Acts of Conscience (54 page)

Mimir’s Well
: (19.36 light-years from Earth) Eta Cassiopeiae A4ii. Though this is a perfectly good G3 star with an inoffensive K7 companion, there are no fully habitable planets. A4 is a juvenile terrestrial world on which life either never got started or was obliterated during an early glaciation. The atmosphere is primarily nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the roughly 1 million colonists are engaged in a terraforming effort that consists of slowly introducing the elements of a terrestrial ecology.

Salieri
: (20.43 light-years from Earth)        82 Eridani 3. This is not a human colony planet, but an earthlike world circling this G5V star. It is inhabited by a species humans call the Kapellmeisters, with their own ancient technological civilization. Humans don’t know how old, but they were once a part of the destroyed Old Galactic Civilization of 400 million years ago, and have been sitting home ever since. They are very upset about the rise of human interstellar civilization, and some elements are even looking at possible ways to destroy humanity.

Kapellmeisters are small, vaguely octopus-like beings (sort of like little black leather hassocks) that are almost all nervous system, with 7 stiff, muscular tentacles, each with a 7-fingered foot-hand, and 7 “eyes” on short, telescoping stalks. Actually, these are sensory clusters, bearing their ears, noses, and mouths as well, but what they look like is fuzzy, brightly-colored tennis balls (though all Kapellmeisters have black skin, their eyes come in red, blue, orange, yellow, green and violet—only one color to a Kapell, of course).

Though they have spacecraft of their own (AsMet-derived, used only for travel within their own star system, with humans wondering why they have never gone to the stars, since they’ve had the capacity for a very long time), they are mainly focused on their biotechnology, and are themselves the product of bioengineering, with nervous systems so sophisticated they are contact-telepathic with each other and the animals living on Salieri. They have begun visiting the human colony worlds over the last century or so (and are secretly sneaking around in their own hidden FTL ships, checking out the neighborhood to see if they are in any real danger).

[In the original Starover Universe, much of which I invented when  I was in the 9
grade, in 1964, this species was known as the Capellans, and lived on a habitable planet of that star, which could not possibly exist. For the origins of the names Salieri and Kapellmeister, in the Starover reboot, I refer you to a certain popular movie of the 1980s.]

Some Notes on Interstellar Trade and Travel:

There are very few nonhuman “tourists” wandering around loose on the major human worlds. Most of these are Arousian students sponsored and looked after by Mace Electrodynamics, which controls the Sigma Draconis System.

In the Solar System, where most people are illiterate and essentially knowledgeless outside their own social context, a alien would not usually be recognizable as such. Most of the people living in the poorhouses of Luna, for example, do not know that there are interstellar colonies and that extraterrestrial beings have been contacted. Most of these people, encountering a Kapellmeister in a naturalistic environment such as a large nature park (some Lunar parks are millions of hectares in extent and are part of the life-support equipment), would run screaming from what they would regard as some kind of hideous wild animal (bearing in mind that Kapellmeisters look sort of like huge, partly-inflated ticks).

Kent is an evolved techno-industrial society dominated by the ethics of a fused Muslim-Christian religion (in which God-Allah is usually referred to as the Word and understood to be named Yhwh, an archaic Hebrew verb meaning, approximately, “I am that I am” [giving the deity something in common with Popeye, I guess—I yam what I yam]).

Green Heaveners are usually well educated, but their society is a peculiar hybrid descended from the original 7 colonies (the nuclei of the Seven Cities) plus the earlier colonists of the Adrianis Desert and the Iles des Français. Since then there has been a steady influx of “middle class” immigrants fleeing the corporate superculture of the Solar System, all of them resentful of being crushed between the rich do-nothing bosses and the poor do-nothings on the dole. The end result is a society vaguely like the late 19th century America, but rather more sophisticated. It is a place where an alien can wander around by itself, but where it is unwise for one to do so. Call it a cross between Old New York and the Big Valley.

The Arousians, as noted earlier, are tall, very stalky pale-tan things on a body plan like a cross between a mantis and a walking stick insect. They do not possess exoskeletons, of course, and the tan color comes from a uniform coat of soft, velvetty fur. They have eyes like chameleons. All of these “civilized” aliens talk through computerized translation devices.

Regarding Kapellmeister motivations: They are an old species, present during the Shock War of 400 million years ago, which only lasted about 5 seconds. While Kapellmeisters are individuals who live and die (albeit with lifespans on the order of 60,000 years), they have a racial memory based on well-founded theory (they can communicate directly between nervous systems through specialized appendages—i.e., they have something like “contact telepathy”). Thus, the Kapellmeister character herein has clear memories of standing under a starry sky which sparkles and flashes for tens of thousands of years as the light from exploding worlds reaches Salieri.

Having taken a quick look around the neighborhood, the Kapellmeisters know that the Tertris Hegemony is expanding toward Orion Arm from a few thousand light years away, and that the older, more pacific civilization of the Tai Akoidei is abroad in the galaxy beyond them. In addition, the nuclei of the Khaara and øStennh have begun to emerge, far off in the other direction. The three principal political parties of Salieri comprise those who wish to suppress human civilization (which could be done with a handful of teleport bombs), those who wish to manipulate it with personal bribes (as was done by slipping a sort of immortality to various members of the Board of Trade Regents), currently in the ascendant, and those who wish to do nothing. There is a much smaller group (including this Kapellmeister) who would like to enter into a partnership with humans and guide them openly as a sort of cultural “Dutch uncle.”

I will address notion of “cosmic coincidence” by noting that the reason all these space-faring civilizations are emerging now is because the termination of the Old Galactic Civilization (which human archeologists will later term the Ganesha People, after the physical appearance of its dominant species) by the Shock War has had the effect of synchronizing galactic evolution. Except for a few holdouts like the Ladan (see
This Dog/Rat World
) and Kapellmeisters, plus scattered StruldBug nests, the Shock war wiped out all the intelligent, advanced species that had built up since the beginning of time. It’s taken 400 million years for new intelligent species to evolve. These are by no means simultaneous, of course. The Tai Akoidei have been out and about in the galaxy for more than a million years, but they are a slow and methodical race.

Regarding the Dollie Trade: This can be considered as either an illegal trade in exotic pets or a slave trade in specialized sex objects, depending on how you view the dollies. We’ll look into the hypothetical ramifications of this in the course of the book. Obviously, it is a luxury trade for the rich and powerful, compelling enough it could be carried on profitably via STL relativistic starships. Recall the pre-FTL round trip between Earth and Green Heaven took more than 22 years.

Standard healthcare of this age, in an average human population, extends the typical human lifespan by 2 or 3 times (people typically live past 150), but the very wealthy can extend their lifetimes by a factor of up to 5, living to 350+. The oldest bona fide person, medically tracked for an entire lifetime, in 2604, is now aged 417 (thus, born in 2187). Which means the well-to-do can operate businesses for large long-term profits and anticipate spending the money themselves many years in the future.

In addition, the Kapellmeisters, as part of their infiltration of human civilization, are selecting various individuals as immortal agents to help them work their will in the future. At this early stage, only a few have been created, and none has lived really unusually long. All have been led to believe that the treatment must be renewed once a century, which is not true. Typical of these agents is Board Regent Robert Hagendorn, who backs Eighth Ray’s attempt to seize the B-VEI patents, with the intent of suppressing the hyperdrive at Kapellmeister behest.

Green Heaven

The Name:
Green Heaven is a mistranslation to English of the Dutch name Groentehemel, used by the Rancher (Veldteboer) culture of the savannas. Groente means “greens,” in the sense of “spinach and kale,” more usually seen in the word groenteboer (greengrocer). The ranchers sometimes refer to themselves facetiously as Groenteboeren, and their estates as groenteboerderijen (boerderij, the more usual short form of the “official” word veldteboerderij, meaning “ranchhouse”). Their dialect of Dutch, with extensive lexical, syntactical and phonological connections to English, is called Groentans. For the sake of conformity, I will use Veldteboer in the text, and only bring up groenteboer when I explain about the name. I will use boerderij (pronounced BOOR-duh-rye) for simplicity’s sake. [In the end, I changed my mind about using Veldteboer.]

Colonization:
Green Heaven was first reached during the first burst of STL exploration in the late 22nd century, when Kalyx, a research vessel of the Planetary Commerce Institute (a loose cover organization for a group of “merchant adventurer” companies of the sort that proliferated, and eventually went broke, in the first century after interstellar travel became practical) in 2184. The PCI base was staffed with a few thousand personnel, mostly recruited from the North Sea area, until 2256, when PCI collapsed. The base was always self-sufficient, since Tau Ceti is a 20-year-plus round trip from the Solar System. In effect, the base personnel, on what is now the island of Azraq Azará, were the first colonists, though the survivors and their descendants were supposed to have been evacuated when the base was abandoned.

The Iles des Français were settled by an official colonizing expedition from France in 2290. The colony was never supported after the initial delivery of settlers, but the descendants of the original 8,000 “voyageurs” have prospered.

The major planetary settlement came with the arrival of the Sevenfold Compact fleet in 2344. By this time, the “Trade Regency” quasi-government had evolved in the Solar System, and this was its only real attempt at establishing a formal colony similar to the much older UNIS-era [N.B., UNIS, the United Nations Intereconomic System comes from the Silvergirl Universe) colony on Kent (Alpha Centauri A4). The seven colony freighters, each delivering 20,000 settlers, were Midoriiro (Japanese urban slum dwellers), Orikhalkos (Greek Cypriotes), Azraq Azará (Arabs, mainly from the Basra area), Vapaa (Finns from the slums of Turku), Relàmpago (Brazilians, mainly from Minas Gerais), Mjimkuuwanchi (Swahili-speakers from Dar-es-Salaam, in Tanzania), and Koro’mal’luma (bringing a mixed bag of North Americans). Owing to the great distance and difficulty of communication, the Compact corporations were unable to maintain control of their colonies, which were effectively independent. The Compact itself disbanded in 2479, ending the official planetary governance of Green Heaven.

Though the Compact Settlements (as they are still customarily called) constitute 94% of the planetary population (75,200,000 out of a total of about 80,000,000 people), the real global culture is determined by the back country settlements, the Veldteboers (4% = 3,200,000) and, to a much lesser extent the French Islanders (1.5% = 1,200,000) and the English-speaking Hinterling nomads of the Adrianis Desert (0.5%, about 400,000).

The origins of the Veldteboors and Hinterlings is problematical to the other inhabitants. It is hypothesized that the two cultures began when abandoned PCI base personnel moved off Azraq Azará. The dominant English-speakers settled the coasts of the Adrianis peninsula, eventually developing a desert-adapted way of life. By the 26th century, the Hinterlings had subdivided into two groups, the quasi-settled Robbies (from ay-ROBB, the pronunciation of Arab in this dialect of English), living on the Azraq-facing coastal plain of the Adrianis peninsula and the Reggies (apparently a contraction of Taureg, a reference to their lifestyle, the veiled desert costumes of the men, and the woad-like sunscreen they use on their faces), who inhabit the more inhospitable interior, which features expanses of hard gravel plain, moderately high mountains, and stretches of completely waterless white gypsum erg.

The Veldteboers evolved from the small nucleus of Low German-speaking base personnel from Flanders, Holland, Frisia, and Helgoland (the seacoast of Germany). Groentans appears to be primarily based on Nederlands, the “official” Dutch language, with limited borrowings from the others, but very strongly influenced by English. There is a direct route south along the Adrianis coast to Aardland Pass, the only easily negotiated passage through the Pÿramis Range into the Panviridian heartland, which would have allowed the ancestors of the Veldteboers to begin settling their current range with a minimum of technological assistance. Since the 25th century, the Veldteboers have been augmented by a steady influx of Compact exiles and wealthy offworld settlers of a libertarian mindset. Offworlders generally are referred to as Vreemdelings (“foreigners” or “aliens”), the Compact citizens as Omgangers (omgang means “intercourse,” in both senses, so the word is a pun, meaning either “Traders” or “Fuckers”).

The Planet:
Panviridia, the Afro-Eurasia-sized continent of Green Heaven, lies across the south pole, and is divided into three principal zones by the ekaHimalayan mountain chains of the Pÿramis Range in the eastern hemisphere and the Thisbÿ Range in the west. North of the Thisbÿs is a narrow, mountainous coastland, indented by many vast fjords, the largest of which, Samui Umi (“stormy sea” in Japanese) is comparable to the Baltic. Here lie the cities of Midoriiro, Relàmpago, and Mjimkuuwanchi. North of the Pÿramisen lies the Africa-sized Adrianis Peninsula and the Compact-held island of Azraq Azará. Les Iles des Français lies in the northern hemisphere.