This is the only science fiction the Caribbean Compass, ‘The Caribbean’s monthly Look At Sea and Shore’ has published – and the only sci-fi I’ve sold
I have been cruising aboard Limbo, my Sagittarius SunStreaker 2.7 space yacht, for seventeen years now. Sagittarius builds good yachts.
I sailed Earth-Moon space first, followed by some years cruising the Asteroids. Then I took the plunge, a hard dive for Sun, the ultimate mark, a jibe around, and we were flung toward the outer reaches. I circumnavigated… well, not Pluto. Pluto is for masochists – besides, only the Flat Earth Society still regards Pluto as a planet. A swing around Neptune is circumnavigation. The voyage is “the experience of a lifetime“ in its genre. I am now a “grit“, so named for the space dust one passes through over long years and vast distances. Limbo and I have got the proverbial ten billion kilometers under our keel.
I’m back in the Out Islands now, the Asteroids, where my circumnavigation started and has now ended. We’re cruising the islands, rocks and shoals of the Belt, mostly visiting out-of-the-way places. The Asteroids have become the most popular cruising grounds in the Solar System, but are not yet crowed – the Belt is a big place. A planet is just one place. The Belt circles the Sun. Such crowd as there is gathers at Ceres (a.k.a. The Big Island) or at clusters like the Sirens, the Virgins, St. Indifference, Omygoda and the Geraldines, spotted around the Belt like islands around the Caribbean. The Geraldines were my first rockfall and I quite enjoyed them. But I also wandered off the beaten path using Street’s guide. Don Street VII had been charting the Belt for decades back then and is still at it.
But the Geraldines had changed during my circumnavigation – progress. Most of Street’s secret places were being discovered. So I boldly went where even Street had not. I’ve found some lovely spots, truly away from it all, places to call my own… until someone writes a Compass story about them.
I’m a writer, that’s what I decided on when I retired. Mostly science fiction, I have rejection slips to prove it. But the first story I actually sold, “How On Earth Did I Get Here?“, was published in the Out Islands Compass, “The Belt’s Continuous Look At Rock and Void“. “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,“ it began, “And danced the sky in sunlight-gilded spheres“, after John Gillespie Magee’s poem, High Flight. Magee flew Spitfires, small airplanes, during humanity’s first century of adventuring into three dimensions.
It all began for me nearly two decades ago during my mid-life crisis, which I celebrated early. I had been a mild-mannered account executive, not vice president or big bonus material. I didn’t like the job. But it paid well and I made some good investments. I quit, sold it all, and bought a yacht. There is sound advice not to do such things. It’s not for everyone. But it was for me.
When I began burning out, my attention turned from the Wall Street Journal to Cruising World. I began dreaming of nautical yachting, of sailing to the antipodes of the city, to the very frontiers of elbowroom, beyond all need for social distancing.
I started spending lunchtimes and evenings in Virtual Rum Shops, of which there are several kinds. There are still thousands of Caribbean rum shops, of course, but not virtual – you have to be there to be there. Virtual Rum Shops (VRS’s) can be visited from anywhere… well, anywhere the communication lag is mere seconds – say, within a million kilometers… or you can hang in the lagger lounge, where yachties visiting from the Outer System hang out, where lag time is hours. That’s often where yachties who seem to live in Rum Shops are found. For yachties, there are two Rum Shop choices, an NRS (Nautical Rum Shop) or SRS (Space Rum Shop). A rum shop of any kind offers the broadest possible panorama of its genre. They have all of the answers and most of the questions. You begin to learn what “tradeoffs“ are, and their alleged consequences. It is an excellent background on which to begin to sketch your dream. But bear in mind that truth is a moving target… and highly circumstantial – tradeoffs. Truth is just another opinion… well, not always.
During the year or two that I thought I might become a nautical yachtie, I read Cruising World and hung out in Nautical Rum Shops (NRS). An often topic was the motion aboard a boat on the water, a vast range of experience dependant on conditions and the vessel’s size and configuration. Rock and roll, I was assured, could drive you crazy. Countered by a couple of “salts“ who said, “You get used to it.“ An old salt who usually listens quietly added, “If you make passages, you must learn to love the rolling.“
Motion was also a topic when I switched to reading Cruising Worlds and going to Space Rum Shops (SRS). But space motions manifest differently. If your yacht is a “floater“, microgravity is the motion, weightlessness, always falling. Aboard a spinner, simulated gravity and coriolis effect are the culprits, more so in small spinners. There are two components: simulated gravity decreases closer to the axis of spin, thus your feet are heavier than your head. And coriolis effect confuses your equilibrium. You don’t notice if you are not in motion. But when you move, you feel “light headed“, as we say.
“You get used to it,“ an old grit said.
“Not me!“ a novice spacie complained.
“You must learn to love the feeling,“ another grit advised.
“Hypnotherapy works,“ someone offered.
“I’ll stick with microgravity,“ a die-hard floater muttered.
… Which brings us to some of the tradeoffs in selecting a yacht. First, floater or spinner? Floaters have serious advantages and spinners have notable disadvantages. But floater yachties live in microgravity, thus they must be jocks who exercise hard and like weightlessness. Spinners create the illusion of gravity. Humans and most of their activities prefer gravity. Most yachts are spinners, most yachties are spinners.
A floater, the vessel, is generally… uh, an oblong spheroid? Maximum volume-to-weight and a host of other advantages.
Spinners come in many configurations, monohull, catamaran, even trimaran (a distinct minority but touted by owners). Catamarans, “dumb-bells“, are essentially the skeleton of a monohull. Enclose one in a sphere and you have a monohull – at twice the mass but many times the volume. Racers go for low mass. Cruisers go for volume.
What kind of yachting did I intend to do? Just use it as a home in Earth-Moon space, where provisioning and repairs were close at hand? And where the communication lag was short enough to work from home? No, I’d decided to be a writer in my new life. Writers need solitude. Would I cruise the Asteroids? You bet! Make long distance passages? Who knows? Race? Sail single-handed? Well, yes, for now… who knows?
“What size vessel should I buy?“ I’d asked in the SRS.
“How much money do you have?“ was the first reply.
“In space,“ advised M’kumbi, whom I’d come to trust, “your yacht is the whole world. Small worlds make you crazy.“
“Overpopulated worlds do the same thing,“ someone observed.
“Don’t forget that air weights more than a kilo per cubic meter,“ cautioned Wong, who is a racer. 1.3 kilos per cubic mater for normal yachties, much less aboard Wong’s little catamaran, which carries about half pressure to save weight. Wong is a small woman, which also saves mass, and is said to shorten the handle of her toothbrush.
My employer warned me about my long lunches in the Rum Shops. Then they caught me sneaking a brief visit to an SRS during working hours. (I’d supposed their computers had better things to keep track of.) The end was nigh. So I started looking for my dream yacht.
How much money did I have? I could have bought a factory-new nautical yacht. Which was enough for a used space yacht that was too small for the current market.
When I bought her, Limbo was over thirty years old. In her day, the Sagittarius 2.7, at eight meters, had been the queen of the fleet, luxury accommodations for a crew or family of five, and a hydroponic farm to feed them. All on a single deck of twenty-five meters. But nowadays, even mom-and-pop retirement yachts are double-deckers. At first, double-deckers started at twelve meters, but those soon became known as “cripple-deckers“ – an upper deck has less “gravity“, thus needs much more headroom. The current queen of the fleet, the Sagittarius 21.4, is sixteen meters and contains eight times the volume of little old Limbo – you can see why Limbo was priced at only one point eight – the broker was happy to take one point six to get it off her dock.
As Jane handed me the keys, she said, “Congratulations, Captain! “
Voila! My first command!
Then I did what I have said, learning in Earth-Moon space, some cruising in the Asteroids, and a circumnavigation.
I offered my circumnavigation story to Cruising Worlds. No luck – they just gave us a Passage Note. Compass is a regional rag, so they didn’t want it either. I might freshen it up (though it’s pretty tight already) and see if Latitudes & Attitudes is interested. I’ll try Compass on a day-in-the-life piece or maybe an adventure in one of the special places I’ve found that I don’t want anybody else to know about. But what I really want to write is science fiction, adventures in the coming age of transporters, warp drive, artificial gravity and countless alien worlds and peoples, stuff about the future. And I think I’ve got a new twist on time travel. For the time, however, I’ll write contemporary stories for Compass.
I am trapped in the present – as are we all.
Caribbean Compass March 2021
© 2021