Pharaoh

Benoni Strang's workers on Babur have a secret base on a Baburite moon. The Baburites' oxygen-breathing mercenary army get a whole planet which they know as Pharaoh.

About a million human, Gorzuni, Merseian and Donarrian mercenaries occupy Hermes with a comparable number held in reserve. Recruited in many places on dozens of planets, either they did not register on anyone's statistics or, if some League company did notice, it did not inform anyone else.

"Space is too big, and we too divided."
-Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2011), p. 220.

Isolated for years of training and preparation on Pharaoh, the soldiers have accumulating pay, beer halls, brothels, a multi-sensory library and a hot, wet, barely terrestroid, permanently clouded, planetary environment to explore. The clouds prevent them from learning where Pharaoh is. Falkayn thinks that it is more likely to be inside known space. Outside, it could be discovered by explorers, who continually expand known space. Inside, it might already have been explored once but dismissed as of no interest.

Learning that they are working for Babur against the Solar Commonwealth does not demoralize highly disciplined mercs who were recruited precisely because they were already alienated from Technic civilization.

Ayisha

Ayisha, a Luna-sized Baburite moon, has a dimly lit, airless, cratered, stone surface and a black sky showing unwinking stars and the amber planet with its bands of white, ocher and cinnabar clouds.

On Ayisha's surface, the domes of a secret project hold:

heat;
Terrestrial gravity;
breathable air;
grass;
bushes;
flowers;
a ball court;
fountains;
a swimming pool;
good food and wine;
a handicraft shop;
an amateur theater;
a vice section.

Staff spend a significant part of their lives in the system, have no leaves and receive no visitors and their mail is censored although good pay accumulates at home. Anyone who resigns has their memory wiped. What this shows is that people with technology can master hostile environments while retaining discreditable motives. The motto of Lancaster University is patet veritas omnibus, "truth lies open to all." However, in the future of the Technic History, scientific accomplishment is still accompanied by commercial and political secrecy.

The Mystery Of Mirkheim

The following propositions are facts within Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization:

planetary systems do not condense around giant stars;

Beta Centauri is a giant star with planets because, while it was condensing, its nebula retarded, then captured, a group of rogue planets;

van Rijn says somewhere that scientists are still trying to figure out how the red giant Betelgeuse has planets;

Mirkheim was a planet of fifteen hundred Terrestrial masses orbiting a star as bright as a hundred Sols.

So how did Mirkheim exist? We are told how it was found:

"From the known distribution of former supernovae, together with data on other star types, dust, gas, radiation, magnetism, present location and concentrations, the time derivatives of these quantities: using well-established theories of galactic development, it is possible to compute with reasonable probability the distribution of undiscovered dark giants within a radius of a few hundred parsecs....The most you can learn is the likelihood (not the certainty) of a given type of object existing within such-and-such a distance of yourself, and the likeliest (not the indubitable) direction."
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 653.

But the "...given type of object..." has to be possible, however improbable, in the first place. Surely Astrocenter would not have been able to compute the probability of a condensing giant star capturing several rogue planets? So how was Mirkheim's probability computed?

A Few More Details About Hermes

(This may be the last post for December although I am not sure yet. We have just returned from a solstice ritual.)

Hermetian trees include stonebark and rainroof.
Ornithoids and buzzbugs fly between them.
One flying predator is called a steelwing.
Athena Falkayn wears "...a necklace of fallaron amber." (Rise Of The Terran Empire, p. 216)
The Falkayn manor house derives its name from the nearby Hornbeck brook.
Wyvernflies fly above the brook.
Terrestrial food and drink taste odd to Hermetians so no doubt the reverse would be true.

Sandra Tamarin flies near the Palomino River as it crosses an agrarian property of the Runeberg domain. She sees red-tiled houses of Follower families and the Runeberg mansion which, she knows, contains ancestral portraits and long tradition.

The Insignia Room, its walls decorated only by the colorful devices of the thousand Kindred, is on a high floor with  a view of sky and distant ocean. Grand Duchess Sandra sits at her desk before a three dimensional communication screen occupying half a wall and displaying the image of a hydrogen-breathing Baburite conqueror in his ship in synchronous orbit above Starfall.

The theme of Mirkheim is that times change. They can hardly change more than this.

Valya

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 19 Dec 2014:

The terrestroid planet Valya, close to its dwarf sun, Elena, has:

a forty plus hour day;
a calm ocean;
land covered by russet shrubs and turf;
tiny flyers, not insects;
long-limbed, spindly, blue-furred, mountain-dwelling, dancing, bronze-age natives with antennae on pointed heads and a strange grammar of personal pronouns;
a rich deposit of gold.

Gold attracts Stellar Metals. Bronze age natives are unable to resist extra-planetary invasion. Like Tametha, another atrocity committed by a League company.

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.

Seas

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation, 28 Nov 2014:

On Earth, the World Ocean covers two thirds of the planetary surface.

On Poul Anderson's fictitious planet, Nyanza, a single ocean covers everything except one island and some tidal reefs.

Anderson's fictitious planet, Kraken, is also described as oceanic so it is appropriate that, late in the Flandry period of the Technic History, a Krakener man is married to a Nyanzan woman.

By coincidence, I have interrupted rereading Anderson's "The Game of Glory," set on Nyanza, to start reading China Mieville's The Scar, only to discover that this fantasy novel begins with a four page section describing a sea, the life in the sea and an event affecting one specimen of that life. This section has no speech, just sights, sounds and sensations of the sea.

I am getting the message that the sea is important. One of Anderson's Time Patrol stories hauntingly links the deaths of seafarers, spacefarers, timefarers...