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circular-time · 9 months ago

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Ten years ago, @spacetimeconundrum drew this great fanart illustrating a scene I wrote set around a peculiar little asteroid which had just set the astronomy world on its ear. Astronomer Felipe Braga-Ribas and his team announced they had detected two rings around 10199 Chariklo, a Centaur — an asteroid beyond the orbit of Saturn. Until Chariklo, astronomers had thought dwarf planet Haumea was close to the lower mass limit needed to hang onto a stable ring system.

I haven't followed subsequent research— I assume they've sorted out the physics. But I'm having huge FEELS tonight over photos of fuzzy, distant blobs. From a 2023 NASA blog post about a new team's observations of Chariklo using the James Webb Space Telescope:

There she is. Chariklo, which until now I've only seen in my mind's eye and STC's fanart, Ten years later, she's still holding onto her rings.

That's Chariklo passing in front of a distant star. I don't know which of those flickers is the dimming of the star's light as the rings pass in front. But astronomers have ways of sifting through the noise (it helps that the shadow from the rings will be identical on each side, in reverse order). From this data they were able to calculate the rings' size and composition.

They're water ice. Which is what I imagined in the fic I wrote ten years ago, right after the rings were first discovered. Scene excerpted below:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Doctor looked over the seals of Nyssa’s suit, nodded, and tapped a patch on his shoulder, reflecting as he did so that her excessive prudence was starting to rub off on him. “Comm check.”

“Loud and clear, Doctor. Shall we?” She hitched up the tool bag slung over her shoulder, glanced towards the doors to orient herself, and flipped her sun-shield down.

“Lower your opacity. We’re a long way out from the sun. Are you sure you don’t want me to carry that?”

Her smile was audible. “The weight will be negligible outside. In fact, I’m more worried about floating off.” She paused to adjust her visor controls.

“No chance of that, I can assure you, even with a running start. 10199 Chariklo is a respectable 250 kilometres across, rock and iron, plenty of mass. I couldn’t bowl a cricket ball into orbit.”

“But you might be able to bat it over the horizon?”

“Now, there’s a thought,” he said, glancing towards his coat hanging on the hatstand. That was the trouble with spacesuits: never enough pockets. “You know, I may have to try before we leave.” He reached for the door control. “After you. First footsteps on the surface of a pristene— Nyssa!”

Stepping out into a low gravity field was always a tricky manoeuvre. Nyssa had not been the first companion to learn that lesson the hard way, with an ignominious face-plant during a past excursion. This time, she kept a hand on the door and reached out with one cautious toe to probe the footing. Her glove slipped as she leaned out, caught off-balance by the satchel's loss of weight but not momentum. With a surprised cry, she fell forward and then... up. The Doctor lunged as she made a flailing grab for the top of the TARDIS. Before he could reach her, her boots had drifted out of his field of view.

“Careful!” she called down, determinedly calm, although he could hear her breathing quicken. “Escape velocity is under five metres per second.”

He almost smiled, despite her grave predicament. Trust Nyssa to fall back on science to ward off panic. “Steady on, I’m coming to get you.”

“Latch onto something first!”

“I know.” Berating himself for never having installed a ring under the console, he drew out a retractible cable from his suit's midsection and snapped the carabiner onto the hatstand. Turning the stand sideways, he stepped out and pulled the doors to behind him. Then he looked up. Vertigo mocked his inner compass. Nothing outside the TARDIS made sense.

Uneven ground sparkled in the light streaming out of the crack between the TARDIS doors. Chalky powder and ice crystals yielded like caked sand underfoot. The irregular but marked curve of the horizon and its bright surface showed him at once that this was not Chariklo, the rare ringed asteroid they had come to see.

Overhead, the sky was black and strangely solid: a vast opaque canopy scalloped like obsidian or a lump of coal, pockmarked with sparse grey impact craters. Nyssa was almost invisible against that dark backdrop, a glimmering ghost barely illuminated by light reflected from the ground. With no recognizable markers to serve as reference points, it was difficult to tell that she was moving away from him. Instead, she appeared to be revolving slowly in place, suspended a score of metres overhead. As he sought to determine her course and speed, she began to drift across the other oddity in this minimalist environment: a wide ash-coloured band, fuzzy along its edges, that stretched overhead like an impossibly straight cirrus cloud extending as far as the eye could see.

Registering this bizarre view with one small corner of his mind, the Doctor quickly calculated the velocity he would need to overtake her— just. Too much speed, and his momentum might cause a deflection when they collided, kicking her beyond his reach. Yet every second was precious. He reached up to brace against the TARDIS overhang, bent his knees and pushed off. Like a second leaf falling into the current of a sluggish stream, he began to follow in her wake, keeping his eyes fixed on her boots as she twirled above him.

“Either you landed us on the wrong asteroid,” Nyssa said, sounding strained, “or Chariklo’s suffered a catastrophic impact. Whichever it is, next time, you can have the honour of planting the first footprint on an uncharted world.”

“We can discuss inaccuracies in the navigation library later,” he said. With a sinking feeling — ironic, under the circumstances— he began to suspect that he had missed the right vector by a fraction of a degree. His trajectory was not tracking hers precisely. As they rose metre by metre, he saw that he was likely to pass her just out of arm’s reach. “Don’t panic,” he said, trying to turn sideways so that she would be able to grab his legs. It was no use, of course. There was no air resistance, nothing to push against to change his orientation.

“I’m not,” she said. Perhaps he had been addressing himself. “But Doctor, I don’t think—”

“I know,” he said with forced cheer. “Poorly bowled. I’ll have to climb down and try again. Wait here. Won’t be a moment.”

“How long is the safety line?” she said, her clipped tones betraying the fact that she already knew the answer.

Another of his incarnations might have sworn. Rising at a little under a metre per second, he had already payed out at least seventy metres. The remaining thirty were rapidly running out. There wasn’t enough time for him to reach the ground and make another attempt before she was out of range. There was only one chance left. For his next try, he would have to untether himself, catch up to her, and throw her back towards the TARDIS. He might have just enough strength to reverse her course. There would be no margin for error.

“Doctor, you mustn’t!” she said, and now she sounded afraid.

“I knew I should have brought a cricket ball,” he muttered, reaching for the switch to retract the safety line.

As he glanced down, he heard her gasp. That small sound was a knife’s cold slide between his hearts. “Nyssa!” For a dreadful moment, he thought she had released her helmet to head off his own self-sacrifice. Then he realised her course had altered ever so slightly. She was spinning towards him. The tool bag was floating away behind her shoulder.

Straining against the stiff fabric of his suit until the joints creaked, the Doctor reached out and flung his arms around her right knee as she drifted past. “Got you!”

There was a moment’s cautious scramble as he reeled her in and hugged her against his chest. Helmets banged together with a painful crack. Before they were quite stable, he felt the tug and jerk as the safety line checked his upward motion. He had caught her with only three meters to spare.

“Nyssa, hook onto me.”

“Right.” Despite breathless agreement, she clung to him with arms and legs like a panicked feline fetched out of a tree. He forced himself to wait, listening to the pounding of his hearts, until she could will herself to let go, trusting his grip while she drew out her own emergency line and clipped it to his belt. They both let out an explosive breath in relief as the carabiner locked into place. Twin puffs of air blasted their microphones with a rude burst of static, and they found themselves shaking with laughter.

“Well done,” he said, when he could speak calmly again.

“Sorry I lost your favorite rock hammer,” she whispered, slipping her arms around his chest as far as she could reach.

“Yes, well, I'm sure Iain would be delighted to know of its final resting place,” he said, a little muffled. His suit’s air recycling system had revved up to clear condensation inside his helmet.

“Wherever we are,” she scolded.

“About four hundred kilometres from our target,” the Doctor said, finally allowing himself to contemplate their surroundings. “Not a bad miss, considering the limited data. We’re at Chariklo. Or rather, under her.” He tapped Nyssa’s elbow lightly and pointed up, through the grey dusty lane hanging above them, to the pitted black surface some four hundred kilometres above. As they revolved, he caught a glimpse of stars beyond the limb of the humble rock below them.

“I don’t understand.”

“We landed on a moon,” the Doctor said, excitement beginning to return. “That’s what’s maintaining the integrity of Chariklo’s ring system: a shepherd moon, less than ten kilometres across, invisible to earth-bound instruments. Possibly more than one.”

“Ah.” Presently, her rigid embrace loosened. “I‘m... I’m all right, now. Thank you, Doctor.”

With her tether as insurance, they eased away from each other until they were clasping hands. They spun together in a stately waltz, drinking in the lonely vista. The lumpy, misshapen little moonlet dangled a hundred metres below, lightly frosted from the icy dust blown off by the rings. They were floating midway between the rings themselves, smoky Chuí arching beneath the unnamed moon, Oiapoque hanging overhead like a narrow beach without sea or land. Far above, the dark, craggy mass of the parent asteroid formed the ceiling of this monochrome expanse.

Abruptly, the ground below them blazed into brilliance as they cleared Chariko’s shadow. Refraction added a hint of iridescence to the frost and the rings as the angle of sunlight shifted.

“Well now,” the Doctor said, “that was worth seeing, hm?”

“Oh, yes,” she breathed.

Eventually, the spellbinding moment was broken by Nyssa’s soft giggle — residual nervousness, he suspected. “The TARDIS is following you like a puppy. She’s floated free of the surface.”

“Well, she’s very attached to me.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Nyssa gave his hands a tight squeeze.

Chariklo’s Shepherd Moon

Based on Circular Time’s lovely Five/Nyssa story This Bird Has Flown.

#fifth doctor #nyssa of traken #big finish #other people's art #classic who #chariklo #astronomy #space

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