Fiddler's Green

I, for one, was perfectly happy to get out of hyperspace early. I just don’t sleep well in hyperspace. Granted, I’m nocturnal, for the first part, and a good day’s sleep for me is something like 300 naps of three minutes duration each, for the second part. I always wondered what it would be like to find a warm spot and just spend about three days going in and out of consciousness, but I could never figure out a way to go without eating or marking my territory for that long. In hyperspace, I don’t know what it is, but I fall asleep and the next thing I know, it’s like nine hours have gone by. That almost puts me out of my mind! I talked with a tabby who lives with one of the drive engineers, Tybalt, who says the same thing happens to him. He thinks its because in normal space, we’re constantly brushing up against other creatures that live in the same space but in different dimensions and only cats can sense them. In hyperspace, there is no other life, and nothing to draw us out of consciousness. I thi nk Tybalt might have spent a little too much time curled up on the top of the fusion reactor (not that I blame him, that’s a damb good place for a nap, always warm, gentle hum like your mother’s purr.)

So, we dropped out of Hyperspace, laid in a course for the star system. It took Astronavigation about a day and a half to lay-in the course (we use Sapphirean days on the ship, because when they were deciding which planet’s standard clock would be used, Sapphire took two out of three falls), five days to ramp up to transition speed, and then a nine-day transit to the 4668 Sagitta system. We transitioned six light days out from the system, which was extremely good under good the circumstances.

Following standard procedures, they launched four probes to the system. 4668 Sagitta turned to be a trinary system, a red giant sun with a pair of white dwarf stars occupying the innermost and outermost orbits. There were six planets in all, all terrestrial bodies except for the white dwarves. The probes detected life on the fifth planet. It had a rich oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, and was covered in vegetation. "Green vegetation," the commander pointed out repeatedly. Although the earliest reading detected no signs of human life, he was elated, thinking he had made the right call.

The probes soon revealed that the fifth planet was a curiosity in itself. It was tilted on its rotational axis to 69°, which meant that the poles had warm tropical climates while the equator was belted by a thick ridge of ice. Its thick atmosphere continued highly stratified layers of cloud cover, which obscured the surface most of the time. Hyperspectral terrain mapping indicated the surface was pretty uniform; no mountains, no oceans, all low hills and shallow lakes, as though God had run out of landscaping ideas.

By the time Pegasus was making her final orbital corrections, we also knew that the planet contained vegetation on a massive scale. A typical specimen of plant-life (not really trees, so I was told, but massive fern-like structures) could stretch over 3,000 meters in length. They couldn’t find solid evidence of human inhabitation, though. They spotted some geometric shapes that could have been structures, or could have been rocks or fallen vegetation, or anything.

They decided to dispatch two teams to the surface. Miller would lead one team, Lear the other. One team had experience from the Meridian mission, the other had not seen real landing team duty yet. Lear took the first, Miller the second. They chose a landing zone on a relatively large plain, near some of the aforementioned shapes that may, or may not have been, evidence of human habitation.

The instrumentation on the probes was degraded by constant interference from the planet's strong magnetic field, which was active over a large area of the spectrum. That should have been their second clue.

The Aves Quentin and Victor launched on schedule, with Pegasus in orbit 57,000 kilometers above the surface. I found a nice warm spot in one of the citrus gardens where the light from the solar simulators was just perfect, and began the first in a pleasant series of about twohundred and forty naps.

--- Avember 22, 10154 A.S.