The Sky Cave As Seen From Within

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, Fri 12 Dec 2014.

I wrote in the previous post that there is not much more to be said but, of course, I cannot do better than to quote directly from Poul Anderson's own description of the nebula where a star and its planetary system are condensing:

"Flandry himself saw sinister grandeur: great blanks and clouds of blackness, looming in utter silence on every side of him, gulfs and canyons and steeps, picked out by the central red glow. He knew, objectively, that the nebula was near-vacuum even in its densest portions: only size and distance created that picture of caverns beyond caverns. But his eyes told him that he sailed into Shadow Land, under walls and roofs larger than planetary systems, and his own tininess shook him."
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 284.

- as when, millennia later, Daven Laure sails into the Cloud Universe nebula, except that that one is many times bigger, containing millions of stars, some condensing, some going nova, others at every intermediate stage.

It is the "...walls and roofs larger than planetary systems..." that are truly awesome, generating the impression that this is not interstellar space but a vast three-dimensional material structure, like a cathedral explored by a fly.

To its credit, the very first Star Trek feature film showed the Enterprise dwarfed by some sort of interstellar cloud that it had to pass through.

Unborn Planets

(This cover looks directly relevant to "Hunters of the Sky Cave.")

Long before a newly condensing star has ignited, one of its planets is already forming. Gravity, magnetism and spin pull together a belt of stones which neither shatter nor bounce but unite because the cold has caused ice and hydrocarbons to condense on solid particles. The planetary embryo is a cratered, icy, spinning asteroid bombarded by meteors from mountainous to minute.

Instruments detect dust on every wavelength. Surface gravity is almost nonexistent and the nebula hides the stars although light from the proto-sun faintly reddens the dust clouds and illuminates meteors. When the proto-sun, resembling not a fire but a firecoal, rises, it climbs visibly.

Whereas the Time Traveler visiting Earth near its death saw a swollen red sun, Flandry visiting a terrestroid planet before its birth sees a vague ember-like red proto-sun. The planet's future inhabitants will never suspect that someone called Dominic Flandry led men, four-armed Gorzuni, a quadrupedal Donarrian and a horned Scothanian (that last fighting with a wrecking bar) against green, tailed Merseians and avian-descended Aycharaych on their proto-planet. What might have happened on proto-Terra?

The Sky Cave

Yet another volume of space ceases to be a mere void to be traversed and becomes instead a space-scape with interesting features to be observed and approached. Flandry knows that, although the nebula where a star is condensing is a near-vacuum, size and distance make its dust and gas resemble receding caverns with "...walls and roofs larger than planetary systems..."
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 284.

He sees great black clouds with gulfs, canyons and steeps redly illuminated by the infra-star. His ship passes between the walls and under the roofs of the caverns. The haze and light thicken until he sees the sable-spotted crimson disc edged with "...coronal arabesques...," shining as yet only by gravitational energy because its core has not yet condensed enough to start the nuclear fusion that will ignite a new star, a "nova stella" in the literal sense. A few more million years are necessary. Meanwhile, Terra and Merseia contend for what they call the "Imperial Stars," to quote the excellent title of one Flandry omnibus volume.

Ardazir

When Dominic Flandry escaped from the Ardazirho (see here), he brought with him a copy of their navigator's manual, which should reveal crucial military intelligence, the coordinates of the enemy's planetary system. This is comparable to the occasion when he captured a spaceship of the McCormac rebels and thus acquired their codes, ending the rebellion at a single stroke.

Meanwhile, he makes deductions about Ardazir:

warmer than Terra, though not excessively;

its hot star, emitting strongly in the ultraviolet wavelengths, splits water molecules and sends hydrogen atoms into space;

the ozone layer gives insufficient protection to the hydrosphere;

a dry planetary surface with seas but not oceans;

surface gravity about 1.5, retaining a terrestroid atmosphere;

the Urdahu conquered other cultures very recently;

their discordant uniforms reflect local parochialisms;

Flandry knows how to split such an empire, as he did on Scotia.