Hearth is the Puppeteer homeworld and one of the planets of Fleet of Worlds. It has a population of around one trillion and is covered by arcologies, most over one mile tall. It generates so much waste heat it no longer requires a star for warmth.[1]
From a distance the oceans of the planet look as black as the surrounding space, surrounding continents that glow like sunlight. Across the ocean there are points of light that look like stars but are actually floating factories that helped keep the planet warm with their waste heat.[1][2]
For centuries, the location of the Puppeteer homeworld was a great mystery. No entity in Known Space outside the Puppeteer race was aware of the location, despite extensive surveys. Nessus tells Louis Wu this was because the wrong stars were searched as it was (accurately) thought that Puppeteers evolved under a yellow dwarf sun but by the time the searches were happening their sun had expanded into the red giant stage and the planet itself had been moved to an outer orbit.[1]
The only probable instance of a human finding Hearth is Jinx-born pirate Captain Kidd who discovered the Puppeteer home system by accident and returned in the ship Puppet Master to rob inbound Puppeteer vessels rather than pursuing a formal blackmail arrangement. Kidd claimed the Puppeteers' home planet orbited a "red giant, undersized", in the vicinity of coordinates 23.6, 70.1, 6.0. Before dying, he passed this location to Richard Schultz-Mann of Wunderland.[3]
Puppeteers were willing to pay large sums of hush money in order to suppress even trivial details about their homeworld. In 2642,[4] it was discovered that the Puppeteers' homeworld had no moon, information deduced as a result of the failing of a General Products hulls — GP hulls are not impervious to tidal forces because the Puppeteers have no experience of tides.[5]
The Puppeteers had to make some drastic alterations to their home system, during their history, as excess heat from extreme industrialization and overpopulation was rapidly making their planet uninhabitable. They moved their planet further from their sun to lessen the effects of global heating, with the help of technology purchased from the Outsiders.[1] Eventually the system was rearranged as the Fleet of Worlds.
The planet is circled by an array of stepping disks which allows Puppeteers to cross the whole world in a matter of minutes. The native life forms of the planet are now restricted to parks as elsewhere the land is completely urbanized.[2]
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Ringworld
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 The Ringworld Engineers
- ↑ A Relic of the Empire
- ↑ Official Timeline at Larryniven.net
- ↑ Neutron Star