The Patrician System

(Note: This 30th post of June 2013 will be the last post for this month, probably. I want to work in round numbers and am unlikely to add another 10 between now and the end of the 30th. Any more that are written before then will be published on 1st July.)

In the immediately preceding post, I wrongly referred to six inner and four outer planets of the star Patricius. The diagram of the Patrician System (Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy, New York, 2012, p. 193) is diagonally divided into an upper left half showing the inner planets and the asteroids and a lower right half showing the outer planets. However, closer examination of the diagram reveals that "Vitruvius" appears both as the outermost of the "inner planets" and as the innermost of the "outer planets." Clearly, this is done to show us how the two halves connect. But the result is that the total number of planets is nine, not ten.

The Patrician System is very similar to the Solar System with:

nine planets;
asteroids between the fourth and fifth planets;
colonies on the third and fourth planets.

I have already mentioned:

Daedalus and Imhotep, the two colonized planets;
Archimedes and Leonardo, the two that are obviously named after famous engineers;
Vitruvius.

The remaining four are the two innermost, Liang Ling-tsan and Channing, and the two outermost, Katsuragi no Kami and Sennacherib.

Patricius is St Patrick whom regular Anderson readers have met in the King of Ys Tetralogy before he gained his Christian name.

Despite being equivalent in position to Mars, Imhotep has thirty per cent greater gravity than Earth. This planet held only a scientific base and a few support industries for centuries until the Starkadians were settled there in the previous generation. Since then, the city has grown and now houses Imperial offices in the Pyramid with many other new buildings around it.