* * * * *
Funny how much was coming back to him now--things he had picked up from
the minimal liberal-arts and general-humanities courses he had taken and
then forgotten in his absorption with the science and tech studies.
The first extrasolar planets, as they had been discovered, had been
named from Norse mythology--Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya,
Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the
discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and
Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle of the Seventh Century they were
naming planets for almost anything.
Anything, that is, but actual persons; their names were reserved for
stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the sun of Poictesme, and Beta Gartner, a
buckshot-sized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of
sight on the other side of the world, all named for old Genji Gartner,
the scholarly and half-piratical adventurer whose ship had been the
first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had
planets.
Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to
airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity.
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