Interlude Two: The Cytherians...
Johnny1a
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/browse_thread/thread/7dea075d63bc7b7e?hl=en
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Man came to Cytheria in what Terrans would call the year 31,251 BC.
The arrival of Homosentients was not the result of deliberate effort
but rather of accident, the spacecraft that delivered them was heavily
damaged, having encountered an accident that we need not dwell on.
This had propelled the vessel far from its intended destination, and
inflicted sufficient damage that when they came upon the Aphrodite
System (as it would someday be called by Terrans), and discovered that
it had a marginally habitable world reachable with the remaining
resources of their dying starship, the crew knew that they faced a
choice which was no choice.
In fact, the survivors of this vessel had been luckier than many. As
a rule, accidents and mechanical failures on spacecraft fall into two
categories, trivial and lethal. Only a modest percentage of cases
permit a space vessel, especially a starship, to encounter serious
difficulties and still endure, space is a profoundly hostile
environment. It does happen, however, and it had happened in this
case, there were over one thousand people still alive aboard the
enormous spacecraft.
The ship was a passenger transport, it had originally been on a course
to take it from one of the richest and wealthiest of the old worlds of
the Eosian Hegemony to another similar world. Its crew and passengers
represented people from dozens of worlds, seven different Homosentient
species were represented among the ship's survivors, though nearly
half of them were _H. sapiens_ and another twenty percent were _H.
eostellaris_, as one might expect given the civilization from which
this vessel came. [1]
Carried far beyond the spaces known to the Hegemony by the accident,
the survivors had endured considerable privation already, hunger,
thirst, heat and cold, and now they endured a barely-tolerable
'landing' on Cytheria that was really more of a semi-controlled crash
than a landing. As a testament to the skill of the crew and
especially the pilot and chief engineer, most of the crew and
passengers managed to survive the crash/landing, though the ship was
wrecked beyond any hope of repair.
What followed was ghastly, the survivors were not colonists, they were
not equipped as such, they were on a world totally unfamiliar to their
society, and most of them lacked any of the skills that would be
useful in such a situation. Over half the survivors died within the
first two years, another large swath within the first five years.
Some people did survive, however. Some people, by intelligence, luck,
or some combination, found ways to survive, things that could be eaten
and water that could be drunk, they contracted local diseases and
survived them, developing immunities. Children were born, and as time
passed the unwilling colonists learned to survive in their strange new
environment.
Of all the species that came to Cytheria on the crashed starship, the
_H. sapiens_ had the inherent advantage of being the best at
reproducing themselves in wild conditions. The other species did not
die out, however, they merely reproduced in smaller numbers, and after
a time the local 'native' population began to grow, as Man learned to
master yet another alien environment.
By 31,000 BC, roughly two and a half centuries after the crash,
Cytheria had a 'native' population of about 3000 people, all living on
the same northern-hemisphere continent on which the spacecraft had
crashed. Naturally, the advanced and sophisticated TL9-10 technology
of the Hegemony was lost, the survivors lacked the skills, the
numbers, or the resources to have any chance of retaining their
heritage as starfarers. Instead, a primitive but effective TL1
technology, with a handful of bits and pieces of higher-tech
equipment, salvaged from the wreckage. Many of these tools were used
by the descendents of the original survivors who now lacked the
slightest idea of how they worked.
By 30,500 BC, the population had grown to 25,000, and they no longer
recalled much of what their ancestors had known, the world was the
flat ground on which they lived, the starship that had brought their
ancestors to Cytheria was shrouded and lost in a dozen different
conflicting myths. Nobody dared approach the site itself, radiation
from the damaged drives had made the area deadly, and it was widely
seen as accursed. [2]
By 30,000 BC, the population had grown to 200,000 people, of which
about two thirds were _H. sapiens_, and had spread across thousands of
square miles, in the form of tiny villages and nomadic groups. People
being people, warfare and banditry and all the other evils of
Homosentient history were present, but so were all the good things as
well, for every bandit and murderer there were multiple people trying
to survive, prosper, raise their children, and live their lives as
best they could.
As they learned to live with and use their new environment, each new
generation became more 'at home', learning how to use local resources
and how to recognize and deal with local threats. The tech lovel in
30,000 BC was a high TL1, with small but effective sea craft used to
move up and down the coast of their continent, vessels the Terran
Polynesians would have recognized and understood. They hunted the
larger game, they knew what plants they could eat and what was
dangerous or deadly (at least in their home territories), and they
engaged in trade and commerce of a typically TL1 nature.
Around 29,750 BC, the descendents of the original survivors began
spreading across the narrow shallow seas to some of the other island-
continents. Bit by bit, Man was spreading across the face of
Cytheria, little realizing just how strange a world they did
inhabited.
MORE LATER.
[1] As it happened, the passengers and crew of this vessel were cast
beyond the space known to the Hegemony just before the Beastie Wars
broke out.
[2] Not without some reason. The leaking radiation from the wrecked
starship could inflict a lethal dose in ~20-30 hours.
Johnny1a
factors. There were nine land masses above sea level on Cytheria,
though in fact there were only five true continents, the hot climate
and high ocean levels had flooded the lowlands of several continents,
much like Earth during the Cretaceous Period. The nine land areas
altogether added up to about 20 million square miles, but not all of
this was readily useful.
The first problem was the heat. Cytheria was a 'hothouse' world,
averaging considerably warmer than Earth. Of the nine land areas,
four lay in the 'tropic zone', and were simply too hot to be readily
settled at TL1. Life thrived there, but not Homosentient life, they
could visit, but the effort and cost of surviving there was simply
more than it was worth, even after their seafaring abilities made
these lands available to them. As time passed, the Cytherians
discovered some useful substances in the tropic zone, some plants,
herbs, fungi, and animal products that were of use, but they were
retrieved and taken back to cooler areas. The original spacecraft
crash that began the Cytherian people was in the planet's northern
hemisphere, and for some time the heats of the tropics prevented the
Cytherians from spreading to the useful lands south of the tropic
zone, even after they had mastered sea faring. [1]
The four land areas in the tropic zone made up not quite 40% of the
total land on Cytheria. The remaining twelve million square miles
were in the 'temperate' zone (which tended to have a hot, humid rainy
climate comparable to Terran equatorial jungles) or the subpolar zones
(which temperature-wise were much like Earth, but which lacked
resources and were mostly barren and dry). In fact there was
relatively little land in the polar and subpolar areas, most of what
useful land existed was in the 'temperate' zone. Much of this land
was covered by thick 'jungle' or vast fungal 'forests' that were
habitable...by a generous definition. Even with the native skills the
Cytherians developed, to deal with the local environments, it was a
harsh world.
The Cytherian population grew relatively slowly, limited by problems
of food supply, hostile native life, hostile climate, strange diseases
(often fungal in nature), and of course the ever-present factors of
Homosentient vs. Homosentient violence and hostility. Still, Man is
adaptable and determined as a species, and gradually the Cytherians
spread, from region to region, land to land, eventually into the
southern hemisphere. The population slowly grew, as people adapted
physically and culturally to the new world. By five thousand years
after the crash, there were Homosentients on every habitable land mass
outside the tropic zone, and the tropics were periodically visited
though never permanently settled.
Originally, the entire population spoke a single language. [2]
Inevitably, with long separations of time and distance, the language
changed and drifted, the arts of literacy were lost entirely, and what
had been one language had fractured into hundreds of related but
largely mutually unintelligible dialects and eventually separate
languages. By the 5000th year after the crash, a Cytherian from a
given trible or village might be able to understand a neighboring
village's speech with some effort, a distant village's speech barely
with great effort, and anything further was simply incomprehensible.
Among the best places to settle in the 'temperate' zone were the
valleys around large rivers, they provided fertile soil and a reliable
fresh water supply. As would happen thousands of years later on
Earth, societies rose in some of these river valleys, villages gave
way to cities and large-scale agriculture was practiced. In one
valley in particular a large society grew up around one of the largest
river systems on the planet. One of the northern continents was so
arranged that a single great river system drained practically the
entire land area, and a huge central valley, over fifty miles wide in
places, provided a spectacularly useful site for city building. Four
large tributary rivers and literally hundreds of secondary streams
from the mountain ranges on the east and west coasts flowed through
the upper reaches of the valley, merging into one immense waterway
toward the lower part of the vast valley, which drained roughly north-
to-south. Though the mouth of the super-river was southerly enough to
be intolerably hot through much of the long Cytherian year, most of
the rest of the valley was merely hot throughout the year.
At the junction where three large rivers merged into the super-river
to the south, a city was founded by a trible of Cytherians who had
grown wealthy and numerous in the fertile environs of the great river
valley. A warrior people, they were nevertheless skilled in
agriculture and not without knowledge of the other arts and sciences
of Cytheria. From this city began to spread the first true large-
scale empire of Cytheria, the first large state that was more than the
passing creation of an ephemeral warlord. It took nearly one thousand
years for this new society to grow from the city (or rather the
fortified town) to control the entire valley, but grow it did.
As it grew, the society itself changed. The original warrior tribe
became the nucleus of a sophisticated urban culture, skilled in
stonework, agriculture, hydraulics and irrigation, and eventually
metal work. This was the first great society of Eosia to develop (or
rather redevelop) the arts of literacy, creating a written symbol
system with which to express their spoken language. [3]
This valley-empire would be the nucleus and seed crystal of most of
the civilizations to come afterward on Cytheria.
MORE LATER.
[1] On Earth, it was once a legend that the equator was impassable due
to the heat, at TL1 on Cytheria this was nearly true. It required
thousands of years for the Cytherians to find reliable solutions to
the problem.
[2] Hegemonic Standard, an artificial language derived from the
dominant Eosian native language.
[3] Thousands of years later, Terran linguists would marvel at this
odd redevelopment, since the new symbol system had nothing in common
with the original system of writing the Cytherian ancestors had known,
but it was still the same (albeit greatly mutated) spoken tongue(s).
Johnny1a
on other Homosentient-settled worlds at low tech levels. The initial
river-valley society mentioned above was a fairly conventional river-
society, not utterly unlike Egypt or Sumer. The details were vastly
different, of course, especially given Cytheria's unusual biosphere,
but the essence of the society was not unfamiliar. This society
lasted for about 1500 years, before breaking apart, along the lines of
other Homosentient civilizations. Its 'offspring' societies
eventually sprang up on land masses across the northern hemisphere of
Cytheria.
Technological progress on Cytheria was comparable to that on most
Homosentient worlds, which is to say it was quite slow compared to the
rate of progress seen in the West on Earth. Over the course of
millennia, the TL1 and TL2 technology available on Cytheria was
refined, lost, regained, and gradually improved, societies formed,
grew, peaked, and declined. In the broadest sense, history on
Cytheria was unfolding along familiar patterns.
In detail, though, there were a few differences. One was that
lifespans were longer than was typical for Homosentients at TL1 and
TL2. This was partly due to some natural crude anti-agathics which
occurred in some of the fungal life-forms on the land masses of
Cytheria, they were not magical in effect, but a steady diet
incorporating them could and did extend Homosentient active life spans
by as much as 10-15%. A second reason was that the odd biosphere of
Cytheria actually produced _fewer_ parasites and pathogens that could
attack Homosentients than most habitable worlds did. This was
especially advantageous among children. [1]
Another unusual aspect of the Cytherian population was that the number
of psi-positive individuals was well above the galactic average.
Averaging all the Homosentient worlds together, in a
'natural' (meaning untrained and not specifically bred) population the
psi-positive potential would be about .001%. On Cytheria, the psi-
positive rate hovered around .005%, nearly five times the Galactic
average. By far the most common Powers manifested on Cytheria were
Telepathy and ESP, at a ratio even higher than the Galactic average.
[2][3]
The most common single psi-manifestation on Cytheria, throughout the
majority of the planet's history, was the prescient ESPer dream. Such
dreams are known in every Homosentient culture, but they were so
common on Cytheria that their existence and power was universally
recognized. Even psi-negatives on Cytheria often had prescient
dreams, sometimes powerfully detailed ones. It was in fact a rare
Cytherian who never had any such dreams over the course of a normal
lifetime. One of the effects of this was to shape the culture to
recognize both that the future was not preset, and yet at the same
time to imbue an odd sort of 'conditional fatalism' into the language
and worldview of most of the Cytherian civilizations. They knew from
experience both that prescient dreams did not always come true, but
they also knew (or rather they _thought_ they knew) that only certain
options existed.
[1] This is not to say that the planet lacked pathogens and parasites,
especially as local life-forms began to adapt to the presence of
people, only that there were _fewer_ than was typical.
[2] The definition of 'psi-positive' is that an individual as at least
one psionic Power (GURPS 3e modified) at Power 1 or better. It does
not assume that the individual knows this, or has any training or idea
of how to use the Power if they do know about their ability.
[3] Modern-day Earth also has a psi-positive rate of about .005%, well
above the Galactic average, for reasons involving ancient Atlantis
among other things.
Johnny1a
them quite powerful by the standards of TL1/2, the functional tech
level went up and down somewhat with the rise and decline of
societies, but tended to run in the neighborhood of TL2. The
societies were shaped by the peculiarities of the local biosphere and
the oddly high psychic incidence, but nothing beyond the 'main
sequence' of Homosentient society, historians familiar with Earth's
post-Diluvian history would not find anything too strange in
Cytheria's history, allowing for the differences produced by local
geophysical conditions.
By the year 4750 BC, all the land masses of Cytheria had seen
civilizations come and go, the northern land masses were somewhat more
populous and averaged TL2, the southern land masses averaged TL1 and
had about 40% of the population of the northern lands. This was
partly due to the poorer resources of the southern land masses, but
also due to the fact that the population had diffused outward from a
crash site in the northern hemisphere, tens of thousands of years
before.
The most advanced society on Cytheria in 4750 BC was beginning to work
with iron, and had a highly developed agricultural skill. There were
some cities on Cytheria with populations as high as 25,000, a handful,
but the rural farming village was by far the most common form of
population center. The total population of the entire planet, all
species counted, was about 5 million, of which about 70% were _H.
sapiens_. Culturally, the usual tendency was for each Homosentient
species to remain apart, like dwelling and living with like in any
given down, though many larger societies incorporated multispecific
populations overall. By no means were the various species at each
other's throats _as species_ on Cytheria in 4750 BC, (though they were
in some local places). On the other hand, it was unusual for more
than one Homosentient species to live in any given community (except
for the handful of 'cosmopolitan' cities with populations in the tens
of thousands).
So matters stood when everything changed.
The End of Interlude Two: Cytheria
More Later in the thread: Cytheria: Rise of the Concordium