Helliconia

APPENDIX 1 Cosmological

Star A (later known as Freyr) once had a companion star (Star C).

Eight million years before the narrated events, Star B (later known as Batalix) came within the gravitational field of Star A. In the orbital disturbances which followed, Star C escaped entirely, while Star B was captured. Henceforth, it formed the inferior partner of a binary system. The properties of the binary suns are as follows:

Star A is between 10 and 11 million years old. It has evolved away from the main sequence and is already entering old age.

At the time of its capture of Star B, it was less luminous but hotter. So for the first million years or so after capture, the planets of Star B were subjected to far more UV radiation than at present. X-ray and UV radiation resulted in accelerated evolution of present species.

Star A evolved no planetary system. Orbiting stellar debris was drawn into it and consumed.

Star B has four planets in orbit. They are, working from inner to outer, Copaise, Aganip, HELLICONIA, and Ipocrene.

In the period before Star B’s capture, a moon was in orbit about Helliconia which was lost during the disruption of capture.

A shows the solar system of Star B (Batalix) and its four planets coming close to a binary system consisting of a large A-type supergiant star, Star A (Freyr), and its companion, the G-type star, Star C. Disturbance begins.

B shows resulting gravitational disruptions, causing Star C to ‘escape’, as the Star B system is drawn into Star A’s influence. The moon of one of the planets of Star B (Helliconia) is lost to the system, drifting away in the general direction of Star C.

C shows that now a new binary system has been formed. Star B and its attendant planets are in orbit about the supergiant Star A.

As located from Earth, the binary system of stars A and B lies in the constellation Ophiuchus (The Serpent-Bearer). The main body of a dark dust cloud lies close to the neighbouring constellation of Scorpius, at a distance of 700 light years from Earth. It conceals a cluster of comparatively young stars, with Star A among them.

Star A is just north of Antares. Location: Right Ascension 16h 25m. Declination: — 24° 30 ′.

Helliconia’s first designation on terrestrial charts: Planet G4 PBX / 4582–4–3.

Helliconia is a planet with roughly terrestrial properties.

Axial inclination of rotation axis to the plane of orbit 55°

This compares with about 66° for Earth.

This widens the range of temperatures within climatic zones.

The atmospheric composition varied slightly from pre-capture to post-capture. A greater amount of carbon dioxide in the air, pre-capture, produced a mean temperature of — 7°C. After capture, and at periastron (when Star B and planets are at their closest to Star A), some of this atmospheric CO combined with water to form carbonate rocks.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is thus reduced, so too the benefit of a ‘greenhouse’ effect is reduced, yielding a mean temperature of + 10°C.

In other words, pre-capture conditions were better than might be expected, while post-capture conditions are more severe.

Helliconia’s ‘Small Year’, that is to say its annual orbit about its parent Star B, is equal to 1.42 Earth years.

The motions of stars A and B are such that B orbits A in the equivalent of 2592 Earth years. Star B, in accordance with Kepler’s laws, moves in its orbit at a varying speed, slowing as it reaches the most distant point (apastron) from Star A, speeding up when it nears Star A (at periastron). In consequence, its planets, Helliconia included, spend less time enjoying maximum energy than they do receiving minimum energy.

Fig. 2 shows the ‘Great Year’ of Helliconia about the giant primary, where t = time in Earth years from apastron.

It is the Great Year which has predominant influence over Helliconia’s climate, and Star A which provides most of Helliconia’s heat and energy.

The x to x sector marks the 500 E years of deepest winter on either side of apastron.

The y to y sector marks the period at periastron when Star A appears brighter than Star B in Helliconia’s skies.

Points V, V, and V indicate approximately the periods in which the three books of the volume are set.

The time from 311 to 633 E years marks a period of fairly rapid improvement in climatic conditions. After that, a slow warming process sets in towards periastron. From 1929 E years, a fairly rapid decline takes place. On either side of apastron is a period of over five E centuries when the climate is either severe or unsettled; a minor ice age is either building up or else in slow decline. This contrasts with a more brief 238 E years of high summer, over periastron.

The orbits of the four Star B planets are at the following (E) distances from their primary:

An Avernian shrine stands on Aganip (Bk.2x), it marks the spot where the 512 future occupants of the Avernus satellite were housed during the construction of the Earth Observation Station.

The Helliconian satellite lost during the period of capture was known to the phagors as T’Sehn-Hrr. It holds the key to one of the discomfiting secrets of human life on Helliconia. (The truth is uncovered by SartoriIrvrash in Vol.2, xxi, to his detriment.)

Helliconian humans divide their small year of 480 days into weeks and tenners. One week is eight days. One tenner is 6 weeks (i.e. 48 days). So the year is divided into ten equal parts.

Avernus is a satellite placed in orbit about Helliconia by the terrestrial expedition. It is designated Earth Observation Station. Its function is to relay data on all facets of Helliconia back to Earth. To the inhabitants of Helliconia, the OES is known as Kaidaw, because of its perceived rapid motion against the stars.

Avernus has an almost circular circumpolar orbit, its mean distance above planetary surface being:

Depending on the latitude of an observer, Avernus takes about 20-24 minutes to cross the sky, from rising to setting. From the ground, its maximum angular diameter when overhead presents 137.5 seconds of arc. Inhabitants can observe Avernus undergoing rather complex phases when it is passing overhead.

When the starship from earth was closing into orbit about Star B, 512 colonists were hatched, almost full-grown (i.e. as late adolescents). The DNA of fertilised human egg cells was computer-stored in nanowombs. The colonists were reared in six ‘families’ or clans, each destined for specific duties.

Once they had been landed at a base on Aganip, automated construction units began the building of the EOS, using local stellar material. Owing to difficulties and set-backs, construction took eight E-years. The colonists were then ferried to their new home on Avernus to begin an intensive study of Helliconia.

Information transmitted back to Earth takes a thousand years to reach its target. So the early signals sent in Spring are received on Earth in approximately AD 6344.

By the time of ‘Helliconia Summer’, Avernus has been in orbit for thirty-two E-centuries. Its population now numbers close to 6000 people. Copulation is taught from the age of eight, but all procreation is by extra-uterine birth.

Among the six clans, the PIN family is the ‘Cross-Continuity Family’. Its duty is to follow the unfolding of one or two Helliconian family groupings through generations over the cycle of a Great Year (60 generations).

The GO family deals with questions of theology, philosophy, ontogeny, phylogeny, etc.

The TAN family studies the origins of long-standing quarrels, from personal to national and specific.

As a safety valve against confinement sickness, Avernians can enter a ‘Helliconia Holiday’ lottery; winners are allowed to visit the planet below. This is a one-way ticket.

The colonising starship left Earth in the year AD 2100, arriving in the vicinity of Star B in AD 3600. The journey of 1000 light years took 1500 years to accomplish. Avernus was operative by AD 3608. On the Helliconian Great Year, this is 500 years After Aphelion.

In Book 1 Avernus has already been operative for more than a Great Year.

i.e. about 2592 + 134 E years = 2726 E years

In Book 2 Avernus operative for a further 543 years = 3269 E years

So dates now will be:

On Earth, AD 6877

On Helliconia, 1177 E years AA

On Avernus, 3269

In Book 3 Avernus operative for a further 696 years = 3965 E years

So dates will now be:

On Earth, AD 7573

On Helliconia, 1873 E years AA

On Avernus, 3965

Myrkwyr is an ominous day in 1873. Freyr sinks below the horizon on the Polar Circle, not to rise again for a further eighteen or so human generations.

Helliconian Time reckoned as Earth Time

A Helliconian inhabitant living to the ripe old age of 70 would be 99.4 E years old

The Earth–Avernus method of reckoning Helliconian years is simply to date them After Apastron (AA). On Helliconia itself, various nations have, at various times, their own means of reckoning calendar time. Generally, such calendars begin from the start of the reign of a local despot.

For example, in ‘Summer’ four different calendars are mentioned. Taking these into account, Book 2 opens in

(Terrestrial dateline AD 6877)

Earth years AA

1177

Helliconia year AA

‘Denniss’ calendar

828[1]

Oldorando-Borlien After Union

381 (some claim 408)

Ancipital year

749[2]

Because the Small Year on Helliconia is longer than a terrestrial year, age differentials exist.

The following table (years) gives comparable ages of humans on the two planets.

Life spans are longer in summers of the Great Year

APPENDIX 2 Phagors

The struggle for supremacy on Helliconia is between humans and phagors. Phagors, a two-horned, shaggy-coated species, were the original dominant inhabitants of the planet before Batalix (Star B) was captured by Freyr, the supergiant sun (Star A). They are also known as ancipitals (two-edged), a reference to their sharp horns.

This cowlike species probably evolved from flambreg, vast herds of which graze the northern wilds of Sibornal. They are kin to older pre-Freyr species, such as the kaidaws.

Kaidaws are the large horned animals, somewhat resembling horses, which phagors ride. These older species have physical traits in common, such as ball-joints at knees and elbows. This greater dexterity is counterbalanced by a sporadically firing nervous system; hence frequent bursts of immobility.

Phagors stand upright and possess three fingers on each hand.

A major distinction between phagor and human lies in brain structure. A phagor brain is uni-hemispheric, unlike a human brain with its two hemispheres. There is no equivalent to the neocortex. Inasmuch as the phagor brain resembles a human’s, it consists largely of hypothalamus, overlaid with a kind of cerebellum controlling motion.

It may be said in consequence that phagors live in their own perceptual Umwelts. Theirs is an eotemporal consciousness (Eos was the goddess of dawn, sister to Selene), where endings and beginnings cannot be distinguished from one another. For them, time is no indicator of progression as registered in a human mind. Events are monitored as a series of milestones from which direction has been obliterated; thus a trail is indicated, without an arrow of perception to point direction. A rudimentary nervous system permits only action and reaction. But tether (See Appendix 4) greatly extends ancipital awareness.

Ancipitals were masters of the cool dawn world before Freyr capture. With their cowbirds, commensal avians which feed in part on their hosts’ parasites, they dominated a world, from the lowlands of Pegovin to Mt Estakhadok in the High Nktryhk. In those remote ages, they kept Others as pets.

Ancipital blood is golden, containing as it does an anti-freeze system which (together with their stiff pelage) renders the phagors impervious to cold. Cowbirds, kaidaws, and other dawn animals, share this characteristic. Red blood, free of anti-freeze, represents a more recent evolutionary development.

Moss forms a large part of phagor diet during cold periods. Mosses contain high percentages of arachidonic acid, which is highly polyunsaturated. A concentration of this fatty acid in the phospholipids of cell membranes makes the membranes more fluid. This serves to lower the temperature at which the lipid in the membranes undergoes a phase shift from liquid-crystalline to a more solid or gel-like state. Hence the acid from the moss protects cell membranes from the effects of cold; the cell is then able to function at low temperatures. Humanity, of course, has no such reinforcement.

Linked with their sporadic endocrine system, female phagors come on heat ten times a year (tenners is the Eotemporal term, equivalent to the terrestrial term ‘monthlies’). Phagors copulate infrequently. As with terrestrial gorillas, the penis is small. Phagors never commit rape; that is a piece of human mythology. Females are viviparous and lactate; parturition takes place one small (or Batalix) year after conception. Both sexes carry the helico virus within the mitochondria of their cells.

Phagors used two intertwined languages. Native ancipital is an everyday language, employing only one tense, the continuous present. Eotemporal is a sacred speechform, also used for counting on the base three. It is supposedly the language spoken by those ancipitals sunk in tether.

Language, phagor-to-phagor, is generally accompanied by gesture. Thus the exhortation on parting is ‘Hold horns high’, accompanied by the ceremony of both sides leaning forward, arms to side, foreheads touching, harneys meeting. Then smartly away.

APPENDIX 3 Other species

Following the capture by Freyr of Batalix and its planetary system, the proximity of the A-type supergiant bathed the planets in high-energy radiation.

The effect on the atmospheric composition of Helliconia was to raise the oxygen level, due to the photolysis of CO, HO, etc. The oceans were also affected. Greater concentrations of macromolecules led to increased activity all the way up the food chain.

For something like a million years, the upheaval of capture bathed Helliconia in high UV radiation and X-ray levels. The result was a fairly rapid evolution of species. The human species evolved from a small Hespagorat ape. Some species perished — the childrim for one.

In evolving, the Others escaped from captivity, but remained in proximity with phagors in loose commensal communities, while going through a protognostic stage of development. Hence the survival of ancipital terms into the Olonets language (the main language of Campannlat). Phagors long retained a shadowy dominance (hence the god Akha). Eventually various tribes fled from Hespagorat and the Pegovin region, crossing to Campannlat. The crossing was effected via an ancient landbridge between the two continents.

East–West phagor migratory routes were established at the time of the crossing, or just thereafter.

The tribes crossing the landbridge were known as the Olle Onets. This name was derived from the glut of oil-fish found in the shallows on either side of the isthmus. It became in turn the name of the chief language of Campannlat, Olonets.

Many of the ‘winter’ tribes were driven eastwards before the advancing newcomers. Clans later occupying the lower Nktryhk, such as the Mordriats, are descendants of such defeated tribes.

Landbridge in heavy outline. Present land configuration in light outline.

The isthmus between the Climent Ocean and the Narmosset Sea. The land on either side, following the destruction of the isthmus when the polar caps melted, eventually became the countries of Throssa and Radado, now separated by the Cadmer Straits.

These transhumance peoples have never achieved a fully human consciousness. Madis are categorised as protognostics. Travel is their whole existence, pursued whether there is one sun in the sky or two. This fixed pattern of behaviour suggests that they existed before solar capture, living much as they do at present.

While not numerous, the Madis have made their mark on the landscape of Campannlat. They and their flocks leave behind them a trail of spores and seeds which grows into a continuous line of copse, or uct, to be traversed countless times by the tribes. The uct gives shelter to birds, rodents, and snakes, while serving in some places as a barrier between nations. The Madi have little understanding of time; time’s passage is expressed only by measures of distance.

Madis are meek creatures, easily victimised. They are frequently domesticated by humans, the females serving as sex slaves. Although small, they resemble humanity in most major aspects, and interbreeding is not unknown.

The Madi tribes call their language hr’Madi’h, which suggests pervasive phagor influence. hr’Modi’h is a sung language, complex but in fact incomplete. Nothing can be described accurately in it. It is circumscribed, like everything else in Madi existence, by the Ahd. There is no written form.

Additional words are occasionally imported from other languages, but to these the tribes are hostile — or at least fearful.

Other species and semi-species include the waist-high protognostics, the Nondads. Nondads are of subterranean habit. A peaceful people, they leave it to a warrior caste to fight. Thus, they discuss ultimate questions in a language of ‘clicks, whistles, and snorts’, while their warrior kings do battle in the Eighty Darknesses.

Nondads are hunted and eaten by Uskuts; when roast, they are known as treebries.

Nondads live in Campannlat, the Africa of Helliconia.

A related people, the Ondods, live in the harsher climates of the northern continent, Sibornal.

Descending the evolutionary scale, the necrogenes represent a dead end to one line of pre-Freyr development.

These species of fish and animals give birth only through their own death. Examples are the assatassi (fish or, more properly, fish-lizards) yelk, biyelk, and gunnadu.

Necrogenes are hermaphrodite, without such mammalian adjuncts as ovaries and wombs.

For instance, assatassi, a sharp-beaked fish, semi-winged at maturity, flies ashore in its millions during the great summer along the coasts of the Sea of Eagles. Their mating grounds lie deep in the Ardent Sea. After mating they swarm eastwards, against the ocean currents, through the Cadmer Straits, working up considerable speeds for their death flight.

They then launch themselves onto the shores of Hespagorat, some managing to fly a distance inland. Where they fall, there they die. The young have been carried in their bellies. They live as maggots on the decaying bodies of their mothers, before metamorphosing to a legged and tailed form, and crawling back to the sea. [Assatassi first feature in terrestrial literature in ‘Star Millenia’, in Galaxies Like Grains of Sand (Signet Books, New York, 1960).]

Larger land necrogenes follow similar patterns. After yelk mate, the sperm seed develops into maggot-like creatures which live off the double stomachs of their mothers. When they enter an artery, the maggots explode through the parental body, causing rapid death. They devour the carcass — and each other — until after metamorphosis, when they emerge to survive in the outside world as young adult yelk.

In the great hubbub of Helliconian life, one other life form deserves special mention.

In the centuries of Great Winter, Wutra’s Worm is a kind of devouring dragon. Flighted, it destroys all it comes upon. To the embattled tribes of humanity — in Pannoval and elsewhere — Wutra is God of the Skies. In time, the idea becomes a god.

During the Great Summer, a transformation takes place in the life cycle. The worm retreats to the warming oceans in a marine stage. Having passed its flighted period in higher latitudes, where it mated, it now lives out the rest of its life in the sea. The oceans teem with food. Into this rich environment, the offspring are born.

These fish-like offspring are as vulnerable as they are plentiful, and are known to coastal peoples as scupper-fish. Scupper-fish make a nourishing and tasty dish.

After some centuries, when the Great Autumn sets in, the scupper-fish crawl to land (much like Earth’s mudskippers) and develop wings. A few more years, and Wutra’s Worm is again aloft in darkening air.

Even during the period when it is being eaten in its thousands and hundreds of thousands, Wutra’s Worm has gained a niche in the night sky.

Most nations of Campannlat and Sibornal recognise ten houses of the Zodiac, the plane of the ecliptic traversed by the two suns and the other planets. One of these houses is Wutra’s Worm, sometimes known as the Night Worm. Somewhere within this constellation lies a dim star, Sol.

The Bat

Devil Bull (also known as Wutra’s Ox)

The Boulder

Wutra’s Worm (The Night Worm)

The Queen’s Scar (Akha’s Wound)

The Old Pursuer

The Fountain

The Golden Ship

The Two Dogs

The Sword

APPENDIX 4 Helliconian Humanity

Terrestrial interest in Helliconia stems from the fact that after many centuries of interstellar exploration, a planet was discovered on which human life thrives, part of a diverse biomass. However, researches conducted on Avernus soon showed that Helliconian humanity differs in interesting psychological and physical ways from its earthly counterparts.

One divergence from normal terrestrial existence seems so great, even so uncanny, that it must be regarded as pervasively psychological and phylogenic. Indeed, centuries of dispute on Earth failed to resolve the question of whether Helliconians should be categorised as human, or as a separate species.

The aberration (as some call it) lies in a much gentler gradation between life and death than terrestrial humanity experiences. Terrestrial human existence is binary; one is either alive or dead. On Helliconia, two further states follow bodily demise.

The burnt-out souls of the dead descend into an obsidian realm of entropy. In this realm, this negative of life, are stored two stages of psychic decay, gossies, the residues of the more recently deceased, and, further down the stack, fessups. Gossies are subject to febrile mood swings, from bitter recrimination to saccharine sweetness, perhaps related to climatic conditions. Fessups, increasingly less articulate, sink towards ultimate disintegration and the Original Boulder — as early understanding has the term.

[Later this term is understood as the Original Beholder. That is to say, Gaia, the presiding unconscious will of the biomass which maintains the difficult equilibrium of the planet.]

The living are able to commune with gossies if they enter a trancelike state resembling death known as pauk.

After physical death, phagors undergo a similar gradual diminution towards ultimate disintegration. This is called tether.

Male and female humans exhibit little sexual dimorphism. They undergo instead a dramatic weight / shape transformation before and after the Great Winter. This is in response to the diminished or increased energy reaching the planet. It amounts to an evolutionary survival strategy.

The agent of the weight / shape transformation is a pleomorphic helical virus, somewhat similar to a mumps pathogen. Its shell in the shape of an icosahedron consists of lipids and proteins, and contains nucleic acid RNA. It is 97 millimicrons long. The Avernus has not the means to filter out the virus. For this reason, Avernians are unable to visit in person the planet they orbit (except under unusual — and fatal — circumstances).

The helico virus is endemic twice in a Great Year, firstly approximately 600 E years after apastron. It then rages for many small years, coincidental with improving climatic conditions and increased solar energy. Its second appearance is during a decline into wintery conditions, some 1800 E years after apastron.

At its every visitation, the virus brings widespread death. It strikes at the hypothalamus, causing encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and delirium. Its manifestations at this stage resemble meningitis. Populations are usually reduced to about half. Survivors take on altered form, gaining (in autumn) fifty per cent of normal body weight, as fatty tissue is built up. This phase is marked by unquenchable bulimia: their own children, faeces, asokins — sufferers will seize on and eat anything living. The survivors of the spring epidemic shed a corresponding amount of weight, marked by anorexia and self-starvation.

^{A Survivor of Fat Death towards Winter}

^{B Median figure}

^{C Survivor of Bone Fever in Spring}

In the course of several generations, surviving populations shed the extremes of their thin or heavyweight forms, tending to return to a more average constitution. In so doing, they also lose immunity to the virus.

It will be seen that this terrible scourge has a positive aspect. It forms part of a natural process, ensuring human survival throughout the climatic changes wrought by cosmic upheaval.

In more primitive times, the two phases of the helico pandemic were not recognised as springing from one and the same cause. They were known (in autumn) as the Fat Death, and (in spring) as Bone Fever. By the period covered by Book 3 (‘Winter’), the doctor Toress Lahl has gained a clear understanding of Fat Death — and of its survival rate. A great chain of eclipses occurs at this period, making Bone Fever outbreaks even more terrifying. A total of twenty eclipses takes place between 630 and 658 E years AA.[3]

The carrier of the helico virus is a species of arthropoda or tick. This vector transfers readily from phagors to humans. Phagors are immune to the virus. The human habit of using phagors as slaves or soldiers during the Great Summer and onwards ensures the survival of both tick and virus (even when the latter is latent) among human populations.

The helico virus is a reminder (for those who can understand) of the connection between the present deadly hostility of phagor and humanity and a distant past when the two species were commensal.

Terrible though the disease is, human survival is largely dependent upon the violent weight / shape transformation which it effects. Thus, if the humans succeed in eliminating their enemies, they cause their own undoing.

Or so it seems. If the nations of Summer ceased to war among themselves, if they could then defeat the phagor legions, if they could maintain a selected number in the equivalent of zoological gardens, then humanity could break free from its present limitations. But these are large Ifs….

APPENDIX 5 Kharnabhar

Kharnabhar is a small town in a remote region of Sibornal. The town has grown up about a remarkable monument, the Great Wheel of Kharnabhar. Previously a sacred site, it now houses criminal elements.

The fame of the Great Wheel is universal. When SartoriIrvrash arrives in Ashkitosh (Bk. 2, xi), he sees a tapestry bearing an allegorical depiction of the Wheel. ‘Upon a scarlet background, a great wheel [was] being rowed through the heavens by oarsmen in cerulean garments, each smiling blissfully, towards an astonishing maternal figure from whose mouth, nostrils, and breasts sprang the stars in the scarlet sky.’

The main and almost only route to Kharnabhar is from the port of Rivenjk, on the Climent Sea coast, northwards through the mountains of the Shivenink Chain. The distance is about 2400 miles, equivalent to a journey from Gibraltar to the north of Norway.

The Wheel is a granite ring, carved inside a granite mountain of the Chain. It revolves within Mount Kharnabhar, only one small segment being accessible from outside the mountain. The Architects long ago created the Wheel, encoding with its dimensions the external world, in a bid for astrological symmetry. ‘As Above, so below.’ The holy men who first occupied the Wheel intended it as an instrument by which to propel their world across the heavens, out of Winter and into the welcoming light and warmth of Freyr.

Originally, the Great Wheel was dedicated to God the Azoiaxic (meaning ‘something which revolves beyond life’ — later interpreted to mean ‘one who existed before life and round whom all life revolves’).

Penned within the confines of the mountain, the Wheel is inclined at 5° to the horizontal. It rotates above a floor inclined at 4°. This slight difference permits the river flowing round the base of the Wheel to carry mud beneath it, acting as lubricant.

Three-walled cells like alcoves line the outer surface of the ring. The ring is kept in slow movement, day by day. The immovable fourth wall is not part of the Wheel, although it closes off all the cells; it consists of solid unmoving rock, Mt Kharnabhar itself. Into the rock is inset lengths of chain, stapled firmly into the wall. These chains hang at 125 cm intervals.

With these chains, prisoners in the one thousand and eighty-five cells can haul themselves into and through the dark night of granite. When priests’ trumpets sound throughout, all prisoners must pull in unison on their chains. So the Wheel is shifted in its journey through rock or — as some still claim — through the heavens.

After ten years, the Wheel has been tugged by a captive back to the point at which he started his imprisonment. A revolution has been completed. On that final day, one prisoner finds daylight instead of stone for the fourth wall of his cell, and may make his exit to freedom; in the cell leading his, another man will be entering for his first day of the ten-year journey into and through the rock.

This ceaseless revolution has been seen by some to be echoed by the ceaseless orbiting of the Avernus, high above Kharnabhar.

APPENDIX 6 Populations

Helliconia is a sparsely populated world, at least as far as human and phagor densities are concerned. The following table shows how those densities fluctuate between the periods of extreme cold and heat. Phagor populations are more stable than human ones.

The weight of planetary biomass is in direct proportion to the solar energy absorbed by the planetary surface. At the time of apastron, the total mass is almost one third that at periastron.