IF WE LIVE

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  • Backstories

    The voyage of the Nieuw Breda (Lingo: 9B).

    The 9B was a transporter of the VIC (Vereenigde Interstellair Compagne) out of Concourse:Vier (C:V) engaged in the VIC’s recolonization enterprise. VIC had recognized that a number of marginal colonies settled during late First Expansion might be made prosperous with the adoption of modern, Second Expansion technologies. One of these was New Kashmir (Lingo: NK, Eyeball), a tidally locked planet of the orange star Agni. NK had been a colonization project of the Pure Veda sect during the chaotic last years of First Expansion.

    The mother ship Devi II, intended to settle thousands on the colony, was lost during its voyage. The colony struggled, but did survive – the only one of the eyeball worlds to do so. This presented an opportunity for the VIC. The eyeballs all closely orbited cool stars, which had little of the bluer light frequencies necessary to most terrestrial food crops. The plan for such worlds had been to build solar farms on the sunside of these worlds, then grow crops in artificially lighted fields with the power produced. At first, this worked. Then the PV cells reached the end of their productive lifespans. The AI factories which produced the PV’s failed. Support from Earth (DQ) was lost. Climate change, and the subsequent migrations and wars, had collapsed civilization on DQ. The Contraction began, with abandonment and die off of marginal colonies.

    The 9B made orbit at DQ. As DQ had all the genetic feed stocks, it was still the center of advanced bioengineering. There the 9B took on an exo-agronomy team and seeds developed by PennAgroGen (PAG) via shuttle craft. The seeds were mostly of grain crops which had the DNA of bacterial chlorophylls added to their eucaryocytic genome, to enable them to prosper in cool sunlight.

     The 9B began accelerating at 1.3G sunward, to enter a solar slingshot trajectory. At periapsis she did a brief 2.5G Oberth burn. After leaving the solar slingshot, she settled into her cruising acceleration of 0.65G. The redshifted flare of her matter-antimater (MAM) drive was seen as she crossed the orbit of Mars, already traveling at 25 mC, and exactly on trajectory.

    That was the last anyone in the Reach saw of her.

    Aboard the 9B: Were officers Captain Carey Sulvepeda, First Officer Georgie Mbutu, Second Officer Thea Mele, Chief Engineer James Plott, and Second Engineer Ema Akiyama.  The PennAgroGen exo-agronomy team included Drs. Peter and Helen Sandow, their PhD student David Richard, and support staff. Except for Richard, they entered Induced Torpor for the months’ long voyage, to save space and the mass of their life support supplies. Richard’s role was that of Viability Tech, responsible for the survival of the (very expensively modified) seeds during transit, and the care of those in torpor. Also on board was VIC planetary astronomer Einar Peterson.  The 9B carried a suite of astronomy instruments. During the 9B’s infall, Peterson was to resurvey the Agni system, which had been rather poorly mapped during the First Expansion.

    Ema Akiyama was life systems officer and worked closely with Richard. They began a relationship. She was a native of Concourse:San and a graduate of the Interstellar Academy. Most graduates of that prestigious school became Locators – officers on the interstellar exploration ships which found and explored new worlds. Ema was involved in a political party advocating for the Japanese minority on C:S. A crackdown by the Chinese majority led her to hurriedly sign a contract for a berth on the VIC transporter 9B.

    She was recruited for the position by her former instructor James Plott. He was a native of Concourse:One and a military trained starship engineer. Plott had been involved in suppressing piracy in the Alastor system and then became an instructor at the academy.

    On entry to the warp zone, 9B entered transit just as calculated, but her gray time was much shorter than expected. Gray time – the period during which the ship’s screens grayed out due to their passage through warp space – was inversely related to the potential energy difference between the entry and exit points.  She exited far too soon and found herself falling through the inner system of an unfamiliar star at relativistic speed. Even in the days of powerful MAM drives, interstellar vessels had to enter a system far out beyond most planets, to have time to decelerate to a velocity which would allow them to make orbit. Otherwise, their tremendous momentum would throw them right back into interstellar space.

    The 9B began heavy braking acceleration immediately. Peterson did a survey and found a habitable zone planet (HZP) bearing water and oxygen and a Jovian planet in the outer system. The deck crew calculated a barely possible braking trajectory. It required a high g very close periapsis around the star followed by antegrade braking slingshot around the Jovian. The ship’s AI rejected this trajectory because of the dangerous periapsis. Sulvepeda overrode this, meaning that the deck officers were essentially flying the ship manually from that point onward.

    At the very tight periapsis the 9B did an agonizing 5G burn. The ship was so close to the star that it risked grave damage. Through the burn, Sulvepeda rotated the ship on its long axis to spread the tremendous heat and radiation, but the 9B still suffered significant damage to its attitude thrusters, limiting its ability to maneuver. The 9B exited the reverse solar sling with a reduced but still great velocity and headed to the outer system Jovian to make an antegrade braking sling around it.

    The 9B could never land, even if it could slow enough to do so, as it would burn up during entry to an atmosphere. It did carry a launch, the 9Ba, designed to carry very limited cargo and a few passengers down to colony worlds which had not yet developed orbital supply capacity. The 9Ba didn’t have enough acceleration couches for the crew and the PAG team. Plott and Ema cut couches from the 9B and welded them to every every possible spot in the 9Ba. While they prepared the 9Ba, Richard aroused the PAG team from Torpor. This was a process usually spread over weeks, and had a significant risk of seizures, but Richard had to do it in days – and to explain to the team the terrible situation they faced. Richard had to use anti-seizure medication on several individuals, but the whole team survived.

    After the braking sling around the Jovian, the deck officers recalculated their trajectory. It was quickly apparent that the 9B was still going too fast. She could not make orbit around the HZP without using braking acceleration too high for the crew and passengers to survive. During infall to the star, Peterson had been unable to see anything of the system on the other side of the star, but after rounding the Jovian he did detect several gas giants in the outer system. He hurriedly tried to calculate their masses and orbits.

    Sulvepeda had to make a decision. He could bend his trajectory around the HZP and head to the outer system to hope to do a braking slingshot around one of the gas giants to get back to the inner system. Georgie Mbutu proposed they ram the 9B into the HZP and try to release the 9Ba at just the right time to keep it from skipping right back out of the atmosphere. If he chose the latter course, Sulvepeda had to do it right away: there was no time to allow Peterson to observe and calculate the outer planet masses and orbits. Captain Sulvepeda chose the second alternative.  They could not be sure they could even reach one of the gas giants, much less do a sling around it. Rather than rely on hope, he chose to sacrifice his ship to save the crew and passengers.

    Sulvepeda aimed to hit the HZP dead center. He dared not hit the atmosphere at an angle, lest the 9B bounce off and be flung back into space in an uncontrolled trajectory. He reduced the MAM deceleration to 1G to allow boarding of the 9Ba, then shut down the MAM and ignited the 9B’s methoxy rocket engine. The MAM could not be used in a planetary atmosphere or in close orbital maneuvers: the deadly gamma radiation of its drive flare would kill anything it touched.

    Sulvepeda hurriedly entered the 9Ba and joined Thea Mele on the tiny control deck. Just as the 9B’s methoxy tanks ran dry, he caused the 9Ba to be ejected from the ship: the ejection added a little momentum to the 9B and caused the 9Ba to lose some. He and Thea then fired the 9Ba’s own methoxy engine. Beneath them the 9B was in free fall but still had great velocity. As the atmosphere thickened around it, it began to burn and break up, producing a spectacular display over what they would later know as the Eastern Ocean.

    On the 9Ba they couldn’t see their ship’s fiery death. The 9Ba was tail down, decelerating at maximum thrust. The 9Ba had ablation tiles, and all Sulvepeda and Mele could see was the burning shroud those tiles produced around the launch. The methoxy tanks burned out. The 9Ba was in free fall. Mele was the better pilot, so she took the stick. While the main drive was exhausted, the 9Ba had thrusters to control attitude. Mele used them to turn the launch belly down. The broad surface heated white hot, ablating as the launch gradually slowed, her energy being burned up. Mele was flying the launch as a giant glider, like the shuttles from the very beginning of the space age. She was aiming for a broad plain Peterson had observed from space. The 9Ba burned its way across the Stablen skies, coming down on the western Hastab. The 9Ba struck a slight rise in the ground and was thrown back into the air in an uncontrolled roll. She slammed back down on her side.

    Richard and Georgie Mbutu had two couches crammed into what had been an electronics bay. During the very rough landing, the couches partially broke from their welds to the deck, ramming the heads of both men against the bulkhead. Mbutu suffered a skull fracture and subsequently died. Richard was knocked unconscious.

    The rest of the story is told in IF WE LIVE.

    The voyage of the Devi II

    The Devi II(D2) was a mother ship chartered by the Pure Veda movement to establish a colony on the eyeball world they called New Kashmir. The Devi I had already founded a foothold colony staffed by exoplaneteers. The D2 carried thousands of human blastocysts to establish the population, artificial wombs to gestate and birth the blastocysts, technicians to operate the wombs, and several hundred Anabaptist farmers. It was thought that the colonists would have to farm without technology for many years, and the Anabaptists were skilled in these techniques. The blastocysts of horses, cattle and other farm animals were included among the ship’s living cargo.

    The D2’s trajectory is no longer known, but it must have involved several braking slings of outer system planets to slow enough to land. The D2 was a water lander, and Captain V.K. Patel chose the estuary of the Wawee River.  They made a successful landing and found themselves in what seemed an ideal location. The wide Lastab lay to the west. Rolling hills and woodlands lay to the east.

    The fusion drive was converted to power generation, and the techs began to make babies. For the next twenty years the whole community was engaged in raising them.

    During that time, Patel called for a jubilee. They recognized that their new world, that they named Uma, was far richer than NK. They rejoiced in the divine providence that had given them such a gift. They did not see that Uma’s fecund richness would transform them into something unrecognizable.

    After establishing farms in the east Lastab, the farmers made a brief attempt to plant wheat on the west bank of the Wawee River. The dense mat of whipgrass roots defeated every attempt to plow. The farmers thought the fibrous whipgrass was inedible by terrestrial animals, but their horses quickly discovered that they could nibble off the highly nutritious fruiting tips of the whipgrass. Some escaped into vastness of the Stablen. Herds of feral horses arose, outcompeting the native springer, and fighting off their predators, the slinkers.

    On the east bank the kids, now grown to teenagers, looked up from the tedium of their chores on the farms, and the bewildering chants Patel insisted they learn. They saw an ocean of grass seething with horses. The story of the wild girl is a legendary retelling of the creation of the west Lastablener people.

    As their labor force of kids slipped away, the farmers struggled. Although the short grass of the east Lastab was easier to plow than whipgrass, it still took a great deal of labor to produce a crop.

    The techs finished birthing the last of the kids. The fusion reactor ran out of fuel and shut down. The D2 lost power. One spring, the rush of snow melt in the river combined with a violent storm to break it from its moorings. It disappeared into the eastern ocean.

    Patel did not react well to these changes. He and his crew seized the crops of the farms and tried to redistribute them as they desired. Patel tried to get the techs to work on projects in the compound later called Sunrise House.

    The farmers had heard of a great valley to the north, with a cool climate and deep, rich soils ideal for their grain crops. Across the Lastab, the kids told the techs, was a land on the western ocean, free of the fierce winters of Wawee. The techs began to drift away to the land they called New California, as the kids had already drifted away to the grasslands, and the farmers to the Vale.

  • Uma

    Umasun is a G0V star, a little larger, brighter, and bluer than Sol. Uma is the star’s fourth planet, giving it a year 1.27 times that of Earth. It is 1.17 times the circumference of Earth, but of lower density, so that the gravity is 0.94G.

    The lower density is primarily due to the vast ocean, which covers 83% of the surface, versus 71% on earth. The ocean and the axial tilt of 28 degrees gives the climate a very striking variation between summer and winter. The northern continent is a long rectangle tilted downward  with respect to the meridians, so that the Coriolis winds, blowing unimpeded over the ocean, dump huge depths of snow over the Stablen. In summer intense thunderstorms sweep across the Hastablen, but little of this moisture reaches the Lastab.

    The Hightop mountains protrude from the eastern edge of continent, forming the Northpoint and a chain of artic islands beyond it. Valen mostly lies to the east of the Hightops. The largest province is a great valley – the Vale. The ridges and valleys of the foothills of the Hightops make up the province of Hallen. A narrow coastal plain riven by fyords and bays is Stada

    In remote times life on earth divided into the photosynthetic and saprophytic lineages. This did not occur on Uma. The sea threw up a spray of protoplasts onto the bare rocks of the new continents. There, safe from the sea creatures which had evolved to eat them, they formed a green slime. They were able to photosynthesize but still depended on the sea spray for water and nutrient minerals. At some time over the eons that followed, a mutation gave them the ability to leach minerals from the rock. They swiftly spread over every place that gave them enough water to live. They evolved methods of storing water to live in dry climes. They grew fruiting bodies to spread their spores with the winds.

    In old ocean, the creatures which had eaten the aquatic protoplasts crawled up on the land to feed on the slime mats. They began the long journey of evolution to form all the creatures of the land.

    When humans arrived on the Devi II, they found a great plain covered by strange, whip like grasses. On the Hastab they say the roots of the whip grass go down as far as the winter snows are high – which is up to seven meters in the northern Hastab. They are not actually roots in the terrestrial sense, but a dense mycelial mat. The function of this mat was to absorb water as the snows melted. At the bottom of the mat the mycelia continued their original evolutionary purpose of breaking bedrock into useful minerals. They fixed nitrogen. The stalks of the grasses photosynthesized sugars from carbon dioxide with the high energy light of Umasun.

    Terrestrial plants were never able to compete with the whipgrass on the Stablen, but in other regions, plows were able to cut the mat enough for plants to get a start. The rich humus formed by the mycelia allowed for flourishing growth.

  • About the Three Tales

    Hanny’s Story

    I was just writing innocently along, telling my planetary romance, when I got to the part where my people were over wintering in Wawee. I planned for them to tell stories. I’d give them a couple of lines humorously describing each tale. Sarey telling about one of her stranger clients. Richard, Plott, and Peterson trying to tell the others what happened on their ship.

    Then Kel starts to roll the word. Everything I thought I was doing with this novel went out the window. Up to this point he was a cheerful murderer with a bombastic, almost clownish edge to him. After he tells Hanny’s Story it’s obvious he’s something else altogether. So was this novel. It stopped being my story and became the characters’ stories.

    The Song of Ayva

    The weirdest of the tales is the one that interrupts the action of part two. I was in part one when intrusive thoughts began to tell me a story. This happens to me all the time. I see visions. I hear voices. I transcribe. This is what I do. I knew this was my mind explaining these new people I was going to write about. What disturbed me was a lot of these fragments were in verse. I had no intention of writing an epic poem, which this obviously was. But it wouldn’t leave my mind. I went ahead and wrote the next section, which is basically a heist narrative, in which my heroes rescue Miry from the castle. Once I got to know her, I thought maybe she would tell this tale. But that was obviously wrong. I couldn’t interrupt the narrative in Part 1 yet another time. Also, Miry’s an intelligent person of a preliterate culture: she would have probably known this whole story in the original verse, maybe even been able to sing it. To try to create this verse epic was not something I was prepared to do, even if I thought myself able to do it. I went about my business through the end of Part 1. In Part 2 we met Laury. She was the one. She was going to tell the story. She knows the story and remembers its most striking lines but isn’t part of the Hastab culture. This allowed me to avoid most of the poetry and also add her sardonic takes on the story she was telling.

    After I wrote this, there was no going back. I was writing something that was very strange. I had no idea what it was, but I had to go on.

    Kel and the Bull

     I really enjoyed writing this.  I liked the way it began as a conversation. I liked the way the end is in the beginning. The other side of the coin is that it reveals what Kel Malin really is. He’s an epic hero in the mold of Theseus or Herakles. Like those great heroes, there is a tragic shading to his story. Again and again he tries to save people and do right, but he never gets anything for himself. Until the very end. Once again, these tales trapped me into writing something bigger than I intended.

  • Rise of the Ayvens

    At the time of If We Live the Ayvens are seen as a caste, which claimed the right to rule not only the Stablen, but also each individual band. But they began as a religious movement. As the tales of the Wild Girl percolated up to the southeast Hastab from Lastablen, they began to change into a form which allowed this new people to explain to themselves who they were. The Girl became the goddess Ayva, the mother of the leaders of this new race. She was also confined – and later killed – by her son Amik, reflecting the change from the relaxed matrilineal culture of the Lastab to the authoritarian patriarchy of the Hastab. The Ayvens who spread out among the bands and proselytized this new religion were variously bards and priests of the goddess. They began to grasp the authority to rule from their influence over the people. The Kepta Aykay I paid a group of Hastab bards and Nakalyn scribes to synthesize from the various tales the Song of Ayva, which became the Revised Standard version of the Hastab religion.

    The Sisterhood.

    According to the Sisters, in their version of the Song of Ayva, the goddess had a daughter, Rayna, born of Avik’s rape of his mother. The sisters emphasized this unpleasant origin to make Rayna more of the blood of Ayva than her brother Amik. She was a little girl when he caused the death of their mother, and lived as an almost feral child, much like the wild girl of the Lastab. Like the original wild girl, she gained a mystic knowledge of the Stablen.

    When Amik formed the original band of the thirteen names, he tried to marry her to one of his supporters. By this time Rayna had become a priestess, shaman, and medicine woman, and she refused to marry. She was, she said, the bride of the Stablen, wife to any man, mother to any child. The Ayvens had sacrificed their religious leadership for power, and the Sisters claimed that role. The Kepta Aykay I shrewdly recognized the stabilizing influence of their authority and acquiesced to the idea that both the Sisters and the Ayvens sprang from the same mother goddess.

    The first record of any Hastableners is of the Sisters. The Nakalyn traders, writing home to tell of business opportunities, took note of them before they were aware of the Ayvens or any other group. The fact that they were sexually free in a land where all other women were chattels fascinated the (mostly male) traders, but they also respected their skills as physicians. They noted their value as diplomats. The first thing to do in the Hastab, the traders said, was befriend the Sisters.

    The Girlsmen

    A fanatic cult arose from the worship of Ayva. These men were not Ayvens themselves but believed they could go to live with Ayva in the wild wide Stablen, if they died fighting for the Ayvens. They were feared assassins, and thought to be behind many mysterious events, but not organized beyond small groups. Morik Ayvens recruited them to form his Gray Horse troop of the Blacks, changing them from unpredictable fanatics to fanatical soldiers.