Across the Stars

"The Laboratory" by Nick Stath

Those who do not trust their minds and souls to the inscrutable alien engines that follow the courses of the River; or who will not stoop to travel aboard them in the company of recusants and riffraff; or who simply must travel to destinations where the River does not flow—these must avail themselves of machines that obey the laws of time and space as we know them. Even the finest such vehicles struggle to cross the incomprehensibly vast distances between stars at a rate compatible with the rhythms of human life and society. The nearest stellar neighbors are months or years apart at the speed of light, and longer at the accelerations that manmade machines can accomplish and human bodies can tolerate.

Some cross these distances in enormous generation ships, which may be as large as small moons. Others hope to see other worlds in their own lifetime, and opt for speedier travel. “Slowboats” are so called in relation to their fastest cousins, but solar sailers can reach astronomical velocities, as much as a tenth the speed of light. Even the shortest voyages take decades, of course. Accommodations can be made.

Those with the greatest need to swiftly cross the void, however, and the greatest resources, travel aboard mighty torchships, which blast their way from star to star at constant acceleration, turning a journey of decades into one of mere years. These enormous warships bristle with weapons, sensors, and thrusters, but the vast majority of their bulk is given over to fuel storage and equipment for collecting and refining new fuel at any destination without dedicated support facilities. A torchship often launches with fuel amounting to 90% of its mass, sometimes even more.

PCs, if they are not having picaresque adventures aboard a generation ship that functions as an entire self-enclosed campaign setting (or braving the depths of a baris and experiencing the non-Euclidean weirdness of its interior), likely have a torchship at their disposal. This is how commissars of the Continuum and knights of the Empire speed their way on missions and quests across the Pale. But even a torchship accelerating at 0.3 g must spend long, lonely years in the empty spaces between stars. Much can happen in this time.

* * * 

You always feel unwell, swimming up out of the blank fog of torpor. When you take command of your faculties and clamber out of your cryopod, though, you sometimes find that things have indeed gone wrong:

1. Some part of your body has seriously atrophied or lost function. You will need a prosthetic limb or artificial organ to replace it.
2. Some of your memories are lost or corrupted. You don't remember things quite the same way your companions do.
3. Your personality has changed in some way, subtle or dramatic. Brain scans indicate no physical change, but others are unnerved.
4. They told you that you wouldn't dream during torpor—but surely you did. You are haunted by lingering nightmares, vague but vivid.
5. You have aged abnormally; you emerge from torpor a prematurely elderly person, with unwelcome new aches and pains.
6. The ship hasn't reached its destination yet. Perhaps it's still accelerating; perhaps it's adrift or spinning. You must investigate.

On a 6 above, what has gone wrong that caused the cryopod's systems to rouse you from torpor early?

1. The pod itself is malfunctioning (or perhaps all the pods are). You need to fix the defective equipment before you can reenter torpor.
2. Somebody else in the crew is experiencing a pod malfunction or a medical emergency and needs to be awakened and aided.
3. The ship has gone off course. You need to manually correct it, and may need to tinker with the automated navigation system.
4. Something has collided with the ship, damaging the hull, the thrusters, the sensors, or more than one of these. You'll have to make repairs.
5. Alarms are blaring. Intruders! Saboteurs among the crew? Stowaways? Or have boarders somehow managed to penetrate the hull?
6. Nothing seems to be wrong at all. You double-check and triple-check, but it was just a false alarm…right?

If PCs are awakened from torpor and need to spend more than a few days attending to repairs or other tasks, they might run out of emergency supplies and have to jury-rig some kind of equipment to produce nutriments and drinkable water from the life-support system. Tall tales abound of desperate torchship crews unable to return to their own pods who murdered crewmates for access to theirs—or to cannibalize their bodies.

Run River

"Alien Construct Interior" by Alan Dickinson

 

I didn't really stick with the whole Lore 24 thing last year, but the meta-setting I was fleshing out there continues to rattle around in my head. The basic idea, again, is a distant future where an Orange Catholic sort of taboo against “thinking machines” and other wickedness precludes transhumanism, artificial general intelligence, and advanced computer technology in general. No artificial gravity or FTL travel either—or at least none that humans can control. As long as we're willing to stick to one solar system (or can have fun with years-long time jumps as characters blast their way from star to star at high subluminal speeds), we've got the makings of some old-fashioned (and obviously very Dune-flavored) space adventures.

If we need to break those rules and do a little FTL travel, though, it ought to be strange and to obey inscrutable rules that the humans in the setting can't understand. To meet this need, I came up with “barises,” ancient or alien vehicles that superluminally follow a semi-mappable set of routes called “the River.” Inspo for what the vessels, and the journeys, might be like comes from Indrapramit Das, Dan Simmons, Alastair Reynolds, and above all Gene Wolfe—the ship from The Urth of the New Sun is the main referent here. You want to climb aboard a freaky, possibly demonic, contraption that uses paracausal space magic to violate the laws of physics? Have some tables to roll on!

* * *

What is the exterior form of this baris?

1. A tower of some impervious material that stands at the center of a great stone circle on a windswept plain.
2. An orb of ancient metal, its pitted surface carved or stamped with obscure symbols.
3. A gleaming doorway that stands shimmering in the open, with no visible means of support.
4. A cylinder or oblong peppered with blisters and antennae, looking rather like a conventional starship.
5. A sinuous nautiloid shell seemingly carved from opalescent stone.
6. A tree-like organic form with gnarled roots and wide-reaching branches.
7. A fractal concatenation of luminous crystals in myriad bright colors.
8. Something like a bird or a seed pod or a primitive oceangoing ship: a graceful body amid a fluttering storm of sails.

What is the nature of its coming and going?

1. Imperceptible. From one moment to the next, it is simply there, out of nowhere. Just as suddenly, it is gone again.
2. It seems to condense from an infinitely diffuse cloud of particles, then dissolve again into dust when it departs.
3. It appears as a single minute point, unfurls itself to its full size, then retracts again into a minuscule singularity.
4. It warps in from an infinite distance and compresses itself into a comprehensible size, then stretches away again to infinity.
5. It arrives with a tremendous flash of light and heat and, if in an atmosphere, a deafening roar. It leaves with similar spectacle.
6. As the hour of its coming approaches, it begins to be visible from the corner of one's eye. After its going, its echo fades away.
7. It crashes in and out of our reality like a wave, its facets spilling together and breaking apart until they resolve into stillness.
8. Light warps and bends around the space where it will soon appear or has just departed. A void awaits it, or remembers it.

What is the interior structure made of?

1. Rough stone. Some pocked and porous, some ridged and folded, some hard and glossy as glass.
2. Naked metal. Ribs, struts, columns, beams, decking. Uniform or variegated. Riveted or welded or seamless.
3. Raw concrete. Monolithic, soaring. Surfaces polished smooth, ridged, or dimpled.
4. Conventional space-age polymers and ceramics. Stark white or cheerily colorful. Smooth curved planes or tessellated tiles and panels.
5. Wood. Forced into molds or planed into lumber or gnarled, tangled, and free. Living or dead, bleached or stained.
6. Other, stranger organic compounds. Chitin, bone, flesh. Oozing, pulsing, trembling, respiring.
7. It's unclear. Parts of the structure seem to be invisible or are not connected to one another.
8. Roll d6 twice and combine the results.

How is the interior decorated?

1. It's inlaid with gold and other precious metals and stones.
2. Heavy fabric is draped everywhere: curtains, banners, tented ceilings.
3. There are windows—or other portals—everywhere you look.
4. Lamps and lanterns gleam from every corner and hang from every ceiling.
5. Murals or graffiti cover every plausible surface.
6. Holographic displays blink and glow throughout the space.
7. Greenery sprouts from planters, fountains, wall hangings, or the structure itself.
8. Art and handicrafts—pottery, weavings, paintings, carvings—are displayed throughout.
9. It's not. The corridors and public spaces are starkly unadorned.
10. Roll d8 twice and combine the results.

How is the interior organized?

1. A rigid, easy-to-follow grid system.
2. A haphazard maze of twisting, turning corridors.
3. A living tangle of passages and chambers that regularly restructure and reorganize themselves.
4. Impossible topology. You can never come to the same place by the same route. Retracing your steps only gets you more lost.
5. A vast hollow space containing a number of substructures (roll d4 for each if you want them to have different styles).
6. One giant chamber or seemingly boundless plain. Functional spaces are tents, dugouts, towers.

What sounds do you hear inside?

1. Constant dripping. Water—or some other liquid—condenses everywhere or flows through the walls.
2. Howling wind. Violent air currents run through pipes, ventilation shafts, or the corridors themselves.
3. Beeping, blooping, humming, crackling. Noisy electronic machinery is all around you.
4. Chimes, bells, gongs. Slow, ringing musical tones, resonating from nearby instruments or arriving from a great distance.
5. Voices. The cheerful hubbub of a busy throng or the eerie whispers of mysterious persons forever out of sight.
6. Creaking, groaning, rumbling. The entire structure strains under unfathomable pressures or bends to reshape itself.
7. None. It's eerily silent apart from you, or something seems to muffle even the sounds you make.
8. Roll d6 twice and combine the results.

What odors do you smell inside?

1. Blood, sweat, and piss. The stuff of animal life.
2. Fragrant smoke. Incense, burning wood, well-cooked food.
3. Bright vegetal scents. Perfume or cut grass, citrus or pine.
4. Damp and rot. Wet earth, wet stone.
5. Rust, dust, and dry decay. Stale old air.
6. Acrid vapors. Electrical fires, chemical burns.
7. Something cloying, artificially sweet, unsettling.
8. Oil, grease, ink, paint, solvent. The factory floor.
9. None. It's strangely sterile.
10. Roll d8 twice and combine the results. Maybe a whiff of one amid the constant presence of the other.

What is your berth like?

1. Small but cozy. You wake unusually refreshed after each “night's” sleep.
2. Spacious but uncomfortable. A bare warehouse for you and your luggage.
3. Unimpeachably luxurious. Like staying in a fine hotel.
4. Awkwardly repurposed. Clearly used to be a kitchen, a bathroom, a lounge, a morgue, or something alien.
5. Pleasant but peculiar. Perhaps not meant for somebody of your size or general anatomy.
6. Uncanny. You never feel entirely comfortable or completely alone. Strange dreams disturb your rest.
7. A tiny slot for your body, not much bigger than a casket.
8. A common lodging, shared with several other passengers. Roll d6 for the general vibe.

How easy is it to find your way around?

1. No matter how complicated the layout may be, you somehow always know where you are and how to get where you're going.
2. It can be confusing, but there is excellent signage always within sight to help you reorient yourself.
3. You need some kind of tool or mnemonic device to keep track of your movements. A map, a compass, a skein of thread.
4. Whether you can manage on your own or not, crew members are always available and willing to assist you.
5. It's practically impossible, even with assistance, and you get hopelessly lost if you stray far from your berth.
6. Variable. Some routes are easy to learn; others elude simple understanding.

What is the nature of the crew?

1. Humans or epihumans who look more or less like you.
2. Humans or epihumans who have some novel aspect: green skin, three eyes, tails.
3. Machines with familiar forms: humanoid robots, hovering drones, and the like.
4. Humanoid beings, whether parahuman or alien or machine, with demonic aspects.
5. A hodgepodge of humans, epihumans, aliens, and machines.
6. Beings of unclear form and uncertain nature. Glowing points of light, flickering shadows, ghostly voices.

How restricted are your movements?

1. You have the run of the ship. You could go meet the Captain…if you could find the bridge.
2. Many areas are passively closed off, but they are not impossible to enter.
3. Many areas are forbidden to you, and firmly sealed or actively guarded by the crew.
4. You cannot go anywhere outside your quarters without an escort from the crew.

What areas might you find if you go exploring?

1. An area so cold you cannot explore it without a suit. The crew either guard it zealously or superstitiously avoid it.
2. A bay full of strange instruments or weapons which seem to protrude out through the hull. You do not recognize them.
3. A garden of surpassing beauty and tranquility, full of pleasant sights, sounds, and smells.
4. An abattoir of some kind, where unfamiliar animals are being drained of unfamiliar ichor.
5. A shrine or temple, scattered or piled high with offerings. If you wait long enough, you might meet a votary.
6. Some kind of barracks or storage area or gathering place for the crew. You may be unwelcome here.
7. An arena or theater of some sort—risers encircling a platform. Perhaps a fight takes place, or a dance, or a lecture.
8. An ossuary or crypt. Honored remains tucked into niches or stacked in great mountains of urns.
9. A titanic cargo hold, crisscrossed by catwalks and piled high with exotic wares.
10. A map room or observatory crowded with charts, projectors, armillary spheres, or holographic displays.
11. A dark alley or ravine or cul-de-sac, abandoned and overgrown, a dump for detritus. One being's trash…
12. An area so hot you cannot explore it without a suit. Enormous machines pump lambent molten metal.

What notable persons are among the passengers?

1. An imperial noble, traveling incognito with the smallest of retinues.
2. An arrogant arms merchant, gloating over the size and value of the cache he's brought aboard.
3. A jittery courier, never more than a few steps away from their coterie of heavily armed guards.
4. A troika of Continuum commissars in pursuit of a dangerous renegade, uncomfortable about being on a baris.
5. A troupe of performers, happy to entertain their fellow travelers with their arts.
6. A murderer, perhaps. Bodies keep appearing; passengers keep disappearing. A serial killer? An assassin?
7. An individual sealed up in a bulky, archaic space suit. They seem to be human, but refuse to shed the suit.
8. Itinerants of the Condolent Inquiry, eager to teach the Litany of Solace to those fellow travelers who do not know it.
9. A whole community of refugees or other migrants with all their worldly belongings, including livestock.
10. An esteemed scholar, assistants in tow, determined to study the vessel and its crew.
11. A surpassingly beautiful person clothed in elaborate finery who claims, discreetly, to be the true Emperor.
12. A flock of mystery cultists or other sectarians, their number diminishing day by day as the voyage goes on.
13. An old hand who claims to have sailed this route a dozen times or more and to know all the ship's secrets.
14. A band of hijackers or mutineers, plotting somehow to take control of the baris.
15. A group of travelers gone native, now permanent residents of the baris, offering services to newcomers.
16. Acolytes of the Benthic Lance, investigating some tenuous rumor or ambiguous prophecy.
17. A hunted android, desperately hoping the River will carry them to safe harbor among the Recusant Worlds.
18. An inconspicuous hooded figure whose features remain forever obscure. An Outsider traveling the Pale? An Arbiter?
19. A haughty individual who clatters about the baris mounted on a horse or other riding animal.
20. Who knows? You hardly meet any other passengers in all your days aboard.

How do you pay your way?

1. It's all arranged with a broker beforehand. You use the local currency at your point of departure.
2. A terminal aboard the baris accepts a dizzyingly wide range of currencies and in-kind payments.
3. You must bring a certain quantity of (extra) trade goods along, to be left behind in the hold.
4. A crew member comes to your berth and presents a personalized receipt; the demands vary widely.
5. You are expected to provide some service or perform some labor for the Captain or crew during the voyage.
6. You don't. You don't seem to, anyway, at least before or during the voyage.

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!

* * *

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 from 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 world, 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.

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 the 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.

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.

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, and 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.

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 barises [i.e., "riverboats"] rarely seem to correspond to the size of their interiors. People have been known to part ways upon boarding a baris 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 barises 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 barises.

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 subjugated individually, 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 barises 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 Spire 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 Continuum 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 Continuum, 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 Continuum'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 Continuum 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. Worlds that decline into such a state, 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 many 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?

Lore24: The Pale of Sanctuary

From "Terra" by Calder Moore

 

I bounced off Mastodon late last year, and I'm not really following these instructions to the letter, but the important thing is just writing a little something every day, right? That and sharing it with the world, which brings us to this post.

* * *

The Pale of Sanctuary is not a new idea, but developing it as a TTRPG setting is. I've been running a Stars Without Number game for the past few months using the default meta-setting—rolled up a sector, whipped up some factions, had a jolly good time detailing things far in excess of what was necessary—but of course the soul cries out for more. A bigger canvas! A unique science-fiction setting entirely of my old invention! All my favorite stuff and nothing I don't like! (On that note, I started writing about things I don't like in recent SF and a couple of my dislikes metastasized into an entire post of their own. Oops!)

So what do I want from a bespoke SF setting? I want it to be set extraordinarily far in the future, so that I can get as weird and wild as I want with human civilization. But I do want a recognizably human civilization, not a post-singularity hivemind. In fact, I don't really want to deal with advanced computer technology at all. Yet I do want terraforming, interstellar travel, massive orbital habitats, and things of that nature. How do I square that circle? A Dune-style cultural taboo against thinking machines!

What else? I want to try jettisoning some of the fantastical technology that's de rigueur in SF games. No artificial gravity, no faster-than-light travel or communication. I'm imagining zero-gravity combat with nets, darts, blades, and the like, and I'm imagining interplanetary societies that have to cope with years-long lag times when communicating, or trading, with their neighbors. Then I find myself backtracking a little: I still want some FTL travel to be possible, for the sake of being able to offer various different campaign types (and for the sake of mystery), I just want human society not to have mastered it. Massive objects of uncertain origin, with no human crew, course their way through parts of the Pale following constrained but not perfectly predictable courses, like riverboats steaming up and down a watercourse (except that instead of steaming, they're jumping from star to star in the blink of an eye). This River shifts and swells and shrinks and slows according to no pattern a human can ever fully discern. The riverboats resist any attempt to use them to violate causality, as well as any attempt to use them for major military operations.

Now, what sort of interstellar societies might be sustainable in a setting without (reliable, predictable) FTL? The really obvious one is a feudal empire, and (surprise!) I love Dune, so I'm sold already. It's also a great opportunity to subvert the idea of the totalitarian evil empire; in this empire, the left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing. Some nobles are good (some Miyazaki influence bleeds in here), some are bad, some are diligent, some are disinterested. The center cannot hold, etc. This also suggests an exotic counterpart: a society that labors, with great effort and at great cost, not to see its constituent parts diverge even across tens of light-years. A society obsessed with continuity and consensus, where change comes at an almost literally glacial pace. Part bucolic solarpunk degrowth utopia, part totalitarian communist surveillance state, with duty-bound commissars criss-crossing the spaceways fighting to keep everything, and everyone, in line.

Throw in a third, looser confederation, some independent planets, a deep history wherein the empire sprawled out from its heart to encompass nearly all the Pale, back when populations were smaller and laws less defined, only to convulse and contract and spit out offshoots. Accept that some things are placeholders and it's not all polished and perfect yet. Hardly anybody's going to read it anyway! Here's one month's work:

1. The knights of the Empire and the commissars of the Continuum are similar, even mutually sympathetic figures, held up in their respective societies as paragons of honor and self-sacrifice (both groups are, of course, fallible and corruptible, much as each society would like to pretend otherwise), prepared to give up decades of their lives, maybe the entire length of their lives, to travel the stars and enforce the law. The law of the Continuum is of course superficially quite distinct from that of the Empire, but many of the fundamental principles are similar. Both are ultimately derived from the Rule, which is older than the Empire itself.

2. The universal language promulgated by the First Emperor and now widespread throughout the Empire, the Continuum, and all the worlds of the River was derived, based, so the story goes, on the emperor's deep studies of ancient texts, from several prominent Indo-European languages (i.e., it's Anglo-Esperanto), and is written with a script, also carefully selected by the emperor, derived from Hangul.

3. The Dissentient Synod is an anticlerical, antimonarchic faith community that periodically crops up around the fringes of the Empire.

4. Aaru is the green and pleasant world at the heart of the Empire, a watery planet of low-lying continents and island chains, mighty rivers, and, at most latitudes, mild seasons marked by periodic heavy rainfall. It is quite hot in the tropics and temperate nearly all the way to the small polar icecaps; water is an omnipresent feature nearly everywhere, from vast marshlands to mangrove forests to shallow river valleys cutting through lush steppes.

5. In secret, wary of old taboos and prejudices, some scholars attempt to study the evidence of technological civilization in the space beyond the Pale, working to decipher the “language” of the Outsiders, if indeed that is what the strange, sporadic signals are, and to predict their motions and actions.

6. The independent systems that defy the emperor's divine authority are known as the Recusant Worlds. Irredentist extremists apply this epithet to the Continuum as well.

7. The noble dead of the Empire lie in state in the Hall of Tears for a public mourning period commensurate with their rank.

8. Rumors persist of androids, synthetic beings that simulate human life perfectly. It is said that they were created in the distant past, during the Age of Strife or before, and can even reproduce as humans do; they are, some stories say, indistinguishable from humans down to the molecular level.

9. Some things are allowed on the River and some aren’t, but it’s never entirely clear what the restrictions are. Obvious military force is never permitted, but some traders are able to travel with modest quantities of weapons and others are blocked from shipping so much as a brace of rifles.

10. “Backwaters” are systems visited by the River so infrequently, or so inconsistently, that torchship travel is, on average, faster (assuming one can find crews willing to put up with it).

11. The Ministry of Concordance works to prevent political, legal, cultural, or any other kind of social drift among the far-flung worlds of the Continuum; commissars from the Ministries of Concordance, Memory, and Safety (collectively, the Ministries of Coordination) typically travel together on decades-long tours of duty. Such a unit is called a troika.

12. The ancient laws of war put stiff restraints on the sorts of brutal tactics a knightly caste with access to outrageously powerful warships but without the means (or manpower) to invade and occupy densely populated planets might otherwise gravitate toward. Terrible crimes were committed during the Age of Strife, long ago.

13. Any military or police operation outside of one’s home star system means years spent away from home, maybe decades, and all without direct supervision. Unimpeachably loyal, highly effective soldiers are at a tremendous premium. They are generally promised great rewards and instilled with strong beliefs in the righteousness of their work, and their leaders are loath to risk them, or even send them away from their home ports, except when absolutely necessary.

14. The worlds of the Empire, and many beyond, uphold the sacred rights of hospitium, including the obligation of nobles to provide hospitality to interstellar travelers (who are assumed to be, almost by definition, nobles themselves). This is a tremendous, and dangerous, privilege for those commissars and diplomats of the Continuum who have occasion to travel beyond their own borders.

15. The ruling caste of the Empire, or at least the tradition-minded among the high nobility, never trim their fingernails and rarely use their hands for any purpose except eating.

16. Various parahuman and epihuman clades exist in the Pale—populations who can be traced back to some deliberate, engineered split from the main human line, optimized for various environments (like gravity considerably higher or lower than human standard). Such tinkering with the human genome has long been forbidden by the Rule, but long-established clades are not regarded as aberrant.

17. The Inmost Houses of the Empire are descended from the clans that backed the First Emperor during the Great Conjugation; the Utmost Houses are descended from those that opposed him. The Low Houses are descended from those who attempted, dishonorably, to remain neutral.

18. On the periphery of the Continuum is an archipelago planet with beautiful calm seas and abundant life whose people live a mostly premodern life (albeit with access to modern medicine and the other rights afforded by their government).

19. Elsewhere on the Continuum's periphery is a world of endless steppes; shallow, wide river valleys; broad deltas; and long, low lines of hills, where enormous storms boil up over the plains. The people, mostly farmers, live in low, sturdy homes half-buried in sod banks or hillsides.

20. Far out on the edge of the Pale is a wilderness planet honeycombed with sprawling concrete structures, some recognizable from their past purposes, others totally inscrutable, all overgrown.

21. Anchorite redoubts [pinched from Dan] are mysterious structures of widely varying form and size, having in common only that they drift in zero gravity or freefall and that they are, or at least seem to be, impenetrable. Some are found in asteroid belts, others orbiting barren planets, still others in deep space. They are occupied, it is thought, by humans or parahumans who in ancient times chose to remove themselves from the affairs of the greater galaxy for unknown reasons. None responds to communications, although some do show faint signs of activity, like venting waste heat.

22. An underground progressive movement in the Continuum has taken up the slogan "continuity leads to destruction."

23. Near the edge of the Pale, a rarely contacted planet is scattered with mostly abandoned cities still ritually visited by the rural people descended from their onetime inhabitants.

24. On more than one world in the Empire and Continuum alike, rock-hewn cities crowd underground caverns, paraterraformed to be human-habitable below a pitiless surface.

25. Old and persistent tales tell of a certain order of Outsiders, or servitors of the Outsiders, who enter the Pale to judge the righteous and the wicked and to enforce the Rule. Opinion is fiercely divided as to whether these Arbiters are angels, demons, aliens, or something else entirely, if they even exist.

26. The highest principle in the Empire and among most religious groups in the Pale is not "good" but "truth" (which is understood to mean, among other things, "loyalty" and "obedience"). Falseness and disloyalty are the most loathsome sins. "Wide is the gate and swift is the river that leads to Falsehood, and many go by it," however.

27. Imperial nomarchs (ruling nobles with circumplanetary or interplanetary fiefs) are ideally twins; one governs from the family's ancestral seat while the other, with a comitatus (a retinue of sworn companions) goes abroad as a knight.

28. “In the beginning, God created the dark and the light and all the heavens. He set the stars and planets in motion and spread life across the cosmos, and human beings were his greatest creation. And He made seven great angels to govern creation, and bestowed upon them wondrous powers and set many lesser orders of angels beneath them. But when He instructed these lieutenants to serve His favored children, there was dissent. The first and greatest of the seven, who was the right hand of God and is now become the Adversary, would not kneel before human beings, and rebelled against his Creator, and overthrew the throne of heaven.”

29. The emperor is widely believed to have access to the memories of all previous emperors, or to literally share a mind with all previous emperors, or in fact to still be the First Emperor, a deathless soul, millennia old, who simply migrates into a new body when their old one wears out.

30. Government in the Continuum, at every level, is a representative consensus-based democracy with delegates chosen by sortition; being selected to participate in an interplanetary congress is a tremendous honor but also a life-changing burden.

31. In the absence of any kind of immediate responsiveness or alacrity on the part of delegates, a lot of the day-to-day business of maintaining order in the Continuum and responding to people’s concerns falls to the vast bureaucracy.