The integral trees
When leaving Earth, the crew of the spaceship Disciplinewas prepared for a routine assignment. Dispatched by the all-powerful State on a mission of interstellar exploration and colonization, Disciplinewas aided (and secretly spied upon) by Sharls Davis Kendy, an emotionless computer intelligence programmed to monitor the loyalty and obedience of the crew. But what they weren't prepared for was the smoke ring-an immense gaseous envelope that had formed around a neutron star directly in their path. The Smoke Ring was home to a variety of plant and animal life-forms evolved to thrive in conditions of continual free-fall. When Disciplineencountered it, something went wrong. The crew abandoned ship and fled to the unlikely space oasis. Five hundred years later, the descendants of the Disciplinecrew living on the Smoke Ring no longer remember their origins. Earth is more myth than memory, and no recollection of the State remains. But Kendy remembers. And just outside the Smoke Ring, Disciplinewaits patiently to make contact with its wayward children.
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- Or in the words of Larry Niven (The integral trees)
East takes you Out
Out takes you West
West takes you In
In takes you East
- As Larry Niven wrote in The Smoke Ring and The Integral Trees...
"West takes you In, In takes you East, East takes you Out, Out takes you West, North and South bring you back again."
- It's like a bit from The Smoke Ring (or Integral Trees) by Larry Niven, where a very weird planetary configuration made a human-habitable ecosystem out of an orbiting ring of gas. [0]
The locals refer to "East" as in the direction of orbit (prograde), "In" as towards the central star, and teach their children: "East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East, North and South take you back."
[0] https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/physics/gravity/physics-...
- This reminds me of Larry Niven's Integral Trees. Very cool!
- Forward is the author :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward#Fiction
note wrt to comment elsewhere in this thread that Forward was also involved with physical aspects of the Integral Trees/Smoke Ring world build.
- When I was 10 (1988) reading Larry Niven's "Integral Trees" I was disappointed that the story didn't end - as I had expected it to - with the Carther descendants eventually building trees to entirely surround the star.
