CRADLE OF SATURN BY JAMES P. HOGAN
CRADLE OF SATURN BY JAMES P. HOGAN
Acknowledgments
The help and advice of the following people is
gratefully appreciated:
Doug Beason, USAF; Jim Dorris; Steve Fairchild; Andrew Fraknoi, Astronomical Society of the Pacific; Charles Ginenthal; Jackie Hogan; Les Johnson, NASA, Marshall Spaceflight Center, Huntsville, AL; Frank Luxem; Melinda Murdock; Jeffrey Slostad; Brent Warner, NASA, Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MD; Betsy Wilcox, USAF
THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE ORBITS
Keene sat before the communications screen and looked at the lean, hawkish features of Idorf, captain of the Kronian ship. “Captain,” he asked, “what’s going on? Do you know any more than I do? . . . What is this all about?”
“Nobody’s told you yet, eh?”
Keene showed his palms. “I’ve been trying to find out all day. It’s almost like you said. The whole of Washington’s acting as if a war is about to break out.”
Idorf regarded him fixedly for a few seconds; then, he seemed to make up his mind and nodded. His expression was grim. “Yesterday evening, I passed some news down to Gallian that had just come in from Saturn. Our observatories there have been able to make measurements that won’t be possible here for a few more days until Athena moves further out from the glare of the Sun.”
Captain Idorf paused for a moment, then continued. “It seems we can forget further speculating about whether the electrical environment can be altered, Dr. Keene. Athena has come out from perihelion on a changed orbit. It isn’t going to cross fifteen million miles ahead of Earth as was previously thought. It’s coming straight at us!”
By James P. Hogan
Inherit the Stars
The Genesis Machine
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede
The Two Faces of Tomorrow
Thrice Upon a Time
Giants’ Star
Voyage From Yesteryear
Code of the Lifemaker
The Proteus Operation
Endgame Enigma
The Mirror Maze
The Infinity Gambit
Entoverse
The Multiplex Man
Realtime Interrupt
Minds, Machines & Evolution
The Immortality Option
Paths to Otherwhere
Bug Park
Star Child
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution
Cradle of Saturn
PROLOGUE
Times had always been plentiful. Since the beginning of the age when their ancestors first walked in the world, the People had lived in harmony with the spirits and the elements. Their language had no words for war or want, famine or drought. The forests were vast, the plains fertile. Fair winds brought rain from warm oceans. All of life flourished in abundance.
* * *
No memory had been handed down of where the People came from.
Some taught that they were born of Neveya, who ruled the skies during the times of lesser light when the smaller but brighter Sun was absent, and at the end of mortal life they would return to her across the Golden Sea in which the world floated. They learned to farm the lands and tame animals; to study the ways of wood, and stone, and metals; to admire and create music, likenesses, and things of beauty. Their sages pondered over the mysteries of mind and the senses, life and motion, of number and the nature of things. Communities grew under social imperatives and marketplaces for ideas, and became centers of government and commerce.
* * *
Iryon stood near the mouth of a broad river, between arms of green hills rising to distant mountains. It was not the largest of cities, but its buildings had been shaped and ornamented with a care that made the whole as much an expression of art as the carved gates and gilded window traceries, or the marble reliefs surrounding the central square. At the summit of one of the five hills on which Iryon was built stood the Astral Temple, where priests of Neveya charted the cycles of the heavens.
Each day began with the world looking out across the immensity of the celestial Ocean that extended away to Neveya’s orb, dividing it equally like the plane of a blade halving a water-fruit so that only the upper hemisphere of Neveya was visible. Then the Ocean would rise, tilting and narrowing as it did so until it became an edge crossing past the world to reveal briefly all of Neveya’s countenance; from there, now above, it broadened again to expand its underside, at the same time obscuring Neveya’s upper part to reach its half-day low, after which it would fall and cross back again. This cycle repeated 5,623 times in the year that the stars took to turn through their constellations.