Moonstar Read online

  A laughing group of sailors came up the Concourse then, slightly tipply, almost dancing, flushed and weaving, with their arms around each other, giggling, singing bawdy songs about their lovers on the islands they had been to. They wore no hats nor shirts, nor makeup, on their cheeks. Their hair was cropped, their kilts were brief; they flashed with color in every way, armbands, jewels, necklaces, long brown legs and golden shoulders. They moved in catlike bounces; they were lithe, like dancers, and their muscles glowed like oil. Jobe stared in fascination (by the way, they had no breasts) till Hojanna made her turn around. “Don’t listen to their songs, Jobe. They are manner-less and coarse; and they reek of bad smells too.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” said Jobe, but Hojanna wasn’t minding.

  Jobe waited for an explanation—why were the sailors bad? But no one answered, so she put the thought aside and considered the more pressing one. “Why do people have big tits? Except some people don’t.” She asked, “Why is that?”

  At first, her mother didn’t hear her question, but the sudden grin from Kuvig and the angry scowl from Dida made Hojanna stop abruptly in mid-word and look at Jobe. “Eh? What was that?”

  “Why do people have big tits?”

  “Because,” Hojanna told her patiently. “Some follow Reethe, the Mother; others are for Dakka.”

  “Oh,” said Jobe, with puzzlement. She had heard the names before, but thought them both detached from life, a different kind of bedtime tale, a higher grade of myth.

  Seeing her blank look, Hojanna said, “Some people choose to live by Reethe, and so she makes it possible for them to be birth-mothers. It is her gift—she also gives them two soft purses to carry milk in for their babies.”

  “But Dida has no babies,” pointed Jobe. “And she has—”

  “Dida might have babies someday. Just because you have a purse doesn’t mean you have to spend what’s in it,” Hojanna paid no mind to Dida’s blush. “Other people live by Dakka. Dakka gives no purses.”

  “What does Dakka give?”

  Hojanna paused—and Kuvig interrupted with, “Dakka gives a magic staff. It makes you cry with joy. And it only does this magic when it’s snuggled in its sheath.”

  “Oh,” said Jobe, considering this knowledge. Reethe and Dakka, holy names, were real after all. They affected people’s lives—that meant they weren’t words and fables, they were concrete, they were real. They altered human body-shapes, and that implied a lot; self-images were malleable, the bastion of the soul was soft—what else was prey to change?

  In just a few short moments, Jobe’s world had grown in size, was now a doubly complex place, with new events to classify. And while her map of the terrain might now be more complete, it seemed that when she looked around, the terrain was far more rugged than imagined. They left the tea-booth then and proceeded to the Plaza where Dida’s marriage was arranged with a family in the north—she’d be living on a vast plantation near the Azure Sea. Jobe didn’t whine at all for the rest of the day; she was lost in introspective thought and the chests of passersby. If they bore tits, she classified them Rethrik, of the Mother; those tits were magic purses—but if not, then Dakka was at work. Sometimes Jobe looked long and hard, staring to be certain—some fat old Dakkariks were confusing, looking more like grandmeres than the -peres they surely were. In any case, the Dakkariks had magic staffs instead.

  But when the day was almost over, and the sun was nearing zenith—all the light had turned a shade of clay, the “dusk” before eclipse—they returned at last to Wester-Dock where their trimaran was moored. Jobe took her grandpere’s hand and asked, “Grandpere Kuvig, were you fibbing?”

  “Eh? Fibbing? About what?”

  “About the magic staffs. I looked all day—and I saw a lot of purses, but I didn’t see the staffs.”

  Kuvig laughed then, heartily, and with surprising strength, she plucked her grandchild from the dock and hugged her to her chest. “Don’t worry on it, little one—it’s not all that important. Someday you’ll have a chance to see more staffs than you will want to.”

  Jobe let the subject drop then. It was just one more grown-up mystery, the kind they all referred to without trying to explain. Jobe’s concern was not a major one, but one born out of boredom, and now that they were heading home, she was content to let it die. But occasionally thereafter, the thought would rise to haunt her. Where were the magic staffs?

  Satlin is 104 million miles from its primary, a small white orb with an overabundance of heat radiation. The Satlik call it, “Godheart”—not because of any specific religious significance, but because of its refusal to be easily understood or explained by human beings. It is just far enough off the main sequence to confound most explanations for its existence, and the best rationale is simply that it is trying to burn itself out in one hell of a hurry, that being the quickest way to remove itself as a certifiable anomaly.

  Satlin too is an anomaly, refusing any easy explanation. There is evidence that it was once the core of a massive Jupiter-type planet, a gas giant that had its outer layers burned off at some point in the past when its star was nova. The composition of its mantle and core structure tend to support this theory; however, there is also evidence that the planet was once a rogue and was captured by this star—for instance, the irregularity of its orbit; the plane of it is 60 degrees off the ecliptic. The planet also has too much water in its crust; on the other hand, its orbit is nearly circular. There is just enough evidence of either origin to make Satlin’s history uncertain. If anything, the planet is one more proof of the innate perversity of the universe.

  But, because the likelihood of a habitable planet around Godheart is slim, Satlin is not a planet that one would either predict or expect; hence its belated discovery far after the Diaspora of colonization had spread beyond it. Satlin is the only planet circling its primary, except for a ring of asteroids and assorted other rubble scattered in a belt some 225 million kilometers out. (The orbit of the asteroid spill establishes the plane of ecliptic for this star system. Because of the severe angle of Satlin’s orbit, twice a year she experiences heavy meteor showers of debris wandering inward from the belt. Since terraforming, most of this matter is burned up in the atmosphere, but occasionally larger chunks of rock have to be bumped out of the way.) The planet’s general unlikelihood lends some credence to the legend that the pilgrims were steered toward this world by an “angel”—the same angel that delivered “the Savior” to them and gave them Choice. As with many other aspects of the world, even its material sciences are bound up in mysticism.

  The planet has no life native to it. Before terraforming, it was a hard-baked ball of rock, almost totally lacking atmosphere, and bathed by actinic radiation strong enough to kill. The planet is 15,140 kilometers in diameter, larger than Earth, but with far less heavy metals and density. Gravity is only .84 Earth-normal. There are three small moons, massing less than one-third Luna (total), and scattering of asteroids. All of them are more than 300,000 kilometers out and exert only minor tidal effects. To the unaided eye, they are point-sources, not disks.

  The early colonists beheld a world that was barren and pocked; its cratered face was forbidding to look upon—she was world battered by cataclysm, lonely and hostile. If she had water, she held it within herself; what polar caps she wore were mostly CO2. What atmosphere she wore was thin and inhospitable, less than 1.2 psi. She turned upon her axis only once every 53:33:12 hours, producing extremes of day and night beyond the parameters of viability. The 26:46:36-hour day was too long and too hot, even before high noon temperatures on dayside became lethal; oceans, if any, would have boiled. Conversely, the equally long nights were too cold; freezing temperatures on nightside were generally reached eight to ten hours before dawn. In the higher latitudes, it was not uncommon for CO2 to crystallize out of the air was the night progressed. This continual heating and cooling put the planet’s crust under heavy strain, making it prone to volcanism and a great number of (usable) geothermal
vents. Earthquakes were not uncommon.

  After more than nine years of surveying and simulations, preliminary terraforming began with the construction of an atmosphere. Several ice-asteroids had been nudged out of orbit and pushed into eventual collision course with the planet; they began to arrive within a year of the completion of the primary simulations and their courses were corrected for specific target areas. The largest of these ice-asteroids was more than nineteen kilometers in diameter. When melted it would provide enough water to cover the surface of the planet to a depth of one centimeter. To import a whole ocean in this manner would take several centuries, more energy than the colonists had to work with, and probably would have reduced Satlin to rubble by the continual battering of asteroid collisions. The colonists were gambling instead that the small polar caps already in existence, as well as the core samples they had taken, were evidence of additional water trapped in Satlin’s mantle. The asteroid collisions opened thousands of holes in the planet’s surface and vented billions of tons of rock and hot gases into the air and created both an atmosphere and an ocean in a single generation. The pilgrims watched from their safely distant orbit and waited, not without prayer. Of course, the water that they did import was not wasted; although its primary purpose was to startle the mantle of the planet into releasing more of the treasure, eventually it flowed downward to its destined lake and ocean beds—the seven asteroids used added less than six percent of the total resultant atmosphere and ocean; the bulk of the planet’s resources were already there, waiting to be tapped. A few hard knocks were all that was needed.

  Satlin was less water than Earth, and it is spread across a vaster surface; the asteroid collisions were aimed to provide channels of interconnection for the oceans that would later flow down through them. Satlin’s oceans are generally shallow, warm, and for the most part, fresh. They have not had time to accumulate significant salt content. The seas circle the planet in wide belts, flowing from crater bed to crater bed. Many shore-lines are steep and inaccessible, being the formerly sheer mountains of crater walls. Beyond them, there are vast remains uninhabited and uninhabitable. For the most part, they are unexplored, although many legends seek refuge in their mystery.

  The present-day map of Satlin shows more than half a million small islands dotting the seas like stepping stones; many of them are shaped like crescents—the map is a swirling pattern of loops and circles, the legacy of the planet’s cratered past. Larger craters have become long circular chains of mountainous islands sketched around peaceful seas or inland deserts. Smaller craters have become dry pocks within the seas, depending on their elevation and the integrity of their walls. As a result, much of the planet’s habitable surface also remains unexplored and only casually seeded. A number of areas have been purposely unseeded to allow for future preserves and research enclaves. Others have been allowed to grow wild.

  The islands are thickest in the waters bordering the highlands where the oceans are their shallowest. The bulk of the Satlik population is settled in areas of this kind—between the desert and the dark blue sea. A typical example is the triangle of Luskin, Chung and Carlisle, west of Hull. Here the water averages less than a meter; it is possible to walk across the intervening straits, if one is patient enough. The “magic triangle” formed by these three peaks is known for its excellent offshore gardens, a favorite of boaters and bathers alike.

  Terraforming Satlin was not the easy process that this altogether too brief description seems to imply; in fact, the bulk of the work occurred after the initial formation of the atmosphere. The construction of a viable and sustaining ecology was—and still is—the primary concern of the Satlin Authority. The presence of an atmosphere provided significant filtering of the ultraviolet given off by Godheart—but the prolonged rotation of the planet still made the days too hot and the nights too cold. Secondary terraforming demanded some adjustment—an adjustment that helps to explain the still rigid control of Satlin Authority; theirs is a historical mission of maintenance, one which is regarded with reverence bordering on awe by most inhabitants. A series of controlled-shape (spider-frame, magnetic harness) optically thick, ionized plasmas, functioning as unphazed photon-interference fields (self-generating above compacted density thresholds), reflective on both sides, have been placed in synchronous orbit over selected localities. These shields provide necessary eclipses and darkdays. The Weather Authority controls day and night over every inhabited locality on the planet. Every decision affecting the Satlik ecology is subject to review by Authority.

  The shields of Satlin are something of an engineering marvel; the first of them took twenty-three years to construct; later fields would take less than fifteen. Each field is elliptical, in a synchronous orbit 84,000 kilometers; the long dimension is oriented north-to-south. Lacking significant mass-effect, the plasma is relatively immune to the effects of light pressure, although orbital corrections are occasionally necessary due to certain masscon perturbations of the focusing satellites. Each shield umbrellas the area of Satlin it is synchronous to, producing a period of 7:46 hours, centered on zenith, of total eclipse, every day; thus dividing the normal Satlin day into two days of 9:30 hours each. Each eclipse provides enough cooling to keep the shielded locality within the parameters of viability.

  Coming around toward nightside, the field functions as a mirror. A period of 10:30 hours, centered on midnight, becomes a darkday of illumination reflected off the underside of the field and focused on the same locality. Adjacent shields (when there are adjacent shields) provide additional illumination until their own localities approach darkday or are past it. Darkday occurs for a locality when its shield is directly opposed to the sun; before or after, the moonstar’s light spills onto adjacent darkdays, leaving its locality in night, but the bulk of any region’s illumination always comes from its own moonstar because the moondrops of adjacent shields are too far off their reflective axes.

  Because a shield covers a larger arc of sky than either the Godheart or Satlin’s own shadow-cone, it will appear as a phasing organ of light in the night sky; first, a glowing lens, growing brighter—too bright to look at directly; then as the shadow-cone begins to slide across it, an oval with a sidewise bite out of it, becoming a crescent, then an elongated ring—a silver-brilliant eye of zenith—then the process reverses, the ringstar becoming a crescent open to the opposite side, then an egg with a missing bite, then a glowing orb sliding back into dimness. “Noon” of the darkday is its twilight; its brightest moments come at the hours of morning and evening. Throughout, the adjacent shields can be seen as large moondrops in the eastern and western skies; larger even than the sun, they turn through phases as the planet rotates. Night and day, the sky of Satlin is a dome of wonder.

  Although not ideal, the adjustment works. Since initial colonization, the Satlik have opened up fourteen shielded regions: Goah, Dhosa, Allik, Tartch, Nona, Bundt, Lagin, Kessor, Kabel, Weerin, Oave, Dorinne, Astril and Asandir. The first nine of these are in the southern hemisphere, the latter are northern shields. The bulk of Satlin’s population lives in a belt that stretches across half of the South Wilderness Seas and diagonally up into the north, on the islands bordering the continent of Lannit.

  The third phase of terraforming—what most persons consider the actual process—began with the early seeding of massive doses of organic catalysts, bacteria, lichens, fungi and various tailored one-celled organisms designed to turn a reducing atmosphere into an oxygen one. The sea was seeded with diatoms and algae and plankton, the land with earthworms and mushrooms and ferns; as the atmosphere began to stabilize, creating a green-house effect, the heat absorption and radiation properties of the growing biosphere began to stabilize. The polar caps began to grow again, this time H2O; oxygen began to appear in significant quantities, aerobic bacteria followed; each encouraged the other. The introduction of more complex organisms followed that; plants and small water animals to feed on them; insects, both land-crawlers and airborne; fish, small ones to feed on t
he plankton, larger ones to feed on the small ones. An ecology was being born. Land-growing plants were followed by small animals to feed on them, and almost immediately by predators to keep them in check. Each new creature had at least two major food sources and one major predator following after.

  The Satlik bio-circle was monitored and watched; each new creature was carefully considered; simulations and ecology models were manipulated for years to establish the parameters of every change—and even so, each change was introduced only on a local scale until it was known that it was functioning within the predicted limits. Stingfish, for example, were not introduced as predators except on a controlled breeding basis; no fertile stingfish have very swum free in the oceans of Satlin for fear the resultant population explosion would quickly decimate all other species—including humans.

  The Pilgrims arrived at Godheart almost five centuries ago; after the “storms of ice and fire” that lasted fifty years, after the “great hesitation” while the atmosphere quieted, the first colonists began to land and settle. It would be a hundred and fifty years before they could walk the surface without O-masks; and then the islands were still mostly barren; there were some saplings, shrubs and bushes, some forms of grass, but mostly moss and ferns, vines and creepers, piquant flowers—vast fields of them—and a sense of virgin newness over everything, a sense that persists on Satlin even today. In fifteen generations, despite a devastating plague in the seventh, the Satlik have increased their numbers to nearly 100 million individuals. The work of ecological tailoring continues, as does the process of “thickening” the atmosphere. Despite the lesser gravity, the atmosphere is still not dense enough to support an economical aircraft. The primary method of transportation is the boat, mostly shallow-draft barges or catamarans, equipped either with sail or field-effect motors, or both. Due to an overall mean temperature of 27 degrees Celsius, cloud-cover tends to be thick, and also quite low. It is said that one can reach up and grab a handful of clouds on Satlin. (Not quite, but . . .) Breathable atmosphere extends only to an upper limit of 2400 meters above sea level. Above that, O-masks or pressure suits are required. Because of the atmospheric limits, as well as the relative ease of ocean transportation, most settlements are on coastlines; there are only observatories above the 1000-meter level. Air pressure at sea level is 11.1 psi.