Lore24: March

"Research Station" by László Szabados

Continuing from February. A little late because I was slacking and, when the month ended, some of these entries just said things like "uplifted cats?" or "oxygen tax."

1. The planet Cipactli’s extremely eccentric orbit means that winters are brutal and exceptionally long. Much of the population spends the warmer seasons storehousing food and supplies; nearly all shelter underground through the cold.

2. The margins of the empire, decades away from Aaru, are in a condition of perpetual uncertainty. From Spire, one never knows whether a given peripheral system is loyal, restive, or entirely independent of the empire. Confusion abounds as knights arrive from different directions simultaneously with warrants to reclaim a lost system in the name of a new Marcher House or an old one thought extirpated.

3. It would be beneath the dignity of the imperial nobility to put their lives in the hands of inscrutable alien intelligences; they do not not travel by the River, or if they do, they do so in the utmost secrecy, courting disgrace. The emperor rarely leaves Spire and almost never leaves Aaru. Marriage arrangements between houses in far-flung systems begin at, or sometimes even before, conception. Consorts-to-be frequently spend their teenage years aboard a torchship, speeding toward nuptials arranged in their infancy.

4. Most clippers (placeholder name?) carry at least three shuttle-type craft suitable for moving personnel and materiel between the ship and a planet’s surface, and capable of operating in various atmospheric and gravitational conditions. Some also carry a complement of smaller, heavily armed vessels purpose-built for space combat.

5. The union strictly enforces gender and sexual equality. In the empire, gender dynamics vary from system to system; among the nobility, cognatic inheritance is the norm, but a gendered division of labor is common in which a male (whether the ruler or the ruler’s consort) goes abroad as a knight and his female counterpart hands civil administration at home. The emperor surpasses gender and is always referred to by plural pronouns (the royal we, in first person, “Their Imperial Majesties” in third person). For anybody else to claim nonbinary gender is considered an affront to the emperor, and interaction with nonbinary functionaries of the union is a regular source of diplomatic friction.

6. Because the two halves of a ruling dyad will usually spend most of their adult lives apart, the preference is for siblings to jointly rule imperial fiefs. Twins are highly favored. In some realms, an only child is likely to be passed over in the line of succession; in others, it is accessible for such an heir to take a cousin or even an unrelated noble from a different family as consort.

7. Heralds of the Imperial College travel the empire auditing heraldry, sigils, records of ancestry, and so forth, often with a retinue of knights. A herald will establish a temporary court upon arriving a system and expect to be visited by all the local aristocracy—an event called a Visitation. [h/t Tristan Zimmerman]

8. In the union, mail deemed valuable and permissible by the Ministries of Memory and Information goes from planet to planet in the care of commissars; in the empire it is sometimes entrusted to knights but more often to imperial heralds. Everywhere, and particularly on the River, much mail is carried by independent couriers.

9. The Treaty Worlds are the counterpart to the Recusant Worlds: planets and systems that do not recognize imperial rule but have signed treaties or other agreements with the empire respecting imperial rule in the emperor's own current or historical territory.

10. Among the Recusant Worlds, a thousand-year Cold War between inner and outer planets in one system has led to divergent societies that barely recognize one another as human.

11. In one imperial system, in the orbit of a vast gas giant, the most Earth-like moon comprises the private preserves of various nobles—it started out as an entire private world but has been subdivided a thousand times over by inheritance. Season by season, light snow or cherry blossoms or golden sunlight drifts quietly down on the tidy hedge mazes, gardens, Gothic cloisters of beautiful estates. The entire subject population lives on other, less hospitable moons, crowded in underground warrens, sheltering from inimical atmospheres, oppressive radiation, and unbearable temperatures.

12. The maphteah is a quasi-mythical artifact of uncertain form and function associated with a whole family of prophecies and sought by questing knights, cultists, adventurers, and others.

13. The Outer Rim Company is among the oldest OASEs, and is by far the most massive and influential. Chartered to terraform, colonize, or reclaim non-Treaty worlds within the Pale and to extract valuable resources therefrom, the Company operates on an almost geological timescale, its schemes and machinations stretching beyond the limit of any but the most exotically enhanced human lifespan. A law unto itself on the colony worlds it administers and in the trade lanes among them, the Company has ancient structures, rituals, and traditions to rival those of the imperial court.

14. Arafel, the fog, the cloud-darkness: a poetic name for the infinite volume beyond the Pale.

15. A cogitor lattice is essentially a primitive (but authorized) computer network composed of human minds. Cogitors operate in a pharmaceutically induced trance, receiving information from screens and  headphones and sending on to one another a flurry of signals in response.

16. The Company is rumored to have one or more planets in the farthest reaches of the rim where a carefully calibrated hostile environment is meant to produce, by selective pressure across countless generations, one or more perfect races of hardened, fearless, deadly warriors.

17. Sophisticated analog sound recording devices are ubiquitous; many people keep records or send messages by voice memo. There are also analog machines that can rapidly record written information on a filament scroll with a series of rapid rotating and counterrotating movements. These are difficult for even educated people to use skillfully without extensive training.

18. Belief in keramat—signs and wonders, supernatural mental and physical abilities—is almost ubiquitous in the empire and common in the more remote parts of the union.

19. Imperial coins have a number of unique qualities to prevent counterfeiting, including a radiological signature that can only be replicated by the Imperial Mint on Spire—all legal tender, everywhere in the empire, was once minted in the capital.

20. The deflector array is the sine qua non of knighthood in the empire: a linked group of arcane devices that transfer kinetic energy to incoming projectiles to alter their trajectory, defending the wearer against missile weapons. They are best defeated by luminal weapons or by heavy melee weapons, but can be overwhelmed by very large or very fast projectiles. Usage is tightly controlled; the internal calculator that recognizes incoming trajectories and communicates with the deflection projectors would almost certainly be considered a violation of the Rule in any other context. Production in the empire is tightly controlled by the imperial household; it is not clear whether the union retains the capacity to manufacture them at all, or whether they simply have a stockpile. Commissars on assignment sometimes carry them, but they are not seen as the essential mark of the vocation as they are for imperial knights.

21. The earliest time of the Pale’s history, the Settlement, is recalled in myth and legend as one of hardship and earnest labor. The imperial era, beginning with the Great Conjugation and the Founding, ended the chaotic Age of Strife. That time of war and destruction was preceded by a little-known era when the lords of the Pale attained heights of technology not seen since—and likely violated the Rule as a matter of course. Artifacts of this Middle Period (or Missing Period) are highly sought after, whether to be destroyed, sequestered, used, or abused.

22. The ancients of deepest history and the lords of the Age of Strife experimented with all manner of strange and wondrous technologies. Many attempts were made to impart wisdom, reason, and speech to man’s brother creatures from Old Earth; some relicts of these experiments survive in various corners of the Pale.

23. Space combat is fought at such distances that relativity presents challenges. The most effective weapons fill a large conical volume with small, extremely high-velocity projectiles; the object is to maneuver just close enough to be able to enclose the enemy in a cone such that no possible maneuver could, in the seconds or minutes it takes the missiles to travel, bring their ship beyond the field of fire.

24. Though the Lords Director of the Outer Rim Company are notionally nobles (albeit their titles are not heritable), the myriad captains, secretaries, factors, and other agents who represent the Company are not. Nevertheless, they seem always to observe the imperial nobility's taboo against travel by River. In fact, although the Company does possess some torchdriven clippers, much of its traffic is carried by sailcraft. Rumors persist about the beings that crew the great ships on their sometimes centuries-long voyages: Are they entirely unmanned ghost ships? Staffed by long-lived epihumans? Operated, perhaps, by forbidden machines?

25. One common legacy of now-forbidden genetic engineering is scramblejack, a fast-growing vine that can be trained up simple bamboo trellises. The plant pulls minerals from the soil with extraordinary alacrity and efficiency, quickly forming a tough, rigid, skeleton onto which other materials can be daubed or bound to create great large, complex, durable buildings. The sinuous organic forms of such buildings are ubiquitous in younger colonies and impoverished rural areas.

26. Child labor is forbidden in the union, but it is a fact of life in much of the empire, particularly in agricultural societies. To escape a life of toil and drudgery, young people are often quick to volunteer for military adventures, and recruiters are happy to take them very young, given that it sometimes takes years to move an army to a combat zone. In the union and in many single-star independent polities, the empire is characterized as being sustained by child soldiers.

27. Not all who leave their dreary homes seeking adventure among the stars end up in soldiery; many find themselves bound in indentured servitude, owing insupportable debts for the journeys they took away from their homeworld and sinking ever deeper into debt as they are charged for everything they need and don't own, including breathable air in the hostile environments where they are often taken to work.

28. Combat aboard starships and space stations tends to take place at very close quarters, under disorienting conditions; firearms can be blinding, deafening, and apt to send users flying. Automatic weapons are certainly used, especially for area denial by defenders who can brace against the recoil, but the hallmarks of zero-g combat are more “primitive”: daggers, bolos, nets, and the like, intended to entangle or disable enemies, or to decisively puncture their critical suit systems. EVA combat relies more, at least when they are available, on sophisticated luminal weapons and micromissiles.

29. Lasers and micromissiles rub shoulders with swords and bolos in specialized combat, but mass engagements downwell revolve around simple millennia-old chemical explosives: artillery, slug throwers, and rocket launchers.

30. Although autonomous drones operated by machine intelligence are most strictly forbidden—they are the very image of the horrors banned by the Rule—sophisticated machines operated by remote control (known variously as poppets, effigies, and ectypes) are used (and sometimes accused of being automatons or other abominations).

31. Cults and secret societies abound throughout the Pale. In the union, the Ministries of Coordination are endlessly diligent in rooting out these threats to concord; in the empire, they are generally left alone, even if they are responsible for the most odious blasphemies against the empire and the imperial rite, so long as they do not disturb or seek to disturb the Rule. Those groups that do attempt to subvert the Rule are hunted by imperial inquisitors and commissars of the union alike; they will even join forces, on operations beyond the borders of the empire and union, to bring justice to such malefactors.