The Celesti

The following is taken from Kambiz's Almanac of Conjunctions, Pocket Edition. Even in the pocket edition, they make space for the editor's views on the function and origins of the Celesti. Although their theries are not widely accepted, and are indeed ridiculed by many wizards, the editors show no hesitation in stating their views as fact.

A hundred million years ago, in a galaxy far away, there prospered a civilization of magic-using biological creatures called the distantae. The Celesti Sector has made no direct contact with the distantae. Their existence, so far as the citizens of the Celesti Sector are concerned, is a deduction rather than an observation. The distantae evolved on a weakly magical world, where they received no competition from spirits, but evolved the ability to use magic. They unified their galaxy by means of great magical machines called celesti. These machines were of two main types. A former-celesti is a mountain-sized machine that modifies planets so that they are habitable for the distantae. A joiner-celesti connects one such habitable world with another.

Former-celesti travel in packs of fifty or more, explore new solar systems, select planets, descend upon them, and bioform them over a period of ten or twenty thousand years. When former-celesti are done with a planet, its land masses are covered with forests and grasses, but no animal life. The forests support algae that generate carbon dioxide from plant debris, and the forests generate oxygen. The oxygen content of the atmosphere is stable at close to 20%, the carbon dioxide below 1%. Nitrogen makes up over 70%. The worlds upon which this transformation is brought about must be magical. No bioformed world has been encountered with a wind strength less than a tenth of a Yardley.

Former-celesti contain chemical, spirit, and conjured matter. They make extensive use of space bridges to syphon off harmful gasses from a planet, generate colossal forces, and transport heat. They make worlds hospitable for distantae colonists. When such colonists arrive, if they ever arrive, they clear the silent forests, plant their own trees, and spread their own wildlife. Within a few centuries, the world is as good as home. Terran colonists find the bioformed worlds to be equally welcoming.

A group of formers left the home galaxy of the distantae, and traveled to our galaxy, which was several million light years away. They arrived on the outskirts of the new galaxy and made their way inwards. The Celesti Sector lies along their path. There may be, somewhere, a conjunction that leads to the galaxy of the distantae, but is has not yet been discovered. There may be distantae living on planets in our galaxy, but they have not yet been found.

Olympia was made habitable by former-celesti somewhere between one hundred and five hundred thousand years ago.

On a planet with a strong maeon wind and suitable chemicals, former-celesti can mate and reproduce. The same is true for joiner-celesti. Joiners mate for life. Mated pairs effect their unions at regular intervals. Each descends upon a separate bioformed world, usually at night, and lands upon the surface. It melds with the terrain, securing itself, and swells with conjured matter to fifty meters across and twenty meters height. The couple cooperates to open a class four bridge, a conjunction, between them. The conjunction is usually three meters in diameter. It is accessible from both sides through tunnels in the bodies of the celesti. After a week or two, the conjunction closes and the celesti rise into the night sky. This procedure is repeated at exactly regular intervals. The interval is different for each pair, but is on average two Claran years.

The Celesti meet their mates, and commence their long-lasting union, out in deep space. They generate space bridges. The female takes the south halves of these bridges, and the male the north halves. They separate, and each select a separate bioformed planet. They know where to find such planets because they are linked by space bridges to the formers. The planets they select are typically within ten or twenty light years of one another. They prefer planets with stronger maeon winds. The Celesti Sector, which is the area of space owned by the gods, is a sphere of radius one hundred light years centered upon Olympia. To travel the breadth of the sphere, one must pass through at least a dozen conjunctions.

After they separate, mated celesti keep track of their accelerations during their search for a planet, and so minimize the time shift associated with their shared bridges. Despite the fact that their searches can last for decades, they manage to keep this time shift down to a matter of days. Once they have selected their planets, they remain within a few light-weeks of their solar system. The time-shift associated with their conjunction changes by only a few hours from one occurrence to the next. Furthermore, the conjunctions are constrained by the following empirical law.

Law of Forward Passage: Even if you travel at the speed of light from one conjunction to the next, it is impossible to pass through multiple conjunctions and arrive back where you started at at time earlier than you left.

This law gives us the following correlary.

Rule of Separation: The two halves of a conjunction may not reside on the same planet.

The proof of the above corellary is simple. If the two halves of a conjunction were to reside on the same planet, we could pass from one half to another over-land and over-sea in a negligible length of time. Since the conjunction is bound to have a time shift that is non-negligible, we would be able to enter one half, arrive at a time earlier than we left the planet, travel instantly across the planet to the half we entered, and be there before we entered. Therefore, no conjunction can link a planet to itself.

The female celesti is always producing an offspring, assisted via space bridges by her mate. A female with a new embryo measures 40 x 40 x 10 meters fully expanded upon a planet surface. A male measures 30 x 30 x 10 meters. A female about to give birth measures 60 x 60 x 20 meters. Gestation is about 1000 years. The child is born in orbit around the mother's planet, and remains in orbit, growing, for 500 years, then leaves in search of a mate. Meanwhile, the mother begins producing another child. Joiner-celesti operate in this way for up to five thousand years before one or other of them ceases to function properly. After that they drift around in space and advise their descendants. Both the joiner-celesti and former-celesti are intelligent and thoughtful. Several daemons have learned to communicate with celesti out in deep space, using a language of movement.

The space bridge made by a joiner-celesti is called a conjunction. A conjunction has a spirit matter sheath. Celesti are designed to obscure the manner in which they make the spirit sheath. Several layers of conjured matter enclose the sheath, and tampering with these layers causes the conjunction to close rapidly. If you harm a celesti, she does not return. She and her mate will find another pair of planets to use.

The amount of land on the surface of a habitable world of the Celesti Sector can vary by an order of magnitude from one world to the next. On average, however, it is two hundred million square kilometers. The number of conjunctions that frequent a world is not dependent upon its land area. It depends upon the strength of its maeon wind, and is approximately two hundred conjunctions per Yardley.

The number of conjunctions that have been discovered upon a world depends upon that world's population density, and the time for which it has been populated. For worlds discovered over two millennia, which includes the free worlds and most other worlds within fifty light years of Olympia, we have the following discovered fractions.

Clarus has maeon wind 1 Yardley, land area 200 million square kilometers, and population 50 million. By virtue of its maeon wind, our model predicts that it is visited by 200 celesti. Almost all of its people live on two continents whose combined area is 100 million square kilometers. These two continents, being half the land area of Clarus, would be visited by 100 celesti. The population density on the two continents is 50 people per 100 km², so 80 of these 100 conjunctions have been discovered. Of the remaining 100 conjunctions, 20 have been discovered on the sparsely populated continents. That makes a total of 100 conjunctions known to link Clarus to other worlds, or 50% of those that actually occur there. The number of conjunctions presently known on Clarus is 117, so we claim our model works well. Applying the model to other planets in the sector yields agreement to within 20%.

Of the conjunctions that occur upon a world, fifty percent will lead to worlds less than twenty light years away. Seventy-five percent will lead to worlds less than forty light years away, and so on. Each of the free worlds is frequented by approximately two hundred celesti. Of these, approximately half provide connection to other free world, one quarter provide connection to Olympia, and the remainder provide connection to open worlds.

Finding the optimum route for a traveler to take between two worlds is a difficult job. It requires a thorough knowledge of The Almanac, and a firm grasp of mathematics. It may take a traveler carrying The Almanac several days of study to determine the best route home, but a good router will find the same route in a matter of minutes or hours. A good router will often find you a way to travel across your own world by travelling a shorter distance across another world. You go to a nearby conjunction to a second world, pass through it, go a short distance to another conjunction, and pass through the second conjunction to return to your own world, near your destination. Three or four steps might be used to shorten your journey. Usually, the shortest journey between two nearby worlds uses a single conjunction, but sometimes it uses several conjunctions, and between distant worlds it may use as many as ten conjunctions.

The period of a conjunction is the time between one occurrence and the next. The distribution of periods among conjunctions, measured in Claran months, is very close to the distribution of the sum of four twelve-sided dice. The duration of a conjunction is the time for which it is open. This is close to one day per two months of the period.

One hundred conjunctions have been discovered linking the four free worlds. There are fifty conjunctions on each world, but each conjunction is shared by two worlds. To go between worlds, one can pass through one conjunction, a one-link, or two conjunctions, a two-link, and so on, up to rare occurances such as the eight-link between Olympia and Clarsu that occured in 2106. Some two-links occur over and over again, because the two conjunctions occur with the same period. Such links are called synchronous. The normal links, which occur by chance, are asynchronous.

If one assumes that the populated area of each free world is 10,000 km by 10,000 km, that there are 100 randomly distributed conjunction linking the four worlds, with randomly distributed periods and phases, and that one's overland speed is 1000 km per month, then our calculations suggest that the shortest one-link, two-link, and three-link journey times are distributed as in the table. We use the table to set our expectations when planning travel between the free worlds, even though the simulation does not account for the fact that many conjunctions will lead to unpopulated continents upon other worlds.

The time shift of a conjunction is measured with respect to Olympian Standard Time. Each world has a master bridge to Olympia, through which one can consult Olympia's master-chronometer. The time on the Olympian master-chronometer, as viewed through the world's master-bridge, is the Olympian Standard Time for that world. The time-shift of a conjunction is defined as the Olympian Standard Time on the world one reaches after passing through it minus the Olympian Standard Time on the world one left behind. The time shift of the master bridge is, by definition, zero.

All space bridges are magnetic monopoles, either north or south. Conjunctions, being enormous space bridges, should produce a powerful magnetic field. They do produce a field, but not nearly as strong as that which would be produced by single bridge of the same size. From this we conclude that conjunctions are a variety of doublet. They have two bridges pressed against one another, one a south pole and the other a north pole. If this were not the case, it would be impractical to carry anything made of iron through the conjunction because the force attracting it to the center would be thousands of times greater than its weight. Instead, the magnetic field in the immediate vicinity of a conjunction is barely noticeable except with a compass needle, which will point towards one entrance when you stand in front of it, and away from the other. Because of the doublet arrangement, the field does not fall off as quickly as it would with a single bridge, so that the magnetic field generated by a conjunction can dominate the magnetic field of a planet at a distance of tens or even hundreds of kilometers. Some conjunctions, however, have hardly any magnetic field. For each conjunction in The Almanac, we give an estimate of the range at which its field dominates that of the local planet's. Most planets have a magnetic field. Those that don't are places where the sun's light appears to be dangerous, and you cannot linger there for long.