Note
^
^
^ Using w.bat and wc.com to do 1500words/day
PART I
CHAPTER 1
Note
!INCON Ultradrive spines not mentioned -- what we have on this ship is
! is just the container portion plus a torch. This may SOLN the INCON
! but it may also make relativistic velocities too easy to attain:
!IMP I need at least 500y grace before any remnant of the Blighter fleet
! shows up on Tines World
!V IMP INCON agrav
!PRB Maybe put in an explanation for absence of agrav
!
!Following is IMP but not outright INCON 03Feb91 10:23:55am
!BKG INCON In init version, there's only 1 mention of Navnløs moon in
! t1/t2
! I think it's right to have a moon. If so, then months make sense.
! PROwrite more references to the moon
! I propose 1mo = 38.7d (1d very much like Earth's)
! Other things being equal, this would mean it would be 1.24 our moon's
! distance, 1.24*384e3=476e3km. On the other hand for sequels, it might
! be good if it were with a period of 10 days, which would put it
! at a distance of about 0.5*383e3=192e3 km (though actually that
! wouldn't make it any easier to get to; if I want it to have the
! the lighting characteristics of our moon, it would then be smaller
! though). (You could also work out it's size and escape velociy
! Looks like in the ten day case it would set almost 3 hours later
! every night. You could have 40 ten days per year, ten per season;
! again, you'd want the days to be a little shorter than Earth's)
! Hmm, I am tending toward the ten day version February 9, 1991 but
! I think I will not explicitly say in n7
!V June 10, 1991 implicitly, tenday=month, but I will not use the
!V term "month" among the Tines DONE 10Jun91 08:47:02pm
!IMP: in connection with indecision, go through and revise Tinish
! references to "month" in terms of tendays
!NO: Tines calendars composed of 10 40d months + a fudge month
!NO: V making day a little shorter could give 40d months okay, I think
^ V June 10, 1991 Following still a big PRB:
^ V But you don't use this later
^ Note that the seasons don't map very well then
^ I suggest having Straumers have a word for "week" (about like ours)
^ but don't normally use the word "month"
^ "week" may have a statutory value in seconds, but is shrunk to fit
^ local circumstance (which on many worlds would include a separate
^ word translating as "month")
^
!QU PRB MG Want to start this scene in second chapter and to make it
! shorter. Says this is too much like a happy juvenile
!iMP Need an inter pack sex scene
!V Think the following is somewhere in novel:
!ID Flenser killed his conscience "I killed my conscience long ago"
! "I sent my conscience for a walk"
! "Send your conscience for a walk" (similarly with other virtues)
!HLD Other landing scenarios
! other high docs images
! explain the High Beyond
!TITLE Gift from the Transcend
^ ID How about a map of the Zones?
^ MAP on Log9
!NÆH RETRO the scar is Y-shaped
!PRB QU Too much bundling about of Johanna; not enough solicitude for her
! health -- TUF, and I think I have done some things to ameliorate
!V this problem
!Find name for dark rocks in the area -- NÆH
!INCON Jaque's telescope usage and its fit in the story
!RETROwrite (PROwrite?) the pressure disks in Olsndot's pressure
! suit?
!V probably should just delete
!SEQ:
!ID PRB should be a mind rape some place. Relationship to ordinary
! rape? This is all part of the general PRB that the interrogations
! should be easy IMP!QU How painful does an effective interrogation
! have to be?
!V INCON BKG think about usage of "putting a member to the question"
!BKG QU Inheritance management
!IMP! PRB Making things very clear in the Part I
! About the Tines
! About the Zones
!Skipping to 07.txt for further transcribed notes
!
!IMP Reason why the two kids in particular were revived
!
!PRO Should remember to use the word "pressure shell" elsewhere, or
! delete it from here -- deleted it 03Feb91 11:12:50am
!pRB Delete "ablative shielding"
!pRB Generally have to lay to rest radiation problem (though perhaps not
! in
! this version). I think I have done this in t1. Later, if Pham talks
! about dirty landers, you may need to reinforce it
!V Small PRB should think how much energy the torch would need to
!V do the landing and then don't make the sum of all the heating
!V greater than that.
!V June 10, 1991 There is only one small mention of this (in c13),
!V and that refers to a time "shortly after the landing"
!
!V CHK INCON 309
!V It seems to me that I have way too many characters whose names begin
!V "V" or "W". (In this novel, at least Wenda, Vendacious, Woodcarver.)
!V I would kinda of like to changes Wenda's name. There is no
!V alternative that seems absolutely right, but my first choice is
!V Katrin
!V Other possibilities that have occurred to me:
!V Johanne, Gyda, Elena, Gerda, Giske, Liana, Natalja
!V Margrete, Joanne, Dordei, Doradei, Katrine, Eli, Else,
!V Elsa, Jo, Katrina, Katja, Joana, Joanna, Eva
!V Suggestions? Johanna
!
The coldsleep itself was dreamless. Three days ago they had been getting ready to leave, and now they were here. Little Jefri complained about missing all the action, but Johanna Olsndot was glad she'd been asleep; she had known some of the grownups on the other ship.
Now Johanna drifted between the racks of sleepers. Waste heat from the coolers made the darkness infernally hot. Scabby gray mold grew on the walls. The coldsleep boxes were tightly packed, with narrow float spaces every tenth row. There were places where only Jefri could reach. Three hundred and nine children lay there, all the kids except herself and her brother Jefri.
Note
! ; heck, their "ship" was nothing more than the Lab's infirmary
! jammed into a cargo shell.
!V March 3, 1991 this deletion to avoid later claims that maybe there
!V should be more medical equipment
The sleep boxes were light-duty hospital models. Given proper ventilation and maintenance, They would have been good for a hundred years, but.... Johanna wiped her face and looked at a box's readout: Like most of the ones on the inside rows, this was in bad shape. For twenty days it had kept the boy inside safely suspended, and would probably kill him if he stayed one day more. The box's cooling vents were clean, but she vac'd them again -- more a prayer for good luck than effective maintenance.
Mother and Dad were not to blame, though Johanna suspected that they blamed themselves. The escape had been put together with the materials at hand, at the last minute, when the experiment turned wicked. The High Lab staff had done what they could to save their children and protect against still greater disaster. And even so, things might have worked out if --
"Johanna! Daddy says there's no more time. He says to finish what you're doing an' come up here." Jefri had stuck his head down through the hatch to shout to her.
"Okay!" She shouldn't be down here anyway; there was nothing more she could do to help her friends. Tami and Giske and Magda and ... oh please be safe. Johanna pulled herself through the floatway, almost bumped into Jefri coming from the other direction. He grabbed her hand and hung close as they drifted toward the hatch. These last two days he hadn't cried, but he'd lost much of the independence of the last year. Now his eyes were wide. "We're coming down near the North Pole, by all those islands and ice."
Note
!pRB Do you really want him wearing the skintight? Yes
! Well, I use it to protect him from arrows
! I hope not, and don't think so:
! Later there is a little reference to the Tines mistaking the release
! disks for tympana
! Besides, he might have the helmet nearby
!
!CHK 1 hour? Suppose they are 500km up. Not that they are doing a drop
!V approach. So the lower bound on the time is tmin where
!V 500km = 0.5*(9.8m/sec**2)*(tmin**2) ==>
!V tmin = 319sec ! This makes an hour actually sound like
!V too much, but I'm sticking with it June 10, 1991
!V (also note that for much of the flight, they are in a terminal
!V hover to avoid "aero forces")
!V June 10, 1991 CHKd 20d confinement
In the cabin beyond the hatch, their parents were strapping themselves in. Trader Arne Olsndot looked up at her and grinned. "Hi, kiddo. Have a seat. We'll be on the ground in less than an hour." Johanna smiled back, almost caught by his enthusiasm. Ignore the jumble of equipment, the odors of twenty days' confinement: Daddy looked as dashing as any adventure poster. The light from the display windows glittered off the seams of his pressure suit. He was just in from outside.
Jefri pushed across the cabin, pulling Johanna behind him. He strapped into the webbing between her and their mother. Sjana Olsndot checked his restraints, then Johanna's. "This will be interesting, Jefri. You will learn something."
"Yes, all about ice." He was holding Mom's hand now.
Mom smiled. "Not today. I'm talking about the landing. This won't be like an agrav or a ballistic." The agrav was dead. Dad had just detached their shell from the cargo carrier. They could never have landed the whole thing on one torch.
Dad did something with the hodgepodge of controls he had softwired to his dataset. Their bodies settled into the webbing. Around them the cargo shell creaked, and the girder support for the sleep boxes groaned and popped. Something rattled and banged as it "fell" the length of the shell. Johanna guessed they were pulling about one gravity.
Jefri's gaze went from the outside display to his mother's face and then back. "What is it like then?" He sounded curious, but there was a little tremor in his voice. Johanna almost smiled; Jefri knew he was being diverted, and was trying to play along.
"This will be pure rocket descent, powered almost all the way. See on the middle window? That camera is looking straight down. You can actually see that we're slowing down." You could, too. Johanna guessed they weren't more than a couple of hundred kilometers up. Arne Olsndot was using the rocket glued to the back end of the cargo shell to kill all their orbital velocity. There weren't any other options. They had abandoned the cargo carrier, with its agrav and ultradrive. It had brought them far, but its control automation was failing. Some hundreds of kilometers behind them, it coasted dead along their orbit.
All they had left was the cargo shell. No wings, no agrav, no aero shielding. The shell was a hundred-tonne carton of eggs balanced on one hot torch.
Mom wasn't describing it quite that way to Jefri, though what she said was the truth. Somehow she had Jefri seeming to forget the danger. Sjana Olsndot had been a popular archaeologist at Straumli Realm, before they moved to the High Lab.
Note
!IMP Remember to explain why these kids are awake
Dad cut the jet, and they were in free fall again. Johanna felt a wave of nausea; ordinarily she never got space sick, but this was different. The image of land and sea in the downward window slowly grew. There were only a few scattered clouds. The coastline was an indefinite recursion of islands and straits and inlets. Dark green spread along the coast and up the valleys, shading to black and gray in the mountains. There was snow -- and probably Jefri's ice -- scattered in arcs and patches. It was all so beautiful ... and they were falling straight into it!
She heard metallic banging on the cargo shell as the trim jets tipped their craft around, aligning the main jet downwards. The right-hand window showed the ground now. The torch lit again, at something like one gravity. The edge of the display darkened in a burnout halo. "Wow," said Jefri. "It's like an elevator, down and down and down and ..." One hundred kilometers down, slow enough that aero forces wouldn't tear them apart.
Sjana Olsndot was right; it was a novel way to descend from orbit, not a preferred method under any normal circumstances.
Note
!V too bad "directions we got", could be something more evocative
!V maybe "dreams"
!V QU is it too repetitive that Countermeasure appears "fungal"
!V (ie, collision with the term "blight")?
^ V June 10, 1991 Maybe they should have confided in Johanna more??
It was certainly not intended in the original escape plans. They were to meet with the High Lab's frigate -- and all the adults who could escape from the High Lab. And of course, that rendezvous was to be in space, an easy transfer. But the frigate was gone now, and they were on their own. Her eyes turned unwillingly to the stretch of hull beyond her parents. There was the familiar discoloration. It looked like gray fungus ... growing out of the clean hull ceramic. Her parents didn't talk about it much even now, except to shoo Jefri away from it. But Johanna had overheard them once, when they thought she and her brother were at the far end of the shell. Dad's voice almost crying with anger. "All this for nothing!" he said softly. "We made a monster, and ran, and now we're lost at the Bottom." And Mom's voice even softer: "For the thousandth time, Arne, not for nothing. We have the kids." She waved at the roughness that spread across the wall, "And given the dreams ... the directions ... we had, I think this was the best we could hope for. Somehow we are carrying the answer to all the evil we started." Then Jefri had bounced loudly across the hold, proclaiming his imminent entrance, and his parents had shut up. Johanna hadn't quite had the courage to ask them about it. There had been strange things at the High Lab, and toward the end, some quietly scary things; even people who were not quite the same.
Minutes passed. They were deep in the atmosphere now. The hull buzzed with the force of the air stream -- or turbulence from the jet? But things were steady enough that Jefri was beginning to get restless. Much of the down-looking view was burned out by airglow around the torch. The rest was clearer and more detailed than anything they had seen from orbit. Johanna wondered how often a new-visited world had been landed upon with less reconnaissance than this. They had no telescopic cameras, and no ferrets.
Note
!mARK 01Jun89
Physically, the planet was near the human ideal -- wonderful good luck after all the bad.
Note
!V ZZZ okay as is, I think -- yes 03Feb91 11:25:31am
It was heaven compared to the airless rocks of the system that had been the prime rendezvous.
On the other hand, there was intelligent life here: from orbit, they could see roads and towns. But there was no evidence of technic civilization; there was no sign of aircraft or radio or intense power sources.
They were coming down in a thinly populated corner of the continent. With luck there would be no one to see their landing among the green valleys and the black and white peaks -- and Arne Olsndot could fly the torch right to ground without fear of hurting much more than forest and grass.
The coastal islands slid past the side camera's view. Jefri shouted, pointing. It was gone now, but she had seen it too: on one of the islands an irregular polygon of walls and shadow. It reminded her of castles from the Age of Princesses on Nyjora.
She could see individual trees now, their shadows long in slanting sunlight. The roar of the torch was as loud as anything she had ever heard; they were deep in atmosphere, and they weren't moving away from the sound.
"... things get tricky," Dad shouted. "And no programs to make things right.... Where to, love?"
Mom look back and forth between the display windows. As far as Johanna knew, they couldn't move the cameras or assign new ones. "... that hill, above the timber line, but ... think I saw a pack of animals running away from the blast on ... west side."
"Yeah," shouted Jefri, "wolves." Johanna had only had a quick glimpse of moving specks.
They were in full hover now, maybe a thousand meters above the hilltops. The noise was painful, unending; further talk was impossible. They drifted slowly across landscape, partly to reconnoiter, partly to stay out of the plume of superheated air that rose about them.
Note
!CHK feasibility of this delta vee (mass ratios)
! I don't see how it matters, now that you're not claiming this is a
! fusion drive
!In fact, 10m/s**2 takes 50000s = 13h53m to reach 500km/s
!V IMP INCON Work this out in Blighter chase consistently!
!V have to say the attaching the jet was ad hoc too -- no, see my
!V rewriting of this 03Feb91 11:37:33am :
!V SEQ interesting implications here for multiple cargo shell shipping
!V I'm vague about the delta vee to match novel's ending
!V parent talk referenced
The land was more rolling than craggy, and the "grass" looked mossy. Still Arne Olsndot hesitated. The main torch was designed for velocity matching after interstellar jumps; they could hang like this for a good while. But when they did touch down, they'd better have it right. She'd heard her parents talking that one over -- when Jefri was working with the coldsleep boxes and out of earshot. If there was too much water in the soil, the backsplash would be a steam cannon, punching right through the shell. Landing in trees would have some dubious pluses, maybe giving them a little cushioning and a standoff from the splash. But now they were going for direct contact. At least they could see where they were landing.
Note
!QU Is it okay for the steam to visible as white?
!hld: superheated steam is clear. White would be particulates
!hld This better be a fusion or antimatter reaction drive for that much
!hld deltaV ... or else something really weird
!hld Suggest soft focus the enigne or really tighten it up to avoid
!hld backsplash
Three hundred meters. Dad dragged the torch tip through the ground cover. The soft landscape exploded. A second later their boat rocked in the column of steam. The down-looking camera died. They didn't back off, and after a moment the battering eased; the torch had burned through whatever water table or permafrost lay below them. The cabin air grew steadily hotter.
Note
!0.5s fall at 10m/s**2 =~ 2.5m = 8.2 feet
Olsndot brought them slowly down through it, using the side cameras and the sound of the backsplash as his guide. He cut the torch. There was a scary half-second fall, then the sound of the rendezvous pylons hitting ground. They steadied, then one side groaned, giving way a little.
Silence, except for heat pinging around the hull. Dad looked at their ad hoc pressure gauge. He grinned at Mom. "No breach. I bet I could even take this baby up again!"
Note
!V small PRB this last sentence is a red herring -- TUF
!
!CHK pRB Put in page breaks by chapters. Also number the chapters