Mariners in the Sky

I chose this point in the story to clear up and explain further some loose ends and to sow seeds for coming chapters. For instance, much of the last third of the book takes place on the high seas. Why, the high seas? Well, I’ll discuss that later. Throughout the book there are vignettes regarding rafting and rudimentary wind-sail development. Then, during this current portion of the book, while cooling their heels at Plateau Lake Outpost, the highest table of land on the entire route – some 16,000 feet above the altitude of The Grove - the humex became engaged in recreational boat building. Here, they continued to develop the wind-sail system, but also importantly, made new and impressive strides in creating sleek hulls made for speed, jettisoning the raft-body in favor of a newly conceived hull which was deeper and rounded so as to move through the water much more swiftly than the rafts ever could. Almost the entire population of Plateau Lake fell into one of three categories: (1) master boat maker, (2) speed sailor or (3) avid fan of the sail boat races. The more money that was bet on these races, the sleeker and more efficient these boats became. Many volumes were added to the marine engineering library during this period and would prove most valuable for the larger cargo ships that would be developed for future humex encounters with the great seas and oceans of their new planet.

During this part of the book, we are introduced to young Ahlu as a political anthropologist. He worked first as a student, then a politician and finally as a humex leader in his quest to figure a way to convince the Xran Earth doubters that their only future was outside Xra’s great cavern and then on to Earth. They were rigidly ensconced in this cavern as a religious cult and no amount of cajoling or appealing by the Xran surface dwellers could convince them that Earth was the only answer to their survival. They were important to the growing humex civilization on Earth because of their assimilation value once they reached Earth. The pure-humex population ratio to non pure-humex was rising, thanks to Amda, but much too slowly. Another large assimilation project would be necessary and the cavern dwellers figured prominently in the plan.

Here we learn the reason for the rigidity of the cavern dwellers resolve. The truth of a scientific miscalculation showed that the remaining three moons would continue in orbit around Xra instead of one-by-one plunging to Earth, protecting the descent vehicles from the worst of the heat from atmospheric entry. The plan had been formulated to put all Xrans safely on Earth in less than a year after the first successful descent. After many Xran generations of recalculating and identifying the initial error in computations, the estimate for the remaining three moons to move into Earth’s atmosphere was now a hundred years – some 30 Xran generations. That mistake was so grevious that many Xrans moved into the great cavern and suspended all belief in scientific pronouncements. 

This was the intellectual log-jam that Ahlu had to confront and break up. In later chapters we follow Ahlu’s elaborate and long term plan, then its execution and conclusion. The plan was long term relative to the Xran life span which had increased from a little over one year to almost three years, thanks to scientific breakthroughs.