Lore24: February

 

"Nausicaa Meets Jedi Temple" by Swang

 

Continuing from where I left off in January. Already starting to sneak back in to revise things.

1. The observable exterior dimensions of riverboats rarely seem to correspond to the size of their interiors. People have been know to part ways upon boarding a riverboat and wander its corridors for a week or longer before reuniting.

2. The Ministry of Memory keeps voluminous records about all the worlds and peoples of the Pale; commissars on their way to a planet, especially one off-River, are briefed at great length by the Ministry’s local offices.

3. For various reasons, some known and some not, the largest moons of Jovian planets were highly prioritized for terraforming. Through the Pale, miniature Earths glitter and glow under the watchful eyes of orbital complexes dense with mirrors, shades, atmosphere processors, and other devices more specialized and arcane.

4. Some riverboats take on human crew, who are then typically tasked with passenger-facing work on board: assisting passengers, managing cargo, performing janitorial duties, and so forth. Some say that human crew members receive their orders from machine terminals, other that they serve under alien officers. Few claim to have ever met a Captain, but it is well known that orders filter down to the lowest crew from such a potentate, at least on some riverboats.

5. Every child and grandchild of the emperor is styled "prince" or "princess," and because the nobility of the empire can live for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, there are an absolutely tremendous number of them. A few, via marriage between the imperial family and the reigning nobility of vassal realms, have found themselves ruling other worlds or haunting other courts, but the vast majority clutter up the imperial court on Aaru, doing very little of any worth.

6. The identifies of the "seven great angels" described in the canonical story of the Fall and the Exodus to the Pale of Sanctuary are hotly debated by theologians and scholars alike. Not only is their nature unknown (some believe them to metaphorically represent seven species of intelligent aliens whom humanity individually subjugated, but who rose up together to overthrow their masters) but Scripture is unclear about whether all of them rebelled, and which did and did not, assuming that some remained loyal to humanity (or the throne of heaven, as it were).

7. The most common method of interstellar travel, for trips that cannot be made on the River, is by clipper (placeholder name). These enormous vessels typically use antimatter-catalyzed proton-boron fusion torchdrives, often assisted by ram scoops, laser-pushed lightsails, or magnetic sails for deceleration, to sustain modest thrust for years at a time. Even with hyper-efficient drives and assistance from scoops, sails, and laser arrays, they must carry an enormous quantity of fuel, far in excess of the mass of all other components combined, and yet the massive shields and radiators they must carry also contribute to a size and mass entirely out of proportion with their small payloads. Incapable of maneuvering easily within a star system, they will usually "park" in a planetary orbit and launch smaller, far nimbler parasite craft.

8. Many imperial and ex-imperial planets have extreme caste hierarchies, with entire categories of labor or realms of human activity relegated to certain oppressed groups. Some in the uppermost castes will not deign to use their hands in public; much more common is a taboo observed even down to the lower middle classes against stooping in public, or indeed touching the ground or taking anything directly from the ground. The notion of an "upright person" is taken very literally.

9. Vessels superficially akin to riverboats pass through the Pale occasionally, charting their own mysterious courses. They usually arrive and set off again unexpectedly and far from any inhabited place, but occasionally they appear close to a settled planet or station and are boarded by the curious or desperate, who, if they don’t get off again quickly enough, disappear forever when these strange craft depart.

10. At the heart of the horizon-spanning sprawl that is the Imperial City, there is a great and rare outcropping of bedrock, creating a table mountain that rises above the sea, the fields, the slums, and even the tops of most of the towers in the various "downtown" clusters that speckle the illimitable city. This is not the oldest part of the city, but it is among the oldest, which makes it very ancient. Here are many palaces, residential and governmental, and here, literally above all, is the Spire of the imperial residence, which reaches even higher into the heavens than the table mountain on which it was founded. The Spire, or simply "Spire," is what people call the entire city, when they do not call it by its other names, and is frequently used as a metonym for the emperor, the imperial court, Aaru, the imperial house, or the entire empire.

11. An old custom still observed in most of the empire and points beyond dictates that one must not pass by an acquaintance or kinsman without engaging in a series of reciprocal greetings and pleasantries. Much of the empire has simplified this series, relieved particular castes of its burdens, or limited the full extent of its use to certain holidays and other auspicious occasions, but in places, the old ways prevail, and a simple walk through a town center might be delayed for hours by the observance of these rituals. To circumvent the inconvenience, those on urgent business (or, on some worlds, nearly all going about their daily affairs) wear masks that nominally anonymize them and relieve those who pass them of the obligation to greet them.

12. Thalatta is a watery world in the union whose population mostly lives on fishing, farming, and herding, but which is also home to a number of prominent universities and research institutes. It is considered one of the most ideologically unreliable worlds in the union, but is also a source of pride and an invaluable asset.

13. Together with the Ministries of Concordance, Memory, and Safety (the Ministries of Coordination), the union's executive council is composed of the heads of the Ministries of Disposition, Information, and Harmony (the Ministries of Concentration).

14. The colors of the empire are stark and bold: red, white, purple, and black. The colors of the union are estival and autumnal: green, gold, and orange. Blue, associated with long-lost Earth, is everywhere a symbol of faith, hope, and forbidden knowledge.

15. Among the Recusant Worlds—many of them—the Rule is weaker, treated as superstition and hidebound tradition, not immanent law. On some worlds it is distorted or barely known. Here, the otherwise-forbidden is often part of daily life: cybernetic modification, genetic tailoring, thinking machines. These worlds, as a general rule, do not long endure.

16. The mainline religious tradition in the empire is the Rite of Redemption, which holds that the emperor is a divinely appointed steward or “custodian” set to govern the Pale while the Incarnate God gathers strength in occultation; on the day of the Restoration, the Incarnate and the emperor will together lead the armies of the righteous to reclaim the throne of heaven. Various heresies and heterodox variants exist, most of them disputing the emperor’s role in the divine plan, sometimes vociferously (the Temple of Universal Redemption, for instance, holds that the “pretender” must be thrown down before the Restoration is possible). Some quibble about the identity of the Incarnate or the conditions of the Restoration, but all agree on the fundamental structure of the universe and the purpose of the Pale.

17. The principal religious tradition, or group of traditions, in opposition to the Rite of Redemption is the Rite of Ascension (sometimes called the Rite of Transcendence, although other sects consider the term gravely blasphemous). These heterogeneous groups maintain that the Pale is a kind of celestial proving ground—whether for individual souls, for groups or clades, or for all of humanity varies according to different teachings. Although the specifics vary a great deal, most Ascendant faiths hold that some figure analogous to the Redeemers’ Incarnate exists, but that it is a demiurge, a false divinity—either an Arbiter set to watch over humanity as they undergo their trials or a hostile entity determined to mislead them.

18. On the edge of the Pale there is an airless world of vast rock-hewn cities of unknown origin, older than human memory. Travelers avoid it.

19. There are rumors, as old as the empire and so numerous and persistent that many assume there must be some truth to them, of powerful beings (angels, demons, machine intelligences, alien gods) lost, hidden, or imprisoned in vaults beneath oceans, glaciers, trackless alien jungles. One of the most enduring rumors tells of an entity of incomprehensible power trapped in some deep underworld bastion, bound by seven ancient seals, that will grant wishes to those who descend to meet it, or perhaps only to those who would free it. Or serve it.

20. Among the Recusant Worlds is a planet of women (mutants, perhaps, or an obscure genetically engineered clade) who reproduce by parthenogenesis.

21. On Belphegor, which has a rotational period longer than Old Earth's year, migratory alien forests creep around the higher latitudes at a steady, plodding pace, staying forever in the light of the sun.

22. Many alien ecosystems were wiped out, or irreversibly altered, by human colonization thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. Even where alien life is gone, however, its leavings can be hazardous to humans. Some of the skeletal or fossil remains of long-extinct alien creatures cause hallucinations, personality changes, and permanent brain damage to humans who spend too long near them.

23. The Peregrine Flocks are an entire migratory society (or perhaps several unrelated societies) drifting from star to star in slowboats driven by the interstellar wind.

24. New Haven is a mostly abandoned city crumbling into the cracked and drying mud of a seabed ever farther from its planet's receding, shrinking ocean, acidic and rich only in jellyfish and a few hardy species of cartilaginous squid.

25. Just outside the Pale, and observable from within its borders, is a system once clearly densely settled by an advanced technological civilization—it is littered with decaying space stations, satellites, and other orbital infrastructure—but now silent and dead; it all looks, as far as instruments can perceive across the light years, like material of human design.

26. Near or beyond the limit of the Pale is a planet once settled by eugenicists banished from the ecumene. They dissolved into schismatic chaos as smaller and smaller splinter sects pursued their own visions of genetic perfection. Little remains of the life they spawned, obliterated by engineered plagues the cultists unleashed on one another, but the ruins they left behind teem with forbidden treasures and unspeakable dangers.

27. Operational Autonomy by the Seal of the Emperor is a status given to free cities, stations, or entire planets and certain corporate entities in the empire; OASEs answer directly to the emperor and are independent of any local lord's authority.

28. Here and there in the far reaches of the Pale, and even orbiting unvisited stars among the core systems, one finds a world scarred and twisted by exotic weapons of the Age of Strife but still inhabited by the descendants of those who endured those weapons’ power.

29. On the fringes of the empire, ambulatory cities rumble across the surface of a hostile planet following ancient programming or their own volition; being, or at least seemed to be animated by, thinking machines, they are considered dangerous, heretical technology—but where else can their citizens go?