a beach house in rigel…
The plan is to build a high-end boutique villa overlooking the warm waters of the West Andulasian Ocean, that will be both a family getaway and when we are not there a business opportunity for our local business partners to rent to tourists, mostly human of course. The question everyone asks me is, why ?, what ? and after a brief pause, why Rigel ?
. Actually it was about a decade and a half ago, I did a three month economic reporting job on five, and after the conferences ended I was reporting on, we explored the coast, (the we, being my wife and family). We wanted to go somewhere we could afford, before taking the ship back home to London.Earth, somewhere. without any religious issues, (this was just after 28.6.2876) and somewhere with a nice climate. We’d never been to Rigel or the coast before, and we had no connections there. Actually I don’t think more than a few thousand humans had been to the coast before. Rigel remains a poor planet, but it was even poorer back then, still recovering from more than half a century of colonial and civil war. Yet the Rigelians were fun, optimistic and friendly. The land we traveled through was more beautiful than the cities which were still being rebuilt. It was a lovely and exhilarating trip, with my wife Zosia, and children who were 7 and 9 at the time.
. The coastline we explored was about 1000km long, a lot of beaches, quite a few of which we swam, enjoyed and explored during that holiday. One particular place and its beach stood out, a 10 kilometre north facing beach on an unnamed peninsula that points towards the deep ocean, it’s about 200Km from the regional capital with an unpronouncable local name that translates (roughly) into Herasinkli. It was on this beach, whilst I was paddling in the water and watching the dolphin like animals chasing the flying fish and catching them in the air, that I wondered why there was so little development here. Just a few self-catering villas, beach bars, and a handful of holiday homes.
. Rigel. might still make you think of the dangerous civil wars, but apart from some local varieties of maleria like diseases that vaccination protects you from, the area is clean, mostly dry and safe. My children have always walked around by themselves in perfect safety. I became increasingly obsessed as I investigated further. It became clear that the coastline hadn’t been developed because Rigel had been torn to shreds, caught between planetary, system and intersteller politics, the local species-ism had been exceptionally difficult as the local system was awash with failing ubermensches, the continuing intersteller image of the planet was of starving people hiding as chaos and war passed by. But as this faded away, Rigel began to hope that it could stop being a backwater people avoided.
. It was whilst sitting in one of the bars drinking something strange and red that I thought it was time to invest. I’m a journalist specializing in economics and politics, we had never even thought of owning a holiday property before. Somehow Rigel seemed affordable. even if it is 780 light years away — and it is pretty much untouched. Some further investigation found us a Yela neuter called Barra who had built a holiday house. a few years previously. but now needed cash and wanted to sell. A few months later, and we were transferring relatively small amounts of money from the HSBC to Barra. We were the excited owners of a second home on Rigel. We called it ‘H0me SLD’ — and put a placard up when we went back the next year. That’s about when the building project began. The local manager Arth’r and his partner ’S’s’n became friends and after shortly after that partners in the business. Rigel’s economy has exploded since then, infrastructural (mining, new airports and spaceports) and extrastructural development as external investment was encouraged, including of course from Earth, it’s an Earth corporation which is. removing the hideously dangerous and defunkt Space elevator before it falls down and destroys the planets biosphere.
. Having agreed a 50/50 partnership a few years ago, Arth’r and I managed to negotiate building rights on a nice site high above the beach. The site had previously had an unfinished and abandoned holiday. home on it from a long time before. Through Arth’r, I had come to understand the labyrinthine rules that required that. if you wanted development rights. as an extra-system investor in Rigel, you had to do the actual investment and supply external system capital, since the planet has an economy designed to develop jobs and help the local (planetary and local) economy. Our building plans and investment schedule were signed off by the Herasinkli Mayor’s office, which incidentally turned out to be the sleepy local town that was first visited by an Earth ship half a century or so before.
. Our deal with Arth’r is typically modern, we supplied the capital, whilst Arth’r and his family supplied the local expertise and management to enable the building of two six bedroom villas., both facing out onto the Ocean. The design is simple, bedrooms. and living rooms are arranged on one level around a central courtyard with a pool. There is also an external area that faces out to the Ocean. The materials are all local, the external structure is made of local bricks, mostly ground coral mixed with the local aggregates and baked. The roof tiles are solar collectors, and the floors made of a local green wood which keeps the local flying insects away… The pool has an image of Sarfanski (another rough translation) the partner of the first president of Rigel who sadly died just after the colonial and civil war ended, it’s an image of her waving a carbine. Strange how so many cultures have invented carbines…
. Anyway a date for your diary, in late June the property build should be completed and we’ll be traveling to Rigel on the direct 36 hour flight to visit Arth’r and family and see what the villa looks like…. The beach calls.
(plagiarized from the Guardian and FT)
