The Ballad of Shadow - Part II

“Yeah, I’ve had to make a new home,” Mal began. “You ever heard of a planet called Shadow?”

“Yes,” River said, and almost managed to hide her impatience.

Of course she’d heard of it. She’d had more schooling than Mal himself had. And she was a genius who remembered everything…

He plowed on. “Well, to refresh your memory, the planet’s name had been something else, originally. Prospero, I think. Some salesman shortened the name to Prosper when they opened it up for settlement. But most folk called it Shadow.”

“Because of the parasol.” River made it a statement, moving the story along.

But Mal was trying to relax into storytelling, here, and this wasn’t a story he’d told to – well – anyone. So he’d do it at his pace. “Yes, on account of the parasol.”

“The parasol was like a big … parasol. A big, round sunshade, shielding the planet. Shadow was closer to the sun than the in-most of the Core planets, and all that sunlight fair cooked that world to the bone before the parasol was put into place. The parasol screened the sunlight, though, filtered it so that Shadow got enough sunlight for the planet to be livable, but no more than that. How it hung there in the black while Shadow kept spinning beneath it is kind complicated…”

River broke in, explaining. “The parasol rested at the L1 Lagrange point between the planet and the sun while mirrors in a polar orbit were used to counter-balance – “

“ – It was complicated,” Mal said with some finality. “It was complicated but it worked. Let’s not get too much into the details of how, okay?” The details make my head hurt, he didn’t say.

“So folk called it Shadow?” she prompted.

“Yeah, the name Prosper didn’t take. Turned out most prospective settlers were skittish about livin’ their days underneath a disk that was bigger in diameter than the planet they was standin’ on. They couldn’t picture the sky looking normal. They had an image in their heads of what living in constant shade must be like, so the called the planet Shadow instead and looked for other worlds to live on. Worlds that didn’t have so much between them and the sun except a lot of black. Eventually everybody called it Shadow, even those of us that called it home.”

Mal took a breath and sighed it out. Then he continued. “Shadow was my home. It’s where I was born and where I was raised. The sky on shadow never looked odd to me. It was the only sky I knew for a long time.”

“Of course now that I’m a crusty old man I’ve seen the sky from just about every world spinning at one time or another, and I can tell you that the sky on Shadow was made to look as much like the sky anywhere else as it could be. There was only one thing about the sky on Shadow that someone from another world might think was odd. Two things, I suppose, if you consider sunrise and sunset as two different things. But they’re really the same thing. They’re both that moment when you’re standing on the line between Day and Night.”

“The Terminator.”

“What?”

“That’s what the line between day and night is called. It’s the Terminator.”

Mal paused his story for a moment and thought to himself: Well, that turned out to be kind of an appropriate name for the difference between Night and Day on Shadow…

Mal decided not to think any more about that just yet, though. He also decided he didn’t care much for all the interruptions, especially when the interruptions were so damn educational.

River folded her bare feet up under herself in the co-pilot’s seat, then planted her elbows on her knees, put her hands together, rested her chin on her hands and stared at him, a caricature of attentiveness, but still River.

Mal continued: “Normally the terminator – that line between night and day – is something you can see better from orbit than you can when you’re standing on the planet in question. Well, on Shadow it was kind of the other way around. From orbit it was kind of hard to see that line, on account of how the parasol was so big it shaded the whole planet and its atmo and everything. You could kind of see it – some sunlight was still coming through, after all – but if you were in orbit where you could see the terminator then you were probably out from under the parasol, and probably where you could see a sliver of the sun-side of the parasol, just at the edge. And that wrecked havoc with your vision in the black, it was so bright, even through polarized windows and faceplates and whatnot. Made it really hard to see the terminator-line on Shadow below.

“Meanwhile, if you were standing on Shadow at sunset or sunrise then you could see a line in the sky. The line between the blue and the black. They'd done a pretty good job of it so it faded from the blue of the parasol to the slightly darker blue of the oncoming night, but -"

“The parasol was blue?”

“Well, it looked blue, from beneath. What you’ve gotta understand, Little River, is that during most of the day the parasol was the sky. The sun is big, and it's really big when you're on a world that's too damn close to it. So they built the parasol to make the sun look blue in order to make it feel normalish to people on the ground. The parasol actually looked gold on the sun-side, but somehow the gold reflected away a lot of the yellow in the incoming light, letting through just the blue. Really, the whole noonday-sky was a big blue sun.”

River was quiet. Mal guessed that she was running the math on the filtration of sunlight, but it was hard to say, for certain. She looked like she'd just put something together in her head, though.

He decided to forge ahead while she was quiet. “There was still something that looked like a sun in the middle of the parasol – in the middle of the sky – and that’s something I’ll get to in a moment. What I was trying to work around to, though, was that you could see the edge of the parasol, sort of. Especially if you knew where any of the core planets should be in the sky then in the evening you could see them pop out of nowhere when they came out from behind the parasol. And you could see them wink out in the morning, too, all sudden-like.”

She was eerily quiet, still. He probably wasn’t describing it well. You had to be there. But he had been there, standing on the surface of Shadow after a long day of chores and looking forward, for once, to an evening of schooling from Ma, because things had gotten interesting. He finally understood that he was standing on a rock floating in space, and the brigthest lights in the sky were other places with other people on them.

He was gonna go out there someday. Ma had lived on one of those before she came here, she said. The `verse was so big, but it wasn’t so big you couldn’t begin to understand it.

And suddenly there was Sihnon in the sky. As big and bright as ever. Just popping out of the edge of the sky, just when Mama said it would.

“You thought it was magic.”

River’s comment brought Mal back to himself. “Well, let’s just say that it was pretty neat.” Where had he been going with this? Oh yeah. “So that was the thing that was a bit different about the sky: Stars and planets appearing and disappearing when they passed a terminator you could see in the sky. One side of the sky had stars. The other didn’t. Like there was a line in the sky – because there was. No other world spinning has that sky.”

Actually, no world spinning has that sky anymore. He glanced up at River when he thought this to himself, but she asked him no questions. He’d get to that part of the story when it was time and not before.

“Still, they tried to make it look like regular sky. That was the whole point of the parasol. To make things look as they should if you were standing on a normal planet. So they turned the sun into blue sky, and then they created a little tiny sun on the planet-side of the parasol. Really it was just a crystal ball lit up with a tiny sliver of less-filtered sunlight that came in through a tube in the center of the parasol. But it served to make everything a mite less blue down below, which people did seem to appreciate.”

“I guess it was the only place I’ve really seen the sky. I mean, seen it and known what it was I was looking at. Every other world in the `verse the sky is just…air. Air with light moving through it, I guess. But on Shadow you could really see the sky and know that it was something up there that you could touch. It’s like the sky really was the way they told you it was when you were a kid, when they weren’t ready to explain things like orbital mechanics to you. The sky was all of a piece and it was held up by some god or giant, you remember?”

River just looked at him with her eyebrows scrunched up like he was the crazy one. Her parents had probably skipped the stories and gone straight to the orbital mechanics. Anyway…

“Well, that was my home. Shadow was my home and it was the only home I knew, growing up. And then …” He paused. This is what he had been going to talk about. But it wasn’t a story he was ever in a hurry to tell. Yet here he was, about to tell it. Oh well.

“Then one day I had to go make myself a new one.”