Murasaki, page 40
When the enslaved tads went out to sea there was fric-tion between them and the free juveniles, who had lived out their tad lives on small islands and shores not inhabited by Ihrdizu. The free juveniles tried to persuade them to give up the Ihrdizu, and many did; but enough remained true to their training to continue to serve the Ihrdizu.
The more civilized Ihrdizu do not enslave himatids anymore, but a few more-primitive groups continue the practice. These groups also have a taste for himatid flesh. In particular, when an elder himatid, in the carpet-whale phase of existence, comes near one of their shores they set out in fleets of boats to drive and tow it toward land. If they are successful and it is beached, or caught in a narrow bay, they eat it—often enough while it is still alive.
It is known that the adult, carpet-whale himatids com-municate with each other over great distances in the sea, but what they say to each other no one knows. Not even the juvenile himatids. The himatids grow more intelligent as they grow older, by simple multiplication of nervous tissue; the adult language is too subtle and complex for calves to comprehend.
Humans (and some Ihrdizu) have various theories about the huge adult himatids. Some think they may be philosophizing. Others that they are artists, and their main purpose in life is to sing and speak gracefully and poetically to each other. Still others believe that with advancingage they go mad, or suffer the himatid equivalent of Alzhei-mer’s; but most students agree that no one really knows.
The himatids have one physiological trait Poul did not discuss. As they metabolize, their waste products give off certain molecules that human beings find pleasurable— even addicting; they are like psychedelic drugs. (It has no such effect on Genjian organisms.) It is possible that some humans enter into raptures un-der the influence of himatid exudations and feel that they are en rapport with the himatids.
The Chujoans
As Poul has told us, the proper name of the second planet is TO no Chujo, but as my WordStar program makes a hash of putting macrons in the proper place, I’ll just call it Chujo.
For the purpose of the overall story line, we assume that humans will first visit Genji (since it is apparently the more hospitable planet).
Chujo is thus relatively unknown at the point in time from which our stories take off; it seems to me that stories involving Chujo will be basically stories of exploration, and that it is up to the individual writer to decide what his explorers discover. So I will add only a few “first impres-sions” to what Poul has already provided.
The Chujoans have had to adapt to the much more hostile present environment.
They wear heavy clothing. Their favorite garment is a kind of living skin, perhaps vaguely like the himatid’s, that generates a little warmth.
Their name for themselves is a sort of trill, best ren-dered by human beings as a whistle through the teeth that sounds something like fweess-chupchup; the first syllable is prolonged on a high note, the second and third run to-gether lower in pitch. Humans sometimes refer to them as “Chupchups,” or Chujoans, or simply “the apes.”
Although their environment is harsh, their lives are not unduly arduous; the remains of the self-sustaining farms and their herds give them plenty of food. It seems to human explorers that, with a little more exertion, Chujo could eas-ily support a much larger population of the Chupchups, as it clearly did before the climatic change. But the Chupchups don’t seem to want to increase and multiply.
Communication between humans and Chupchups is very poor. The few humans who visit Chujo have barely scratched the surface of the Chupchup language, and have only the cloudiest notion of what Chupchups think, or want, or do with their lives. The best theory is that the Chupchups are a race of philosophes whose primary interest is to think about the meaning of things. They seem to have long ago understood the fundamental principles of cosmology, evo-lution, entropy, and so on, and now devote their minds to creating a grand, unifying Theory of Everything. They are intrigued by human machines but have no interest in learn-ing to use them, or in adapting them for their own lives.
As Poul has told us, there are about 1 million Chu-joans. One human investigator thinks that is not an approx-imate number. He believes that there are exactly 1,048,576 Chupchups at all times, divided into 1,024 tribes of 1,024 individuals each (And subdivided within the tribes to 32 families of 32 members each.) It appears that these numbers are immutable. It is not clear how the numbers are main-tained: either new children are conceived when there is a death in the tribe, or when a new baby is born another member of the tribe dies, by suicide or ritual murder.
The Chupchup society is a confusing mixture of au-thoritarian centralism and individualism: the main purpose of any Chujoan’s life seems to be for him to perfect his own understanding of himself, his world, and the universe.
As far as anyone has yet been able to determine. Chup-chups do not seem to have a religion in any Earthly sense. They do not appear to believe in a God or a hereafter. Best guess: What they believe in is rightness. It seems that the most important question for any Chupchup to decide is when it is right for him to die.
Why Chujo Is So Mysterious
Living Chujoans are not immediately detected, either by the Ihrdizu or by humans from space. Since the inter-stellar ship undoubtedly has surveillance equipment at least as good as twentieth-century spy satellites, and since Chu-jo’s atmosphere is rarely clouded enough to hide anything, why aren’t the Chujoan communities, baggage trains, and so on seen immediately?
There are two answers to this. One is simply time. Cluj() is, after all, a whole planet—it has more land area than Earth—and the more resolution in a camera, the smaller its field of view.
The other answer is that the Chujoans prefer to live in the woods. The reasons for this are three.
First, the “trees” protect them to some extent from dust storms. Second, the “trees” are a source of food—the equivalent of nuts and fruits, and probably things like truffles, fungi growing among the roots.
Third, the worst predators don’t come into the forests.
A fourth reason might be simply that they like it that way, because they are Chujoans.
The ruined cities, on the other hand, are certainly large enough to be quite easily visible. They have in.
fact been observed, even by the Ihrdizu—sort of. Some are com-pletely buried and can only be detected by observing veg-etation growth patterns in the soil above them (as buried archaeological sites can sometimes be located by aerial re-connaissance on Earth). Others are partly buried, and the parts above ground have sometimes been worn away by time and dust storms. Nevertheless, a few ruined “cities”
have actually been seen and charted.
What is not seen ever is their inhabitants.
There aren’t any actual city-dwellers any more. The surviving Chupchups don’t live in the cities that have been discovered, since the change in climate has put those cities in harsh environments, and the survivors have long since migrated to more benign ones. (Still, there may be a few old cities surviving from the Golden Age of Chujo where some tribes still live. Perhaps they are on starside. If the first interstellar ships take station in Low Genji Orbit, Genji being the more interesting-looking planet, Chujo’s starside won’t be easily observable by them—and not by the Ihrdizu ever.) Individual Chupchups have in fact been seen by the mapping scans from the interstellar ships—as have most Chujoan animals much larger than a cat—but they have not been identified as intelligent, or related to the city builders. Such sightings are very rare. With only about a million Chujoan sentients on the whole planet (and most of them generally hidden in the forests), only a few thousand could be visible at any given time. Think of maybe a dozen hu-man beings in the state of Kansas: how many would you see from orbit?
So what is known about Chujo and its people is far less than what remains to be discovered—presumably by you.
About The Authors
Frederik Pohl, after a career spanning more than fifty years that is unmatched in the history of science fiction for its many-sided nature, remains a vital creative force in the field today, maintaining a vast popularity among science-fiction readers and the admiration of his fellow professionals. Pohl has been a magazine editor, a book editor, a literary agent, a futurologist known as a keen student of scientific and sociocultural trends, and a novelist famed for his multivol-ume “Heechee” saga and for his satirical book The Space Merchants (written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth), among much else. He won the Nebula Award in consecutive years for his novels Man Plus and Gateway and is a six-time Hugo winner, winning, three awards as an editor and three more for his own fiction.
David Brin leaped into prominence with his second novel, Startide Rising. which was published in 1983 and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. Since then, with such books as The Postman, The Uplift War (a Hugo winner in 1988), and the recent long novel Earth, he has consolidated his position as, one of the most successful of the newer science-fiction authors. His work is marked by vigorous and vivid writing, deep insight into the speculative side of scientific thought, and a pervasively optimistic view of the future. His shott story “The Crystal Spheres” brought him an ad-ditional Hugo trophy in 1985.
Poul Anderson made an immediate mark in science fiction with his first published story,
‘‘Tomorrow’s Children in 1947 (written in collaboration with F. N. Waldrop), and has been a conspicuous and widely published figure in the field ever since. His best-known novels include The High Cru-sade, Three—Hearts and Three. Lions, Tau Zero, and the recent awards nominee, The Boat of a Million Years. Among his profusion of shorter works are the classic no-vellas “Call Me Joe,”
“Goat Song,” and “The Queen of Air and Darkness.” He is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award, for the last two stories and “The Saturn Game,” and he has won seven Hugos for his fiction, a total that no other writer has surpassed.
Gregory Benford, a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, has since the early 1970s maintained a highly successful career in science fiction, producing works of great originality and power. Among his many books are the memorable novel Timescape and such highly regarded works as Great Sky River, Tides of Light, and In the Ocean of Night. In collaboration with David Brin he published the well-liked novel Heart of the Comet in 1986. He is a two-time Nebula winner: for Timescape in 1980 and for the novelette “If the Stars Are Gods– (with Gordon Eklund) in 1974.
Greb Bear’s first science-fiction stories were published in the late 1960s, when he was still a teenager. From that precocious beginning he has gone on to a significant career as one of science fiction’s most original thinkers, with an enthusiastic readership making his books best-sellers in many countries.
Among his works are the novels Eon, Eter-nity, The Forge of God, and the recent Queen of Angels, as well as dozens of novellas and shorter stories. He is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (for the novella “Hard-fought” and the novella “Blood Music,” both in 1983, and the short story “Tangents” in 1986.) “Blood Music” and “Tangents” brought him Hugo Awards as well.
Nancy Kress began her writing career in the 1970s with three fantasy novels—The White Pipes, The Golden Grove, and The Prince of Morning Bells, but it is as a science-fiction writer that she has primarily been known—partic-ularly for the powerful novella “Trinity,” a Nebula finalist in 1985. She won the Nebula Award in 1986 for her short story “Out of All Them Bright Stars.’,’ Her most recent novel is An Alien Light.
Robert Silverberg, Murasaki
