Lore24: May

"Deep Castle" by Leon Tukker

 

Continuing from April.

1. A starship, especially a warship, "in yarak" is ready for action.

2. The Manubial Endowment was the period in Imperial history when the spoils of the Great Conjugation poured, decade after decade, back to Aaru and the other worlds at the heart of the Empire with the Emperor's fleets, creating an extremely unusual surplus, and diversity, of building and decorative materials and leading to a prolonged boom in the construction of monumental architecture and the flowering of many artistic movements.

3. Among the universal responsibilities of Commissars moving among the worlds of the Continuum is carrying genetic material from planet to planet in order to stock creches with genes both diverse and consistent throughout the Continuum, in order to prevent population drift.

4. Estrapade is a planet whose oceans are home to an extremely resilient halophilic bacterium engineered in times past to devour organic matter (and then lapse into torpor when no food is present). It is extremely unsafe to set foot in the oceans even briefly, and the inhabitants can't use plastic, polymer, rubber, wood, or any other organic compounds for the hulls of their vessels.

5. Folktales abound, and have since time out of mind, about manmade "gates" and wormholes that can whisk starships across light-years in the blink of an eye. Some tell that such phenomena can even carry people backward through time. There is no evidence for such gates' existence, but they are a common object of quests; seekers (or charlatans who would prey on them) often claim to know the location of a gate or door to an unplundered paradise world or into the prelapsarian past.

6. The Kritarchy is a volume of space at the dissolving margin of the Empire, surrounded by fallen baronies and ghost systems, where the laws of the Emperor are followed in absentia and the jurists who adjudicate those laws have become quasi-monarchic rulers.

7. Travel long and far enough and you are bound to encounter one story or another about a tower, vault, prison, space station, or other lonely site where a figure of vague but tremendous significance—a prophet, a sorcerer, a messiah, perhaps the Incarnate herself—waits or is held in hibernation, meditation, occultation, or perhaps merely mundane reefersleep. You might even encounter such a site, tightly guarded by a militant cult of some sort. What would you actually find if you penetrated their defenses and entered the place? One can only guess.

8. One of the many technological bogeyman rumored to still lurk in the far margins of the Pale, or to wait beyond its limits for those who would defy the Rule is the Maw—also called the Phage, the Eaters, the Many Mouths, and by other names. This is, in some tellings, a crude synthetic intelligence that gobbles up raw materials and mindlessly spits out machines and weapons for a long-dead economy or to fuel long-forgotten wars. There are other, more sinister versions of the tale.

9. Nearly all bordars and vassals in the Empire believe in the supernatural or paranatural, but the specifics of their beliefs vary greatly. All acknowledge that saints or wali existed in the past, and most attribute keramat and barakah to the nobility, or at least to the ancestors of the present nobility, but many take a dim view of any seeming magic performed by commoners in the here and now, decrying it as witchcraft or demonology.

10. The vessels that ply the mysterious paths of the River are called "baris" (or "barises," "barques," "barks," or "barges").

11. The River has many names in different cultures: the Dark River, Heaven's River, the Unreflected Path, the Shepherd's Road, the Road of Thieves.

12. One of the fundamental laws of the Empire is the Peace of God, which is meant to protect those who cannot (or must not) defend themselves, like children, peasants, and clergy, from violence.

13. The Grandfather Clades are the epihuman lineages that are known, or firmly believed, to predate the Rule and are considered true humans (as opposed to the latter-day abominations brought into being by Rule-breaking apostates).

14. The Rule forbids violation of the laws of causality and relativity, whence the near-universal ban on research into FTL technologies, and whence some of the uneasiness, especially among those most closely bound to the Rule, with the use of River barises.

15. Atavites are probably-mythical holdovers from the Age of Strife or before, apostate humans (or demi-humans, or post-humans) who cling to the wicked ways of the worlds that were. They are sometimes conflated with Anchorites, although most hold that the two groups are distinct.

16. There are important holy sites scattered around the Empire, mostly among its most central worlds, including quite a few in the vicinity of Spire; the Assizes are an occasion for the faithful among the nobility and their comitates to visit many important sites. A few especially holy sites are light-years removed from the Imperial seat, however, and the burden imposed by a pilgrimage to these makes undertaking one seem all the worthier.

17. One area in which the Empire's generally laissez-faire attitude toward cultural drift is contradicted is the language of the uppermost castes and classes; another one, closely related, is their formal dress. Court at Spire during the Assizes is a chaotic, crowded affair enough without a riot of bewildering provincial costumes making rank and station difficult to ascertain at a glance. Changes in court fashion happen only in the smallest details, and even then at a glacial pace.

18. Among the noble rulers of some of the march worlds most distant from Spire, and especially those dukes palatine responsible for governing multiple systems, it is customary to divide the nomarch's duties among more than two persons. Triplets are especially auspicious, but any set of three or four siblings (included adopted children) will do, in order to have one coequal nomarch to govern, one to carry out the erres and attend to martial matters (or even two to divide these duties), and one to attend the Assizes (the journeys to and from which may, across a distance of ten or twelve light-years, require the better part of a normal lifespan).

19. The Assizes are an opportunity for various important servants and officers of noble households to visit Spire and hold conferences with their fellows; many of the functions of the Continuum's Ministries of Coordination are accomplished, in a somewhat haphazard and piecemeal fashion, via these infrequent meetings. The tutors of the noble houses visit the Imperial archives and consult with one another; the quartermasters of their mesnies visit the halls of the Worshipful Company of Armorers.

20. On most of the worlds of the Kritarchy, it became customary for the sitting kritarch to nominate a successor; subsequently customary for that successor to be chosen, trained, and groomed for the role; and finally common for the successor to be the sitting kritarch's kin. On Alaka, however, circumstances led to a tradition wherein the order of succession is established by a grand examination of all the minutiae of the Rule and Imperial Law and the accumulated common law of Alaka. Any free person (and on Alaka, there are no serfs, although there are indentured slaves) between the ages of 15 and 45 is permitted to sit for the exam.

21. The Continuum does not have currency. What is needed is provided freely to all; what is not deemed needful is generally not provided.

22. A burly older man sits on a chest down by the docks, quietly but keenly watching the starport's foot traffic. He is lightly dressed, showing off his muscular body. He has no augments or prosthetics, but is heavily tattooed; many of the tattoos feature an ancient alphabet unfamiliar to the vast majority of travelers, and a language known only to a minuscule handful, perhaps only to the old man's kith and kin back home. The words—or are they initialisms?—VAQT and SABR are spelled out across his knuckles.

23. Among the gravest sins of the Machine Age, according to a common folk myth, was finding a way to drive down through the Earth into Hell and mining that dark place. Many variations on the story exist: that the people of olden times sucked energy from the souls of the damned, affronting the angels, or that they robbed riches from the King of Hell Himself, driving Him to bury men's cities in great earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

24. One widespread Redemptionist tradition holds that the Incarnate will not return until every instance of Rule-breaking (especially Rule-violating technology) in the Pale is eradicated. This event or process will be, or for some proactive cults is, called the Great Simplification.

25. Persistent malcontents, rabble-rousers, and troublemakers in the Continuum are eventually forcibly removed from the communities whose life and work they disturb, to be reeducated and resettled in a distant new home. As a rule, they are not seen or heard from again.

26. Starfarers tell of mysterious "cold colonies"—dead to sensors, apparently lifeless, but active and purposeful, if one knows how and where to look—that are supposed to be home to Anchorites, Atavites, or God knows what else.

27. Many Imperial systems have an outlying area—sometimes an asteroid belt, sometimes a marginally habitable outer planet or array of moons, sometimes an archipelago of stations, sometimes a region encompassing all of these—to which criminals and other undesirables are banished and where restive bordars are tacitly permitted to flee.

28. Independent interstellar traders, who don't have access to the Company's wealth of information, cogitative power, or limitless resources, are uncommon but influential, moving as fast as possible and dealing in high-value goods unlikely to have their markets disrupted by cultural change or the rare burst of technological innovation. Weapons, which meet these criteria and cannot be moved on the River in large quantities, are a perennial favorite.

29. Some of the worlds of the Continuum are closer to Imperial systems than they are to the rest of Continuum space, and particularly far from the core worlds of the Continuum. Those that have resources sought after in the Empire are (relatively) frequently visited by traders, making them an ongoing nuisance to the Ministry of Safety.

30. The arrival of a Commission vessel in a Continuum system, especially a far-flung one, is one of the most exciting events of any given decade (or several-decade period). Although some citizens go into service that takes them to stars, and a few are occasionally removed from their worlds by Commissar Peacekeepers or ship out with independent traders (or even pirates), for the vast majority, the only opportunity to see another world is in the complex calculus of population exchange. The Ministry of Disposition is forever balancing the needs of the myriad Continuum worlds for genetic and cultural interchange against the desires of individual citizens to migrate (or to stay put) and attempting to predict the future needs of distant worlds, especially those in less-coordinated regions. As far as possible, the Executive Council tries to meet migration needs with willing volunteers.

31. On Brontide, generations of conservationist barons enclosed more and more land as preserves to be cultivated as Earth-like wild places, pushing their bordars into ever-smaller regions and imposing increasingly draconian laws on them, including banishment to the outer system for any family that had more than one child. Today, the Baroness Kassa and her household are nearly the only people living on the surface; even her broader administrative staff are largely restricted to orbital habitats.