged.

The Medichironian Sea extended from the cool temperate southerly climatic band to the warm, subequatorial lat.i.tudes at its mouth. Its eastern sh.o.r.e lay along narrow coastal plains, open in some parts and thickly forested in others, that rapidly rose into the foothills of the Great Barrier Chin, beyond which stretched the vast plains and deserts of central Oriena. The opposite sh.o.r.e of the sea opened more easily into Occidena for most of its length, but the lowlands to the west were divided into two large basins by an eastward-running mountain range. An extension of this range projected into the sea as a rocky spine of fold valleys fringed by picturesque green plains, sandy bays, and rugged headlands, and was knows as the Mandel Peninsula, after a well-known statesman of the 2010s. It was on the northern sh.o.r.e of the base of this peninsula that the Kuan-yin's robots had selected the site for Franklin, the first surface base to be constructed while the earliest Chironians were still in their infancy aboard the orbiting mother-s.h.i.+p.

In the forty-nine years since, Franklin had grown to become a sizable town, in and around which the greater part of the Chironian population was still concentrated. Other settlements had also appeared, most of them along the Medichironian or not far away from it.