Notes & Queries on Other Places
The Lighterman-Nebrasov Portal and other things
If you're the type of person who has ruined their eyesight trying to read the Timeline leading up to the development of interstellar travel, which feature in jjhudsson’s philosophical parable, Other Places Which Also Are the World’s End, then you'll probably want to know about the Lighterman-Nebrasov portal. Either that, or you are Austen, our stalwart reader from Port Meldrum, who writes to ask the same thing.
It’s worth stating at the outset that if you have not got around to reading Other Places yet, this blog is unlikely to make much sense. But then again, we’ve read both and still don’t really understand it.
Quite why anyone would want to know about the Lighterman-Nebrasov Portal specifically is entirely beyond us. It certainly seemed to be beyond jjhudsson, whose response to our request for information upon this point is not something we can reproduce here. Evidently, however, the Storyteller relented, and a few days later the following outline was delivered to The Tricky Genre Press, written on the back of a Final Notice. It was also wanting a stamp, so if you are reading this, Austen from Port Meldrum, you owe Nigel forty-five English pence.
What follows is a little disjointed. The author seems to have been following a line of thought unique to his inner dialogue. If you can tune into that, we imagine it makes some kind of sense; otherwise, we have done our best to add a few clarifications and some navigation to the raw text in italics to guide the reader. However, the text does refer to concepts and words that appear in the novel. Rather than take up blog-space restating them here, we direct the enquiring reader to the Glossary, the relevant parts of which we have extracted and published as a separate blog; words in bold refer.
The Lighterman Portal (2075)
Lighterman ported to Nea in the third Wave (2075). His deslizaration site was close to Dome Three. Initially, Lighterman appears to have adhered to porting protocol and stayed close to, but crucially not actually in, his cocoon. However, while he was waiting for a PrimePort Recovery Team to pick him up, Lighterman observed the area around his cocoon behaving erratically; it was flickering in and out of existence. Unquestionably, Lighterman understood the significance of this phenomenon. It meant his portal had not fully closed [ed. the irony of Lighterman’s portal being one that remained open is prodigious; for it was just this theory which he had argued against so forcefully back on Old Earth, and which was the reason he was marginalised by UNWGIT]. Fearful of being ‘re-ported’ by the wandering aperture of his own portal, Lighterman unwisely broke protocol and left the area. He was extremely fortunate to have been detected by a recovery team a short time later for, as the novel makes clear, to move on Nea is to take your life in your hands. Nevertheless, he was not thanked by the PrimePorts, who suspected they had lost an opportunity to acquire a second stable portal. For these reasons, and others, Lighterman was incarcerated in the Monastery, where he would later encounter the hero of our story, and also lose his finger, both of which are recounted in the book.
A Note About Portals
(Ed. Here it may be wise to remind ourselves of the principal eccentricities of open portals. Not that we doubt the reader has grasped such complexities from the text, but because the theory of porting is complex and liable to confuse even its author.).
Most portals close in the same instant that they are created. However, a small number become ‘rogue’ - that is, they fail to close properly after transit, their apertures flicking in and out of existence. The reasons why some portals do not close are poorly understood. However, during open periods, anything on the deslizaration floor of the Portal is sucked into the aperture, and there it will alternate between existence on Nea and existence on Earth. Cue slammers [ed. like September Deal] whose job it is to seal (or slam) rogue portals. Very rarely - in fact, there are only two in existence - a rogue portal becomes ‘Open and Stable’. In such cases, not only does the portal remain open, but it is also tethered to its space-time insertion points. It is said, therefore, to be stable: i.e. within tolerable limits it connects to and from the same points on Nea and Earth, respectively. These unique phenomena may be the only means to effect safe return porting to Earth. You can imagine, then, PrimePorts’ interest in them and their frustration at Lighterman’s folly.
There is one further point about porting to bear in mind. Because mass is an important factor in Transvector Rigas Spheres, any unexpected change in mass will cause the deslizaration point to ‘wander’ at both ends [Ed. additional weight - in the form of contraband - was the main reason for the catastrophic losses of the 3rd outwave].
Now back to Lighterman. Without Lighterman in it, his cocoon had less than the expected mass. Therefore, even though it was said to be stable, and its space-time insertion points tethered, on Earth the cocoon did not return to its exact portal engine site [Ed. which we impart was Stagg Field, University Hyde Park Campus in Chicago]. Instead, it briefly appeared almost a thousand miles away south-west of Boston, [Ed. in Ashland State Park, MA, which is where Tolly will find it after the Collapse]. On Nea, Lighterman’s cocoon wandered several kilo palagats to Roughton Heath. It is this locational uncertainty that causes the PrimePorts to lose track of Lighterman’s portal and why they become so suspicious of Tringley and his band of Returners when they settle on the Heath.
The Nebrasov Return Portal
So why is it called the Lighterman-Nebravsov Portal? To answer this question we have to turn the Nea clock back a little. Readers of Other Places Which Also Are the World’s End will recall that Nebrasov was a Russian portalnaut who outported in the Second Wave, in May 2071. He was one of 15 portalnauts of whom six survived. Of course, we know almost nothing of Nebrasov after he ported, other than that he was in Dome Three at the time of the disaster there. He survived the cataclysm and is last seen leading a party of survivors into the Cloud Well, having waited in vain for help from Heligoland. His party was presumed lost. However, this is not the case. We now know that under Nebrasov they made their way to Roughton Heath, no doubt hoping to be spotted above the vapours of the Cloud Well. There, they survived for several weeks before eventually succumbing to light-madness and starvation. Only Nebrasov escaped.
It was during these fateful weeks of struggle that Nebrasov’s party must have discovered the cave system beneath the surface of the heath, and set-up camp there to avoid solar toxicity. While exploring the cave system he, or one of the Dome Three survivors, found Lighterman’s cocoon [Ed. where it had ‘wandered’ following Lighterman’s port]. It seems unlikely that anyone would have realised the portal was open and stable, but how it came about that Nebrasov transvected back to Earth can only be guessed. Perhaps the most plausible account is that Nebrasov was harvesting the cocoon for parts or supplies [Ed. The latter would explain the can of baked beans] when the portal leapt back to life. What happened afterwards is revealed in Chapter Twelve of Other Places. What we can say with some degree of authority is that the portal used by Nebrasov was the same one used by Lighterman - hence the name, the Lighterman-Nebrasov Portal.
The Sao Paulo Incident
Without wishing to burden any reader who has inexplicably not yet read the full story of Other Places, there are one of two nuggets of enlightenment that fall out of this short recapitulation.
First, is the observation that Lighterman’s cocoon and the ‘machine’ much worked upon by Tolly on the plateau in Part 4 of Other Places are one and the same. Back on Earth, Lighterman’s cocoon was lost in Ashley State Park until after the detonations of the Collapse (no mention is made of it before then). How Tolly comes across it is not known, but it is he who removes the outer casing and some of the internal systems into the ravine where they become his ‘machine.’ [Ed. does he, in fact, know what it is?]. Thus, bizarrely, Tolly and Nebrasov are harvesting the same cocoon, one on Earth and one on Nea. This must have been perplexing to each of them, and certainly would have created fluctuations in the cocoon’s Nea- and Earth- locations. It was the inclusion of Nebrasov’s mass, whether by accident or with intent, that led to the so-called Sao Paulo Incident of 2076 mentioned in Chapter Ten. We can say no more of it here.
How does Tringley learn that Lighterman’s portal is the second return portal?
Another question concerns how it was that Tringley knew that Lighterman’s portal was the second stable portal he’d been searching for? The answer to this is lateralization. When the Chinese portalnaut Gao returned in 2069 it was noticed that there were differences in her external radiation scar patterns: those acquired in her outport, in 2060, were scattered all over her body, but the recent ones from her return port were clustered on her left-hand side. This, it was argued at the time, was to be expected since the portals she had used were different and had been used at different times. There the matter lay until Nebrasov returned, seven years later, in 2076. Nebrasov’s radiation scars exhibited the same pattern, with those accrued in the return port having a marked bias to the left. The left-oriented clustering suggested something unusual was happening in return transits via these stable portals. It was this lateral clustering that proved critical to Menlo’s Ariadne team in conceiving a functioning Return Portal Engine [Ed. and which is neatly expressed in the Greek inscription that forms the subject of Chapter Three].
Amulets and the Collapse
Which brings us to the topic of amulets. If you’ve read Other Places, you’ll know what we mean. Here again, in keeping with the novel’s principal theme of circular time, we have to cycle back.
The period following Lighterman’s arrival on Nea was traumatic for the fledgling human settlement. Not only had he misplaced a stable portal, which was thought (correctly as it turns out) to be the only way back to Earth, but immediately following his arrival there occurred a major setback. The Dome Three disaster, the cause of which is disputed, rocked the confidence of the Neah. The human loss was bad enough in such a small community [Ed. apart from the fact that mostly they were lawyers]. Then came the start of the Discord, which followed the failure of the recovery operation at Dome Three. Finally, there was strong evidence that amidst the crisis, someone had left the planet [Ed. i.e. Nebrasov]. Although this fact was never divulged to the wider population on Nea, Nebrasov’s radiation burst was picked up by the PrimePorts and it was strongly suspected that someone had found and traversed Lighterman’s Stable Portal. This tumultuous period concluded with the Nea Revolution, where the Inaugural Provost was deposed, and the PrimePorts took the decision to cede from Earth, thereby suspending cooperation on the Return Porting Programme, Ariadne.
Back on Earth, for reasons that the novel discusses, these events were not appreciated by UNWGIT until the years immediately preceding the Collapse, when portal data exchanges between UNWGIT and the PrimePorts became less frequent and eventually ceased altogether. Apparently UNWGIT was unaware of what had happened on Nea [Ed. but by this time Earth had problems of its own to worry about], but one person suspected something was wrong.
With the discovery of universal lateralisation, viable return porting was finally within the Ariadne team’s grasp. Designs for Return Portal Engines were a matter of months away. Tipped off to the troubles on Nea, the Ariadne team deployed a failsafe method of getting updated portal information and data to Nea. They settled on transcribing the new engine algorithms into metal amulets which could be smuggled on board outports without adding too much mass. This method became known as the ‘backdoor’. By the summer of 2079 - with Collapse just weeks away - UNWGIT’s already failing control of porting technology was fully and disastrously usurped by its elite paymasters. Uncontrolled mass outporting began to take place. In August 2079 alone, over one thousand ports were attempted. The unexpected arrivals on Nea caused havoc and thousands of lives were lost. It was amidst this chaos that the Ariadne team secretly transferred the last of their updated models, moments before the Collapse. On Nea, the question became who had those amulets - and whose side were they on?
That’s more than enough science fiction for one blog. If you’re curious about Nea, take a look at our blog on the images and charts that form the background to the planet. And if you are still wondering what it’s all about - what it is really about, that is - then the blog Trick of the Tale is for you.
Notes
Blog cover image. ‘Wormhole Gamma’ by PantheraLeo1359531, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
