Page 45 of The Sunlit Man

“I offer this explanation to your ignorance,” Contemplation said. “Our engines cut out if we go too high. They roar and try, but we do not move—and then they die. Beyond that, people go unconscious if they spend more than a few minutes in the heights.”

“Wait, how tallarethese mountains?” Nomad asked.

“Tall,” Zeal said. “At least a thousand feet.”

A thousand feet? Like a single thousand?

At first, he assumed that the Connection had stopped working, and he hadn’t interpreted those words correctly. These people werestymied by a set of “mountains” that would barely be considered hills on his homeworld? He’d lived in a city at over fifteen thousand feet elevation, back there.

And yet he wouldn’t call them fools. Naive, maybe, but not idiots…

I’m lost, the knight says with an air of bafflement, commensurate with his solemn, dignity-ravaging intelligence. Am I understanding this right? What’s going on?

“Math,” Nomad realized. “Math is going on.” He switched to their tongue. “Someone get me a pad of paper and something to write with.”

When they resisted, he glared at them until someone who had been taking notes proffered the implements. A woman brought him a chair, and he settled down, rubbing his forehead. Writing came easily to him these days—strange to think that ability had once been considered unseemly to some back home.

He sketched out some equations, dredging far, far back—to a person he used to be. He thought through the way the hovercycles worked, picturing their engines. His best guess was that the engine mechanism somehow used Investiture from these sunhearts to superheat the air, then sent it out those jets on the bottoms, providing upward thrust. Essentially their hovercraft relied on downward-pointing jet engines rather than lift from wings.

“Propellant,” he muttered. “That’s the problem. Up above, the air gets too thin to act as a propellant for your ships. Remarkable…”

The people slowly gathered around, and if they seemed shocked to see complex mathematics produced by their “Sunlit Man,” a killer with a sour attitude…well, he didn’t blame them one bit.

“What does this all mean?” Contemplation asked softly as he wrote.

“Your planet is really small,” he said. “Like, almostcomicallysmall. It takes how long to complete a rotation again?”

“Around twenty hours,” Contemplation said.

“Hmm. Give me a clock.”

They provided one, and he was able—using his own internal sense of time—to do some vague reckoning. Their hours were shorter than his by roughly half. Factoring it in…yeah, that gave him something to work with.

He guessed their day was maybe ten hours galactic standard. The planet was small, and turned slowly enough that people could keep up in ordinary aircraft. He figured it was possible to fly all the way around in just four hours. Except you couldn’t. You had to wait for the planet to turn, because if you got too far ahead, you ran straight into the sunlight.

Calculating that—with some measurements he demanded from the others—he arrived at the planet’s diameter. From there, the answers lined up. He’d been fooled at first, since the gravity felt roughly similar to what he knew back home. Less than most worlds, but still within common ranges. He could test that with a few dropped objects. Regardless, that initial gut impression had given him a false sense that he understood the physics of the world. In reality, he had been way off.

“Most worlds with this kind of gravity,” he explained, “are much bigger. You’ve got something dense at your core—Invested, I’d say, since no natural element could create this kind of a gravitational pull and leave the planet livable.

“Your atmosphere also seems to thin at an alarming rate. From my estimation, a thousand feet up, and you’re well into the death zone. No wonder you only hover your ships thirty or forty feet in the air.”

He looked up to a circle of blank faces.

I’m raising my hand, the knight says. You can’t see it, but I am. Call on me.

“Okay…” Nomad said in Alethi.

Can I go take an art class instead, teacher?

“Auxiliary, you’reliterallya living manifestation of physical forces—sharing substance with the concepts of gravitation and the interaxial force. You should know about this stuff.”

Uh, right. And just because you’re made of meat and various strange liquids, every human is born knowing all about primate anatomy.

“Well, it would be a good idea to pay attention anyway,” Nomad said, though admittedly he felt foolish saying it. If he’d paid better attention himself, he’d have figured this out earlier. The curvature of the planet, the low air pressure at ground level…these things were blazing signals of the planet’s size.

He switched back to the local language. “Look. It makes perfect sense that your engines give out as they try to cross mountains. These ships move via the displacement of air.”

“If it pleases you to be contradicted,” Contemplation said, “they fly using sunhearts.”

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