Mercury
The planet closest to the Sun. By day stone glows with heat there, and in the craters at the poles, where sunlight never reaches, ice has been lying for billions of years.
- Distance from the Sun: 58 million km
- Day: 176 Earth days
- Gravity: 0.38 of Earth's
Views
What is there
The Sun here is three times larger than in the Earth's sky. By day the ground heats up to 430 degrees, by night it cools to minus 180. Scorched crust and hollow salt shield a ship from radiation; golden sulfide is needed for the graviscope.
Master of the world
Creatures
People
- Terminator Folk — Short, stubborn diggers of the terminator, the line between the scorching day and the freezing night of Mercury. Their ancestors walked with that line around the whole world; now they live dug in behind walls of salt, which drinks the heat of the day and gives it back all night. Every family keeps a mirror on a pole, and humans are "softbacks" to them: no shell, no claws, and hopeless at digging.
- Burrows of the Line. A settlement of the Terminator Folk: burrows dug into the plain, each roofed with a low dome of polished salt that shines like their own shells, and beside each one the family mirror on a pole. In the middle lies the Line Court, its floor split by a golden line into night and day, where the whole settlement turns its mirrors to the Sun at the long dawn.
Structures
A crater whose floor and walls fused into scorched crust. Whatever fell here was hot enough to melt rock; what is left of it is a drop of gold at the bottom, cooled where it landed.
A box sunk into the ground with a glass cold room at its heart. The crew waited out the day down here, and when the coolant ran low they packed the room with salt from the hollows. The salt is still there.
The same ring as on Earth, on a dais of the local stone and in the colors of this world: whoever set the gates out did it on every world at once. This one sleeps. It answers only one who has brought down the master of this world and lived through its trial; then lay the master's heart, the dust of the road and what this world gives into the ring, and it will join the other gates that are awake.
A heat shield standing on edge in its own crater, and behind it the hull it was meant to protect, burnt through and torn in two. The shield held. The hull did not.
A dome of salt, a bubble the hollows blew and someone found. Rows of stone benches face a carved block under a gold stone. In the salt it is quiet; people came here to listen to the quiet.
An adit driven under the crust: steps down behind a brick portal, a propped drift and a stope where iridium lies in every wall. The miners left the face half worked when the pool of quicksilver in the middle of it stood up and walked; since then something has lived in the dark, and the side cut with the crate is sealed.
Two dozen mirrors on posts, all turned to one tower. They caught the Sun and threw it into a pit beside the cabin until the rock there ran like wax. Half the mirrors are down, and not from the wind; the pit still glows, and something sleeps in it under two of the missing mirrors.
Columns of salt that grew out of the hollows the way ice grows in a cave, each lifting a cap of rock on its head. A seam of scorched crust runs between them: the heat that feeds them.
A paved square with a golden ring set into the floor and a stone sun on a pillar. The stelae around it face inward, away from the real Sun: whoever prayed here stood with their back to it.
A polished needle fourteen blocks high with a gold point. Its shadow has not moved in years: whoever raised it laid a band of slabs along the shadow and marked the hours in gold, and the marks are still right.
An expedition dug four levels under an airlock in the shadow of a scarp, on the line where the day of Mercury meets its night: quarters for the shift, the machines that traded heat for cold, the sun working and, at the bottom, the archive where they laid their records and themselves. The warden they built to walk the line still walks it.
Ores
Plants and food
Weather
- Sodium Tail. At night the sky glows with an orange tail of sodium atoms — bright enough for solar panels.
- Heat Shimmer. By day the air above the scorching ground trembles and the distance drowns in white glare.
- Terminator Crackle. At dawn and dusk the rock heats or cools by hundreds of degrees and cracks; cinnabar rolls out of the cracks.
Events
- Solar Flare. The heat rises; the cinder walkers wake
- The Hollows Grow. The ground boils away under the Sun. Step off the fuming patches: golden crystals wait at the bottom
- Magnetic Tornadoes. Columns of solar wind roam the plains: they shock, charge a spacesuit and drop iridium and stardust