On my second trip down, for the Admiral's fifteenth wedding anniversary, I decided to look up my grandparents. We had never communicated. My parents always said that they all disapproved of them going out to the Big, and thought it a crime to bear a child out there with all the medical problems during gestation and, lord, how would the child turn out? Well, I was fine, if a little brittle and prone to a mild form of spacer's arthritis.

My paternal grandfather was dead. Mina Barker still lived on the farm where my father was born and raised. I called her first, identified myself and asked if I could meet her. She said 'yes' and 'right now' and then cried for fifteen minutes. That made me a little gun-shy about calling elderly Earthlings, so it was a few hours before I called my maternal grandparents.

My grandfather Robert Joyes answered on his cell and said "Mina just called us! We're already on our way." I was floored. In one gee.

I took a helibus to the town of Kirkfield, near Lake Simcoe, and then a groundcar from there to the farm. It was a large-scale freshwater fish raising concern in an old flooded gravel quarry. They also ran a tourist marina on the Trent Canal, since the quarry was only a few meters away.

The highlight for tourists and visitors was the canal liftlocks, that carried boat traffic up and down a high cliff that would have otherwise prevented the canal construction. It was a solution to a problem that reminded me of how us spacers faced an unusual problem; with a unique solution.

My grandmother Barker and Robert and Eva Joyes were standing on the porch of the house with glasses in their hands. There were a few other people there too. Cousins, as it turned out.

I didn't know what to say to start things off, but didn't have to worry.

"You're taller than your father, David!" said Grandmother Barker. She threw her arms around me, then jumped back, obviously afraid she'd break something. Then Grandmother Joyes hugged me too. Grandfather Joyes shook my hand, then so did everybody else.

I met a dozen more relatives whose names I only half remember, even though I was recording everything. Almost all employees of the farm and marina, they were Wilsons, Stewarts, Lytles and, to my surprise, Sherpas. I commented on being related to immigrant Tibetans and the entire party broke up in laughter. A Barker cousin explained that they were Chirpaughs, an old Irish surname in the area. I was reminded that my heritage did not begin when my parents left for the Big.

I was offered sushi (trout and some other local delicacies), salads, interesting adaptations of the vat-cloned meats that were first being marketed then, and a very nice local beer.

Finally the grandparents shooed everybody back to work and we retired to a sitting room overlooking the quarry. The open sky above was, thankfully, obscured by a partial dome to keep the harmful sunlight off the water and the workers. That and the flat surface of the water, with all the rafts and pens, and the meters high cliffs helped calm my initial but mild agoraphobia. And, as we all know, there is really no such thing as a 'sky'; it's an illusion, like rainbows and 'red sun at night.'

"Call me Gramma," said Mina Barker. She gestured outside. "They all do. My God. Eva, look at him. Looks just like Lillian."

"Norm's hair, though, Minie," said Robert. "So you saw one of those aliens, did you, David? Dave? Davey? What do you like?"

"Dave's fine, sir."

"Listen to you! Sir! I'm your grandfather, Dave. Some of your cousins call me Gramps, some call me Grandda." He pointed to Eva. "She's Ayesha."

"I am not. You shut yourself up, Rob. Now, David. Please tell us. Do you speak to them? Write? Anything?" She meant my parents.

"Ma'am. Grandma." She smiled. "I haven't heard anything from them since they left." Nearly twenty years ago,then. And I didn't want to give them any illusions. "There is no colony that has them on file. And no -uh- abandoned settlements on record. I've checked." A hundred times.

Eva sighed and cleared her throat. "But they could be -"

"Sure. People are still settling the Jovian Trojans and we don't get much data from them at all," I said. I was afraid they'd ask what the Jovian Trojans were.

Robert shook his head slowly. "They were such a pair a goofs. My god." I thought he was going to cry.

Mina, sitting beside me, took my hand. "Do you know anything about them, Dave? Did they tell you anything about us or here?" I shook my head. "Do you want us to tell you anything?" I nodded, because I realized that I did. "Ask us anything. Oh! I'm going to cry! I am so happy right now. We were so afraid we'd never meet you, and then we heard your name after the battles out at Saturn and we hoped it was you!" She wiped her nose. "I'm sorry. Good God. No, I am not." She leaned over and hugged me again.

"They always seemed so intense, even when I was little. Like I was important not because I was their kid, but because I was the seventeenth human child born in the Big. Like they needed to learn everything about space so that they could write the book on it." I surprised myself with that because I had never actually thought about it that way before.

"Norm and Lillian," said Eva. "Do you know what a moby is, Dave?"

"A fish? A golden calf idol from an old movie?"

"Mobies were from the first groups of kids to grow up in the mall cities and arcologies. You've seen them, I'm sure. Small apartments, shared public spaces, parks, playing fields, everything. Moby means 'My Own Back Yard'. It was what they wanted to have. They were hippies of a sort." Ah, some kind of Utopian. "Norm grew up here, and worked here summers when he went down to Toronto to Ryerson. Lillian grew up in Parkdale Village, under the first Toronto dome, in the Roncesvalles Mall. They met at school. She came out here to work one summer, they fell in love and were married right out back in the arbour garden."

I was a little flustered. My parents had always seemed very efficient and all-business in our various flats in Clavius, L5 and a couple of different geosynchs. "But if Mum wanted more space, more room, and Dad was perfectly happy here, why did they - "

"Go out?" asked Mina. "Propaganda, I guess. Lillian was already used to limited spaces, and Norm's type of experience and training here was exactly what the UN wanted on the moon and Mars, too."

"They were so serious all the time," I said. Everything was mission critiical for them. "Who wrote who off? They said you didn't want to contact them."

All three gasped, startled. Eva looked at Mina, and both started to cry. "I'm sorry," I said. "Please. I -"

"Leave them, Dave," said Robert. "When we asked them about you, about Lillian getting pregnant when even the UN doctors disrecommended it, they both got mad. It was like having one of the first babies born in space was their destiny." They'd treated me like a project sometimes.

Eva was wiping her eyes. "We sent you books and toys and pictures. We told them to come back for a vacation, but they said they couldn't due to health problems. Norman even hinted once that they could never return to Earth or they'd die, and we knew that was a crock. Once, when you were about four, I told them I was coming up and they said they were moving to Mars." I remembered that move, although we just moved to Giordano Bruno on Farside.

Mina looked at me woefully. "When they posted the announcement that they were immigrating out to the Asteroids, I cried for days. We thought you'd gone too. When we got the updates from the front, it made sense to us that David Barker would be on the front lines. We didn't know they'd just left you behind." I was at school the day they left. "You should have called us then."

"I didn't know you'd - I didn't think of it." I do not get easily moved, but that day, well.

"Are you happy up there, David?" asked Robert. "Do you like it?"

"It's home. It's my home." I looked around at this house that first my father and later both my parents had called home. Large rooms and wide halls, ancient furniture and static paintings and hangings, an antique television with a fish-tank in it, rugs and windows and a view from here to the edge of the world. But no further. Not even an negative exponential fraction of the view from Farside back almost to the beginning of time.

"You're welcome here anytime. I know you don't belong here like Aaron or Elizabeth out there, but we're family, you know. Put us in your address book, your distribution lists. I know you have work to do while you're down here, but could you visit us again, sometime? Maybe call? Let us give you our addresses and websites. Well, you have those. So put a star beside them."

Mina looked into my face, into my eyes. "You have a second cousin or something. I can never keep these things straight. He's at the UN training school for immigrants in Sudbury. Can we ask him to call you when he gets up there?"

I believe I was near to tears myself. "Of course. Certainly."

I included this story for two main reasons. One to brag about the fact that after a great many years without, I found I had a family again. The second is to let you in a little on why I am the way I am. Until I met my grandparents, I had no idea that being this way was genetic.

Well, somebody down there has a sense of humour and apparently thinks that I do too.

A correspondent in Ireland sent me this, saying that it reminded her of the way I talk about spacers and living in the Big.

It's the words to a song called 'Iowa Stubborn' from a very old musical comedy called 'The Music Man'. Credit where credit is due - (c)1957 M. Willson

It purports to be the way the people of the mythical River City, Iowa think of themselves vis-a-vis newcomers.

Here you go. Make of it what you will. I kind of like it.


Oh, there's nothing halfway
about the Iowa way to treat you
when we treat you
which we may not do at all.

There's an Iowa kind of special
chip-on-the-shoulder attitude
we've never been without
that we recall.

We can be cold as a falling
thermometer in December
if you ask about our weather in July
and we're so by-god stubborn
we can stand touchin' noses
for a week at a time
and never see eye-to-eye.

But what the heck, you're welcome,
join us at the picnic.
You can have your fill
of all the food you bring yourself.
You really ought to give Iowa a try,
provided you are contrary.

We can be cold as a falling
thermometer in December
if you ask about our weather in July
and we're so by-god stubborn
we can stand touchin' noses
for a week at a time
and never see eye-to-eye.

But, we'll give you our shirt
and a back to go with it
if your crops should happen to die.

So what the heck, you're welcome.
Glad to have you with us
even though we may not ever mention it again.
You really ought to give Iowa a try.

Hawkeye, Iowa
DuBuque
Des Moines
Davenport
Marshalltown
Mason City
Keokuk
Ames
Clear Lake

Ought to give Iowa a try.

Nuff said.

Some notes, snapshots, ideas, et cetera.

............................................................

That time down in Georgetown, when I was speaking, during the Q&A, a girl came up to one of the microphones.

She was a radical steeler hardcase with only just more attitude than tattoos and a Spock gene-hack to the ears. Since that was expensive it meant that her parents had probably paid for it. So she was either spoiled rotten or her units were compensating.

"Hi, Dave", she said."Fluid Stasis." That was her name. "My brother Nick was on Ring of Solomon." And bingo. The last ship lost before we declared war, that made us declare war. Captain Riegert sent video back of the Thaiax ship that was destroying his. His crew were the first martyrs of our first interspecies war. Fluid Stasis was probably Nick's only sibling.

"You kill any?" she asked.

"Probably."

"Good," she said and sat back down.

A few years later I ran into her in Clavius. Well, she ran into me. She'd emigrated and enlisted and wanted me to know it was because of my talk. "Gonna give those bastards the Static Flu," she laughed.

............................................................

As of right now, this instant, when you are reading this, humanity in the Big is completely independent of humanity on the Dirt. Absolutely.

We don't need you for energy, food, water or even replacements.

We have solar power in the Inner System and fusion out where we need it.

We have habitats whose sole purpose is to grow food. Vast plantations out in the Asteroids spinning silently in the dark, with hectare after hectare of wheat and corn and soy,all suitably genetically diverse to avoid plagues.

We move mountains of ice to where we need them. It's considered an honour to get the first drink of water off a newly tamed comet.

We move mountains of stone to where we need them, too. We build our own worlds, with technology developed out here, where we have unlimited space and energy to experiment with anything we choose.

There are young adults on Mars who were born and raised there. Who are having their own families now.

Children on Mars aren't memorizing American state capital names, or Old World GNPs. They don't even call it the Old World because that's meaningless to them in that context. As far as they care, Earth is the Old World, people came from there and now they're on Mars.

Kids born at L5 have their own anthropological jargon to describe people, and it's catching on all through the Big. Here's a sample:

Old World - east hem
New World - west hem

European - eurogen
African - afrigen
Asian - asiogen
Indian - indogen
aboriginal (any) - eogen

So, I, born in the Big of Canadian European descended caucasian parents, am a west hem eurogen. NB, no caps.

These words are mere historical adjectives, with no negative connotation, like up and down or east and west. And here in the Big, when they're used, their meaning is completely local and consensual.

Yes, there's Jews and Muslims et cetera out here, but in most cases, they're like hobbyists. A few hardcases, to be sure, but life goes on.

............................................................

The copyrighted name for OR/Aeneid's fusion plant, whether used as a rocket or a power source, is the Askr. It's really hardly ever used. It comes from ancient Norse myth of Ragnarok, the end of the rule of the ancient gods like Odin and Idun and Loki. After the apocalyptic war, two figures emerged, the first man and the first woman of the new world. (Historians usually point out the obvious Christian influence on the evolution of this part of the story.) Askr was the man and Embla was the woman. If you don't know, Embla is the nickname of the 'flying girl' figure in OR/Aeneid's logo.

Rumour has it that ASKR are the initials of relatives of one of the original founding principals of OR/Aeneid. False.

............................................................

Re: ships and stations

Ever since the production of buckytubes and buckyballs was made practical by zeegee factories like at L5-l'Usine, stations or habitats are really just special cases of ships.

(I keep saying this) 'You know' the Gibraltar bridge was built with the substance sometimes called fullyester or bylon or half a dozen other copyrighted names for strings, cables, sheets or stays made of woven, braided, twisted, plaited or knitted long tubular carbon fibres that are the strongest substance we've ever made. And, yes, we have way more uses for it out here than you do down there.

The standard design for an OR/Aeneid ship is really the same as the design for a habitat, or as they're saying now 'communitat'. For years now, the standard construction material has been fullyester.

After a few test cases were built out at Ceres, including the showcase Amarna, OR/Aeneid approached the Europeans and joint-ventured the construction of L5-la Ville. And please, west hem eurogens should know that it's pronounced Ell Sank La Ville. It's French. L'usine means 'factory' and it was built by the Euros too, the old fashioned way.

Stations/habitats/communitats have to be as robust as any ship. First of all, they are seldom built in situ. They come with a standard fusion engine so they can be moved into place on completion. Or moved to another orbit or location later.

L5-la Ville is the largest station that OR/Aeneid has ever built. It's fifteen klicks long and four in diameter. It maintains one standard gee on the inside surface and it can even rain inside. It is such a design and functional success that several more are planned, some to replace the much smaller rings and toruses at L5 and L4. Even some of the geosynchs will be replaced.

'Communitats' like L5-la Ville can only become more common, so I imagine a time when there will be bred and born spacers who might never leave their home habitat, just like - ahem - you. I'm not really kidding, but I truly hope I'm wrong.

I forgot that I was going to explain about the Wreck last time. I will this time, but a couple of related tangents first.

I was reminded sideways by a snotty e-mail from a Brazilian who plans to emigrate when she's old enough, and clicks on anything having to do with anything 100 klicks or more above the Dirt's surface. (And N.B. to correspondent in Atlantis, it may be Oceanus to you, Earth to everybody else, but it's still only the Dirt to me. Sorry if you're offended. Watch your language. I BCC'd your mother.)

Brazilian pointed out that everybody who has a clue about the Big knows what the Wreck is, and I don't have to assume that everybody on the Dirt knows nothing about the Big.

A bit of background, because, face it, you need it.

I had never been down to the Dirt in my life until just after the first war. I'd met the Admiral (only a captain then) through a mutual friend (see the first entry in this log) and later she invited me down to spend some time with her and her family.

When Command (they run things up here for the UN) found out I was going, they asked a favour, for which they would pay me. I was checked out to stay down for three months (after one month of 1 gee treadmill stuff at the L5 hospital) and could I take some of that time for a simple speaking tour of some Canadian and American schools within flying distance of Toronto? They wanted some live PR for immigration (that's what they called it then, now it's officially emigration, sounds more frontiery, I guess). I said yes.

So I spent some time travelling around, mostly to schools (yes, spacers, real-time meat-in-the-seats 'say present but only if you are' schools), and the occasional town hall meeting, real and VR.

Kids down there knew about the war, but since it had come nowhere near the Dirt, it was like a car-accident in another country. Sad but irrelevant. Command (and the UN) wanted me to give them my first hand account of things, which I did. I even had pictures. No, it wasn't morbid. My suit took them while I was in action and I kept them.

I remember a class in a town called Georgetown, outside Toronto. It was at one of the local high schools, the oldest as a matter of fact. It had seen better days, a long time ago. My speech was supposed to be a reward for all the high-rollers in the senior class, but in the end, they just opened the doors and let half the school in. The rest were watching in VR or on the screen in the cafetorium. I was popular.

I talked. I showed pictures. I talked some more. Sadly, some of them didn't care at all about the invasion or our losses, just the time off from classes. They didn't seem to understand - maybe couldn't - what the presence of two intelligent species fighting over territory implied about the galaxy, about our future, even when I spelled it out for them.

And I quote: "We are not alone. This isn't the tag-line from an old movie. This is the truth and it is terrible or awesome, as your imagination allows. Some of you might want to immigrate someday. Do it. And I can't tell you to forget all the dreams you might have about life out there. Go out with all the dreams you want. Just remember, that for the first fifty years, it was just us in the Big. There was no enemy but ourselves and our own inexperience and even stupidity. But the Thaiax invasion changed that completely. From now on, it is in our own best interests, as individuals who do not want to die, and as guardians of our own species, to be constantly aware that war could happen again at any time." (And as you know, it did, three years after the end of the first war.)

Well, it was mostly like pissing in the Big talking to these kids. That kid from Atlantis might understand about beautiful but innately deadly environments, but they didn't. Out here you can kill yourself two meters from your front door by pressing the wrong button on your spacesuit, failsafes be damned. And a very important point I tried to make over and over: your best buddy can kill you with one teensy stupid mistake. "The evolution of human culture in the Big is lamarckian," is what I told them, and left the ones to look it up who wanted to. It's memetic, too, of course. Letting the next guy know what killed you also goes into the rule-book for everybody else.

J.J Earthling can't get killed by forgetting a doorcode. (Spare me the e-mails, it's a generalization, not an absolute. I know what the crime rate is in some places down there.) J.J can't kill the family by pressing the red button instead of the blue one. And do you all know what happens if you're stupid enough to go EVA during a coronal mass ejection? Out here, if you're not on your toes all the time, you're 64 bytes in the obits tomorrow.

So to finish up my point to Brazilian, there is a lot you need to know and truly believe to survive out here. And you never know enough. But, guess what? You can't just go out with a memorized list of do/don't do. You have to be observant on every level. The Wreck taught us that. (Yeah, I know. Finally.)

Five years before the start of the first war, let's see. Control was keeping things humming at Earth/Luna (yes, one says Earth/Luna not Dirt/Luna). OR/Aeneid was single-handedly taming the Asteroid Belt and extending the frontier out to Jupiter and Saturn. As new ships came off the assembly lines at Ceres, they were sent inwards, sometimes with robot pilots, sometimes with meat. The people who'd commissioned them or selected them out of a catalog would pick them up and sign on with the next caravan going back out. The Guard (now Service and the Fleet) had regular scheduled runs according to orbital stats. Safety in numbers because there were pirates.

Hey, another small tangent, because some of you don't get this when it's really easy. Earth orbits the Sun in one year. So does Mars, but it's one martian year, which is about two Earth years. Ceres' orbit is even longer, and Jupiter's even more so. You don't aim your ship at Mars where it is when you leave, you aim where it's going to be when you get there. Huh?

Ah, my old friend Distance, and his brother-in-arms, Celestial Mechanics. Factors to consider when planning a trip outside Earth/Luna are basic. Say you're a freighter captain with a contract to take some luxury items to Mars. They mass a certain amount on top of what your ship does, fully fuelled, provisioned and crewed. Your contract stipulates a latest allowable delivery date. Where's Mars going to be by that date? So your departure time, speed and fuel consumption all depend on that. How much mass do you have to get to Mars in how tight a time window? Does the Guard have a caravan scheduled that matches up, or do you a) go alone (dangerous) or b) try to get a caravan of your own together and get the Guard to fly along? Let's say b).

So you're on your way out to the Asteroid Belt with your caravan and a couple of Guard ships armed with mass-driver rail-guns, some big lasers, and maybe experimental plasma cannon at that time.

In an earlier post I mentioned that we put telescopes on everything because we have to. Part of the original reason was to find approaching objects whose path might or might not intercept your own. On an outbound caravan, that would almost certainly be pirates, since anything natural would probably have been charted and redflagged years before. But we look at everything anyway, cuz we don't call it the Big for nuthin'.

You find the Wreck. Your name goes down in history and it's all you talk about at parties for the rest of your life.

Captain Mike Cecutti was the ranking officer on that (real) caravan. (Invite him to a party. He loves it.) The trip was unscheduled and the due date tight, so they were going faster than usual on a non-standard trajectory, but they were being tracked from Earth/Luna and from Mars. If the trip had never happened, or if the Guard had refused to accompany the caravan, the Wreck would probably never have been found. But it was.

At first they thought it was a wrecked human ship of non-standard (ie, non OR/Aeneid) manufacture. The second thing they noticed was that markings on the hull appeared to be in the same alphabet as the inscription on the Czech Probe.

It had been holed by a high-velocity object and then apparently been almost completely cannibalized and left adrift. Calculations suggested that at one point some years before it had been in or very near the Jovian system.

It took some doing, but with Guard negotiated changes to that freight hauler's contracted delivery date, and some fuel borrowed from the caravan ships, two of the Guard ships hauled the Wreck back to Earth/Luna. It might have been easier just to take it to Mars with them, but Control wanted it back home ASAP.

Now be aware that there really were pirates. They came from small rat-hole colonies out in the Asteroids who needed food, air, volatiles, reaction mass for their fusion plants, whatever.There weren't a lot of them, and lost colonies died fast, but they were a definite nuisance on single ships and even caravans. Uusally out in the Asteroids, but they been known to attack within Mars' orbit.

Ships had been disappearing without a trace, or found holed in exactly the same way, for several years at that point. The pirates had been blamed for all of it. The Wreck suggested very strongly that the aliens who left the Czech Probe had attacked one of their own ships exactly the same way ours had been.

You see where this leads. We'd been under attack for some time by then, and didn't even realize it.

You may not know that a very appropriate (for us) expression from an old movie became very popular around that time. "Keep watching the skies!"

I had been thinking about this next point for a while when I got an e-mail from that friend of mine you've all probably heard of. She was a hero of the last war and is an outspoken proponent of immigration out to the Big, even though she still lives down there on the Dirt. She asked me to talk about the Wars.


Now, I had been hoping to put off writing about the Wars specifically for as long as possible. It was a strange time for many of us, even surreal. Nobody with a practical soul (and to survive in the Big you have to be ice-cold practical a lot of the time) ever thought that we would find ourselves engaged in a guerilla/territorial war with an alien species that basically blind-sided and sucker-punched us. Everything we had ever read or learned about the Big stated that chances were we'd never see another intelligent technological species and likely never actually hear from one either. Well, I looked one right in the face out at Mimas.


"Straighten them out" she wrote. "Tell them where the Fleet came from. Tell them it wasn't all Star Wars and Independence Day or even Ender's Game.Tell them how cold and boring our patrols were. Tell them what it was like to stare for months into the Big Empty and end up just hurting for company, even an dark-eyed enemy ship." Bit of a poet, our admiral.


And so I will. I was there too, so I know exactly what she means. She was an officer, and I was infantry on a different ship, but what we both went through and came out the other side was a whole lot of nothing, interspersed with severe jolts of making history.

I'm going to explain to you about police navies, lost colonies, pirates & privateers, daring rescues, magic cities, seven league boots. (Only some of that is a joke.)

The place to start, I suppose, is how we conquered the tremendous distances from point A to point B. The ones I think about. Remember?

The single most important factor in the human colonization of the solar system deserves to be written like this:


FUSION POWER!

Like television, functional fusion power came about by the happy meeting of several different little theories and technologies and innovators. In fusion's case, it was in a lab on Luna in 2032. I don't know the particulars and don't ask me how fusion works, but it does, and OR/Aeneid keeps making it better. If you really need/want to know, then do the research. It's all out there, everything from the basic ABCs to <insert something impressively scientific here yourself.>

So at that point, we had cheap, easily controlled, very efficient and highly productive fusion power.

That was in the ivory towers of science.

Out in the real world...

A few years before, a small geospace startup called Ohi-Ridpath (first initials sound familiar? It's the same OR as in OR/Aeneid, and everybody knows who they are) had got hold of the metallurgical assay of an NEA called Gamma 2016. One of the crew on the actual team on the asteroid had e-smuggled the data, encrypted, to an accomplice at NASA, and it got out on the web from there.

The assay (and again, all this is public knowledge) showed the usual and expected high levels of iron, nickel, some carbon, with the added bonus of half the surface of the asteroid was encrusted with mostly water ice, likely from a fairly recent brush with a comet or cometary fragment.

OR landed a cobbled together refinery/rolling mill on Gamma 2016 and basically started to build ships. The plan was to build them cheap but sturdy, sell them to the pioneers, and float back and collect the rewards. And that's exactly what they did for a while.

Then when it became possible to lease the rights to the new fusion patent, OR was rich enough to outbid everyone, even most governments. (This was during the period when the most critical national priorities were rising sea levels and protecting humans and animals from the rapidly increasing ozone depletion. The same reasons why you probably live in an arcology or a mall-city.)

OR had originally planned to lease the best NEAs that came into the Inner System. They would mine them up to a certain allowed percentage of mass, build their ships (and later stations) then go on to the next. But the unlimited energy, high speed and time-savings that fusion power offered got them thinking really hard about the original business plan.

Finally someone on staff thought to take Mohammed to the mountain. They moved the whole project out to Ceres. All the rocks they would ever need were right there and being at the frontier was useful for many reasons. At Ceres, OR established the colony that would one day become the fabled city called Zion-in-Starlight. I have been there, oh my readers, and I will never forget what beauty humans are capable of building with space-rock, clunky robots and cometary ice.

OR became OR/Aeneid and would be instrumental in us winning both wars against the Thaiax, due in part to their eccentric maintenance contracts and lifetime replacement policies..

And it's just been announced as I write this that - surprise, surprise - OR/Aeneid has won the UN's contract to build your space elevator. Now ain't that somethin'?

The fact that they are richer than half the human race combined and that most of the spaceships in existence come from Ceres is just a minor historical footnote. =;]

Oho, my loyal readers! An old two-part weblegend rears its ugly mug, yet again. I think everybody thought that this old thing had been thrown out the airlock long ago (taken out behind the barn and shot, same thing).

I'd been doing some research for this log and came across pages of hits on a websearch that were all fairly recent, all references to these 'facts'. Okay, it's human nature to believe what you're told when you trust the source, but these yarns have been debunked so many times that even Graham Hancock's ghost doesn't believe them anymore. (Look him up.)

Part 1:The Czech Probe

This was found in Mare Tranquilitatis, Luna in 2029, about 20 kilometers from Tranquility Base.

It was a, by then, electrically dead device, equipped with a dish antenna aimed at Earth and one facing out into the Big. About twice the size of the base of the LEM, It was made out of some pretty prosaic metals and alloys and some pretty interesting substances used as sheilding and insulation. Of course, the electronics were completely new to us, too. It made the news bigtime.

Otherwise well-informed websites are still saying that one of the pieces of evidence for the presence of the Thaiax in the solar system from well before the war is in reality a Czech space probe launched in, variously, 1972, 1978 or 1984. No. It's called evidence of Thaiax presence because it IS evidence of Thaiax presence.

Analysis of its exposed surfaces for exposure to cosmic rays indicate that it has been there since about 2000, and is the closest anything associated with the Thaiax has ever come to Earth, even during the wars.

Prague has posted notices several times on the national homepage that, much as they would like to claim credit for something like that, they can't. It would have been during the Soviet era, and what was then Czechoslovakia simply didn't have the technology. If you check it out, you'll find they provide a list of links to all sorts of pages about the Probe, from scientifically serious to woo-woo crazy.

One thing that's funny is that because this story was so prevalent ten years ago, even historians started calling it the Czech Probe, instead of its formal name, TMA 1.

Part 2:'Thaiax' is Czech for 'Alien'

Where do they come up with this stuff? The Czech for 'alien' or 'foreign' is zahranic'ni. I don't know how to pronounce it, but you can look it up if you want.

This probably is just an extension of the first part of the weblegend.

But do you really want to know why we call them Thaiax? Huh? Send me enough e-mails and I'll tell you.

No, that's cruel.

Hopefully you know that we've never ever talked to one. We don't know how they communicate with each other, and we honestly don't know if they've ever really tried to communicate with us, outside of the rebus they sent that ended the First Thaiax War. And that was just our own video sent back to us, played backwards; a human ship moving away from a Thaiax ship. You've all seen it.

So we don't know what they call themselves, or what they call us, for that matter. As far as physiology goes, there's lots of autopsy data and analysis/extrapolation on the bodies they have out at Ares 51, but you can look that up for yourselves.

So on to the name. This part, to me, is more interesting (read 'fun') than the very odd attribution of the probe to the Czechs. Go find a VR of the probe. If you don't have VR, find a 3D movie. Got one? Okay.

Bring the camera in so that it points straight on at the inscription on the band around the middle. It usually shows up as black on beige. Now, whichever media you're using, turn it upside down, or stand on your head. Rotate the image slowly from right to left. What you're looking at is what is believed to be an alphabetic sequence and that's all they're saying it might be. It could say the equivalent of 'McDonnell-Douglas' or 'GM' or it could say 'The Only Good Human Is A Dead Human!' We have no way of knowing. Yet.

As it rotates, you'll see a pair of wiggly exclamation marks. Just after that, you'll see a sequence of characters that look like distorted versions of the lower case Romans letters that spell 'Thaiax'. Seriously.

In 2032, at Giordano Bruno, one of the journalists attending the first conference noticed this and it stuck, just like 'the Czech Probe'.

Now I think I'm not anticipating the Admiral's coming autobiography by telling you that this discovery and the much later discovery of the Wreck were what inspired her to sign up with what was then the Guard. She'd been second officer on a nice Earth/Luna freight and immigrants loop, on a little ship called Bournville. Something about the undeniable presence of non-human sentients right at our own front door got to her, and she enlisted with what was then basically a UN police force and bodyguard for ships going out to Mars and the Asteroids. Check out her book when it's posted. She'll do a fine job of explaining herself, I'm sure.

This entry is going to sound whiny.

It occurs to me that all of you Earthlings (it's been politely suggested that I refrain from calling you Dirtsiders), you know how many you are, are living lives that have been basically unchanged since the days of your grandparents.

Oh, sure. There's been major political changes in China, Africa and India. Sea-levels are higher now than ever before. England has tornadoes, there's malaria in Vermont, and you've lost more species in every biome in the last fifty years than in the previous five hundred. Definitely your grandparents wouldn't recognize a lot of what you have that they didn't; VR, gene-hacks, cybersex. But economics have barely changed, the global economy is still based on money, and you still work to get paid to buy groceries to live.

If you're reading this, you may end up being an exception, but most of you have never and will never see a spacer in the flesh. VR doesn't count. There's billions of you and at last estimate (because we don't census well) there were about 3x10⁵ of us out here, spread from Mercury to Saturn. Most of us don't like leaving the Big, but don't assume that just because Luna has gravity, it isn't in the Big. It is.

I know from my e-mail that a lot of you have olde tyme romantic notions about the Big, about spacers and space travel. And I know that VRs about the wars are way more popular than documentaries and that the VRs do it all wrong. It's probably a feedback loop; the producers give you what they think you want to see and you respond by wanting to see more of what they gave you. Human nature plus ratings equals...

But whatever you think happened during the two Thaiax wars is probably wrong. And most of you will go to your graves with the wrong movies playing back in your heads. I hope I can do a little something about that.

And I think I speak for every spacer, born and immigrant, when I tell you that no matter how efficient your apartment is at it, no matter what brand you use to do it, no matter how small a package your kitchen delivers to the municipality, you guys don't know nothin' about recycling.

Seriously. Now I truly believe that Distance is the single most important factor in defining human culture out in the Big. Sometimes though, when I think about being in a small, closed, artificial pseudo-ecosystem (read patrol-ship on picket duty), I almost want to change my mind. Especially when I just want a drink of water.

I won't say that humans out in the Big and most of you down on Earth are becoming two different peoples. But our sensibilities can be very different.

Take multi-party on-line conferences. Three parties, let's say. Yours:Toronto, Hong Kong, and London. Mine:Clavius, L5-la-ville, and High Manhattan.

You moan about 3 or 4 seconds latency between parties. Five is just insufferable and anything more is a letter off to the carrier with a copy posted to your favourite discussion groups. You have what we call 'Least Fuss Routing' of data packets (that's your fussing, not the carriers or the routing software), so data always gets where it's going the fastest possible way, fibre, radio-link, or worst choice, satellite or copper. Along with higher priority for video and audio data streams over simple text or binary transfers, you're surfing in paradise. And you don't appreciate it.

The worst crowflight your data can take is all the way around the world at the equator, which is what, 38,000 km? And the speed of light in a vacuum is 3x10⁵ kps. So allow a little slower transmission rate for fibre or atmosphere, and 3 or 5 seconds is worst latency you're likely to get on an average day down on the Dirt. (Don't e-mail me with documented proof of 10 seconds latency on a simple ping back in '68. I said average.)

Our conference on the other hand, has all three legs that are each nearly 4x10⁵ km long. One way. So just to say 'hey' and get a 'hey' back is 3 seconds. If there's no data congestion. And no EM interference from the Sun, or you guys.(Radio free-for-all light-minutes out in all directions, I swear.) So, when the people at our three locations are trying to have an important meeting, the one with the slowest latency time has to wait until the one with the longest has got the original -say - question, and thought about it and replied.

There is no way adding more data pipelines can overcome this. The problem is not a paucity of routes or inefficient routing algorithms. We have stations and relays and satellites all over, and our networking software is by and large better than yours. The problem is the limitation imposed on our communications by distance, by c.

Okay. So I'll hope you get the difference. That is, why we think differently, and not just about how we communicate. That's only an example. And a good metaphor.

The distances out here are truly the thing. You might think it was the Big itself, the vacuum, 'the final physics lesson' as one guy put it. No. It's the distance.

And I bet you're thinking right now, 'Hmm. Travel must be an imperial bitch.'

Yup.

And I'm breaking my own rule about these postings by coming back a day later to add one thing relevant to the distance/latency issue. Spacers are, by a long shot, way more patient than you.

You can't see the Big from down here on the Dirt. Yeah you can, you tell me. Go up north! Go out at night! Look at all those stars, man. Nope. Sorry. All what stars? You're missing -oh, a few. And stars don't twinkle. And where's the colours?

I can stand at a rec-room viewport in Mosco City on Farside and see farther back in time than you can anyplace on the Dirt. There's starlight arriving from out there that doesn't have a star anymore, it's been travelling for so long. That orphan starlight just gets absorbed by your atmosphere. But out in the Big, if you're looking at the right tiny window of space at exactly the right time, you might see new light arriving here from stars that only ignited fifty-thousand years ago. I watched a stellar nursery bloom one day a year or two before the first war. Just because I could.

Spacers put telescopes everywhere, robotic and manual, watching the whole spectrum. We have to. Most of the time we track asteroids, space-junk(yours and ours) and ordinary, prosaic celestial objects. But we keep an eye on each other too. Everybody knows everybody else's comings and goings because we have to. But sometimes we aim the telescopes at the nebulae and it looks like we're just doing research. And for the most part we are. But we've been doing this for over fifty years, and we learn the signs. Sometimes, the word goes around. 'Cassie out at Linden 2033 says that stellar creche she e-mailed us about is definitely going to bloom soon. Time and coordinates follow.' Pass it on.