(urth) Ansible Interview

[Stanisław Bocian]

Hello!

On 27 stycznia 2009, Matthew Groves wrote:

> I'm having trouble seeing how the excerpts quoted indicate that the
> shade is a spiral, and trouble envisioning how a spiral shade would
> ever provide night anywhere in the Whorl, since there would always be
> sunlight coming from the east or west.

> The last excerpt, for example ("...the first thin thread of the long
> sun cutting the skylands in two") seems to me to indicate that the
> shade moves from north to south over the width of the long sun, not
> east to west along its length.  Same with "the sun has already begun
> to narrow."  And when Silk is looking at the skylands and seeing
> valleys, it's late at night, and they're "as clear and bright as
> Silk...had ever seen them."  So it's full light, i.e. noon, in the
> skylands.  The light is coming straight down on the skylands, not
> obliquely from the east or west.  Yet Silk sees valleys filled with
> shadow.

> Can you point to anywhere in the text that refers to sunlight coming
> from the east or west but not from overhead?
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Here is a quote from "Calde of the Long Sun"
"Thank you," Silk repeated. "Thank you very much indeed, Doctor." He grasped the operator's shoulder. "You said we were getting a vector. Exactly what does that mean?"
"It's a message you get if you float too fast, My Caldé, either north or south. You're supposed to slow down. The monitor's supposed to make you if you don't, but that doesn't work any more on this floater."
"I see." Silk nodded, encouragingly he hoped. "Why are you supposed to slow down?"
Oosik put in, "Going too fast north makes you feel as if someone were shoveling sand on you. It is not good for you, and makes everyone in the floater slow to react. Going south too fast makes you giddy. It feels like swimming." 

As can be easily seen, the Whorl rotates from south to north. If you stand at the Mainframe - the East Pole - and look West, the Whorl - and you- turn towards your right hand, that is north.

And now look again at those quotes from the Exodus:

...
The airship had revolved, whether from the torque of its engines or the pressure of some passing breeze, until Mainframe stood upright as a wall, its black slabs of colossal mechanism jutting toward them and its Pylon an endless bridge that dwarfed the airship and vanished into night. 
Horn gestured. "See, Caldé? We don't have to sit on the edge, but we can go over there if you want to. Way, way down you can see the Mountains That Look At Mountains, I guess. It's kind of blue at first, then so bright you can't be sure." 
Nettle emerged from the hatch. "I still don't understand what Mainframe is, Caldé. Just all those things with the lights running over them? And why do they have roofs here if it can't rain? How would they get the rain to come down?" 
"This is Mainframe," Silk told her. "You are seeing it." 
"The big square things?"
"With what underlies its meadows and lawns; Mainframe is dispersed among them all. Imagine millions of millions of tiny circuits like those in a card—billions of billions, actually. The warmth of each is less than the twinkle of a firefly; but there are so many that if they were packed together their own heat would destroy them. They would become a second sun. As things are it is always summer here, thanks to those circuits." 
....

Nettle said, "Caldé, you never did answer my question about the roofs. And I wanted to know why the shade's so close here, and we can't see the sun." 
"The Pylon makes it," Horn declared, "or anyhow it shoots it into the sky. Isn't that right, Caldé? Then the sun burns it but instead of smoke it turns into air. If the Pylon didn't shoot out more, the shade would burn up and there'd be daylight all the time. Only Mainframe would fry, because it's so close. The sun starts at the top of the Pylon and goes all the way to the West Pole." 

And another quote from the "Nightside"

"So it is with the gods, Auk. They speak to us all the time, exactly as the sun shines all the time. When the dark cloud that we call the shade gets between us and the sun, we say it's night, or nightside, a term I never heard until I came to Sun Street."


Pylon is vertical, that is, it grows from the Mainframe towards the Long Sun. It produces the Shade so that it permanently shadows the Mainframe. Notice that Mainframe is flat, not concave, and it certainly doesn't go around the Long Sun - it is only on one side of it. If the shade was a fixed construction parallel to the Long Sun, it could not at the same time keep the mainframe in the permanent shade.

But it is not fixed - it is, in fact, a cloud.

The most easy way to keep the shade in place would be to have it not rotate. (If the shade rotated it would have to be fixed to the Sun or it would be driven into the inner surface of the Whorl by the centrifugal force). Since the Pylon, which produces it, rotates around the Long Sun, and the shade is created always above Mainframe, as the result you would get a coil moving along the Long Sun. 

Interestingly, the shade must be produced at uneven speed - shot out in pulses. Otherwise it would shade always the same places.



As regards the first quote from the Nightside,  you give only a part of it:

"It had been late already when they had left the city. Beyond the black streak of the shade, the skylands had been as clear and as bright as Silk (who normally retired early and rose at shadeup) had ever seen them; he stared at them as he rode, his thoughts drowned in wonder. Here were nameless mountains filling inviolate valleys to the rim with their vast, black shadows. Here were savannah and steppe, and a coastal plain ringing a lake that he judged must certainly be larger than Lake Limna—all these doming the gloomy sky of night while they themselves were bathed in sunlight."

The skylands are rather far; my suggestion is that their different parts are in different time-zones, so those that are near shadeup (morning) or shadelow (evening) would have shadows. Note that in one quote from the "Calde of the Long Sun" there are mentioned shadowy skylands visible during night. There are fairly low south.

"So briefly that she was not sure she had really seen it, something flashed from the monstrous dark flying bulk, a minute pinprick of light, as though someone in the shadowy skylands behind it had squeezed an igniter. "

> Can you point to anywhere in the text that refers to sunlight coming
> from the east or west but not from overhead?

Why, the names East and West themselves. Why does the Whorl have East and West poles - a bit unusual convention? Because the light starts in the East.

Also the names shadeup-morning and shadelow -evening. Shadeup means the shade rises up in the East showing the first thin line of the sun; shadelow means the shade cames down in the West obscuring the last light of the sun. But since the shade is a helix, not a round band moving along the sun, the long sun appears first as a thin line and then grows wider.


-- 
Best regards,
Stanislaus B.


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