Lore24: April

"Village" by Sergey Vasnev

 

Continuing from March. Late again, and for the same reason. Not doing a great job of actually coming up with one thing every day, but hey, approximately seven a week ain't bad, right? And I'll redouble my efforts to do it correctly. (Starting tomorrow.)

April is the Gene Wolfiest month:

1. Duchess Thekla and Chatelaine Sophia are identical (?) twins; Sophia governs from their family seat as regent, while Thekla roams the stars with her comitatus in the torchship Farewell to Refinement, searching for who knows what.

2. The Continuum (aka "the union"; still not 100% certain about names) weapon manufacturer Charis produces firearms sought after all over the Pale.

3. Although the machine intelligence that ancient drug discovery depended on is now forbidden, drug manufacture is a simpler affair, and myriad formulas survive, some jealously guarded: recreational drugs, drugs to induce torpor for interstellar voyages, drugs to sustain the trance cogitors function in, and more.

4. A secret society called the Benthic Lance searches, in its glacially slow manner, for something it believes to be buried beneath the seafloor on an ocean world somewhere in the Pale.

5. The laws of the Empire (it's a capital E now, why not) are bewildering to outsiders, particularly visitors from the Continuum, but visitors are subject to the law all the same. Two frequent points of friction between empire and Continuum are amercement (payment or service demanded by a lord to settle a claim of trespass) and distrainment (when a lord simply seizes what’s owed, or what they feel is owed, by force). Via the process of replevy, fortunate or persistent petitioners can get their distracted possessions back in a court of law; the quickest, easiest way to resolve a demand for amercement is often just to offer one's service willingly.

6. “Adulterine improvements” are stations, ports, or other facilities built within a lord’s fief but without their approval. Some are hidden from view, tunneled into asteroids or the like, while others are brazenly placed in the far reaches of a weak lord's territory.

7. In most of the Empire, the commoners can be divided into the vassal minority (i.e., free persons; “citizens” in the language of the Continuum) and bordar majority (enserfed persons tied to their domicile and subject to an annual chevage by their lord).

8. Whereas in the Continuum the Ministries of Concordance, Memory, and Information labor endlessly to maintain mutual intelligibility of the universal language among their myriad worlds, recording and transmitting new coinages and correcting linguistic drift, the language of the Empire has fractured into a thousand dialects. The nobility all learn the same ossified, formal ancient speech, but the commoners represent a veritable Babel. On one planet—or on one continent of one planet, even—a vasal smallholder's plot might be a virgate; on another, the equivalent property is a sulong, and a virgate a unit of measure; on still another, the sulong is a unit of measure, a smallholder's estate is a carucate, and a virgate is the plot worked by a bordar.

9. Erre (or eyre) is a lord’s right—usually exercised on the emperor’s behalf by heralds, although vassal lords with subvassals are expected to perform erre themselves—to inspect the holdings of any vassal at any time. The lord or herald performing erre will convene a hallmote (i.e., a manorial court) and demand the fief's customal (i.e., an abstract of the customs of a particular manor) and extents (i.e., formal valuation of a given manor and its holdings).

10. In some parts of the Empire, the lord may impress their bordar subjects into service in the manorial household, whether as ancillae and famuli (female and male servants, respectively) or military personnel (the mayne or mesnie, i.e., the household guard).

11. Every century (as reckoned on Aaru), and in certain rare emergencies, all of the emperor’s direct vassals are expected to appear in court at Spire, an event know as the Assizes.

12. A palatinate is a fief whose lord exercises imperial powers as a proxy for the emperor; many systems ungovernably distant from Aaru are so ruled either directly (as in a march palatine) or via a high-ranking vassal lord whose seat is only a few light years away (as in a duchy palatine).

13. A pittancer is an officeholder, usually religious but sometimes part of a manorial household, who distributes alms and charity to the poor.

14. The names, structures, and makeup of military units raised locally in the Empire, either for in-system action or, in rare and dire circumstances, for some grand fossato, vary widely; they might be called banners, banda, minghan, or by any of dozens of other names. Basic unit sizes range from the low hundreds to several thousands. Some are all conscripted bordars, other exclusively vassals, many a mixture.

15. Everybody knows that the Rule forbids humans from crossing the Pale and leaving the Sanctuary, but there’s little agreement about whether Outsiders are beholden to the Rule, or to what extent it constrains them. Are they conversely forbidden from crossing the boundary? Are they permitted to enter, but forbidden from leaving? No one is certain.

16. The Judges, Arbiters, mischievous demons, or avenging angels imagined (or known) by some to enter the Pale and interact with humans are described variously: as luminous beings beneath human-like masks; as creatures of once-perfect whiteness soiled by their transit through these low domains, like dirty snow; as an incompressible mass of blinking eyes and howling mouths; as animate void.

17. In the popular imagination of the civilized (Ruled) systems, the Recusant Worlds are all in the thrall of abominable powers: tyrannical thinking machines, genetically modified philosopher-kings, hive minds. Such things do exist, or at least have existed, in the dark corners of the Pale, but the more mundane and much more common reality is small populations leading a hardscrabble existence, without the benefit of advanced technology whether proscribed or permitted.

18. It is possible to induce torpor in humans and safely hold them for years in a hibernatory state at temperatures near the freezing point of water, but if true cryogenic sleep ever existed, its secrets are lost. Tall tales are common in which ghost ships drift between the stars laden with frozen colonists, tens of thousands of years old, or survivors of lost ages wait in hidden vaults deep underground for some signal at which they will rise to lay claim to the Pale—or to gather their banners and assault the throne of heaven.

19. Missions on behalf of the Continuum outside its borders are undertaken by Commissars-Expeditionary and their adjutants—usually a troika representing the Ministries of Concentration, although larger (or, very rarely, smaller) parties are sometimes marshaled.

20. On Kaimana, near the heart of the Empire, the ducal seraglio grew so vast, over the course of countless generations, and became so inextricable from the functioning of the manorial household, that it eventually merged with the administration. The dukes receded into a figurehead position and eventually disappeared from public view entirely, living out lives of hedonistic bliss—one imagines—deep in their maze of a palace while a small army of courtesan-bureaucrats sees to the duchy's affairs.

21. Not all of the systems in the volume of space governed by the Continuum belong to the Continuum, strictly speaking. Uncoordinated and "less-coordinated" worlds exist at various points on a centuries-long timeline of gradual, uncoercive integration into the greater polity.

22. Interstellar piracy requires tremendous coordination and years of planning, and its execution is a long, lonely, dangerous enterprise. Pirate vessels coast for years at relatively low velocities to intercept torchships (which cannot afford to maneuver much, especially on long-haul voyages) near their destination systems or to pillage slowboats deep in the void.

23. The ecosystem of Berken is dominated by the feral descendants of several species commonly kept as pets long before the Continuum was established.

24. The proliferation in the Empire of cults around mystery traditions, oracles, and proscribed entities, so worrisome to the Commissars of the Continuum, is generally self-regulating. Little sooner than the rise of the Cathedral of Spring comes the advent of the Covenant Against the Cathedral of Spring, and the new faith ebbs with a tide of schism and theological recrimination. It is difficult, too, for even the strongest faith to leap from star to star, even along the banks of the River; proselytes seem to lose their way in the labyrinthine corridors of the great ferries.

25. A knightly cohort charged to reclaim a lost colony in the Chattra system arrive after a decade in transit to find that the herald's now 25-year-old report of murder and mayhem seems to have been mistaken—the supposedly extirpated noble house whom the emperor granted the fief (with whom none of the newly arrived knights is intimately familiar) is safely ensconced on their throne.

26. The ancients did cruel and degenerate things with artificial humans. Explorers have recorded ruins in which, it seems, lab-grown bodies were teleoperated in environments inimical to human life or its mechanical simulacra. Intense radiation, for instance, ruined even the hardiest clone bodies, but not so quickly that they could not serve for a few short days of labor.

27. On Bakayan, a tree grows whose fruit is so delectable that, fresh, it’s said to be cripplingly addictive. The preserves and other shelf-stable derivatives that reach neighboring systems are merely delicious.

28. Throughout the Pale, on almost any world with an environment even remotely resembling those in which humans evolved, one will find the near-universal rudiments of human civilization: goats and bamboo. A thousand strains of each exist on a thousand planets and moons, heir to all manner of genetic meddling across tens of thousands of years, yet still substantially resembling their distant ancestors from prehistoric Earth.

29. Traditionally, the Pale is understood to contain one thousand stars; in fact, it has somewhat more than a thousand star systems, many of which have more than one star, so that the total number of stars is perhaps half again one thousand or more. Nevertheless, the Pale is sometimes referred to as “The Thousand Suns,” and the Empire as “The Thousand-Sun Empire,” or simply as “The Thousand Suns” itself. Although the Empire controls, even notionally, not much more than half the Pale, it may indeed contain a thousand stars, or at any rate close to that number.

30. A researcher found to have been privately conducting illegal experiments in the field of machine intelligence has, disgraced and awaiting censure, apparently burned herself to death; the remains match her genetic record. Commissars-Detective of the Ministry of Safety suspect misdirection—and, if the human remains are the product of cloning, a conspiracy to assist and protect her.