Its obvious from the book, and from its logic that there are pan-versal structures. The most common is the Smaller Multiverse like a line of worlds that runs from Chaos to Order, and almost all have a high magical bias. Also, every story is true somewhere so the story goes, and pan-universal structures are not exactly common in fiction, but they do exist.
And let me drop that thread for a second.
One of the evils besetting Old Earth was an abundance of competent, intelligent, and ambitious people. There were whole groups of elites suited to running things as they were, but only one group could run things.
In truth, what they were lacking was compassion and vision. An opportunity was placed before them to rise above, to make a grander, and greater land than any that had been seen before. Instead, they opted for stasis, for doing things as they'd done them before.
Which left the various groups of elites out of power. Civil war threatened, and this was not a world in which civil war might be survivable. Loitering remotely piloted vehicles armed with Fusion bomb pumped lasers, and hypervelocity beadpistols had replaced fighter jets and tanks. A man could control an rpv with voice and eye clicks, and with his hand hold a pistol that could shoot five thousand rounds per minutes of beads that accelerated due to airflow before breaking apart at slightly below escape velocity. A few seconds flow of beads, a mere pulse, could reduce an old-style tank to confetti. A 'fuse-laser' could turn a city block into a puddle in a fraction of a second.
And war was coming.
So all the sides were happy to accept exile for the losers. Earth spent itself nearly into bankruptcy to send the Five Ships out. The propaganda was of brave voyagers. The truth was War or Exile.
What happened on Old Earth afterwards? Some thought it turned inward, and became cautious and a touch repressive. Others thought that the war they had tried to dodge came to them anyways. No one thought that Earth would send any more into space in the next several centuries as much of the wealth of the world had gone with the exiles.
Of those who fled into space, there were four powerful factions, and one weak one. The powerful naturally took the best for themselves, and the nearer stars, and the finest of Earth's museums, and set themselves up. What happened to them is uncertain.
At least one must have suffered a total societal collapse all the way down to using bone for weapons because flintknapping was too complicated. One may have created its own stellar system wide enterprise as it was interested in the asteroid belt and the great wealth to be found there....or that system might be dead with space factories and habitats half-built and the makers starved. There was a slight chance of one developing into a local star federation, but who might do that was uncertain. One would have suffered a fall, and then begun climbing back up, and was no doubt thinking of travelling the stars like the Ancients did in a few centuries. They had fallen as far as steam power, but now, a mere fifty years later, they had aircars.
But, our colony, the weakest faction, had to be satisfied with the leavings. They got some wealth, some seeds (which mostly did nothing for them), but the Mona Lisa and David were already spoken for. So too the great space habs that Earth had spent nearly three decades building.
The weakest faction were firm believers in the value of the wise, the sensitive, and the strong to guide things. And so they set out with a group, and with another group of refugees that had been taken from refugee camps around the world. Again, they had the leavings of these camps as the others got to pick first. After all, each elite needed its followers.
And thus Old Earth got rid of elite troublemakers, and emptied out its refugee camps at the same time.
Upon arriving in the system they named High Frieresc after their leader's home city of Frieresc back on Old Earth, they began to study. Happily, they found a functioning biology that seemed as if it would be friendly to humans.
The sheer mathematical impossibility of this did not bother them as they were Darwinists at that time. Later they changed, but not by logic.
However, there were problems with the system. It was a trinary system, which had not been obvious to them back home to them. The three suns produced enough heat to bake an egg in its shell on the planetary surface. They also produced enough radiation to thoroughly scramble a genetic code.
They considered leaving, but then they found that their stardrive, which was rated for ten thousand lightyears, and had gone barely five hundred had maybe a hundred left in it. It seemed Old Earth had a few tricks up its sleeve. Perhaps Earth had sent them out in the hope that they would die, and had managed to help things along.
This revelation produced a coup d' etat. The security forces took over the Ship. They argued that insufficient paranoia, that they had not been listened too enough, that weak-willed leadership had contributed to this disaster. They had a point as the former leadership had been dithering for a month after the scope of the problem became apparent.
Things got moving. Exploration teams were sent down because as King Johannes the First (nee' Security Chief Clark Johannes)oointed out, they had to live here, so they might as well find out how.
The silvery surface of the planet turned out to be leaves, with a very high aluminum concentrate. They lost a shuttle when something exploded underneath it. Things seemed hopeless until the King ordered a nuke strike on the 'surface. The launch was meant to clear back enough space to peer through with radar. Instead, it caused an planetwide explosion at the level of the silvertop. Much later, they found out why, and realized that the silvertop explodes on its own every fifty years or so.
The radar went down, and down and down, and just saw more, and more tree trunks and branches. Eventually, several hundred miles down, the radar energy was attenuated enough to stop returning a discerible signal. Which meant that the planet was a solid forrest at least three hundred miles deep with an atmosphere of two hundred miles above the 'silvertop'.
Botanists suggested that the silvertop was a protection against the excessive radiation and heat. Biologist suggested that humans could live somewhere. Military types pointed out the fruits hanging from some of the silverleaves that read to sniffers as nitroglycerine.
The fruits were what had killed the shuttle. And since the suns gave so much energy, it seemed that the trees stored some energy in long chain, high energy molecules aka explosives.
The problem with landing a shuttle was a very difficult procedure involving dropping men on ropes with tools. The Firstmen (who later became important, and were known as the knightly Order of the Axe) built a platform for shuttles to land on from the native trees, and from the Ship material.
People started to be ferried down. This was a significant problem as the Ship had been designed to land, and unload its gorging holds. However, no one could think of a means to land the Ship with its multi-million tonne mass. The Launch Deck on Earth had been made of carbon-carbon chains which were tens of thousands of times stronger than the rather sturdy trees of the Wood of High Frieresc.
MORE LATER....
