CHAPTER 203: A BRIEF MOMENT FOR RI-JAZZ MUSIC

Ri Ja was selected as the first Earth colony for several reasons, first it was very much like Earth. If you didn’t look too close at the plants or animals and you didn’t touch the plains grass, of course, you could almost trick yourself into believing that you were on Earth. Even the slightly reddish-orange cast of the sunlight wasn’t that different than the way the Earth’s star looked on a late summer sunset. On a day-to-day basis, you would notice that voices sounded different, a higher pitch. They were as severely altered as when someone inhales from a helium balloon on Earth because the concentration of helium was lower by far, but it was noticeable shift. Other noises also sounded a little odd until you got used to it. The sound of a tree falling, or the splash of water pouring into a glass. The common everyday sounds of life all seemed wrong for the first few days.

Scientists, when they eventually got around to it, would notice that the speed of sound was different on Ri Ja that it was on Earth. Sound travelled faster here than on Earth, from Earth’s 343 meters per second to about 363 meters per second on Ri Ja due to the difference in the atmosphere’s composition. They would find most lasers to be more efficient on Ri Ja than on Earth with reduced diffraction over distance due to the thermal properties of Ri Ja’s air.

The same thermal properties, however, meant that the difference between daytime temperatures and nighttime temperatures was much greater. Right now, it was winter on Ri Ja. The daytime temperatures would rise to 70-80 degrees Fahrenheit on an average day. At night, though, the temperatures would drop fast, reaching 30-40 degrees before sunrise.

After colonists woke the first morning and found frost covering the plants and their equipment, the idea of sleeping outdoors under the stars, at least in winter, lost much of its appeal. Once the sun came up, however, the temperature rose quickly. Strong thermal updrafts carried the melting and evaporating frost into the sky in visible vertical sheets of thin cloud-like fog, that seemed to reach a ’ceiling’ height and flatten out. Strong upper level winds kept the upper cloud levels moving all the time. Even these burned off under the sun’s daylight intensity most days.

The updrafts caused by the rapid daily warming had been present of Ri Ja for millions of years and had affected the evolution of Ri Ja’s plants and animals. When plants were ready to release seeds, many of them did so at the first light of dawn, seed pods bursting open and ejecting light fluffy down that caught the updrafts to be carried far and wide with their seed payload.

Animal’s too used the updrafts, some tiny ’bugs’ used a strategy like that of the plants, light fluffy appendages unfurled in the morning sun, and the ’bugs’ used springlike joints in their legs to launch themselves up into the air where the updraft and the lateral winds would carry them many miles away before they settled to the ground at night to feed and breed. Plants and small animals on Ri Ja, therefore, were remarkably uniform from one part of the world to the next, varying much more based on climactic temperature differences of longitude than the spacing of continents.

Larger animals did vary across the continents, even within longitudinal climate bands. Especially those without the ability to fly. The open plains near where the colonists had landed hosted a variety of grazing herd animals that ate the prevalent grass that produced the rashes in humans. Although the irritant chemical in the grass was safely metabolized by the grazers, it made their meat both unpalatable and toxic to humans.

The colony had selected a location at the edge of the plains, where the low grass-like vegetation gave way to an increasing density of tall vegetative growth with thick woody trunks that could be called tree-like. The population of herbivore herds was lower here, but the colonists still had access to sunlight at ground level. In the full forests, the canopy of the ’trees’ was thick and intertwined, even between different species of plants. It formed a thick barrier to sunlight and trapped moisture in the understory, making the humidity much higher in the deep dark forests, than it was in the plains.

In the plains, the air wicked moisture away rapidly from human skin which had evolved in a different atmosphere. Unshielded humans were in constant danger of dehydration and often suffered from dry, irritated eyes, and nosebleeds as the nasal mucous membranes dried and cracked. This was a known problem before they arrived and it was easily solved by wearing portable shield generators, usually housed in rings like the ones we had used for protection from bullets on Earth. The shield fields could be tuned to regulate the level of moisture and heat exchange between the skin and the atmosphere, as well as filter the air before it entered the shielded person’s airways. While a few die-hards did try to experience Ri Ja without shield protection on the first day on planet. The dry eyes, cotton-mouth, and nosebleeds quickly dissuaded them.

The colony site was also chosen for its geological stability. Ri Ja had considerably higher volcanic activity than Earth. Finding a region that had effectively zero chance of issues from volcanic activity, especially from the possibility of frequent ash clouds from volcanoes that might be far away but could cause problems by spewing pumice and ash into the prevailing winds of potential colony locations. Ri Ja’s colony was placed on one of the two largest tectonic plates on the entire planet, far away from the rifts or upwellings caused as the plates drifted away from or crashed into other plates.

The other key difference between Earth and Ri Ja was the planet’s magnetic field. Ri Ja had a very strong magnetic field compared to Earth. While invisible to humans except during the intense aurora borealis effects each evening, this difference probably had the greatest impact on the colony. The strong magnetic field tended to create electrical charges in conductive materials as they moved through the field. Electric wires in any unshielded application became dangerous unpredictable things, with additional voltages being induced as the wires moved through the planet’s magnetic fields, or fluctuating fields affected even stationary wires. Essentially everything on the colony had to be either made of non-conductive materials or magnetically shielded.

A few of the colonists had brought their guitars from home, aside from the changes in pitch from the helium rich atmosphere, the magnetic field of the planet changed the way the guitar, even acoustic guitars with metal strings worked. As the strings vibrated within Ri Jas magnetic field an electric field current was induced in the string. This led to a surprisingly high number of unique effects. First, musicians were generally shocked, literally. Sparks of static would leap from the strings to the musician’s fingers with almost every note unless extreme care was taken to electrically isolate the musician from ground or she had her person shields on with electrically conductivity of the shield adjusted accordingly. One particularly creative guitar player tried to acclimate himself to the frequent static discharges and played in the dark, adding a visible tiny electric light show as sparks jumped from the strings to his fingers. He gave up the effort after a brief experiment. It was only visible to a few people if they happened to be very close to the performer, and it was surprisingly difficult not to let your fingers reflexively pull away from the from the electrical sparks.

But this wasn’t the only effect on guitars. Even if the guitar player took precautions against the static discharges, the building electric currents in the strings resulted in a variable magnetic resistance to the actual movement of the strings. They could still be plucked easily enough, but the vibration in the string that caused the note to linger faded quickly, giving each note a much shorter duration and a more rapid decay than when played on Earth. This gave it an altogether different ’sound’ or feel than Earth music, especially when combined with the higher pitch in the helium-rich atmosphere. Some learned to use this to good effect and ’Ri Jazz’ Guitar Music experienced a brief period of moderate popularity back on Earth.

Electric guitars were only possible if the guitar and the entire signal transmission system were fully shielded. Magnetic pick-ups had all kinds of issues in the planet’s field, most notably distortion and static as the planet’s field competed with the effect of the string on the pick-up. Of course, if the pick-up were to have by-passed, the string itself could have been wired directly to the amplifier using it’s own induced current as the source signal for the amp, but while one player thought about it, the difficulty of magnetically isolating himself, the signal transmission, and amplification while leaving the strings exposed to the Ri Ja’s magnetism was a level of head-ache he decided not to add to the relaxation of playing his guitar.