The World
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The Neighbourhood
Every star in this book is a real star and every figure is a real measurement. The distances, the colours, the planets and the oddities are what astronomers have actually found. Only the people and what they built are invented.
Here is what your character already knows, the way a courier knows it: by which door it is and what it smells like when you come out.
The chart
Every star on this sheet sits at its true position, worked out from the real measured parallaxes, and every line on it is a door that actually exists in the campaign. Nothing on it is drawn by eye.
Read it as a graph, not a map. Distance in light years tells you how far a telescope says something is; it tells you nothing about how long it takes to get there. What matters is whether there is a line.
Note the two plates. Twenty-two of the twenty-eight systems are inside seventeen light years of Sol and crowd into the inner knot, which is why they get a second plate at three times the scale. The other six hang alone on a shell out at forty to forty-nine light years, on the longest and thinnest lines on the sheet, and there is nothing at all in between.
And count the lines meeting at Sirius. Nine. Sol holds seven.
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.
The frontier
The ships are still flying. Twenty years per light year, launched nine hundred and seventy-five years ago, which puts the arriving edge at a little under forty-nine light years out and moving one light year every twenty years.
Next year it reaches LHS 1140 — and that one matters, because LHS 1140 b is the best rocky planet in the habitable zone of anything anybody has ever found. Every door that has ever opened has opened onto rock, vacuum, cloud or somebody’s hull. That one will open onto weather.
Its ship has been flying for nine hundred and seventy-six years. Do the subtraction.