Describing the Chasm Chain

 The Chasm

Think of Chasm not as a feature on a planet, but as a phenomenon; a device to travel from planet to planet.

Each planet on the Chasm Chain has this geographic feature: a canyon or gorge some 70 to 75 stories deep, between 2 and 8 miles long, and between 50 and 300 feet wide at bottom. Sides are extremely steep if not sheer; ends are perpendicular to the surface of the planet. Most are in temperate climes.

From outside the canyons, they look like short, unnatural slots in the surface.

From inside the Chasm, the canyon appears to continue indefinitely, because each end is connected to the end of the next in the chain.

How the Chasm came to be

After several hundred years of star flight, humankind had inhabited about 50 worlds aside from Earth, none of them possessing any kind of sentient life (that was recognizable as such, at least)

First contact with another intelligent being proved embarrassingly to be also the last contact mankind would have, at least in the foreseeable future, because the Others, as we called them, only came by to say get off our lawn, as it were. Seemed that our space flights, technological marvels we thought them to be, were only messing up some vast, unimaginable experiment that they had been working on for millennium. We must stop the flights immediately, they said. (They fused every warp engine we had and encased every facility that produced them in something so clear and hard that nothing so far tried has so much as scratched a surface no one can see anyway.)

“But” we protested weakly, “how will we get to our colonies?”

Well, they may have been as advanced over us as we were over dinosaurs, but perhaps some bleeding-heart faction of them set up a protest to ‘Protect the Wildlife’, because they responded (in a few years time, I suppose it seemed immediately to them) by providing us with a magical version of the Habitrail; and we call it the Chasm.

Actually, they were quite generous, since they not only connected the 50 inhabited planets, but also included exactly 146 more planets of like condition, that is, pretty close to Earth normal, although a certain amount of variation in gravity, rotation, atmospheric conditions, biosphere, etc. was bound to be had. (You could stand in Chasm on Windstrom in broad daylight and across the line on Peter’s Planet it would be pouring down rain in the middle of the night.)

Connections

Some of the worlds’ Chasms had Y’s in them, and thus connected three worlds. After years of careful mapping, explorers finally came up with a model for the interconnections. It looked like a double-helixed Horus. The reason there were 196 planets then became obvious, the helix could be divided up into 14 sections of 14 planets each. It turned out that there were two main strings intertwining, on which every second planet possessed a Y-canyon. Each Y had one leg that led to the other string, some in the same section, some in the next section and some jumped two sections at a time.

Each planet was thus immediately and physically connected to at least two other planets, at each end of its Chasm section. Naturally this posed a security problem for a lot of governments, until it was found that the ‘gateways’ could be shut by either world. Many of the more paranoid ones lined the edges and insides of their canyons with military firepower and had gates and toll stations to limit entry. One planet, LockJaw, whose population wished never to have to deal with anyone else used explosives and hauled in truckloads of dirt and rock to fill in their section of the Chasm. For decades, this watchful attitude prevailed among the governments, but treaties and agreements and common sense finally brought most of them to agree to allow pretty close to if not fully free access for commerce and tourism. By this time, many communities had grown in the bottoms and walls of the canyons themselves (up to within 50 feet or so of the ends; there the walls were encased in that impenetrable stuff) Many of these communities were free trade zones, and essentially outside the governments of the planets they were on, although police and other services were provided, sometimes by a section of the military. 

 

A rail system was devised linking most of the planets on the Chasm chain. On the more inhabited planets, this was roofed over to become an ‘underground’, on others; the train was open to the elements. [See MagneTrain]