GLOSSARY, GAZETTEER,
AND SHIP NAMES




ArtInt:Artificial Intelligence. Any machine or device with sophisticated decision-making ability, and the capacity to interpret and execute complex orders. Generally speaking, ArtInts are deliberately built and programmed so as to be regarded as appliances and tools. Thus, while it is possible for them to speak and understand speech, they are usually designed to discourage any tendency to treat them as human.

Autofac:Automated Manufacturer. A near–von Neumann machine, not quite capable of replicating itself, but capable of making a wide variety of machines and objects, usually working from a set of specifications written for the express purpose of programming an autofac. Much of high-end technology has been shaped by what can and cannot be built in an autofac.

Base Glister:Oskar DeSilvo’s “official” name for his operations center on Glister. It is known to its visitors as “DeSilvo City.”

C.P.S.Belle Boyd IX:CP Intelligence Command Ship. Named for a female spy active in a near-ancient war in North America.

Big Run:“The Big Run” is the name given by the peasants and rural people of Solace to the panicky attempt to evacuate Solace some years back. A rumor that there would be no more ships leaving the planet led to a rush to get out. Many did get out—but then were stranded on orbit until it was possible to send them back—and they were willing to go back. Although only a relative handful of people made The Big Run, it demonstrated just how fast and violent panic could be. It affected everything from planetary policy to the peasant’s view of the government.

Burn-off suit:An isolation suit, for use in extremely hostile environments, worn completely over an inner pressure suit. At the end of a period of exposure, the wearer enters a burn-ball filled with pure oxygen. The burn-off suit is made to burn, incinerating any unwanted life-forms and—usually—leaving the inner suit and its wearer intact.

Canyon City:The diehard settlement inside Last Chance Canyon.

Chronologic Patrol:The military organization assigned to protect the timeshaft wormholes, and to defend against any deliberate or accidental attempt to abuse time travel so as to damage causality.

Circum Central Wormhole Farm:The timeshaft wormhole that once linked Glister to other worlds, usable for transit to Solace as well. The name was an optimistic misnomer. Circum Central was not central to anything, and there was only one timeshaft there, though the termwormhole farm usually refers to three or more wormholes clustered near each other at a main transfer point. Circum Central was supposed to be much more important than it turned out to be.

Collapse Wars:The name given to the conflicts during a final period of contraction of interstellar civilization. As available resources contract more rapidly than population, the survivors will battle all but continuously over the scraps that remain.

Comfort:A large gas giant planet in the outer reaches of the same planetary system that holds Solace. The satellite Greenhouse orbits Comfort, and SunSpot orbits Greenhouse.

Cruzeiro do Sul: Large auxiliary ship, or lighter, carried aboard theDom Pedro IV.

Dark Museum:Informal name for the Chronologic Patrol’s Technology Storage Facility, a vast underground complex on Mars where suppressed technology is stored for future reference. Badly damaged in an explosion centuries ago, it was assumed to be completely destroyed. The lowest level, however, is partly intact.

DeSilvo City:Informal and semi-ironic name given by theCruzeiro do Sul party to Oskar DeSilvo’s massive operations center on Glister. SeeBase Glister .

Diehard Habitat, diehard:A habitat, or person, that remains behind after the collapse of the planet or major habitat on which it depends. Diehards might remain for economic reasons (for example, to mine a valuable deposit) out of some emotional, spiritual, or religious motivation, or might simply have been left behind after the last evacuation, with no means of departure. Diehard habitats rarely survive more than a few generations past the collapse of the planet or main habitat.

Downtime:Referring to events in or travel toward the past as regards a timeshaft wormhole. For a hundred-year timeshaft connecting 5100A.D . and 5000A.D ., 5000A .D. would be the downtime end.

Founder’s Dome:A large habitat dome on Greenhouse. Quite near Research Dome, it was deliberately blown, i.e., exposed to fire, heat, toxic gases, and then explosive decompression and vacuum, in order to sterilize its badly contaminated interior. Repair plans are dependent on the outcome of the NovaSpot Ignition Project. It is home to the tomb of Oskar DeSilvo.

FTL:Faster Than Light.

Gleaner Party:A group sent out by a diehard community to search a particular area—the site of a crash, a newly discovered abandoned facility, the wreckage of a nearby collapsed diehard habitat—and collect whatever is there that might be of value.

Glister:A terraformed planet near Solace that has suffered a climatic collapse.

Grand Library:The ultimate storehouse of human knowledge, housed in a massive habitat orbiting Neptune. Two Permanent Physical Collections, or PPCs, serve as backups in the event of the Grand Library’s destruction. One PPC is in a different orbit of Neptune, while the other is buried in an undisclosed location on the farside of Earth’s Moon.

Greenhouse:A rocky satellite of the gas giant Comfort, used as the research station and breeding support center for Solace. It is illuminated by the failing SunSpot.

Intruders:Name given, more or less by default, to the thirty-two ships that attacked and went through the Circum Central Timeshaft Wormhole, transiting from downtime to uptime, past to future.

Last Chance Canyon:Site of Canyon City, diehard habitat about seven hundred kilometers south-southeast of DeSilvo City on Glister.

Lodestar:Local name of HS-G9-223, the star around which Solace orbits.

Lodestar VII:The official interplanetary spacecraft for the Planetary Executive of Solace.

Lowdown:A slang term that keys off the termupper, but it has come to mean more than a lower-class person. It refers to a peasant who has not—or cannot—escape the surface of the planet, or someone who has been so severely oppressed or manipulated that he or she is lower than a peasant.

Near-ancient, near-ancients:Referring to a period of remote human history, or the people of that period. The near-ancient period is considered to start roughly with the Enlightenment, and end roughly with the establishment of wormhole transit. Thus, from about 1740 to 3000A .D.

NovaSpot:A replacement for the gradually failing SunSpot.

Objective time:The time or duration as measured by an outside observer. Typically used in regard to timeshaft-wormhole travel. A timeshaft ship might travel for one hundred years of self-chronologic time, and experience significant relativistic time dilation, but arrive only a week or so after departure in objective time, thanks to passage through a timeshaft wormhole. SeeSelf-chronologic time andSubjective time .

Reiver:Any member of a reiver troop is a reiver, but the reiver is the head of the troop. By extension, the extralegal lord and master of the territory controlled by his troop.

Research Dome:A medium-sized habitat dome on Greenhouse, home to the Terraformation Research Center and other scientific and technical institutions.

Robot:An ArtInt provided with sensory inputs and manipulators that allow it to do mechanical work. Typically, robots will work under a master ArtInt, normally a sessile unit that is more sophisticated and intelligent. Much of a robot’s ArtInt capacity must be given over to physical coordination and mechanical control, so it is rarely cost-effective to build a robot with much onboard intellect.

Sabot Drone, Sabot Ship:An uncrewed vessel disguised as, for example, a harmless freighter, but concealing a powerful and destructive weapon, such as a bomb or a wormhole-destruct system. The term is a merged back-formation fromsabotage, to destroy enemy property covertly, andsabot round, a smaller-caliber round placed (and therefore concealed) inside an inert spacer in order to allow the smaller round of ammo to fit in a large weapon.

SCO Station:Solace Central Orbital Station—the largest and most important of the spaceside facilities in orbit of Solace. It houses thousands of people and a great deal of technical expertise in ship handling, ship repair, cargo services, and so on. A natural trading center, it is in effect the capital of the Solace System space habitats.

Self-chronologic time:The accumulated duration or age of an object, a person’s life, or an event, as it would be measured by a chronometer physically attached to an object or person, and ignoring the actual calendric time and date and relativistic time-dilation effects. Put another way, self-chron is a measure of how much an object or person has actually aged, regardless of time travel, cold sleep, or temporal confinement. A person who traveled, over the course of several trips, for five centuries in cryosleep, but traveled down five one-century wormholes, would have gone through five centuries of self-chron time but experienced virtually no subjective time, and might well end up in the same objective year from which he or she started. SeeObjective time andSubjective time .

Settled Space:The region of worlds, centered roughly on the Sun, that have been settled by humanity.

Slowboat:A ship that travels from one star system to another without transiting a timeshaft wormhole. A timeshaft wormhole ship might take ninety years of shipboard time to travel between stars, but by using the timeshafts, it might arrive after only a few weeks of objective time. A slowboat would take ninety years to make the trip, and arrive ninety years after departure. Except in very rare instances, they are entirely robotic. They might be loaded with some sort of freshly made luxury item that improve with age, or supplies that will be needed decades later by long-term construction or terraforming projects. Large criminal organizations use slowboats for certain forms of smuggling.

Slowtime:Slang for temporal confinement. Time moves very slowly for anyone inside a temporal confinement field.

Solace:A newly terraformed planet.

Solace City:Capital of Solace.

C.P.S.Standfast:The downtime Chronologic Patrol Ship attacked and destroyed during the Circum Central incident.

Subjective time:The apparent time or duration as experienced. A passenger aboard a starship might be in cryosleep for a century, but only be awake to experience a few weeks of subjective time. SeeObjective time andSelf-chronologic time .

SunSpot:A massive fusion generator, in effect a miniature sun, surrounded by an adjustable reflector, which orbits Greenhouse in the same period as Solace’s day, and thus provides simulated day and night to Greenhouse.

Symbiote-mold:The generally accepted term for the complex of commingled life-forms that have, somehow, formed into a symbiotic whole that has engulfed virtually all the habitable land surface of Mars. Molds, fungi, bacteria, and other forms of various species have merged into a meta-life-form that adapts to differing landscapes and climates by expressing whatever combination of member life-forms is best suited to the local environment. It is unclear exactly how the symbiote-mold came to be.

Technology Storage Facility:SeeDark Museum .

Terraformation Research Center:A think tank located in Research Dome on Greenhouse. At the time of the story, the TRC is mainly concerned with climate maintenance and ecosystem repair—subjects related to terraforming but on a much smaller scale. No one has really given serious thought to the question of terraforming a new, barren world since Solace itself was declared complete.

Timeshaft Wormhole:A wormhole linking past and future. A hundred-year timeshaft would allow one to travel back and forth exactly one hundred years—no more, no less. In the year 5000A.D ., the downtime end of a hundred-year timeshaft would link with the year 5100A.D . on the uptime side. A timeshaft experiences normal duration, such that both ends are moving normally through time, from past to future at the normal rate. In 5001A.D ., the same timeshaft would link with 5101A.D ., and so on. A hypothetical twenty-four-hour timeshaft would link 4:15P.M . Tuesday with 4:15P.M . Wednesday. Two days later, 12:05A.M . Thursday would be linked with 12:05A.M . Friday. Move from the downtime to the uptime end of a timeshaft, spend five minutes on the uptime side, and then return to the downtime side, and it will be five minutes later there as well.

C.P.S.Upholder:The Uptime Chronologic Patrol Ship, commanded by Captain Anton Koffield, that survived the attack of the Intruders during the Circum Central incident.

Upper:Solace peasant slang. A member of the upper classes, or, anyone who outranks the person using the term.

Uptime:Referring to events in or travel toward the future as regards a timeshaft wormhole. For a hundred-year timeshaft connecting 5100A.D . and 5000A.D ., 5100A.D . would be the uptime end.