From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Leagues and gravity
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 00:26:37 -0600

Andy Robertson opined:
[snip]
>When his hero got to Blue, he started to play with the idea that Blue/Green
>just *might* be Ushas/Lune.
>
>It is only at this point that we learn that Green comes even closer to Blue
>than the moon does to the Earth today - something which may signal that
>Green is a torn-away moon.
>
>
>I think Blue/Green are in such unstable, temporary, orbits because they are
>a young configuration - one which was formed when Lune was torn away from
>Ushas by the White Fountain.

And Grant Peacock added:

>I think you are surely right that the orbits are unstable, even if the
force
>exerted by Green on Blue is a small percentage of that exerted on Earth by
the
>moon.  This means that the arrangement is a new one.  For those who believe
the
>Blue=Ushas theory, what must have happened was that the white fountain
grabbed
>Lune out of orbit as it came lumbering in and made into a planet.

I don't want to get into the Blue=Ushas debate, but Lune didn't go anywhere.
It came up as usual--only much brighter--the first night after the flood,
and seemed to behave itself in its customary manner thereafter. See the last
paragraph of Chapter XLV of URTH.

>Does the white fountain literally move through space into the system, or
does it
>just magically appear?

It moved through space--Sev watched it get brighter as it came nearer.

-Roy


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