Murasaki, page 37
Any other rational or nonrational reasons for such a venture that might occur to any of you are, of course, your own to play with. It is very unlikely, however, that anyone could hope to make money out of such an expedition, in view of the terribly high cost and long travel times. No one is likely to find spices; pharmaceuticals, or rare gems worth the cost of shipping them back to the Sol system; though, of course, some people might hope to.
Outposts (as on Antarctica) are likely on both Genji and Chujo, for long-term research; self-supporting colonies are not. On these planets, the colonization imperatives that drove Europeans to Asia, Africa, and the Americas don’t apply: because of transportation time and costs, there is no hope of finding markets for Earth products or cheap plan-tation labor to produce raw materials to ship back. Nor is there a “frontier” to attract pioneers. The environment of neither Genji nor Chujo is benign enough to support home-steading. (Though, here again, some people, driven to es-cape from some form of political, religious, or other persecution, might try.)
Human beings visiting Genji or Chujo arrive there after a very long trip in crowded quarters, and few of them will ever return to Earth. Their contact with family and friends left behind is either tenuous or nonexistent. These facts will have psychological effects on your char-acters, no doubt exacerbating interpersonal relationships. A certain amount of personal screwiness seems probable. And all of this is of course made worse by the environ-mental adversities they experience after landing on Gcnji or Chujo.
Human Technology
Generally speaking, human beings are still human beings, not physically much different from ourselves. There have been very great advances, of course, in such things as molecular biology. Most diseases have been prevented or cured. Healthy life spans go up to nearly a hundred years.
However, humans do not change their gender at will or grow extra limbs, etc. They look much like us—rather, they look pretty much like our movie stars. They select for benign genes in their offspring, of course, but have not bred a race of supergeniuses or physical freaks.
That’s for Earthlings. It is a little different for Spacers. In space, people may be richer, but Earth people live longer; they’re not exposed to the risk of lethal solar radi-ation from flares, or to all the other probable stresses: dietary. circulatory, bone-mass loss. And, as mentioned above, although space people don’t necessarily have more accidents than Earth people, the ones they do have tend to be more probably fatal.
Computers are far advanced. “Fuzzy” programs make reasonable deductions from incomplete evidence. Smart machines, which rely on quantum-effect devices, or QEDs, are damn smart. (The QEDs are about 1/100 the size of current chip technology and roughly 10,000 times faster and more powerful.) This has made possible very small, and therefore relatively cheap, interstellar probes. They have a pretty good idea of what the Murasaki System is like before any human being actually gets there.
However, the people are not cyberpunks. There is no direct human-to-machine linkage, and they do not wear computer implants in their brains. (Perhaps there was a fad for that sort of thing a century or two earlier, but the people using such devices went psychotic. Or at least socio-pathic—or both, like the characters in cyberpunk novels.)
The Interstellar Ships
As Foul has informed us, these are propelled by antimatter drives, perhaps very sophisticated versions of the Augen-stein (porous tungsten blocks through which liquid hydro-gen is diffused, reacting with streams of antiprotons) or Morgan (pion-exhaust) drives. If the Augenstein, or any other drive in which the matter-antimatter reaction is used primarily to heat a working fluid to exhaust, then a working fluid is needed; probably this will be hydrogen, and unless the ship is to store great quantities of it, the ship will need something like a Bussard scoop to collect interstellar gas along the way.
This makes several design problems. One is that the same thrust engine is used for both acceleration and decel-eration—meaning, no doubt, that at the halfway point the ship has to be turned around, proceeding stern first toward Murasaki from then on. But the scoop must always face forward; so at the turnover point it must be rerigged from bow to stern—not necessarily easy to do.
Another is communication with Earth. The ship’s communication antennae have to point toward Earth, and during the acceleration phase are trying to get a signal through a cloud of very hot plasma from the drive’s ex-haust. I doubt this is going to be easy, and it may not be possible; so the ship may be out of touch with Earth for some years.
That’s not the only communication problem, however.
During the flight, communications will be hampered also by Doppler frequency shifts (not a big problem, just requiring careful tuning), but far more seriously by time dilation. Messages from Earth come in at half the speed of messages to Earth, if they are possible at all.
Power is also a—problem. At interstellar distances any signal is going to be seriously attenuated, and the ship (and even the “colonies” at destination) will have limited, though considerable, resources.
Probably at the. Sol end of the line a large orbiting dish, roughly Arecibo-sized, will have to both receive and transmit; either it will have to be a dedicated antenna, or transmission and reception time schedules will have to be worked out in advance.
Voice communication will be digitalized and sent slowly (probably even redundantly), to be reconstituted at destination. Pictures will be even slower. Receiving them will be not unlike watching the probe pictures come in at JPL, as they build up line by line. “Motion pictures” can be sent in either direction, but they will take forever to transmit. Arbitrarily let us assume that one hour’s trans-mission back to Earth can yield a) maybe twenty minutes of voice transmission, b) a few hundred still photographs, or c) about thirty seconds of videotape.
If explorers on Genji or Chujo wish to send a one-hour National Geographic-type film back to Earth they can certainly do so, but it will take five days of continuous transmission time. And it will take twenty-one years to get there.
There will certainly be no face-to-face conversations by means of interstellar videophone. Apart from the prob-lems of slow transmission, anything anyone says on Earth takes twenty-one years to get to Murasaki and just as long for an answer to get back.
Presumably the first few ships, at least, to carry people to Murasaki will be as small as possible, for economic reasons.
That is not, however, really very small. Assume a ca-pacity of maybe twenty-five crew. (It would not help much to make the capacity smaller, because of all the things they have to carry with them.) The ship then needs to carry everything these people will need for an essentially indefinite period: food, air, and water (no doubt recycled, perhaps even with food synthe-sizers—but the food has to be synthesized out of some-thing); clothes; books; tapes; pharmaceuticals, surgical stuff and other medical needs; cosmetics; games; etc.
It also needs everything they will need during explo-ration. Small items they will generally carry with them, like scientific instruments, probably weapons (for use against predators, if for nothing, more sinister),—trade goods”—things like pocket calculators, maybe solar-powered (but maybe they don’t work well in Murasaki’s light), toys, flashlights (but their yellow-green light hurts the natives’ eyes?), beads, etc., wristwatch radios, etc. Larger things for exploration: probably a couple of light planes for surface exploration, and no doubt a few moon-buggy things for the same reason; a food synthesizer (or a lot of food); a power plant to drive all their equipment; pressure-reducing suits and helmets for exploration of Genji, and air masks for exploring Chujo. They will also need at least one !ander shuttle.
And the ship itself will need everything to make it run, plus spare parts for repairs and tools to make the repair with. This is a job for considerable mass. No small inter-stellar ships need apply.
(Later on, of course, ships might be really big. Prob-ably some group of spacers may well decide to hook an-timatter drives onto a self-sufficient 100,000-person habitat and launch it toward Murasaki. No doubt this would be much slower than a purpose-built ship, but it would sure carry a lot of people. That might be the actual ultimate “colonization” of the Murasaki System.) A Puzzle For Planetographers
Although probes and space telescopes have identified other planets in the galaxy, Genji and Chujo are the only ones that seem to have life of any kind.
Is this because Genji and Chujo are co-orbiting twins, as the Earth with its moon? Is it necessary for a planet to co-orbit with another body of similar mass, with its con-sequent great tidal forces, in order for life to develop on it?
Some astronomers have speculated that this is true. (In fact, they have done so even in our own twentieth century.) They suggest that life cannot evolve on any planet that lacks the equivalent of a Van Allen Belt, because ionizing radiation would destroy it; that the Van Allen Belts can’t develop without a strong magnetic field; that there cannot be a strong magnetic field without a molten core; that only a nearby co-orbiting large mass, constantly churning up the interior of a planet, can keep a large core molten after the surface of a planet has cooled long enough for liquid water to be stable for geologically long times.
Genji and Chujo almost support that theory. Genji and
Chujo are the only known planets, other than Earth/moon, with co-orbiters; they are also the only known planets, other than Earth, that support life. That is too much of a coin-cidence to be purely coincidental.
But neither Genji nor Chujo has a strong Van Allen Belt. It is only one detail, but that’s enough to wreck the whole chain of deduction.
So human planetographers are puzzled. Perhaps this is one reason why some people are anxious to study the Mu-rasaki System at close range.
A far stronger reason is that Genji/Chujo are the only other planets anywhere in the universe so far known to harbor life. If humanity is to meet any intelligent aliens anywhere, the Murasaki System is the only place to go.
How Humans Live On Genji/Chujo
As Poul has explained, human beings cannot get around on either planet in shorts and solar topis. On Genji, they es-tablish “settlements” on the high plateaus. Even those are not comfortable: they’re cold, dark, and bleak, but at least there they can breathe the air.
To explore the sea-level surface of Genji the humans need something like rigid diving suits. The partial pressure of oxygen at 2,000 millibars will do irreversible damage to airways and lungs if endured too long.
They may, however, expose themselves to the sea-level air for brief periods, though they risk nitrogen nar-cosis. It is possible that some bored humans use sea-level Genjian air as a recreational drug, enjoying the “raptures” as a kind of high. (“Low”?)
Human Life, on Genji
Genji is no more than marginally habitable for human beings. Their most difficult problem is food: they can’t eat Genjian organisms, and, they can’t easily establish farms to grow their own food. The high altiplanos where they live lack the rain and warmth necessary for farming. Conceivably they could bribe natives into farming for them at lower levels, where crops might grow, but there isn’t enough blue-green light for Earthly chlorophyll to work well; ar-tificial lighting would probably be necessary (and expensive), and minor variations in the soil chemistry would probably cause crop failures anyway—at least until some high-powered agronomists worked out ways of deal-ing with them.
The same food sources the people had on their eleven-year (subjective) flight from Earth would have to feed them once they land: I presume some sort of closed-cycle system using their bodily wastes to nourish plants. Such recycling systems can be quite efficient (this is far enough in the future to allow for considerable improvement in using de-signer genes for food plants and animals), but they would probably need constant attention; if the system fails, the people starve. (No doubt there will be redundant systems, so the people might not starve but would have to eat un-satisfactory diets.) At 1,000-millibar elevations, the Genjian biota (as Poul points out), is sparse, tough, and small.
Stunted plants, things like mosses; possibly when (very infrequently) it rains there is an explosion of
“flowering” plants, as in Earthly deserts.
Getting to Genji
The interstellar ship itself does not land on a planet but orbits somewhere—around Chujo? around Genji? around both of them? The landing crews come down in smaller craft, perhaps like shuttles or the Spaceplane.
Most travelers probably leave Earth when they are twenty-five or thirty. When they reach Genji they are push-ing forty (though their twins back on Earth, if they have any, are nearly fifty).
According to Poul’s stats the interstellar ships travel at a uniform 1-g acceleration. Actually, I think they tend to increase the acceleration slowly. Spacers would probably want to start out at lesser thrusts; both Earthies and Spacers would likely want to build up to 1.5 g in the final decel-eration period, so that by the time the adventurers reach
Genji they have become more or less accustomed to its 1.5—g conditions. This need not shorten the total travel time very much, and perhaps not all ships will do it—those heading for Chujo have no need to.
The condition of the explorers when they arrive on Genji depends on how successfully they have managed the stresses of the long trip: living in each others’ pockets for a decade is likely to bring out any latent psychoses. Some ships will do better than others, but the worst of them may have had mini civil wars, murders, vendettas, etc., which may carry over.
No doubt by this time in the future there will be phar-maceutical (or other) treatments for most forms of loopi-ness, but it is fair to assume that the treatments carry side effects (lethargy, confusion, depression—take your pick). So the voyagers do not step off onto the soil of Genji as hale and well balanced as when they took off from Earth.
Physically, both Spacers and Earthies will probably take some latter-thy analogues of steroids and calcium-binders, to help stand the 1.5 g.
All Genjinauts are aware that their voyage will be long and most likely one-way. (All right, fellows, why do they let themselves in for this? Do some of them want to convert the heathen to God? Are some social misfits, even crimi-nals? Are people drafted for this? Are they paid so hand-somely that they can get their families out of poverty into affluence forever?—their families rather than themselves, because whatever the voyagers themselves are paid, they can’t spend it. Is this part of the story material you will invent?) Still, some of them can return. It is probable that at least one or two ships will return to Earth at some time, perhaps five years after landing: they will probably want to bring specimens of some kind back for study. This means that a lucky few can go home. When they get there, those who started out at twenty-five will now be fifty or more. (Their cohort-mates left on Earth may well be pushing eighty; so no one comes back to the girl he left behind him.)
How do they decide who goes back? I think it depends on each separate shipload; perhaps there are stories there. Maybe the decision will be made by a lottery. Maybe by political decisions and various forms of skulduggery. Maybe by force majeure; or maybe whoever survives gets to return.
I assume that almost everyone would volunteer to re-turn to Earth, since certainly those few who get back, es-pecially the first few who get back, can look forward to fame and fortune—may even be elected to whatever the Senate is like at that time. Those who stay on Genji may get rivers and mountains named after them so their names will live forever, but the ones who get back to Earth will get all the chicks. (Or cocks, as the case may be.)
Of course, a lot of humans who get to Genji will die there before their normal time, by accident, exposure, vio-lence, or simply exhaustion.
I’m not sure how much attention people on Earth pay to what’s going on on Genji. After all, by the time the first ship reaches there, and the first messages come back to Earth at light speed, more than forty years have passed: half the human race will not have been born when the ship departed. And by then humanity may have other things on its mind....
The Ihrdizu
Before I get very explicit about the manners and customs of the Ihrdizu, let me go over and perhaps expand on some of the points Poul has already made about Genji.
“Sea level” on Genji is a fairly ambiguous concept, because of the vast tides; nevertheless, most Genjians live somewhere near it (partly because of their amphibious or-igins). Humans, on the other hand, are comfortable only at great elevations. Ships from Earth will ordinarily land on high plateaus and will establish bases where they land; so Earthmen can be on Genji for some time without the Gen-jians’
being aware of their presence.
Humans can go to sea level if they wish, but not easily or comfortably. The easiest way would be to travel in sealed aircraft, which they would never leave, doing their exploring (and communicating with the Genjians) through robot proxies or just looking out of the windows. They could leave the aircraft for at least brief periods, but they would run the risk of nitrogen narcosis, or “rapture of the deeps,” if they stayed unprotected at sea level for any length of time they would risk bends; and probably if the exposure were of long duration or frequent there would be damage to their lungs. (Their situation at sea level is anal-ogous to a Terrestrial skin diver working at a depth of about thirty meters.) If they wish to walk around the surface of Genji at sea level they need to wear a sort of diving helmet, at least, with an air pump to reduce the pressure inside.
Alternatively, a human could wear an all-metal diving suit. (It could not be flexible, as were the rubberized suits with metal helmets human divers used to wear, because those suits were pressurized from within.) Both the helmet and the full suit would be cumbersome (especially in Gen-ji’s higher surface gravity), uncomfortable, and generally unpleasant, though in somewhat different ways. Some hu-mans would prefer to go out unprotected and pay the pen-alty of short excursions and slow decompression, or to take their chances.
