Satrap of Saturn

Lexington is a small city in the heart of the bluegrass. When I say small, I mean small by the megapolitan standards of the present titanic world: a bare quarter million souls or so. Compare classical Athens or Florence, forty or sixty thousand strong, that created arts, sciences, and culture to endure centuries. Our present era makes us larger in numbers, in mass, in reverberations of one active voice against the past, and smaller, more self-similar to our hordes of contemporaries than the past. My world was the library, my imagination, my drawings and creations, and my church. These spheres gave me expansion and constriction. To the library fell the exemplars of knowledge across some dozen spheres. (More, of course, were available, but I did not avail myself of much more beyond kids' books, atlases, sharks & lesser domains of archaeology, gemstones & lesser crystals, geography, geology, weapons, sea-ships, rocket ships, astronomy, classical monsters, and mythology.) Fr...

Grabbing the first notebook to hand, a pocket sized jobber I first used for Arabic vocabulary. [RANKS IN THE BLOODY NAVY] Livtenńt—commissioned officer who can command a small interstellar vessel such as a brig (for exploration, transport, reconnaissance, pickets, escorts to cargo or transports in groups of 3+) or a fast interplanetary vessel like a cutter (antismuggler, antipirate, fast transport). Less lucky livs command a watch or a portion of the crew of the great interstellar ships. Outside of spacecraft command, a livtenńt serves many roles in orbital docks and wellside ports: construction, comms, intelligence, batteries, and the impress service. Livs who command a brig or cutter, or who stand out in wellside service, are usually the officers promoted to Cmanŕ. Livs who possess technical competence without genius or ferocity may spend a great many decades as junior officers on the great interstellar ships before graduating to the command of a transport or exploration ves...

Orbs of the Terhume Diaspora 618. As many as one star in twenty of FGKM types have autochtonous life. An Earthlike, shirstleeve-habitable planet has never yet been found in the [REDACTED] hundred decamillennia of the Diaspora. Proteins, trace elements, mutations and diseases particular to the interactions of two or more biologies all require either gear unique to a narrow class of planets, or surgical or genetic modification for shirtsleeve colonying up. An alien biome requires centuries of domestication and typically results in the obliteration of 80% or more of native life. The modern Terhumene frowns upon such acts. Millennia and decamillennia are required for the typical unliving domestication targets, such as Venus, Mars, and Lune in the Zeroeth Age, and Sigma Draconica in the legend-haunted First Age. Domestication possibilities are dramatically sped up at the Fourth praxic plateaux, notably under the Machinic Secòndment, when slipstream mastery leads to deep gal...