Re: A Fire Upon the Deep ending

Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Mon, 26 May 1997 12:11:39 -0400


Anton Sherwood wrote:
>
> quoth Hal Finney--
> : One problem with this is that the Zones are said to be shrinking at
> : 710 m/s. This is about 2000 ly per billion years. So if the Slow Zone
> : was pushed out beyond the Transcend, it would need to shrink more like
> : 10,000 ly to be back to where it is today, requiring 5 billion years.
> : But this is much longer than their history seems to go back. Possibly the
> : surge is more temporary, shrinking back at a much faster rate initially,
> : then slowing down as the Zones approach their "natural" states. In that
> : case the previous incarnation of the Blight might have happened only a
> : billion or two years ago.

In the history of "the Blabber", we see that AFUTD is in our own future
history, and even in AFUTD, we read that either Sjandra Kei, or the
planet its founding fathers came from was settled directly from Earth.
In "the Blabber", the attraction of the Blabber's world to those in the
Transcend was that it had been settled only a hundred years or more
previous by people directly from earth, only since they had been riding
a subluminous "slowboat" they had been traveling for some 35,000 years
in cold sleep at relativistic speeds, which is why they could
realistically pull off a reproduction of a 20th century Michigan port
city for the transcendant tourists.
>
> Didn't the Zones contract around Tines World just before the
> Countermeasure's final surge, so that Tines World was briefly
> in Transcend?

Yes, but that region was already at the bottom of the transcend, so that
just prior to reaching the Tines world, Ravna and her pursuers hit breif
pockets of slow zone, wherever the gravity gradient was too steep.
>
> One thing we do know (from "The Blabber") is that Ravna is destined
> to return to the Beyond, somehow.
>

We don't however, know when she does in relation to AFUTD. In the
Blabber, doesn't the ansible reply that the Tines interstellar empire
(that they supposedly would build AFTER AFUTD) was a thousand or more
years dead, and that the Revenge was blamed on them as an even worse
blight than The Blight.

-- 
TANSTAAFL!!!
			Michael Lorrey
------------------------------------------------------------
mailto:retroman@tpk.net		Inventor of the Lorrey Drive
Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com
Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com	http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/

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