The Neighbourhood

A First-Through’s Guide

No system can be governed from anywhere else. A message takes as long as a child takes to carry it, and no fleet can be landed, so for nine hundred years every star has run itself however it ended up running itself.

They have not converged. Here is what you walk into.

Sirius — the Nine

8.6 ly. Nine doors. Two stars and no worlds at all, so every stone of it was carried here.

A cylinder two kilometres long turning in a blue-white glare nothing quite filters, with the anchor hall at its waist and the hottest white dwarf in the neighbourhood for a second sun.

Run by: nobody, properly. Nine door-holders sit as a harbour council and have been arguing since before anyone’s grandparents. Nothing is decided and everything works, which outsiders find intolerable and residents consider the point.

They want: your manifest, your toll, and the news. The Nine runs on knowing things first.

Every human culture that exists is in one room here at any given hour, and the room smells of eight different stars’ worth of air.

Sol — the Garden

0 ly. Seven doors, in one hall on Luna, with a window.

Run by: nations. Actual nations, the old ones, still arguing after six thousand years, plus a Luna port authority nobody elected that everybody obeys.

They want: to be taken seriously, and they are not.

The only world with an outdoors. Weather happens by itself. The food comes up out of the ground without a lamp over it, and none of it is worth anything to anyone more than a toll away.

Alpha Centauri

4.4 ly. The first door, 887 years old. Habitats around the orange sun.

Nine centuries of building outward, and the oldest sections are thick and over-engineered with redundancies nobody specifies any more, put up by people who did not know whether help existed.

Run by: houses. Hereditary, courteous, and a court of precedence so refined that cases are inherited. They have the oldest archives in human space and will tell you so.

They want: acknowledgement that they were first.

Barnard’s Star — the Works

6.0 ly. Four scorched pebbles, no habitable zone, and the best industry in the Causeway.

Being useless to live on makes a system perfect for everything nobody wants nearby. Smelting, hull plate, reaction mass, batons, the dirty end of anchor parts. Three shifts, forever. The habitat air tastes of it and residents cannot smell it.

Run by: the Works — a syndicate of foundries where your vote is your shift. Brutally practical, genuinely fair, no patience whatever.

They want: parts orders, and for you to stand out of the way.

61 Cygni — the Yards

11.4 ly. The first star whose distance anyone ever measured, and they mention it constantly.

A sprawl of stations, hulks and machinery broken on purpose, strung around the smaller sun. Everybody here is either under twenty or an instructor.

Run by: the Threshold, which makes it the only system in human space governed by a service that holds no doors anywhere.

They want: children who can take the crossing. It is the one commodity nothing else can supply.

Gliese 887 — the Coldwater Holding

10.7 ly. A quiet red dwarf and a world you can stand on under an open sky.

Four thousand people. One street with a roof over the middle. Grain under long low covers in permanent red afternoon, and meltwater running in a cut stone channel down one side of the road.

Run by: five elected councillors and a board on the street wall where every order placed and not delivered is posted in public.

They want: their coupling assembly, which has been refused twice.

Gliese 65 — the Flare Twins

8.9 ly. Two red dwarfs that brighten by a huge factor in under a minute, several times a day.

A refinery stack with its living deck buried in the middle where the mass is thickest. The lighting browns out when the field gets busy and the crew read it like a clock.

Run by: a company, and the company is three doors away and has never been here.

They want: relief, and nobody is sending any.

Tau Ceti — the Shelters

11.9 ly. A sun very like our own, wrapped in a debris disk ten times ours.

Something comes down somewhere on Tau Ceti every few weeks. Seven hundred years of that has produced the most beautiful architecture in human space, all of it underground: vaulted, layered, lit from shafts, built by people for whom a roof is a theological matter.

Run by: the civil defence corps, which stopped being an emergency service about four centuries ago and never handed anything back.

They want: nothing from you, politely, and a bunk is free to anyone caught outside.

YZ Ceti — the Singing

12.1 ly, and one and a half light years from Tau Ceti — the shortest door in the Causeway.

The star and its innermost planet throw radio at each other, and the aurorae that come off it can be heard on any receiver on the surface. Everyone here grew up with the sky making noise. Their music has it in it. Outsiders find the silence afterwards unbearable.

Run by: lot. Names drawn annually, service compulsory, refusal unthinkable.

They want: to be left alone with Tau Ceti, with whom they are effectively one two-city state joined by a ninety-second walk.

Epsilon Eridani — the Belts

10.5 ly. Young, loud, and full of rocks: two asteroid belts and a Kuiper analogue around a Jupiter-mass planet.

Claims, prospectors, and more wealth loose in it than anywhere else inside twenty light years. Also more funerals.

Run by: claim law and arbitration, enforced by whoever is nearest, badly.

They want: your silence about what you saw.

Luhman 16 — the Lantern

6.5 ly. Two brown dwarfs and no star at all.

Permanent night, and in that night the largest weather any human being has ever seen: banded storms the width of worlds, lit from inside by lightning. People live in the cloud decks in aerostats, moving with the bands.

Run by: captains, under a maritime code older than most planetary governments, because everything here floats or falls.

They want: nothing you have. They come up for parts twice a year.

TRAPPIST-1 — the Seven

40.7 ly. The frontier jewel. Seven tidally locked worlds, three of them temperate, and every one of them with a ring of permanent dusk where the wind never stops.

Terminator settlements strung along the twilight, under-supplied, a long way from the anchor, farming and digging in an eternal evening.

Run by: seven different arrangements that agree on nothing, plus whichever two the Tally has brought under toll.

They want: anything. They are the poorest-supplied people in human space and the proudest about it.

Gliese 876 — the Clockwork

15.2 ly. Four planets locked in a resonance so exact it has kept time for billions of years.

Run by: an order of timekeepers that began as astronomers and did not stay that way. They hold the Causeway’s standard clock, which every system sets by, which is a quieter kind of power than tolls.

They want: your observations, written down, properly.

van Maanen’s Star — the Office

14.1 ly. The nearest lone white dwarf, visibly swallowing the wreckage of its own planets, throwing hard little shadows on everything.

Four rooms bolted to a rock. Two staff. No colony, no industry, no traffic.

Run by: Sep Anwar and Meriel Koll, in the sense that there is nobody else.

They want: a visitor. It has been a while.

Gliese 65, the Flare Twins

8.9 light years. The door is seven hundred and ninety-eight years old.

Two red dwarfs bound to each other on a twenty-six and a half year orbit, eccentric enough that the distance between them changes by a factor of four over a cycle. They are called BL Ceti and UV Ceti, and UV Ceti is the star every other flare star gets compared to — the textbook case, the one the whole class of behaviour is named after. It can brighten by a large factor in under a minute, without warning, several times a day.

What that means on the ground is simple. The sky here does not kill you gradually. It kills you on a schedule nobody can read far in advance, and the only defence is mass between you and it.

The thing nobody thought about for seven hundred years

Two stars swinging round each other on a twenty-six-year ellipse do not just make a dangerous sky. They make a moving floor.

A mouth is pinned to a gravitational potential and sits wherever that value currently is. See Straying. At a single star, or a wide pair, that surface creeps a few metres in a century and a housing gets rebuilt around it twice a millennium and nobody writes anything down.

Gliese 65 is the only door in the Causeway at a close eccentric binary. It is the only place in human space where the whole potential landscape reshapes on a human timescale — thirty complete cycles since the door opened, and a human career spans one, which is why nobody has ever seen it twice.

Everybody has always known this sky kills you. Nobody ever thought about the floor.

And the two things are the same thing. The twins come to closest approach once every twenty-six and a half years, and at closest approach the potential reshapes hardest and the flare activity spikes, because that is what two flare stars do to each other when they get close.

The worst weather and the unstable floor arrive together, on the same clock, thirty times since the door opened — and not one document in nine centuries puts them in the same sentence, because no two consecutive directors of anything have ever both been in post for one.

What people built here: a refinery, and a shelter under it.

The metals in this system are good and the labour is cheap, because nobody with options takes the posting. The refinery is a squat industrial stack with its living deck buried in the middle, and the hardened shelter — the only part of the installation rated for a hard flare — is on the anchor side of the living quarters.

That was a cost decision made long ago by somebody who has never been here. It means that in a bad hour the crew must cross their own corridor to survive, and whoever holds that corridor holds their lives.

Flare warning runs on the honest old method: you watch the star, and when the count starts climbing you have minutes, not hours. The deck lighting browns out when the field gets busy. The crew have learned to read the lights.