Murasaki, page 36
Some remain. A troll resembles a Chujoan in the way that a chimp or orang resembles a human—not so tall but much wider and thicker, with long arms, comparatively small head, and huge jaws. It is not arboreal, though it can climb when it wants to; its legs are shorter than a Chu-joan’s, but aided by it arms, it can get across the ground almighty fast. Anything sizable, other than a Chujoan. it attacks, in bands. It is cunning; even the gigantothere turns aside from its flung stones. Chujoans are careful to smear themselves with a certain odorous extract before approach-ing troll country; it reinforces their natural smell and pre-vents misunderstandings.
Remains of irrigation and other large public works show how this civilization tried to keep going as conditions worsened. Insofar as analogies may be drawn to human history, it probably turned itself into something like the labor-intensive despotisms of our early Near East, Far East, and South America. The effort failed, and indeed every-where else on Chujo the sapients apparently died out. (Per-haps survivors migrated to these parts.) Probably the rulers foresaw that failure was inevitable, and set themselves to working out a new way of life.
Dying back, the self-managing fields and forests could no longer support city populations. However, fragments of them endured, especially in the tropics and near the seas—which are found mostly on starside. Also, life suited to cold and aridity was moving south from the arctic. A much-reduced sapient population could take up a pastoral, no-madic existence.
Thus it may appear that a great civilization has died and its descendants have reverted to primitivism, like de-scendants of the Mayas in the jungles of YuratAn But that does not seem to be the case here.
After all, these are not humans and this is not Earth. The changeover was carefully planned and executed.
Insofar as human explorers have been able to communicate with Chujoans, they have found no sense of downfall. The ancestors are admired, but in somewhat the same spirit as we admire classicaLGreece; we have gone on to something quite different, which we feel is in most respects better, though the Greeks might not agree if they knew.
The Chujoans live in “tribes,” each with its own ter-ritory, most migrating according to seasons. As short as the seasons are, these are not simple north-south move-ments, but follow a complex pattern in which subunits move about so as to optimize use of the territory. For ex-ample, a tricorn herd in the lower tropics keeps moving simply so as not to overgraze any pasture, while a herd of peri follows the quickly moving spring and summer of the northern temperate zone north for leafage, then moves south eating the fruits of fall and the roots and bulbs of winter. A subtribe may pause in its cycle to seine a lake for ichthyoids and then move on. (The shores of the shrunken seas, with their powerful tides and intensely salty marshes, would not support “fisher” communities.) While a group moves, hunters range around to collect supple-mental wild game.
The herds are kept chiefly for meat, though some use is made of bone, skin, etc. The herders go afoot, aided by their snakehounds, though they do have baggage animals and, where terrain permits, draft animals pulling light wag-ons. The Chujoans erect tents when they camp. If they do not eat food raw, they usually grill, bake, or stew it (see the Miscellaneous Notes). Most tools and weapons are of stone, wood, and other natural materials, but metal imple-ments, carefully maintained, are still in use where they serve best.
Subgroups meet periodically in their travels, and whole tribes get together every few Murasakian years for negotiations. They seem quite cooperative; a tribe that has suffered misfortune, such as a murrain in its livestock, re-ceives help from others more fortunate, and humans have found no evidence of any that ever attempted conquest of its neighbors. The arrowfowl, more flexibly trainable than the, passenger pigeon, provides quick communication over large distances. It is not clear whether anything correspond-ing to a central authority exists.
Although austere, this way of life is not impover-ished_ From the remaining ecoplantations, tribes carefully harvest most of what they want. Only metal is really scarce, and not much is needed. Literacy seems to be uni-versal. A caravan has space for some books, materials for writing and picturing, etc.
Throughout its territories are cairnlike repositories, inviolable, attended to at every visit. These are libraries, as well as storehouses of specialized tools and materials; a little more on this is in the Miscel-laneous Notes. Obviously architecture, engineering, and suchlike activities are no more, but besides literature and graphic art, there is a wealth of music, dance, handicrafts such as embroidery, and things more esoteric to us. The Chujoans have retained knowledge of past history and sci-entific discoveries. They continue to make updating ob-servations in astronomy and other fields. Thus they know that their world goes around one sun, accompanied by an-other that they never see. There are hints that Genji is cen-tral to their religion, assuming they have what we could call a religion.
In short, human nomads have always been fringe peo-ple of civilization, depending on sedentary industries for many of their needs. This is not the case on Chujo. The nomads are the civilization.
To humans it is a very strange one in many other re-spects as well. Fred Pohl has some ideas about this.
Miscellaneous Notes
At noon on Chujo’s moonside, Genji should be dark, but in fact glows faintly in the daylit sky because of Chujo-light on its clouds and seas. The dark parts of the disk are thus discernible beside the sunlit parts until midnight, when Genji is full; they range from dull blue-gray at the edge toward the bright white-and-blue of the sunlit side, and the boundary of the crescent is burred. When Genji eclipses the sun, its disk does not go totally black, again because of reflections (high albedos), but does become quite dark, sur-rounded by a red ring of sunlight refracted through atmo-sphere. When Chujo passes between the sun and Genji, bluish-gray darkness creeps across the disk of the latter, which at totality glows with a dull coppery hue.
The same phases occur for Chujo as seen from Genji, although Chujo is generally less bright, a buff color on which a couple of seas glint and occasional clouds make white streaks. At solar eclipse the red ring is thinner and at planetary eclipse the coppery shade is somewhat brighter—since, although Genji’s disk is larger, its more extensive atmosphere refracts sunlight better.
The Chujoan nomads do have some ceramic vessels, prepared, like their metal implements, during stopovers at certain sites. These sites normally include a library—re-pository of books, etc., carefully sealed against pests when not in use—and assorted workshop facilities. They can quite safely be left alone, theft and vandalism being essen-tially unheard of.
Like our American Indians and others, Chujoans can also cook with water in the equivalents of bark pots and leather bags, using heated stones. “Stew with dumplings!” proposes Karen; from the ancient plantations they can still harvest starchy foods that need little or no preparation (such as threshing or milling) prior to cooking.
Appendix B: Murasaki’s Worlds
by Frederik Pohl
In constructing stories for Mu-rasaki’s worlds, we have a total of four intelligent races to consider: the Ihrdizu and the himatids of Genji; the Chu-joans; and the humans.
Since presumably most of you will be writing from the viewpoint of a human character, let’s take up the hu-mans first.
All of this takes place in some future time, far enough in the future that interstellar space travel is possible, though very far from cheap or easy; near enough so that the human characters are not very different from ourselves.
Probably most of us don’t need to specify dates, but for the sake of consistency for those who do, here are some:
A.D. 2219 Robot probe (sent by Japanese) first arrives in the Murasaki System, begins sending data back to Earth.
A.D. 2239 Messages (sent by ordinary radio, at light speed) from robot probe received in Earth system. Japanese decide to send a manned ship there.
A.D. 2242 Japanese begin to construct ship in Low Earth Orbit. Will take three years to complete and fit. How-ever, at the same time
A.D. 2242 The Spacers (see below) have listened in on the probe reports and they, too, have decided to explore the system. The Spacers convert a hull intended for transport within the solar system to interstellar use. This pisses the Japanese off, but there’s nothing they can do about it.
A.D. 2244 Spacer ship starts out to Murasaki.
A.D. 2245 Japanese ship starts out to Murasaki. The travel time for each is about 21 Earth years.
(Subjectively 11 years for the ship crews, because of time dilation at relativistic speeds; see Poul.) A.D. 2265 Spacer ship arrives in Murasaki System and begins exploration.
A.D. 2266 Japanese ship arrives.
A.D. 2286 Earliest date when radioed reports from Spacer ship can be received in Earth system.
Ad lib: Other expeditions launched from space or Earth, arriving whenever you like after A.D.
2266.
No doubt Murasaki’s is not the only stellar system investigated by robot probes, but as of the date of first launch above (at least) all the others have come up empty as far as habitable planets are concerned.
Life On Earth
At this point in the future there are nearly 20 billion human beings alive. Nineteen billion of them live on Earth itself. Some 20 million people live in sealed-in lunar and Martian colonies; all the rest, nearly a billion in all, live in O’Neill-type orbiting habitats. Each habitat has an average popu-lation of 100,000, and there are nearly 10,000 habitats somewhere in solar space. (Once the first few were built, it was relatively cheap and easy to make more, using off-Earth resources.) The habitats are widely scattered. A few hundred of them are in Earth or lunar orbit; the bulk are in solar orbits. About 6,000 are between the orbits of Earth and Venus, at convenient distances for maximizing solar power without being too close to the sun for comfort. (The primary in-dustry of these is tapping solar power to make, for example, antimatter.) Most of the others are out near the asteroid belt, for access to minerals, with scatterings orbiting Mars, Ve-nus, and (small ones, specially built) Jupiter and Saturn. There is a thriving commerce among the space habitats, with fusion—or antimatter-powered spacecraft. These space-craft never land on a planet, of course; cargoes for Earth (including people) are frequently dropped like an Apollo capsule; cargoes, and people, going from Earth to space are launched in any of a number of ways (see below), including shuttlelike ferries.
The principal primary energy source is solar power, and there is a lot of it. All the space habitats have deployed arrays of mirrors and thermoelectric (or other) generators to supply themselves with electrical power for heavy-industry smelting and manufacturing (with raw materials from, for example, the asteroids and minor satellites for minerals, and from comet nuclei for elemental hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and their compounds), and for their own domestic use.
The habitats also export energy. As above, many hab-itats in solar orbit use the power to manufacture antimatter, which is then used for (among other things) spacecraft pro-pulsion. Those in near-Earth orbits sell electricity to Earth by microwaving it to rectennae on the Earth’s surface. (These power satellites are visible from Earth’s surface. In fact, they are the principal objects visible in Earth’s night-time sky; they have probably made optical and radio as-tronomy from Earth’s surface extinct disciplines.)
Earth is heavily dependent on this import of energy from space, which is a source of strain in Earth-space relations.
Although even at this time only a tiny fraction of the sun’s radiation is captured and used for human purposes, the proportion is increasing all the time. Our sun is on its way to becoming a kind of Dyson sphere.
As there is a lot of power, there is necessarily consid-erable wealth. The wealth is not equally distributed among all classes of people, though. There, are rich and poor eve-rywhere. The 19 billion, people on Earth have an average living standard about equal to a late-twentieth-century American’s, with a great many much wealthier individuals (as well as many very poor ones). The economic situation of the people in space is more like a late-twentieth-century Kuwaiti’s, for the same reasons. Nobody is desperately poor, and the rich are incredibly rich: space is where the resources are.
A natural question arises: If space is such a neat place, why doesn’t everybody go there? There are two reasons: 1) it’s not easy to get off Earth (see below); 2) living in space is dangerous; it is not the environment humans evolved to live in, and small accidents can be lethal.
There is no “world government.” There are half a dozen superpowers on Earth, as well as a great many smaller “countries,” most of which are client states to one or another of the superpowers. The space population is ad-ministratively fractionated (every habitat is a law unto it-self), but the various habitats and colonies tend to unite together to present a common front in their dealings with Earth for economic reasons, like the oil sheikhs of OPEC days.
As to the nature of national governments on Earth, etc., there is very likely a great spread, as at present. Some are libertarian, some police states, some parliamentary de-mocracies punctuated by revolutions—what you will. The only one I wish to establish as dogma is Japan (because Japanese discovered the system). Japan is a parliamentary monarchy, like England; the royal family goes around vis-iting hospitals and judging cake contests. It is no larger geographically than it is now; the Japanese do not admit aliens to citizenship. But many of the Earth-orbit habitats are all-Japanese and are considered prefectures of the na-tion, like Okinawa. Adjacent Asian states (China, Korea, etc.) are Japanese clients—political independence but eco-nomic thralldom, like a Canadian’s view of the United States.
The ecology of Earth is much poorer than in our time. There have been damages from various causes. There may have been a few nuclear wars a couple of centuries ago, and there certainly was a lot of tsurris with ozone depletion, CO, warming, acid rain, soil loss, toxic-chemical and ra-dionuclide pollution, etc. But the human race has gotten used to it, and most of the scars are now pretty well healed.
Most rich mines are, pretty well depleted by now. Necessary raw materials are either grown (textiles, pharmaceuticals, as well as food), extracted from the sea (by specially bred plants concentrating whatever they want), or imported from space. Recycling of basic metals is universal and important.
International relations are not notably more friendly than they are now, but there are no major wars.
This is because of MAD: everyone is vulnerable to mutually as-sured destruction with everyone else. All of the space col-onies are fragile, and everything on Earth is open to attack from space (possibly by
.
shooting an asteroid at it). There are lots of tensions and disagreements, and occasional mi-nor wars—perhaps about at the scale of the Falklands War; perhaps, there is also a continuing element of terrorism. However, people on Earth travel fairly freely around its surface, and people in space do so easily from any habitat to any other.
Traveling from planet surface to orbit, though, is an-other matter. On Earth some nations may have skyhooks (but only if they have possessions quite near the Equator). Other Earth nations may have Lufstrom loops, but probably of limited capacity. On the moon (possibly also on Mars, using the slope of Olympus Mons for a track) electric, rail guns can launch a ship to orbit (though landing one is harder).
For all other planetside launches the only way to attain escape velocity is to sit on top of a big firecracker of some kind, and that is intrinsically expensie. So, except for a very fortunate very few, Earth’s 19 billion will stay on Earth till they die.
Even allowing for all the wealth and technology, to send out an interstellar expedition to Murasaki is, as Poul points out, a big-ticket venture, with a near-zero prospect of any economic return.
This means that we need to explain why our human travelers are going to Murasalci’s worlds in the first place. There are two parts to this question: Why does anyone pay to build these very expensive ships? And, why does anyone volunteer to man them?
The only rational reason I can see for spending the resources necessary would be pure scientific inquiry. Non-rational reasons might include national prestige, or mis-sionary fervor. Possibly Islam or the Catholic Church could get up the money to send a missionary expedition out, and under certain circumstances might want to do so, assuming they supposed the Genjians and Chujoans had souls to save. (Individual contributors are, of course, free to discover other reasons.) As to the volunteers themselves, their motivations might be much the same—plus the possibility of personal profit for a few of the earliest, at least. The explorers re-turning on the first actual ship to get back to the Earth system will surely be rewarded with wealth, fame, groupies, college lecture dates, and all the other hoopla that was given to, say, Charles Lindbergh or the Mercury astronauts.
The Murasaki System was first described by the Jap-anese by means of a relatively cheap robot probe; that’s why the planets and satellites were named after characters from The Tale of Genji. For that reason, the Japanese might take a special interest in sending actual human explorers there: that would be an example of a possible nationalistic reason for an exploration mission.
Terrestrial nations in general are more likely than Spacers to look covetously at interstellar space; the Terries are resentful of the fact that the Spacers have taken over most of the available real estate in the solar system, and so, somewhat like Germany just before World War I, are likely to wish for colonies of their own_ (Even though they are told colonies won’t be any kind of money-spinners on Genji or Chujo.) They know the economics are prohibitive, but they want. Spacers, on the other hand, have less of that kind of motivation, but interstellar travel is easier for them (though still certainly not very easy).
