Lore24: June (?)

From "Chasing the Lightship" by Les Edwards

Continuing from May, and yes, I’ve fallen behind a bit! I scrawled a few notes for this project during my summer peregrinations, but haven’t yet gotten around to fleshing most of them out. Will I catch up? Who knows. I’ll try!

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1. Because photonic weapons are one of the only reliable ways to harm someone protected by a deflector array, they are tightly controlled in both the Empire and the Continuum. Commissars of the Continuum almost always have a laser cannon or two at hand; knights of the Empire consider them unseemly and dishonorable, but the emperor’s household infantry are well-equipped with them. A hold full of such weapons is a dangerous and immensely valuable asset for any independent trader.

2. Trokhos is a warm Earth-like world (very much like Earth in its orbital period and its gravity), slightly less than half covered in water, that occupies the innermost orbit around Gamma Chrysantae, a K6 subgiant (2.67x the radius and 1.65x the luminosity of Earth’s sun). Trokhos is home to hundreds of millions of people; the majority are bordars who live at an essentially medieval technological level, fairly evenly distributed in small farming communities spread across the planet’s ample landmass.

3. There’s another terrestrial planet, Kheramos, in the circumstellar habitable zone of Gamma Chrysantae, merely half an AU beyond Trokhos. It is larger, wetter, and much colder than its sister world, and wracked by intense volcanism. About two-thirds of its surface is covered in water-ice. There are some research and manufacturing facilities that benefit from the low temperatures, geothermal power, and abundant water, but the punishing gravity means travel between surface and orbit is prohibitively expensive. Fewer than a million people are counted as permanent inhabitants (although at least they all have access to advanced technology). The atmosphere is thick but breathable, at least for short periods; long exposure is toxic.

4. Beyond Kheramos are an asteroid belt, two dense rocky worlds, and two large ice worlds. An archipelago of ramshackle habitats, prospecting bases, research outposts, asteroid mines, “free ports,” and the like are sprinkled across and among these.

5. In the orbit of the outermost planet is a station known as the Alabaster Citadel, an Anchorite redoubt that, a few centuries ago, suffered an explosion that cracked its seemingly impenetrable skin, allowing wreckers to pry their way inside. They found a vast necropolis: The station’s inhabitants had turned nearly every inch of the interior into a maze of catacombs, the dead carefully stacked along every corridor by the thousands upon thousands. The last had laid themselves to rest centuries earlier, and the station had persisted unchanging until one too many automated systems gave out or malfunctioned and a major accident finally occurred.


6. Trokhos had a fairly sophisticated native ecosystem dominated by bryophyte analogues, but Earth-origin life has generally overtaken (or been imposed over) the indigenous flora and fauna. Areas remote from human activity—undersea, near the poles, in isolated deserts and mountain valleys—are home to the most robust native biomes.

7. The hardiest indigenous lifeforms on Trokhos, or at least the surviving indigenous life most visible in human-dominated areas, are a class of invertebrates called hispids, ranging from the size of a fist to that of a medium-sized dog. They are slow-moving creatures with thick carapaces that, in most species, are covered in fine, stiff spines that grow so densely together they resemble fur.

8. Trokhos has long been a world of rigid social order and Byzantine laws, although a great deal of change has come in the last century, ultimately set in motion by House Essa’s great project: a vast high-speed rail network connecting every major settlement and site of economic activity on the planet’s surface. Six generations of nomarchs down to the present duchess, Halyna Essa, have utilized an endless rolling corvée of bordar labor to undertake this and other great public works.

9. Corvée teams are assigned labor quotas but also recognized and rewarded (as individuals and as small groups) for exemplary service. Many are rewarded by being elevated to vassalage, given license to leave their land and seek employment elsewhere. Many receive positions in the growing civil service (as railworkers, in the militia, etc.); many others embark on new careers in the urban private sector.


10. This long-running and increasingly dramatic growth of a free middle class has led to rapid urbanization, substantial social and political upheaval, and a “Trokhene Renaissance”—a flowering of arts and culture. Ex-bordars bring their handicrafts and folk traditions to the cities; rich old families patronize young artists, trying to outdo one other in appointing their estates and diversifying their social circles.


11. The original planetary capital, Approdo, was built at a site selected for its proximity to the equator, to fresh water, and to a deepwater port; there was no consideration given to the possibility of the urban population swelling into the millions. Neighborhoods and sub-cities clamber up and down cliffs, ridges, gullies, and ravines and along a jagged coast. The old spaceport, a small affair, is near the city center and the seaport; the far larger “new” spaceport (centuries old at this point) is well to the south, near the enormous, ever-growing rail terminus.

12. The Essas have long eschewed the heat, humidity, and chaos of Approdo, preferring their mountain roosts and forest lodges in higher latitudes. The original project for which the corvée was instituted was a railway from the new spaceport to a regional capital in the far south, Bukola, built at the behest of one duchess Cervine, who hated to travel by air; the duchy’s seat was transferred there several generations later. The immediately previous duke, Halyna’s father Robor, officially moved the capital a second time, to a small planned city (Roborea) in the mountains east of Bukola.


13. Even from orbit, it’s plainly visible that there’s a lot of high-intensity activity going on beneath the surface of Kheramos; enormous amounts of waste heat are dumped into the otherwise-frigid oceans in various locations, creating large ice-free patches that are visible for space with the naked eye, at least when the weather is favorable. Rumors abound.

14. Copestone is the one “city,” if you can call it that, on Kheramos. A few hundred thousand people live in a low-rise sprawl of sealed habitats that hive the ice around the planet’s solitary spaceport.


15. The romantic cliche of the wrecker crew has them making a lonely, dangerous, years-long delve into a lost system, but most wrecker activity involves shorter jaunts into abandoned or forbidden regions of inhabited systems. An independent captain with a torchship capable of making safe, relatively swift passage between stars is more likely to position herself as a salvage merchant, doing a circuit of semi-civilized systems where wreckers are picking the bones of lost worlds or derelict stations, bartering for their finds, and then taking those goods to market on richer worlds.

16. Gamma Chrysantae is the rare system from which long wrecker delves are launched on a fairly regular basis; several decivilized systems lie within five or ten light-years, and the outer system is perpetually abuzz with activity as crews head out into the black or return with their hauls. Smuggling, illegal trade, unreported recovery of proscribed artifacts, and other related phenomena are a constant headache for the duchy’s small local fleet. Even the fastest torchship burning at an acceleration difficult for its crew for bear takes days to reach the outer planets.

17. The Trokhene nobility have a strong taboo against eating tubers, bulbs, or corms—anything dug out of the soil—and a consequent prejudice against those who eat such things, whom they disparage as “dirt eaters” or “filth eaters.” Onions, garlic, and potatoes are staple elements of the bordar diet nearly everywhere on Trokhos; their social “betters” make much of the supposed stench of these foodstuffs. Conversely, bordars rarely get the opportunity to eat seeds, nuts, or the flesh of vertebrate animals, which are seen as the province of the high-born.

18. The small but growing Trokhene middle class is at pains to imitate the eating habits of the nobility (and avoid those of the peasantry), although they often struggle to afford a balanced diet. Conversely, progressive-minded elites and the rebellious young scions of the nobility are keen to shock their peers and elders by sampling the vibrant, intoxicatingly aromatic cuisine of the poor.


19. Less ironclad than the taboo against tubers and bulbs, but growing in strength as the nobility seek to distinguish themselves from the burgeoning class of civil servants and from those who live off-world, is a disdain for anything grown in water—paddy rice, certain berries, anything grown hydroponically. A schema associating foods with the classical elements has proliferated: Those associated with the “low” elements, earth and water, are unfit for noble hands, which should touch only those associated with the “high” elements, air (the fruits, nuts, and seeds of trees and upland grasses) and fire (cooked meat).

20. The Condolent Inquiry is a sect that has cultivated and curated an extraordinarily ancient body of knowledge (the Lucubrations) encompassing the thoughts and ideas from all of human history known (or believed) to be most calming and comforting to the human mind. They labor to condense and hone these ideas; perfect their expression in all the languages of the Pale; and promulgate a calming, healing, mantra, now widespread in various forms, which the Inquiry calls the Litany of Solace.

21. The wrecker torchship August Moon is presently on its way back from a delve into Beta Chrysantae. The Essas’ fastest warship, the Apologue, is being prepped to intercept her for a customs inspection upon her return.


22. Unsurprisingly, nowhere on Trokhos is a more fecund hotbed of political activity than the railroad, which now connects nearly all of the planet’s largest settlements and employs, or has employed, a substantial minority of all the planet’s inhabitants. The Order of Railway Employees is the most powerful vassal-dominated organization in the system, and its radical offshoot, the United Railworkers, the only organization of any power or note at all in the system to include bordars. 


23. The crust of Trokhos is rich in metals, and there are particularly large, easily accessible copper deposits near Approdo. Some finished copper products (including artwork and electronics) are exported from the planet, but the supply far outstrips the demand—after all, copper is found, even if not so abundantly or so easily, on every world of the Pale; much can be mined from planetary rings and other objects accessible in microgravity. Trokhos, consequently, has a rich tradition of metalworking for local consumption. Copper and copper alloys are seen in nearly every kitchen on the planet, even in poor bordar households.


24. Copper alloys are also frequently used in construction, particularly in Approdo itself—hence its nickname, “the City of Copper.” Brass lampposts line the streets and bronze statuary dots the parks and squares. Copper domes gleam atop new construction; verdigris gives the ancient manses of the upper classes their characteristic signifier of old-money authenticity.


25. “You were born in a small village on a pleasant backwater world. For most of the year, the hundred other villagers were your universe entire. From time to time—to buy, to sell, for pilgrimage—you went to the nearest proper town and moved among a hundred times a hundred people, and this, already, strained your power to grasp. Perhaps you traveled and found that a hundred such towns made a commonwealth, and a hundred such realms made a whole world—a small word, and insignificant, but a hundred times a hundred times the limit of your comprehension. There are a thousand worlds in the Pale, many much larger than yours. You could live a hundred lives and travel every day and never see them all, even from a distance. It is easy to think of our Sanctuary as an impossibly vast space—yet the space beyond is infinitely vaster, as the Pale is to your village.”


26. Solar and wind supply the vast majority of the electrical power on Trokhos; bordars and some poor vassals in rural areas use local peat for heating and cooking, but the cities are fully electrified. The absence of fossil fuels from the native ecosystem means that liquid hydrocarbons are beyond the budget of nearly all individuals and most organizations. Most vehicles larger than bicycles are battery-powered, including nearly all aircraft not intended to reach orbit. Airships, microlights, and EVOTLs ply the local airways.


27. The lands around its inland seas are fertile and relatively densely settled; the more sparsely peopled Trokhene interior contains vast deserts, rugged mountain ranges, steppes, and enormous stretches of seasonally arid hills and plains, studded with baobabs and other hardy trees.


28. Honey is one of the most important products of the agricultural hinterlands, both because nearly all Trokhene cuisine, regardless of class or geography, makes heavy use of it and because the nobility make extensive use of it for cosmetic purposes, including as a depilatory—a custom that has been enthusiastically adopted by the burgeoning middle class. Flowers, too, are a ubiquitous crop, harvested for pigments, spices, fragrant oils, and more.


29. Before the rail network reached its current extent, most heavy transport across the surface of Trokhos was carried by barges along an extensive system of canals. These still carry a great deal of commerce as a supplement to train traffic, and many of the railbeds follow current or former canal routes. Several major cities, like Moagem and Terzihan, grew up along the canals as regional hubs for the collection and transshipment of honey, spices, perfumes, handicrafts, and other valuable goods.


30. Bukola never became a major center of commerce or industry like Approdo, Moagem, or Terzihan, but many of the most prominent Trokhene families moved their seats there for the sake of proximity to the ducal residence. Now that the planetary capital and its concomitant administrative facilities have moved to Roborea, the city is reclining into genteel irrelevance. The former middle-class districts are half-abandoned and two-thirds overgrown, but the hilltop estates ringing the city center still play host to lively parties, dances, and polo games. The city plan for Roborea does not accommodate rambling country estates, and a Bukola address still has tremendous cachet.