Part 8 — The Flock of Moons

When the moon is full imagine kneading it like dough. When you have kneaded it to uniform consistency, divide it into many different-sized pieces and roll them between your palms to make them round. On each of them it would take the same length of time for a skimming orbiter to travel the length of the radius across the surface — they all have the same skimtime. Another way of describing the skimtime is as the low-orbit radian arctime. For earth, which is denser than the moon, it's about a quarter of an hour. It's moderately amazing that regardless of their differences in size, as long as planets have the same density they have the same skimtime. Less dense planets have longer skimtimes.

Put them out in a flock, where the solitary moon used to be. Give each a little spin as you put it out so that they all turn some ten percent faster than the earth. That will make their days a little faster and their minutes a little shorter than on earth. Each of their minutes will be a natural minute and on each of them the skimtime will be between nineteen and twenty minutes, for simplicity call it twenty. You are slightly down-sun of the flock so that they all look like little crescent moons of various sizes. You are seeing mostly their nightsides, with only a thin edge of dayside. A cluster of different-sized crescents.

The universe has a built-in frequency or heartbeat which we will talk about in the next chapter or two. One reason this minute is a convenient unit of time is because this universal frequency is exactly 10⁴⁵ per minute. In other words the universe frequency, which is intrinsic to gravity and light and much else, is a sextillion septillion times faster than the unit frequency of one event per minute.

The people living in this flock of moons all share the natural minute as their unit of time. For them, light in vacuum travels exactly ten million miles in a minute.

The sun is beyond and to the left of the swarm so the crescents all look like the letter "C" — open to the right. You put up your left hand to shade your eyes from the sun so you can get a better look. Each of the planets has some kind of beacon on its dark side. A bonfire? A fireworks-display? Now you remember: they are celebrating the annual festival, their planet's birthday. These are holiday lights.