Chapter 8

"Keep in mind that the orbit of Jupiter would be inside some of the red supergiants," April said. "And that big stars have big planets. A couple of them have planets bigger than the star Rigel ... and those are some of the the inhabitable planets. Their gas giants are stars in waiting."

"Big?"

"It takes eight and a third minutes for light from Sol to reach earth. Some of these in the zone planets don't see the light generated from their stars until next year ... and that's the inhabitable ones. With these big stars, everything is to scale.

"Think of earth as a quarter and NML Cyngi is 721,875,000 times that big," suggested April. "Or ... the sun is 11 feet in diameter and Cyngi is three miles. These big ones don't last very long though ... Sol is 13 billion years old and expected to last maybe seven to nine billion more ... Cyngi might last four or five million before Nova and collapse into a yellow dwarf ... she may end up just like Sol ... we speculate that Sol was a supergiant before she collapsed."

(For those of you who like that sort of thing, I recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NML_Cygni#/media File:Comparison_of_planets_and_stars_(sheet_by_sheet)_(Jan_2015_update).png/ It makes some VERY BIG things very small.) WIKIPEDIA leaves me speechless sometimes ... this is one of those times.

"Let's go visiting," suggested Gary. "We might get a feel for the place."

"Remember," said April. "We're still in the Milky Way. A great many galaxies have much bigger stars."

Gary said, "You said we weren't going to find anything suitable in our Local Galactic Neighborhood and probably nothing in the Vega Super Cluster."

"Doubtful," said April. "Let me make some calls."

"Calls?" asked Vee.

April laughed, "I've been hanging out with earthlings too damn long. Contact ... I'm gonna make contact."

She did. Nicest thing about the speed of thought is we were there before she finished her chat.

Now, dear reader, you need to go to the chart I mentioned earlier because the star was the size of Arcturus and the planet was the size of Sirius.

Oddly enough ... the beings on the Sirius sized planet were bipedal ... in a manner of speaking. They strode along on two appendages. April was flea sized. We might have made a wart on a gnats ass ... but probably not.

We visited what they called a University. April kept us connected and translated. April is a built in translator.

"Earth ... we call it earth," said the professor.

"Oh ... that? It's the sun," said the student, "Why? What do you call your home?"

"Earth," said Vee, "And our star is the sun."

"Strange," said the student.

"Why?" asked Vee.

"Your conveyor tells us that all the inhabited planets are called Earth and the star is the sun."

"April?"

"Yes, Gary," she responded, "Gary, I know what you're thinking ... there's just nothing else that even comes close to their word. Some of the more primitive planets have other words ... but they all mean the same thing; The place we live is Earth and the warm round ball in the sky is Sun.

"The really primitive planets have thoughts that I can't explain because my brain doesn't have a term of reference that fits. We're not going there ... they have even stranger habits."

The professor posed a question and April answered.

"I know ... but not everyone is as advanced as you. You are on the cusp of interplanetary and they are just learning how to plant grain to brew beer, it's going to take centuries before they figure out how to write so they can make beer the same way every time."

"That bad?"

"They haven't realized that someone is going to have to watch the grain grow."