From: m.driussi@genie.geis.com
Subject: (urth) 5HC: star system
Date: Thu,  2 Jul 98 21:33:00 GMT

Roborski,

Right, just when we thought we could cool down, take a breather,
suddenly prion comes along and turns us into mad cows . . . or maybe
just a raving two-headed moon calf?

Anyway, a few words about the star system and the planets in orbit
there.

Yes, prion, the double planets are not tide locked.  Which does go
against the wisdom of PLANETS FOR MAN and other texts.  Then again,
they are double planets of equal mass, orbiting around a common
center, and the tidal force, while producing high tides, isn't so
high to bring them grindingly into a tide-lock (Luna experiences 177
times the tidal force that Terra feels [177 x terra] and is
tide-locked; the Sts. C/A planets, otoh, seem to experience only 5
times the tidal force [5 x terra]).

Granted that having such "double planets not tide-locked" itself is
so wild that it smacks of planetary engineering, still I don't think
this detail is necessarily "bad science."

The best candidate for "bad science" IMHO is an orbital position that
gives a solar year of 402 days (each day being 30 hours).  For a star
like Wolf 294, this means an orbit of .33 AU, which is nice and close-in
by our standards, but far outside the most optimistic "life zones"
of that star (i.e., between .1 and .22 AU).  Which means frozen
solid.

But maybe the Shadow Children mind-control cloaking device is just
messing up our readings of that star, so that we won't bother visiting.

There was a rash of "twin planet" stories in the seventies, wasn't
there?  5HC, and then THE DISPOSSESSED, and who knows what else.
Odd.

So, the twin planets might be an artifact of forerunners building
retirement homes around nice and stable, long-lived M-type stars (a
conceit I'm fond of, myself, and I picked it up from ON CIVILIZED
STARS.  A sort of VERMILION SANDS in the sky, I suppose.).

But the other details of the system, the planets Swift (ala Mercury),
Dead Man (ala ruddy Mars), and Snow Woman (ala white Venus), added to
an enhanced version of Terra/Luna double-planets (Sts. Anne/Croix),
together start to spook me.  And it gets worse when I figure out that
Lune's terraforming and orbital shifting may have been done by humans
imitating the set-up they found at Wolf 294 (I think the tidal forces
on Urth caused by Lune are about the same as those experienced on
Sts. A/C, but I can't find my notes at the moment).

The point being that we know Urth/Lune is a part of an "optimized"
terraformed system; and Wolf 294 seems even more so.

Now kaballah has this notion of multiple genesis, each less perfect
than the last.  Since the Wolf 294 system offers a "more perfect"
version of the Solar System, whether it is due to "natural" evolution
(however unlikely) or Yesodic tinkering (however mysterious) is
beside the point.

This thing I'm trying to transmit grows out of prion's idea that the
Wolf 294 system is the true human genesis point.  Without getting
into the various waves of possible immigration back and/or forth,
with flintstone footrockets colliding with atlantean aethersails, I
just want to agree with certain elements.

Look: in the hard sf mode we can say, "This twin planet thing was built
by ancient aliens."  In the mythic/fantasy mode we can say, "This
twin planet situation is the mythic AEgypt from which we have fallen
and to which we long to return."  (Even if only as immitative
terraformers.)

And the Wolf 294 system is a mythic AEgypt, the land of Fairy.  The
humans who go there bring along all their human-making-psyche-baggage;
they "see" things only as they can comprehend them, translating true
strangeness into ready archetypes of strangeness.  Just as the European
explorers arriving in the Americas (well, aside from the peace loving
Scandinavians who were genocided over a little milk-among-the-lactose-
intolerant <g>) didn't go around saying, "Where are the Klingons?  Take
us to the Barsoomian Temple of Reward!"  No, they went around looking
for all the legendary things they'd been talking about for hundreds or
thousands of years (and the spooky part is where random legend meshed
with some kind of reality, especially the cities of gold).

Which is why, seems to me, the mythic landscape of Sts. A/C are so
charged with French (and the Greco-Roman it contains) stuff.

(Note that Yesod itself takes the place of AEgypt in the Urth Cycle,
but the situation is the same--that is, the thing I'm trying to
express is that in some vague sense Sts. A/C are to Earth as Yesod is
to Urth.)

Anyway, that wandered all over the map!

Mu!  Mu!  By these words I undo, I undo!  Untie, unthink, untry,
unsink!  Mu!  Mu!

=mantis=

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