As Dr. Amy had decreed, in addition to sitting, every day also had sweating.
For the first several weeks I chose swimming as my primary exercise, because it develops every one of the useful muscles and none of the others. That meant long trips to the upper decks, just below the Bridge Deck. The Sheffield kept its swimming water as far forward as possible, to act as some additional protection against the constant shower of deadliness from dead ahead—the bitter complaints of the very tiny, very nearly nonexistent bits of the universe we were enraging to white heat by hitting them at a large fraction of c. (Our drinking water was stored at the opposite end of the ship, against the day when we would flip over and begin decelerating for the last half of the voyage.)
The Pool area turned out to be a lively, buzzing social center, one of the primary places where the people aboard Sheffield, colonists, crew and transportees alike—went to meet each other for sociosexual reasons—practical when you think about it, since everyone there would be naked sooner or later. While I still was not ready to follow Dr. Amy’s advice, I did notice that I worked harder at my swimming than I would have exercised if I had been alone.
While swimming there I got talking with Tiger Kotani, the kindly man I’d met briefly in the antechamber before my examination by Magistrate Will. He turned out to be a soft-voiced dignified astrophysicist from Terra. He persuaded me that simple fitness was not enough, and talked me into signing up for a self-defense class he taught.
Nowadays, of course, most citizens reliably expect to live out their lives without ever being involved in a violent altercation. People looked at me a little funny because I had been. I agreed that it had been a shameful event I should have been prudent enough to avoid. But I also found myself thinking that I was on my way to a frontier world, where people often acted in primitive ways, and where native fauna often acted in murderous and unpredictable ones. If, Heaven forbid, violence should ever come my way again, it seemed to me that it might be very nice to win the fight this time.
By the time Tiger-Shihan was through with me, I had reason to be confident that I might at least survive. He did not teach me to be a killing machine. But he did teach me to be pretty damn unkillable, and to sharply discourage attempts. I believe he himself could have massacred the entire ship’s complement, proctors and all…if we’d attacked him first. All his technique was defensive.
He was also kind enough to teach me a few utterly nonviolent evasive techniques, which became necessary when I learned that some girls who take self-defense classes are the kind of girls who find a man who has been in a violent confrontation with other men interesting. Thanks to Tiger’s footwork advice, I was able to keep them all at arm’s length…but sometimes I worked harder in the corridor outside the locker rooms than I did in the dojo.
The one female I was always happy to see was little Evelyn, so many trillions of kilometers behind me, whenever one of her rare brief letters came in. She always found some way to make me smile. I tried my best to return the favor.
One day another student of Tiger’s named Matty Jaymes, a pleasant-faced man in his forties who showed a lot of quick in class, happened to come past as I was explaining to a persistent brunette that I couldn’t join her for coffee because I had to study: my Healer had told me to learn everything I could about our destination. This was the truth; I simply omitted to mention that I had already been ducking the task for over a month, and fully intended to keep ducking it that night. Matty stopped short, managed to accept the date I had just evaded without awkwardness for any of us, then placed a tractor beam on me somehow and took me in tow. He wanted to discuss music history, about which it soon developed he knew about as much as I did myself.
But he was no musician. By the time we got back to his quarters I knew he was an astronomer, like Tiger, and when I saw that he shared the space with no one, I twigged that he must be the ship’s astronomer. The same one who had originally tried to interest me in his intensive study of Sol, back when I’d made my abortive stab at a job hunt.
If I’d met Matty—he flatly forbade me to call him Dr. Jaymes—in person back then, instead of by e-mail, he would definitely have met my definition of interesting. I haven’t met a lot of men with genius-level minds whom women found irresistible—but at least a dozen of them called warm greetings to him during the few minutes we were in transit.
He certainly saved me a lot of time, once I got him off music history and onto his own field. Except for Claire Immega herself, there may not have been a better expert on Peekaboo and Brasil Novo anywhere in the Galaxy—because it had been to Matty that the report of Immega’s successor Anabel had been addressed, a fact he mentioned as if it were of no significance. If you don’t count the telepathic communicator who passed on the message, and probably had no idea of its importance, Matty had been literally the first person in the Solar System to know that Immega had discovered gamma Boötes was not, as thought, an A7 III star—a giant—but a binary star, whose companion was a G2 very like Sol. Her robot probes had found a very promising planet orbiting the new G2 star—news that had rocked four different planetary stock exchanges when it became public, and had ended up causing the construction and commissioning of the RSS Sheffield.
It didn’t seem to impress him much. Matty spent the entire trip to his room explaining to me the problem with his Sol study, and I think he believed I understood what he was saying, even though I did not try to fake it. He simply was so focused and so excited, he failed to notice my incomprehension, which would have been incomprehensible to him. All I gleaned was that his research was really frustrating to him, because for some reason he absolutely hated the data he was getting.
He had happened to catch a perfect solar eclipse by Terra as we were leaving the Solar System, a major stroke of luck—I understood that much. And something about the displacement of a few stars behind the sun was very very slightly wrong, and somehow that was very very bad. It indicated something about the “J2 component of angular momentum” was bollixed.
But when I tried to find out just what that meant, and why it bothered him so badly, he changed the subject back to the star he was supposed to be telling me about: the one at the other end of our trajectory. Immega 714, AKA Peekaboo.
“In all the catalogs, gamma Boötes or HR5435 is commonly listed simply as ‘gamma Boo,’” he explained cheerily “So when Claire Immega of the 44 Boötes colony sent back word that gamma Boo was not a single star but a binary, with a G2 companion, the formal name of the G2 became Immega 714 in her honor—but it took about fifteen seconds for the System’s media to name it Peekaboo. And when she added that its second planet looked extremely promising in terms of habitability, naturally that became Peekaboo Two. The name was just annoying enough to stick in a lot of minds, and the da Costa consortium became interested right away.”
But of course, you don’t start outfitting a starship on the basis of promises, however extreme. It wasn’t until Immega’s robot probes confirmed the good news that da Costa formed its partnership with Kang and began seriously planning our expedition. That took a while. Long enough that Immega herself did not live to learn just how spectacular her find had been.
Picture the geometry 44 Boo, a variable star (eclipsing binary), lies a little more than forty-one light-years from Sol System. From there it’s another forty-three and change to the newly discovered Immega 714. The first colonists to settle on 44 Boo’s fourth satellite were a bit too busy surviving to stargaze a whole lot, but eventually two of them combined to produce Claire Immega. She became an astronomer, and soon discovered Peekaboo and Peekaboo Two. She was twenty-five before she had amassed sufficient clout to browbeat her fellow colonists into letting her divert what must have been scarce resources for ultrahighspeed probes. Even though these very tiny but very intelligent robots managed a very high fraction of c on their journey, it naturally had to take them well over forty-three years to make the trip, and then another forty-three years for their reports to make it back to 44 Boo
at lightspeed.
From there, of course, the colonists’ telepaths were able to pass the data back to their siblings back at Sol System in zero time. But Claire Immega was over thirty years dead by then. So she never knew, at least not for sure, that the new planet she had given mankind was one of the best it had yet found within its reach.
“G type stars like gamma Boo are damned scarce within eighty light-years or so of Sol,” Matty told me, “and G2s that happen to have planets of the right mass orbiting within the zone that will permit liquid water to exist are less common than buttons on a snake. By now nearly all the really promising ones already have colonies either in place, or on the way there. And so far, nobody else has drawn the kind of jackpot Immega did.”
“It’s really that good?”
“Well, if you had your heart set on skiing, or ice fishing, I’m afraid you’re screwed. If you like bone-breaker gravity, you’ll hate the place. If you adore hostile environments, harsh conditions, scarcity, and surly natives, you’ll be bored silly. But if you can steel yourself to a world where your feet never hurt, food and energy are cheap, and everybody goes naked most of the time…”
Thirteen
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete, and great.
—Willa Cather
As soon as we got back to his luxury digs, he started bringing up Brasil Novo stats for me. Normally I’d rather read figures in printout than onscreen…but what he used for a monitor was an entire wall, bigger than any two walls in my place. So I sank back into an armchair so comfortable I kept murmuring thanks to it, sipped Matty’s excellent Scotch, and learned.
Brasil Novo is roughly the same size as Mars, but thanks to a smaller iron core, it is twelve percent less dense, giving it a surface gravity of .33 gee rather than Mars’s .38 gee. It lies more than 1.1 AU from its star—but Immega 714 is slightly brighter than Sol, so it seems normally bright in the sky for a sun, despite being ten percent farther away.
Here is how the planet stacks up beside Terra:
Brasil N
Terra
BN/Terra
Mass (1024 kg)
0.5648
5.9746
0.095
Volume (1010 km3)
16.318
108.321
0.151
Volumetric Radius (km)
3390
6371
0.532
Mean Density (kg/m3)
3461
5515
0.628
Surface Gravity (m/s2)
3.26
9.8
0.333
Escape Velocity (km/s)
4.43
11.19
0.396
Distance from Primary (AU)
1.1
1
1.1
And here, for perspective, is a set of similar comparisons between Terra and another reasonably well-known planet of comparable gravity:
Mars
Terra
Mars/Terra
Mass (1024 kg)
0.64185
5.9736
0.107
Volume (1010 km3)
16.318
108.321
0.151
Volumetric Radius (km)
3390
6371
0.532
Mean Density (kg/m3)
3933
5515
0.713
Surface Gravity (m/s2)
3.71
9.8
0.379
Escape Velocity (km/s)
5.03
11.19
0.450
Distance from Primary
1.38-1.66
1
1.52
Brasil Novo comes complete with two moons, quite similar to those of Mars. For that reason, and for emotional/political reasons less susceptible to analysis, it had been rather illogically decided to name them, too, Phobos and Deimos.
“What difference does it make?” Matty asked when I raised the issue. “Nobody’s likely to confuse them in conversation with the ones we left eighty-five light-years behind. And very soon after arrival, everyone is going to become sharply aware that those two moons will have radically different effects than their namesakes, at least.”
Always happy to play straightman to a speaker who truly enjoys his subject. “Why’s that?”
“Because of something Mars lacks that Bravo has in great plenty.”
It took me a second to recognize “Bravo” as an Anglicized contraction of Brasil Novo. It was the first time I’d heard the shorthand, but it would by no means be the last. Within a year, even the two dozen or so real Brazilianos aboard would be using it. “What’s that?” I repeated.
He blinked at me. “Water. Teratons of water. The original Phobos and Deimos have tidal effects, but there’s not enough surface water on Mars to make them visible. Bravo is going to have very complicated tide, and I suspect its version of a king tide will be an emperor tide.”
I thought about it. “So, moist air, then.”
“It better be.”
The only reason it didn’t get tedious saying “Why is that?” to this man was that he always answered, and the answer was usually interesting. So I said it again.
“We expect, or at least hope, to live there. So we’ll probably want to breathe a lot. You have probably noticed that we are not carrying along with us in this bucket five hundred and fifty Mars-type low-pressure masks, plus several thousands more for replacements and the next several generations of offspring, nor are we spending any time drilling in them or trying to become acclimatized to them. If not, you’ve surely noticed that you don’t wear one when you’re working on the Upper Ag Deck.”
He paused, and did not say, “Think it through.”
Let’s see. Atmosphere breathable without assistance. But even less gravity than Mars or home. So to get Terra-standard pressure, there are only two possibilities: the atmosphere must be thicker, or it must be much higher in oxygen.
Okay, take Terra. Its surface gets that much pressure from lying under a troposphere about twelve kilometers high. Brasil Novo’s lower atmosphere would need to stand an unreasonable thirty-six klicks tall to yield that much pressure. So…
“The place is a tinderbox!” I exclaimed.
He shrugged carelessly “The drier parts of it, yes. The air is a little over thirty percent oxygen. Here, take a look at this.” He gestured shamanically with his hand, working some virtual remote control only he could see, and the wall display changed to:
ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION
Gas
Bravo
Terra
Oxygen
30%
21%
Nitrogen
60%
78%
Water
4-8%
0-4%
CO2
0.10%
0.04%
Other
1%
1%
“Clearly it’s going to be a warm, moist planet, by human standards. A jungle world, very much like the Amazon Basin of Old Brasil back on Terra, I imagine. Its fauna seem to be fantastically better at photosynthesis than ours. But your guess is correct: that thirty percent oxygen is going to make for severe fire danger. I suspect that if an expedition to one of the drier regions were to be struck by lightning, the lucky ones would be those killed outright on the spot. I doubt the rest could outrun the flames.”
There are times when I’m happier to have a vivid imagination than I am other times.
“But there will be no shortage of damp places. Bravo has almost as much salt water cover as Terra—a bit more than half its total surface, compared to Terra’s seventy percent. What you get basically is three major continents, more or less evenly spaced around the globe, each supporting a large dense jungle, with a major river flowing out of each, as in the Terran Amazon or Congo. There are also several large continental islands analogous to Australia, and if you’ll pardo
n the technical terminology, umpty gazillion smaller islands, ranging in size from humungous to teeny-weeny”
“Okay, got it. The farther from the seashore, the more fire danger…but there’s a lot of seashore.”
He nodded. “The planet’s axial tilt is only fifteen degrees, as compared to Terra’s twenty-three point four five degrees. So there will be distinct seasons…but less pronounced than on Earth. No freezing winters. No polar ice caps.”
That was good. I hate wearing stanfields—as long underwear is called in Canada, for reasons probably lost to history and certainly unknown to me. A world without snowdrifts was just fine with Joel. And no polar ice meant more of the total surface available to live on; more places to put usable seashore.
“And the day/night cycle—”
That one I could address. “—is nearly identical to Mars. Twenty-four hours, thirty-something minutes. Uh, thirty-seven.”
“Of course, that must be what the Zog has you using on the Upper Deck. Well, the farming is probably going to be even better on Bravo than it is in Zogland.”
“Really?”
He caused images to slideshow on his wall, some still, some moving—and all striking. “As you can see, the place is tectonically quite active. Volcanic mountain ranges. Good thing; it keeps the atmosphere replenished. So volcanic ash fertilizes the land—and the mountains present useful minerals and metals which we reach by blasting a little bit sideways instead of digging way down and hauling it back up. But from a peasant’s point of view, the best part is going to be the weather: probably the most stable climate humans have yet encountered.”
Well, I hadn’t said it in several minutes now “Why is that, Matty?”
“Consider the geography” He smiled. “Or bravography, if you will.”