More hours, more days—more weeks.
Really hard to track.
Vera wasn’t being straight with us. Or maybe her Queen wasn’t being straight with her.
I’ve retreated from the cubby, where I now reside alone, to the ribbons, moving aimlessly from ribbon to ribbon. Only about half are illuminated and showing images I can understand—Pluto and occasionally its big moon, Charon. Forward, still visible in the quincunx, the asterisk—there’s our mystery ornament, still blocking stars, and otherwise doing nothing.
I keep trying to find refuge in nerding out, but that part of my intellect has become very thin. Bilyk says he once read an article in a Russian science magazine about the quantum capabilities of plants—choosing chemical pathways, planning ahead based on some sort of botanical intuition, a quantum double-down on their chances of fixing photons … So how much weirder is it that the screw gardens can also look ahead and double down on making space slippery?
Yeah, it’s weirder. Past is no preparation for present. When you keep stepping off the edge of the page and skipping over to another book, it’s hard to keep track of the story.
How many months until we take the leap and push the plants in the screw gardens to their limits?
How long until the cage fighters decide to reappear?
I’m just around the corner from stir crazy when DJ and Kumar echo up near. I hide behind a twisted, dark ribbon. I do not want company, not now—certainly not Wait Staff.
They’re quietly discussing Planet X—DJ’s favorite topic. Another from our squad spiders from the cubbies along the canes to the ribbons, where I recognize him; it’s the lonely Russian efreitor. Like DJ, Bilyk seems to be a fount of knowledge about science, about astronomy. His English is poor, but they manage to make themselves understood, and I envy them.
They murmur ideas and theories like kids, discussing the surface of our former ninth planet. Kumar listens quietly. Kumar rarely says anything since the Gurus were slaughtered.
Russian scientists (according to Bilyk) tried to figure out what had happened to Pluto, and what might still be happening—tried to understand what smoothed and rearranged those features even into modern geologic times. Pluto had either been subjected to tidal stress or had substantial sources of internal heat—radioactive thorium, possibly, which still keeps Earth warm. One of our Socotra professors described thorium as the atomic battery of creation.
Some speculated that maybe the planet and its moons had swung close to Neptune during one of Pluto’s inward passes—too close, on the edge of the Roche limit, below which the bodies would have broken up completely, joining another set of rings. The grazing orbit would definitely have stressed Pluto, and could have added or subtracted moons for both worlds.
Something had definitely messed with Neptune’s big moon Triton, the only satellite in our system with a retrograde orbit. Physically, Triton looks a lot like Pluto—with a supercold nitrogen surface. Could have been imported from the Kuiper belt, just like Pluto.
And whatever pushed Triton around might have tilted Neptune itself into its weird orientation, pole aligned with the planet’s orbit. But was Pluto responsible for these disruptions?
Not likely.
Something even larger, farther out—
Big enough to rearrange everything.
Bilyk insists that Russian scientists had long suspected a massive world with an eccentric orbit, way out beyond the edge of the solar system.
DJ enthusiastically agrees.
“Yeah, I’ll bet on it—Bird Girl’s planet could have made a pass through our system,” he says. “It really is Planet X, rolling around the big old billiard table!”