Contact across the Solar System

Return from Eris

The travelers departed from Eris, returning to the Durnakhemi for the return home, a journey that involved stopping off at a lot of other worlds. They were not in anywhere close to a straight line, so the return journey took longer than the outward one.

The ship headed for Pluto, taking nearly five months to get there. The pilots noted that this time, the Sun's light was blueshifted.

When they got there, a Plutonian asked the travelers about their fellow Earthers' planethood controversy. It was the main thing that many Plutonians knew about Earth people, or at least so it seemed. Hugo explained that it was a redefinition because Earth astronomers were discovering too many Pluto-ish objects in orbits beyond Neptune. Something like what happened with the asteroids.

The Plutonians had a colony on Charon, Pluto's biggest moon. It was on the side that faces Pluto, just as Pluto's capital city is on the side that faces Charon.

The travelers stayed at Pluto for about a week, complete with taking a tour of the world's weird icy geography. Some of the travelers also visited Charon.

They returned to the ship, and after a few months, they reached their next stop, Neptune. It had only one inhabited world, Triton.

They went on to their next stop, Uranus. Or more properly, Titania, the largest of its inhabited worlds. The others were Ariel, Umbriel, and Oberon, with Miranda considered too small for a big city. When the travelers arrived, Jenny explained that "We English speakers have to be careful of how to pronounce your parent world's name. We often pronounce it UR-a-nus instead of ur-A-nus, because ur-A-nus is a dopey pun in our language."

When Orthon learned of that, he remembered when he discussed with Kalna a curious insult that some Earthers have, that something comes from Uranus. It was that pun, again.

After that, they went to Saturn, rings and all. The ship looped around to give the travelers some great views of the planet with its rings. Rings that the planet is famous for all over the Solar System, and not just on the Earth. After the travelers had plenty of opportunity to take pictures of this effect, the ship headed for Saturn's largest moon Titan. Its surface is obscured in visible light by a reddish-brown upper-atmosphere haze, so the pilots took some infrared pictures with the ship's telescopes, revealing the world's surface.

The ship entered the moon's atmosphere, and gradually sank beneath its haze. The sky gradually turned dark brown, and the Sun became dimmer and orangish. The surface became visible, and the ship sank to close to this rocky landscape. Except, as the tour guides explained, the "rocks" are all water ice here. The ship soon encountered a canyon and traveled along it, until the canyon met a sea. "Methane and other light hydrocarbons", the tour guides explained. Then the ship headed upward and speeded up, and a tour guide explained "Our destination is on the night side. We wanted to show this to you before we got there."

The travelers got a beautiful view of Titan twilight from just above the main haze, with the Sun still illuminating the higher haze. The ship continued above the main haze, with Saturn rising high in the sky. Its rings were edge-on, however, as they always were from the moon. Then the ship sank through the haze, making Saturn harder and harder to see until it was barely visible. Then in the darkness some lights appeared, and it was the spaceport. The ship went inside and docked, and the travelers soon departed into the spaceport.

Hank grumbled that the SSC cities seemed rather similar, but Hugo noted that the people of the cities seemed more and more familiar with the Earth as the travelers returned inward.

The travelers also got to visit the outer edge of the main rings, the closest that it was safe to get to them without trying to get into the ring particles' orbits. Even so, their spacecraft was out of the ring plane by a few degrees from Saturn, just to be sure. It also got a nice view of the rings -- they looked like a huge sheet near their position.