On the Colonization of Novatierre & The Evolution of the Tili�n (essay)
By Dolores J. Nurss
In the chaos of global collapse the secret of transfer-technology
slipped out. By the 23rd century, the Age of Migration had reached full
bloom.
The people of Earth colonized Novatierre chaotically and in panic. Not
only superpowers sent out colonies, but so did smaller nations, and
private corporations, and secret projects among the rich, and
coalitions of the poor. Anyone driven enough to survive found a way;
anyone with knowledge--or the ability to persuade the
knowledgeable--could scavenge the materials for a transfer-device from
a junkyard if they had to--not always safely, never reliably, but worth
the risk. No one knows who or how many eventually succeeded in
transferring to Novatierre.
When they got there few had made the preparations necessary to preserve
their way of life. Some brought tractors to lands without oilfields.
Some brought books of acid-based paper that crumbled within years. Some
brought little but a will to live.
Cultures geared to rain-forests found themselves in deserts.
Snowdwellers landed in equatorial savannahs. We'll never know how many
disappeared into oceans, but a surprising number survived to regale
their descendants with legends of crossing seas on wreckage-rafts.
Colonies that seemed huge in the planning proved too small to make it
on their own; they made historic treks to find other men and women,
almost always alien in their customs and their tongues. Cultures
changed and recombined. A dark age came and went. The people of the
28th century resemble us no more than the Renaissance Italians
resembled the Roman Empire.
One needs to understand something about Novatierran technology, despite
the fact that large portions of the population enjoy many of the same
comforts and conveniences that we do. They have no radio. They have no
great highways. They have no fossil fuels and no petroleum-products.
They have three airports on the entire planet capable of trasoceanic
flight, plus a faint scattering of tiny airports with little planes
that can make short hops (on a rare and extremely expensive fuel
derived from a marsh organism found only in one small corner of the
world.) Some nations do
have computers, but their networks do not span the globe, because they
have no global telephone lines.
A number of nations, however, have a level of magentine technology far
beyond anything known to the people of Earth. They have also taken many
other technologies, known to us from the past, and advanced them beyond
our wildest dreams. Sometimes they rebuilt what they lost, sometimes
they didn't, and sometimes they replaced it with something better.
Different populations vary in technology from the stone age to
superfuturistic, in a far wider range than ever existed simultaneously
on Earth.
Because, by our standards, they live in appalling isolation. Large
areas of the globe belong to no one, frequently because they have no
human population. Other regions, believed unpopulated by those outside
of them, sometimes turn out to host small and furtive tribes of human
beings after all, who often as not believe themselves the sole
survivors of Earth's demise.
Some nations have cobbled together roads or railways linking them to
others, and merchants have braved great treks to ply their goods in
distant lands, but many governments prefer to not rub elbows with their
neighbors too closely, and count such infrastructure as a waste of
taxes. Others think back on the Romans, how broad roads aided conquest,
and so they collect their engineers and make their plans...and somehow
none of it ever comes to fruition. (With a little help from those who don't like the idea of great conquering armies.)
And what of Technological Laboratories? Eventually they moved to the
mainland–even the scientists among them called the island haunted. Then
they discovered that they themselves had become haunted, and no move
could change that. Yet in the meantime they had established themselves
upon a peninsula of Alter-Australia (later called Altraus) and imported
(when their own transfer-base regained power) many support personnel
who farmed what became Alonzo Valley, across the Coral Gulf.
Throughout the centuries T.L., now called Til, remained and watched and
grieved for her sins. Yet soon she saw her solution: to make recompense
by sharing her incredible store of knowledge--preserved, rediscovered
or newly made. The earliest generations worked in haphazard stabs, but
by Deirdre's time Til had so devoted herself to altruism that no other
national purpose existed.
(And how did they manage this economically? By holding the monopoly on
other transfer-worlds, unviable for any extensive colonization, but
still producing useful mining and polluting-industry sites for the dead
rock worlds, and a wide range of useful organic chemicals from the
living ones. They did help out the economies of Naugren and Istislan by
operating transfer stations there, but still owned the stations.)
Til gathered to herself all of the unwanted children that she could
find, all over the world, all the expendable ones. These the Tili�n
raised to serve Lovequest. Lovequest means love followed as a quest
rather than as an emotion--a lifelong drive to serve, as the sole
purpose of life. Neglected, abused and abandoned children found that
they could disprove the rejection of their parents by such dedication,
that they could channel the tearing force of their traumas into this
outlet, that life thus became bearable, even grand.
Tili�n morality is not quite ours. Is it exploitation to do that upon
which human survival depends, something that the exploited devoutly
desire for themselves--even if you put the desire there? Is neurosis
better if society benefits? Is it better to cure mental illness or
channel it into a productive direction? I offer no answers here; I
merely report on the world that I've dreamed. (Sometimes, in fact, I
get very angry at the things that Til does! But what institution has
never incurred my anger?) Every era looks morally dubious to those who
come before or after, but always, eternally, we struggle after good.
(The people of Til Institute and Til Territories became known as the
Tili�n, “an” being the suffix for person in Tilianach, their language.
It is an irregular plural. The normal plural would have come out
Tilani, but putting the “i” in the middle emphasizes the importance of
the community to the individual, while accenting the “an” emphasizes
the importance of the individual to the community. The Tili�n try to
keep these two components balanced in equal honor.) What unites all of the Tili�n is the Lovequest Vow. I
offer it here, as nearly as I can approximate Tilianach braided verse
in English. Note that where it says, "I do swear" you may insert the
deity of your choice. Atheists and agnostics usually swear "by my Holy
Integrity". Those who do not swear may affirm. Some say, "I do swear by
______ to serve Lovequest," while others prefer, "I do swear to serve
________ through Lovequest", whichever suits their spirituality better.
(There exists an older, terrifying version of this vow
that ends, “If I fail to love the world/May I cease to love myself!”
The members of Fireheart Friendclan learned this more exacting version
in their youth, though more temperate souls modified it in their later
years.)
Til raises agents. Maybe 20% of those trained for the job make it; the
rest become support personnel. The agent's purpose is to immerse so
completely into a people that one absolutely thinks as one of them, so
that by this means one may find a solution to their problems in keeping
with their own ways. You can compare it to making a plant greener by
nourishing the roots rather than by spraypainting it. Agents make it
their goal to provide for the survival of human life in cooperation
with the whole planet, each populace according to the culture which
they have chosen for themselves.
The Tili�n have a saying, "A snag in a moth-hole can rip open the
fabric of the universe." By this they mean that no culture is too small
for their attention. Let me give you an Earth example: The Battle of
the Bulge sealed the fate of Germany in WWII, by destroying their
dwindling reserve of oil. This only made a difference because a
generation before they had lost access to the oilfields of Arabia. They
lost this access because their former ally, the Turkish Empire,
collapsed to a revolt. This revolt succeeded because the Turks
concentrated on controlling the more "advanced" and theoretically more
dangerous "City Arabs", while ignoring the "primitive" and ill-supplied
Bedouin, who nonetheless had sufficient grievance against the Turks to
campaign successfully for English arms and funding for their revolt.
Novatierre is deceptively beautiful, fruitful and abundant. The land
makes it easy to forget that we didn't quite evolve for this planet.
Five centuries after the Great Migration finds the human populous still
perilously marginal.
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