Daughter of Orion
Page 2
~~~
At every solar system's heart lies a star. Ul's was a red dwarf that the earth's astronomers call Wolf 1061. We Tani called it Lus Im, Holy Light. It's about thirteen point eight light-years from the earth in the constellation Ophiucus.
Many red dwarfs are flare stars, shooting out vast clouds of ionized gas that'd fry any otherwise livable world. Luckily for the Tani who lived near it, Wolf 1061 is a stable red dwarf. It might've shone gentle, unvarying light onto Ul for trillions of years, if the Homeworld had survived.
Astronomers will tell you that any world near enough a red dwarf to bear life will be tidally locked, showing one face always to the red dwarf and the other face always to outer darkness. Ul, though, had a twenty-four hour day, almost the same as the earth's.
Impossible, you say? Not at all! Although Ul was part of Holy Light's solar system, the Homeworld didn't revolve around Holy Light. Instead, the Homeworld was a moon of a gas giant that the Tan didn't discover till about forty years before Ul ended. The gas giant was a red world that lay behind the Homeworld from the People's vantage. With us Tani's typical flair for nomenclature, we named the gas giant Nas-Ul, 'behind the Homeworld.' I saw Nas-Ul just once, briefly, as I was flying away from a world falling to pieces.
Ul was tidally locked to Nas-Ul, which it circled every twenty-four hours. On the Homeworld's outer face, where Nas-Ul never shone, Holy Light rose and set just like the earth's sun. On the Homeworld's inner face, where Nas-Ul always hung at zenith, Holy Light also rose and set, but was eclipsed by the gas giant several hours each day at midday. Because of the daily eclipse on the inner face, it was far colder than the outer face. Where cold air met hot in the Wall of Winds, winds always raged.
The gas giant's gravity, which tidally locked Ul's rotation, also stretched the Homeworld into a shape like a football's. The Homeworld had a high tidal bulge on its inner face and a high tidal bulge on its outer face. Between the bulges lay a ring of low land encompassing the world's north, east, south, and west poles. In this ring, under the dense air of the Wall of Winds, lay most of the world's water. Most of the rest of it had snowed out onto glaciers on the world's inner face. Hence, we poor Tani, on the world's dry outer face, gathered dew and scraped frost from rocks.
Couldn't we, with our crystal-ships, have moved water from the Wall of Winds and the inner face? We tried to move it, but I'm getting ahead of my story.
My mind goes, as it often goes, to one of my visits to Dr. Ventnor in his tiny, book-lined office above a shady quadrangle at the Ohio State University. The visit occurred when I was ten, having been on the earth four years. Sitting by Dr. Ventnor's window, I was watching students toss a Frisbee as he asked me what I recalled of the Homeworld and how I was adjusting to this world.
The Frisbee made me think of the Crossing from there to here. Abruptly, I said, "Why did the Homeworld break up?"
Dr. Ventnor raised a gull-winged brow over an ebon eye. I peered at his long, square-jawed face, with skin of the color of a Starbuck's vanilla frappucino, and with a gulf of baldness that went back and back till it left just a fringe of white hair around his skull's base. Not for the first time I wondered why he resembled the Colonel.
Dr. Ventnor gave me a crooked smile. "The Colonel tells me, Belle" -- Dr. Ventnor was using my earth-name, not my birth-name -- "that you read National Geographic cover to cover and watch the Learning Channel religiously. Do you know what a Roche Limit is?"
I shrugged. "When a little world gets too near a big world, the big world's tidal pull tears the little world apart."
Dr. Ventnor grinned at me. "You'll go far, Belle. Ul, your homeworld, was actually inside Nas-Ul's Roche Limit. Till the Tan came along, though, Ul was safe there. It was a rocky moon of a gas giant. A dense enough rocky world is safe from tidal destruction.
"When Dor-Sad learned how to make the great crystals, the forces that the Tan used to mine glaciers, raise the crystal-city, and send crystal-ships from star to star began to liquefy Ul. In time, what gravity began, gravity ended."
So Grandfather really was guilty, I thought. Dor-Sad, his world's Einstein, had said so to me, but I'd hoped that he was wrong. Now, I had to accept that a man who'd wanted to turn Ul into a paradise had turned it into a graveyard, a Saturn's ring of death. As Einstein's granddaughter, I'd inherited his guilt, as well as the Work that he and the rest of the Tan had sent me to the earth to do.
A tear splashed on a bare, pale knee as I watched the Frisbee soar. Find a better world this time, I thought, one that'll last forever.
"The earth is safe, isn't it?" I murmured.
Dr. Ventnor was silent a moment. When he spoke again, he asked me of school.
What we Tani had on Ul was little. We had three species of domestic animals: the gur-i, which filled the place of cattle; the har-i, which filled the place of sheep; and the lex-i, which filled the place of horses. Ul's horses were carnivores with faces like those of greyhounds, but were gentle, faithful creatures nonetheless.
We had twelve species of plants for food, clothing, timber, paper, and medicine. Some plants, we grew in pots; other plants, we raised in tiny plots of soil that we tended and watered by hand. We talked to the plants. As we watered each plant, we told it, "Su ze bul kol-il ux-es," 'This is water to help you grow.' Tradition-bound, we never wondered whether the water would work just as well without the words. Ul's plants are gone, but I still talk to the earth's plants as I water them.
We had bu, a bluish gel that turned dead bodies and plant matter into soil. Dr. Ventnor told me that bu is a form of nanotechnology. Each Tan looked forward, at the end of a life of about a hundred and eighty of the earth's years, to being put into bu pits. Turned into soil, he or she would stay part of the community as a plant and then as that which ate the plant. We may not have known much, but we knew ecology.
What we had and knew, though, would've been too little for survival without our crystals. Not all of us could make or use them. The gift to do so ran from mother to child in bloodlines of which records have been kept seven thousand years. The presence or absence of the gift divided the Tan into the An-i, the Crystal-Shapers, and the Kum-i, the Companions. For seven thousand years, the Ani made light-crystals, heat-crystals, healing-crystals, and memory-crystals that kept civilization, such as it was, alive. For forty years, the Ani made the great crystals…
The Ani ruled the Tan. The Ani, though, didn't live in mansions behind razor-wire apart from their subjects as the earth's rulers live. The Ani and the Kumi lived in the same tunnels, ate the same food, shared the same tasks, and gave their sons and daughters in marriage to each other as if the gift made no difference to one's status.
In the light-crystals' glow, dour, brooding Un-Thor shakes his head. "The gift did make a difference, though. The eight of us whom the Tan sent to the earth are all Ani."
Par-On nods. "So we are. Please, though, don't judge our ancestors till Mira's story ends. You'll know then all that they did to save all that they could of the Homeworld."
Mystical Lona furrows her brow. "I'm old enough to recall the Homeworld. I can testify that what Mira has said of it is true. Now that I've lived thirteen years on the earth, though, Ul's ecology sounds far too simple to have evolved."
Un snorts. "In some ways, it sounds so. In other ways, it's far too complex. Does nanotechnology just evolve?"
Wise, artistic Sil-Tan raises a hand. "Were we as powerful on Ul as we are on the earth?"
I shake my head. "We're far stronger and faster here than we were there. Our crystal-shaping gift has grown, too. Don't ask me why! I once asked Dr. Ventnor that question. He speculated on a type G star's radiation and the earth's magnetic field, but in the end he had to say, 'I don't know.'"
Shy Dala's eyes get big. "Wow! Imagine his saying that!"