Orb Ertia

Kind: Planet — empire colony, still being settled. “Millions of colonists are yet to arrive.” Location: Orbits a Thorne–Żytkow (TZ Star) “known across the empire for its miraculous flashes and fits, given its neutron star core.” Some four hundred years of longsleep-era voidship travel from Aerth by the standards of the story’s era. Controlled by: Galactic Human Empire.

Summary

A remote, partly-populated frontier world sold to new arrivals “as a planet unblemished by modern galactic materialism” — which is half true. It is indeed empty of the empire’s usual grime, but it is also overrun with psychologists and psychodynamists, “each of them sporting some clever theory about the decline of the empire, or the motivations of the Marquis, or the spirit of history, or the sexual proclivities of the couple next door.” The profession seems to dominate the colonist profile.

Ertia sits in a TZ-star system, and the star is functionally infrastructure: passing hollowships routinely use the TZ for slingshot acceleration, which is why — per the revelations of Ch. 05 — A Dictionary — the empire deliberately stations hollowships in the system hoping for another TZ-exit artifact event. The Vasily Incident is the one that succeeds, at the cost of the Vasily and its 120,000 longsleepers.

Life on the ground is quiet. The chapter’s unnamed narrator lives in a valley cottage a mile outside a small town, works at a small southern-continent hospital whose most pressing daily case is “a broken leg or a botched suicide attempt,” and watches strange birds and insects (Aerth-stock biodesigned for Ertia) bed down in the evenings. The planet’s capital is Shienae, a city on another continent that houses the main hospital the Vasily survivors are transported to after the incident.

Appearances

• Ch. 05 — A Dictionary: Sole setting for the chapter’s first half.

Related

• TZ Star — Ertia’s sun, and the reason the empire experiments in-system.
• Vasily, Vasily Incident, Hollowship
• The Ertian Surgeon, Tabitha Dimitrova

Open questions

• Why psychologists and psychodynamists? Is the colony’s seeding population deliberately selected?
• Are there more TZ-exit events on Ertia after the Vasily? The empire was willing to park 120,000 lives in the system for one; presumably they keep trying.