Veyr-3

On Veyr-3 the ground hands out heat and pressure to anyone standing on it, and takes back the truth of anything built there, a little at a time. The Veyr have spent their whole history on the second fact.

Veyr-3 is the home world of the Veyr Basaltborn. This page gathers what the people's entry, the record's two Veyr pages, the one history a Veyr has given the Archive and the one chapter that quotes a proverb of the world say about the world, and adds nothing to them. The record holds no Veyr polity or Federation standing for it, and this page settles neither.

Heavy, Hot and Shaking

Veyr-3 is active basaltic volcanism, dense mineral aerosols, continuous micro-shocks, and a gravitational field heavy enough that human joints degrade there within a generation. Each of the four does work on everything there.

• The gravity is why a Veyr is a truss. Where human joints would go in a generation, a body that puts its load through one thick member is not available and a body that shares it among many slender braced members is (What It Will Carry). Their care in low gravity comes from the same place: force enough for Veyr-3 destroys a delicate assembly anywhere lighter.
• The volcanism puts heat and pressure at the surface, in quantity, permanently. High-energy materials processing was the ambient condition, and the Veyr had metallurgy before they had much else. Their oldest account keeps no story of a first fire, since nobody's name is on it (What It Will Carry). A volcanic world also carries caves as a by-product, tubes where lava drained out from under its own crust (Where the Weather Stops).
• The aerosol is suspended silicate that scours any moving surface. Veyr chitin resists it the way a glaze resists sand, and Veyr eyes trade resolution for contrast and motion in a medium that is never clear.
• The micro-shocks never stop. A finished surface is being eaten from the moment it is finished, and a joint set true at the start of a working period is not true at the end of it. In Oshek Var's words, the question at home was never whether a thing would move, only whether it would still be telling the truth after it had.

Precision Was the Bottleneck

So the world gave the Veyr fire for nothing and made precision the hard thing. Veyr engineering is a discipline of making things that stay true while the world tries to shake them apart. It is concerned above all with margin, tolerance, redundancy and the honest statement of a rating. Because instruments on Veyr-3 drift and materials do not, the Veyr calibrate by how a material behaves, not by what an instrument reads. One proverb from the world is on file only as a nearest rendering, the lattice knows before the surface agrees, and it stays marked as one (Refusal to Certify).

Veyr-3 is not hostile to a Veyr. It is simply the world, and the temperament it produced is composure, which looks like hardness only to those who have not asked. For a human it is one of the record's worlds that are habitable for someone and lethal to everyone else.

What the Record Does Not Hold

Veyr-3's star, its system, its distance from Sol and its place on the fold routes. Whether the numeral is a survey designation or a position in a system, and whose name Veyr is. Its surface gravity as a figure, the length of its day and year, and its moons. The chemistry of its air and aerosol. What else lives on Veyr-3, which Oshek Var says they have not rated. Where on the world any Veyr lives or was apprenticed, and any place-name. Any Veyr polity, kinship, social order or Federation standing, and who speaks for the Veyr at home. How many Veyr live there. How and when the Corps first met them. No Veyr word for the world, or for anything, is on file.

See also: The Veyr Basaltborn, What It Will Carry, Oshek Var, Qiren Tal, Refusal to Certify, Where the Weather Stops, Habitable, for Whom.