Epilogue

Rilla stood near the birthing pool with Tmafekitch and her mate, a purplish male named Frikatim with a long snorkel and one extra toe. Rilla felt a little shy of Frikatim, whom, after all, she didn’t know very well—how could she? She and Daddy had only been in the village a few days. Tmafekitch had had months and months to get to know Frikatim, and she must like him, or she wouldn’t be having a baby with him, would she? Rilla didn’t know if she liked him or not. As long as he let her have these ten days with Tmafekitch, these ten, days Daddy had promised she could have, Rilla didn’t really care if Frikatirn was there or not. It wasn’t as if she were jealous of her friend’s mate. Much.

She knew why Daddy had let her have the ten days, moving his field camp;clear over by Tmafelcitch’s adopted village (after they found it). Rilla knew why. But she didn’t like to think about the reason.

Tmafekitch made a sudden noise, a high clear click that meant she was startled. She took a few steps into the birthing pool, then crowded closer to Frikatim. In the pool, the tough membrane of the egg sac began .to wobble.

Rilla said, “Is the baby coming?”

Tmafekitch answered, in their own private language, “Soon!” and waved her snorkel in circles.

“I’ll get the Master!” Rilla cried, glad to have some-thing to do.

The Master was staying in a sort of dome made of woven plants and daubed mud, since this village, unlike the one Tmafekitch had been born in, had no Carnot temple.

A curtain of snug hung down in front of the doorway. Rilla knocked on a li-plant stem—the Masters had seemed to understand without any trouble the human custom of knocking—and the snug pulled apart. The Master came out.

He carried a stick covered with crawling snug. Rilla looked at it furtively—would it grow a new kind of plant

Tmafekitch and her baby could eat? One Master had al-ready made a plant with bright red berries that Tmafekitch said were delicious, although of course Rilla couldn’t eat them. She kept her glance at the writhing stick very fast. She was never really comfortable with the Masters. Unlike the Ihrdizu, they seemed to have no interest whatsoever in a little girl.

She said to the unsmiling face, so much farther above her than Tmafekitch’s would have been,—Tmafekitch. Baby. Now.” That was how the Masters liked you to talk to them: the simplest Ihrdizu words, in the smallest number that would convey the information.

The Master didn’t say thank you—they never did, Rilla thought resentfully—and started toward the birthing pool. Rilla followed. The Master walked too fast for her to keep up, which was supposed to indicate something won-derful about their bodies. That the bones or muscles or heart or something were actually changing to adapt to the gravity. Rilla couldn’t have cared less. Even a Master should say thank you.

She had to admit, though, that the Masters had been good for Genji. She didn’t understand it all, but Daddy said that since the Chujoans returned, Genji was being trans-formed from the bottom ecological layer up, for greater stability and abundance. Well, Rilla didn’t know about that, but she did know it was prettier. There were thicker plants, and brighter flowers, and more food for the Ihrdizu, and the sea had more bits of colored plankton floating in it. Rilla even liked the patches of snug that crawled freely around the tidal pools, sometimes venturing onto paths, al-though they gave many humans the creeps.

Like Mommy.

She had to see Mommy this afternoon, because the new ship was leaving for Earth tomorrow and Rilla would never see her again. It was only right, Daddy said, that Rilla see her one last time. She hadn’t seen her much, because Mommy had never come down off the ship in orbit since the day the Masters had sailed out of the sky from Chujo. That old ship was too damaged by its trip to Genji to ever leave again, so it just stayed in orbit, and Mommy just orbited along with it. Everything Mommy knew about the Masters, she had watched on screens.

Rilla hated to admit to herself that she didn’t want to see Mommy.

So instead she hurried along the path to the birthing pool, and by the time she got there the baby was tearing at the inside of the egg sac with its tiny sharp claws. Tma-fekitch and Frikatim watched anxiously, their front legs in the pool up to their tentacles, not helping but making en-couraging bleats and clicks.

Everybody knew you mustn’t help a baby out of its egg sac. If you did, it might not be strong enough to live.

But the baby did get out. It tore the sac and stuck its snout through, and then its front claws, and then pulled its claws back in and stuck out its little tentacles. It kept strug-gling until its back claws were flee, and then it stood in the shallow of the birthing pool where Tmafekitch and Fri-katim had fed it for so long with bits of plants and secre-tions and their own shit, which Daddy said was good for eggs. The Master had pissed in the pool, too, every morn-ing. Now the Master picked up the baby and gently shoved a bit of special snug down its throat and another bit, a different color, under the flap of its tympanum. Then the Master handed the baby to Frikatim, who would care for it while Tmafekitch hunted and protected them.

Frikatim’s snorkel waved.proudly. He sat full up on his tail. Tmafekitch and even Rilla crowded close to stroke the back of the squealing baby. It was such a cute little-she! Rilla put a finger between the teeny flukes of its tail, and the baby flipped it in pleasure. Rilla stroked it again while the Master watched, inscrutable, and all of a sudden Rilla was crying at the little-she, at being with Tmafekitch again, at the beauty and excitement of a new life on Genji.

“Hello, Jane,– Daddy said.

Rilla tightened her grasp on his hand.

Mommy looked calm, which was more than she had looked the last time Rilla had visited her: She sat in a small room on the ship, a room even smaller than Rilla’s partitioned cubby in the field dome. Two walls of the room were painted to look like a place Rilla had never seen. The sky was the wrong color, a sort of garish blue, and the plants were too tall and thin, and very strange-looking. Rilla shrank closer to Daddy.

He said, “I’ve brought her.”

Mommy didn’t even look at Rilla. But Rilla knew she saw her. Mommy hurt, that was why she didn’t look at Rilla, and seeing Mommy again, remembering how Mommy had combed her hair and read her stories, Rilla hurt, too. So much she thought she couldn’t stand it.

But all Mommy said was, “I’ve been reading the orig-inal exploration teams’ journals, Bruce.”

—Oh? Why is that? I thought you read only things set on Earth.”

Mommy didn’t say why. read Toshio Tatsuhiko, Yukiko Arama, Emile Esperanza, Nicole Washington—even Aaron Kammer. The presnug Aaron Kammer. The human.”

Daddy’s mouth turned down.

“And you know what?” Mommy said. “They all re-flect the same concern. They all, cared so much about not causing ecological and cultural imbalance on Genji and Chujo. Were so fucking concerned about human contami-nation. And all the time we humans were completely, to-tally irrelevant. Don’t you think that’s funny?”

Daddy said, “I’m not sure it’s true.”

“Yes, you are. You know it. All the ecological bal-ances, all the cultural disasters, were caused by the Mura-sakians themselves. Not by us. And now they’re being corrected by the Murasakians themselves, and not all our science or religion or so-called ‘art’ or anything else has made the slightest difference to the whole weird process. Isn’t that true?”

Daddy was silent.

–How does it feel to be completely irrelevant, Bruce? How do you stand it?”

Daddy glanced down at Rilla. “That’s enough, Jane. Please don’t start again.... “

“And do you know why we’re irrelevant on Genji and Chujo? Because it’s not our system, Bruce.

We can’t even eat the food, breathe most of the air—we don’t belong here. Even our science doesn’t belong here. Science observes things in order to effect beneficial change, Bruce. You knew that once.

There is nothing we can ever change here. Nothing.”

Daddy said, his voice thick, “Not again, Jane. I brought Rilla here to say good-bye. Just that.”

“Just that. ‘Just that.’ A First Conciliator you bought and paid for decides who gets custody of my daughter and you—”

“That’s not true. Jane! Not even a word of it!”

Rilla saw a place to say something. Holding on to Daddy’s hand very tight, she said, “I wanted to stay on Genji, Mommy. I wanted to. I told Mr. Dane that.”

Mommy didn’t say anything. Suddenly she hugged Rilla so tight Rilla couldn’t breathe. “Mommy!

You’re hurting me!” ‘

Abruptly, Mommy let her go. Then she was pushing them out of the cabin, closing the door. “Go!

Go! Take her!”

Daddy picked up Rilla, who was too old to be picked up, and ran down the ship corridor. He didn’t stop until he got to the shuttle bay, where he set her down, knelt, and brought his face close to hers.

“Rilla—are you sure? There won’t be another ship from Earth for at least three years standard, you know. Are you sure?”

Rilla said, –I’m sure.”

“And I ... I know I’m not the best father for you, I get so caught up in my work “

Rilla hated it when he got like this. It was so much better when he just did the work, letting her do what she wanted to. She was all right, she had Tmafekitch and the other Ihrdizu.... When Daddy got like this, she almost de-spised him. That feeling frightened her. So she said coldly. “Don’t start again, Daddy.

Please.”

After that, Daddy got quiet. Rilla felt herself grow quieter, too.. But it wasn’t until they were in the shuttle, returning to Genji, that she spoke again.

“Daddy—I didn’t tell Mommy that Mr. Dane isn’t going to stay on Genji. I was going to, because I thought .she might want to know who else was going to make the trip with her, but then I didn’t. Was that right?”

Daddy brushed his face with his hand. “That was right, Rilla.”

“Daddy—are we unimportant to Genji, like Mommy said?”

Daddy sucked in his cheeks. “Yes.”

“Then ... then why are you staying? I mean, I know why I’m staying, because I was born here”—Rita Byrne and Seigi Minoru and Cade Anson and me—“but why are you? If you’re completely unimportant to Genji?”

Bruce Johnson looked out the shuttle window. The great ship was in low orbit; beneath them Genji’s clouds swirled thickly, covering and uncovering an expanse of bleak sea, multicolored land.

“Because Genji is important to me.”

Suzy Tatsumi laid the bunch of flowers on Edward Philby’s grave, telling herself it was a ridiculous and sen-timental thing to do. Certainly Philby would have thought so. The body, cremated, was not really buried under the rough stone marker, and the tide would come up in a few hours and carry away the flowers anyway. But they were “new flowers,” the first the Chujoans had engineered, and Tatsumi wanted them to be there.

Jordan Dane waited in the flyer. She knew he still had much to do before both of them boarded the shuttle to-morrow for the ship, but he showed no sign of impatience. He was, she thought, always and forever, a patient man.

“All done?”

“In my grandmother’s house in Kyoto,” Tatsumi said as the flyer lifted, “was a painting on rice paper.

It was very old, and she was very proud of it. The painting showed a mountain beside a sea. It was done in the old style: very spare, quick, light brush strokes. In the foreground were plum blossoms. I would stare at the painting for hours when I was a child. What I remember—although it is difficult to know if memory is accurate—is that the mountain and the sea and the trees filled me with peace. They seemed com-pletely calm, caught forever in a moment of perfect balance.”

“I see,” Dane said.

“I think you do,” Tatsumi said, in her pretty voice. “Jordan, where will you go when we reach Earth?”

“I have eleven years to think about it,” he said. He did not look at her. “1 have never seen Japan.”

“You would very much like Kyoto. At least, the Kyoto I remember. Of course, Japan may be very different now.”

“Do you expect it will be?”

“Not in its essence. That does not change. And of course there are excellent facilities for the writing of your book.”

“I would very much like Japan if you were there,” Dane said.

“It is very different from a habitat. Or from Genji.”

“I, would hope so,” Jordan said.

The flyer skimmed over a cliff and then over the sea. Below them drifted a mass of the new plankton the Masters were breeding, dull red. It was fast-growing, of high nour-ishment to several breeds of Genji sea life, genetically mal-leable. Bruce Johnson had exulted in the new plankton.

Suzy said neutrally, “I am twenty years your senior, Jordan.”

“I don’t think I should want to come to Kyoto if you were not.”

“It is not usual for a young man to value a ... a for-mal balance over, let us say, sexual youth. Or riotous adventure.–

Dane looked again at the drifting mass of plankton, which had not existed two months ago. At the bioloon float-ing in the air in the far distance, above Nighiand. At the manic report Bruce Johnson had turned in correlating QED fuzzy-logic deductions about the bioengineered spaceship, the Masters’ cities on Chujo, the genetic alteration of plank-ton and land fauna, the sudden vocabulary acquisition of the Ihrdizu, and his wife’s refusal to set foot on Genji. The report also covered the origin of carpet whales, which John-son maintained had been created by the Chupchups. Three Japanese res’archers had filed angry and derisive counter-reports, calling Johnson’s speculations “irresponsible sci-ence-mongering,” a term completely opaque to Dane. Maybe it was the translator. Johnson had counterattacked. Resource allocations for Malachiel Holden’s carpet-whale studies were affected by the politics of this and six other scientific feuds dumped on the First Conciliator, with Hol-den’s resources being cut by a third. Or increased by a third—the outcome was not yet clear. Holden and Byrne were screaming anyway, just in case. Three Quantists had declared the Chujoan return to be a “Return,” capital R, and had set about building more Carrot temples. Two of the time artists had moved into a Carnot temple to hold what they called a “court of time”: Dane had failed to find out exactly what this involved. The ship from Earth was bringing a mixed scientific and missionary team. The ship was called the Light of Allah, and most of the people aboard, after eleven years together, seemed to be engaged in blood feuds with each other.

“Riotous adventure,” Dane repeated, and laughed, and reached for Suzy’s hand.

After a moment she laughed, too.

The new First Conciliator stood ready to greet the first team of scientists off the shuttle. It was actually the shuttle belonging to the old ship still in orbit; apparently, the shut-tle on the Light of Allah had been damaged in some un-specified accident in transit. The First Conciliator found it hard to picture this: surely not even a space-bored crew would have reason to try to make use of a shuttle while traveling at an acceleration slightly greater than one g? What could they do with it? These questions had not thus far been answered.

The shuttle touched down on the plain not far from the sub-Genji point. The main base on Chujo had, of course, been shifted to here after the startling events of eight months ago. And now that the new First Conciliator had been chosen, Dune Tiger Station would replace Okuma Base as the center of joint decisions for the humans in the Murasaki System.

If you could call what Miyuki made “decisions.”

The shuttle air lock opened, and the first ten embar-kees, in full suits, stepped onto the soil of Chujo.

Miyuki moved forward, greeting first Captain Salah Mahjoub, then each member of the scientific team.

Before greeting the last man in line, she braced herself.

Even through his faceplate the resemblance was star-tling. The old pictures she had seen ... just the same. The light, sandy hair, so out of place among the dark-complexioned team. The slightly crooked nose, gray eyes, too-small chin.

She said in English, “You are welcome to the Mura-saki System, Mr. Kevin Kammer-Washington.”

His eyes burned with his special interest in this place: the boulder-strewn valley with its deep crevasses, the self-managing fields, the ruins of the Chupchup city on the horizon.

“Thank you, First Conciliator,” he said “I am very eager to become a part of Chujo.”

Appendix A: Design For Two Worlds

by Poul Anderson

Hoping to keep the science in this book as “hard” as possible, I have picked a real star, close enough that it could be reached in human-scale time without going faster than light. I also wanted to avoid those within such a radius that everybody else has been using. Since big, bright stars are implausible (to put it mildly) as suns of habitable planets, this gets us to the red dwarfs. Some astronomers raise objections to these, too, which I will get to shortly, but to my mind this constitutes a chal-lenge with the potential of generating some interesting worlds.

The star in question has only a catalogue number, HD36395 (or—3°1123), for it is of magnitude 7.9, well below naked-eye visibility, in Orion (RA 5h26m, dec.—3°42’). The parallax is 0.”163, which translates to just about 20 light-years and gives an absolute visual magnitude of 9.03, corresponding to a luminosity of 0.0213, or about 1/47, Sol’s. The spectral type is MI.

Twenty light-years is not enough of a distance to change the constellations much. Some stars in the Orion vicinity may show a little displacement. Sol is in Ophiu-chus, of magnitude 4.08, visible without instruments but unimpressive. There does not seem to be any rule govern-ing the orientation of stellar rotation axes and orbital planes, so I am arbitrarily supposing this system is so arranged—at this moment in galactic history—that north is in the gen-eral direction of Sheliak, Beta Lyrae, about 57° off our north celestial pole. Of course, each of the planets has its own north, but this sector is approximately right for all of them, unless some writer wants to give one a radically skewed revolution or rotation.

A spacecraft traveling at one Earth gravity accelera-tion, turnover (commencement of equal deceleration) at midpoint, would cover 20 light-years in 21 years Earth time, but, because of relativistic effects, only 11 years plus a couple of months in ship’s time. A 2-g boost would cut the latter time to 6.25 years. Perhaps people could take this much without ill effect. It would be harder on the circula-tory system than on the bones and muscles: but medications to help might be developed. Bussard ramjets and/or anti-matter fueling will theoretically make such spacecraft pos-sible—though thinking about problems of engineering, what the ship cannot do, as well as human organization and relationships en route, yields material for many stories. If the ship was much slower, I at least would want suspended animation, unless life span had been enormously increased. I no longer believe—generation ships” are feasible.

The Sun

The astronomical data above are not really as exact as they may look; observations have their probable errors. What follows is to be honest, even less precise. It represents what I have calculated using formulas for relationships among such quantities as luminosity, mass, color index, diameter, and temperature. Besides necessarily embodying the uncer-tainties of the primary data, these formulas omit

,

important factors, notably age. Fortunately, red dwarfs evolve very slowly, so that this generally matters much less where they are concerned than it does for larger stars. I have carried out my results to more significant figures than is justified, but we may as well use these; they’re as likely to be correct as any others in the same ballpark.

The mass comes out to be 0.333 Sol’s, just one-third. The diameter is proportionately larger, 0.82

Sol’s, because red dwarfs are less dense. Seen from the distance of the hypothetical planets to be discussed, it has an angular di-ameter of 1°40’12”, or 3.67 times that of Sol seen from Earth. The photosphere temperature is 3,396 K (cf. Sol’s approximately 6,000 K), which makes the wavelength of maximum intensity emitted 8,500 A, in the near infrared (cf. Sol’s 3,300 A, in the near ultraviolet).

At this point I must emphasize that the term “red dwarf” is misleading, as are color names for most kinds of stars. We would not see a dull crimson ember. A temper-ature of 3,396 K is well above that of old-time carbon-filament incandescent lamps (about 2,400 K) and not far below that of a carbon arc (about 3,900 K). Our star is certainly less brilliant than Sol. You could look straight at it for a little bit longer without suffering permanent eye damage, but only a little bit, and you wouldn’t want to. Its light has a yellowish tinge, and at the distance of our imag-inary planets there is significantly less than Earth gets, but human vision is so adaptable that ordinarily this won’t make any important difference. Think of being in a nor-mally well-lighted twentieth-century room after dark. The paucity of ultraviolet radiation does have its very noticeable effects, which we’ll get to later.

It is thought that stars like this have considerable solar winds, in volume if perhaps not so much in energy. If you blanked out the disk of ours, you’d see a larger corona than Sol’s, a spectacular sight indeed. On the other hand, flares and prominences are probably smaller and fewer. There are doubtless sunspots, but it seems to be anybody’s guess how big and many they are, or what kind of cycle they go through. My own guess is that this kind of activity, too, is less than on Sol, but that occasionally a large and highly energetic flare occurs.

Age and composition are equally problematic. As a general rule, which must have individual exceptions, the older a star is, the poorer it is in “metals” (elements heav-ier than helium). Bright ones like Sirius are so short-lived that we can set an upper limit on their ages and those of any companions, which presumably formed together with them. However, the dim ones change so slowly that we have no such clues other than their spectra, which are not always very helpful. HD36395 is in our immediate neigh-borhood, and its rather modest velocity with respect to us suggests that it hasn’t drifted in from a remote and very different region. Subject to correction, I assume it is about as old as Sol, whose age is a bit under five billion years, and has a similar metal content—which means that its plan-ets resemble ours to that extent.

At this point, rather than continue entirely in so ab-stract a vein, some ideas about nomenclature may be in order. ‘I suppose the mythologies of. Earth will long since have been used up on closer planetary systems that are also of interest (if not within the solar system itself, the way things have been going). At the same time, if people intend to pay much attention at all to a given set of worlds. they’ll want names for them, and it will be helpful to have those names bestowed according to some system rather than at whim.

With Karen Anderson’s help. I have christened HD36395 Murasaki, for the famous Japanese writer (fioruit A.D. 1000), and its planets for characters in her Genji Mon-ogcoari. The two on which we shall concentrate are called “Genji,” for the hero of the novel, and To no Chujo.—for his close friend; the latter can correctly be shortened to “Chujo.” Doubtless there are other planets in, the system, of less interest because they have no life; probably they number fewer than Sol’s retinue. Giants could be named for the two emperors in the tale, Ryozen and Suzaku. Other male characters include Sochi and Yugiri; females include Asagao, Aoi, Omiya, and Jokyoden.

Planets

Today it does seem likely that the majority of stars, at least, are accompanied by lesser objects, and that in many cases some of these objects are large enough to be called planets. How common life may be is another matter. So far the solar system has proved disappointing, and, one school of thought holds that the necessary conditions are so strict that Earth may be unique, or close to unique, in the universe. ,I doubt this very much, but for present purposes will assume that life involves proteins in water solution.

Conceivably some-thing radically different exists, but the former is the con-servative, “hard—assumption.

By far the largest number of stars are red dwarfs, so if biopoesis cannot occur around any of these, the incidence of it is enormously reduced. The most telling objections, and possible counterarguments to them, are as follows.

Their radiation is too poor in ultraviolet to energize the chemistry that leads to life and later makes complex, high-energy organisms possible. Answer: Organic mole-cules of significant complexity have been identified in interstellar space. Without much UV to break them down, they can accumulate on planets, and there react with each other. Moreover, the planets themselves offer such energy sources as cosmic radiation, radioactivity, heat, and light-ning, so they might generate their own prebiological mol-ecules. We do not today know how fast chemical and biological evolution could proceed on that basis, but the fact seems to be that the formation of an ozone layer on Earth, vastly reducing the UV at the surface, did not slow it down much if at all. Besides, presumably life could em-ploy more labile molecules than ours, with the visible wavelengths supplying sufficient energy. I shall make that assumption here.

The planet must be at such a temperature, for ex-tremely long periods of time, that water exists in liquid form on its surface, neither all frozen nor all vaporized. The region around a red dviarf in which it receives just the right amount, of energy for this is so narrow that surely very few orbits throughout the universe happen to occupy any. Answer: It ought to occur occasionally. More importantly, greenhouse effect, about which more later, broadens the zone considerably. Indeed, Earth would be frozen solid were it not for this. Hence the situation isn’t really implausible.

3. If the planet is close enough in, the tidal drag of the sun, which follows an inverse cube law, will

,

produce a locked rotation, whether 1:1 as Earth has done to its moon or 2:3 as Sol has done to Mercury. The dark side will get so cold, in its permanent or very long night, that atmos-phere, or at least all water, will soon freeze out, and not much will melt or sublime by day. At best, the whole world will be as arid as our Antarctica. Life couldn’t develop or survive with so little moisture. Answer Atmospherics is not an exact science yet, but full of surprises. Global circulation might actually keep the dark side warm enough. But a more picturesque possibility is that of a double planet, two worlds swinging around a common center of mass that orbits the sun, thus enjoying a sufficiently rapid alternation of night and day. I grant you that this is doubtless rare, but it is the situation I propose to develop, with Genji and Chujo being the companion globes.

What kind of orbit around Murasaki do they share? We don’t today know what determines such quantities. I could put them at a mean distance of 0.1459 a.u. (astro-nomical unit, where Earth’s from Sol

= 1.0 a.u.) so that they get as much irradiation from their sun as we do from ours, albeit with a different spectral distribution. However, that seemed awfully close in—and not really playing the game! ,I finally settled on 0.2233 a.u. This is still a smaller orbit than Mercury’s (0.387), but the gravitational field has the same strength, so it seems reasonable that planets could condense there. Genji-Chujo is, I suppose, the innermost of any noteworthiness; outer worlds are distributed according to some kind of Bode-Titius rule, and the scale of the sys-tem in general is smaller than Sol’s.

At this distance, our associated planets receive 0.4272 the irradiation Earth gets, comparable to Mars’. As men-tioned earlier, the sun appears three and two-thirds times as wide as Sol seen from Earth. The tidal force of Murasaki is about 1.72 that of Sol on Mercury. Whether this would produce a 1:1 rotation, I’m not sure; it’s quite a bit less than the drag of Earth on Luna. Doubtless it would at least have slowed the rotation down greatly, were it not for the double-planet situation.

The sidereal year of the companions is 0.1829 Earth’s, or 66 days, 191/2 hours in Terrestrial terms.

Now the question arises how planets receiving no more energy than this can support life. As observed earlier, we must invoke greenhouse effect, which implies a sub-stantial atmosphere. How much is it reasonable to give a world whose size is the same order of magnitude as Earth’s? All or nearly all primordial gas must have been lost early on, and a secondary atmosphere outgassed. If the amount of this was proportional to mass, we get the inter-esting result that air pressure down at the surface was then proportional to the square of g, the gravitational accelera-tion at that surface. (A recent and rather heterodox idea is that we got much of our water from small comets. The latest evidence seems to have discredited this, but even if it is true, a planet should attract comets proportionally to its mass.) This argument is, though, pretty academic. At-mospheres evolve, and the cases of Earth, Venus, and Mars show how radically different they can become.

Since Genji and Chujo are of approximately Earth mass, I assume they both have plate tectonics and that this, along with other factors, has caused most of the original carbon dioxide to be fixed in the rocks.

Life has also been at work; both atmospheres now contain oxygen, nitrogen, and argon in approximately Terrestrial proportions, with carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane the most signif-icant trace compounds.

Let us start by considering mean planetary tempera-tures. Earth’s is about 288 K (15°C)—which,

,

when one looks at the range of temperatures found in reality, shows how artificial that “mean” is. Yet we need some such fig-ure as the basis for further thinking. The absolute temper-ature, T, should be a roughly linear function of albedo, A, or rather of the quantity 1—A; of greenhouse effect; and of the fourth root of irradiation. I have found the thoughts of Frank Chadwick and his associates very helpful in this connection.

Albedo is an overall figure, depending on how much of what kinds of surface the planet has. Water reflects more light than rock but less than ice, etc. If cloudiness varies, so will A. Given their characteristics, to be detailed later, I estimated the mean A for Genji as 0.35, a little more than Earth’s, and for Chujo as 0.15, about like Mars’.

Greenhouse effect is still more a matter of guesswork and arbitrariness. It should be crudely proportional to the amount of atmosphere per unit area, but we are discovering here on Earth—we are likely to find out the precise details the hard way—what a difference very slight-looking vari-ations in such quantities as CO, content can make. The present case is further complicated by the fact that the greenhouse gases will keep much of Murasaki’s radiation out! Nevertheless, the wavelengths that get through will result in heat being trapped, especially if our planets have a little more carbon dioxide in their airs than Earth does.

Once again weighing the various factors as best I could, I derived a mean temperature of 293K

(20°C) for Genji, 278 K (5°C) for Chujo. Rough though these results are, they indicate that it is reasonable to suppose the two planets support life.

At this point I should admit that none of their char-icteristics came to me through divine inspiration. It was all very much a business of cut-and-try, converging by suc-cessive approximations on the desired result—and more of-ten than not, this or that assumption, while promoting the possibility of a habitable world, had other consequences that surprised me. This is one of the things that makes planet-building fun.

The Genji-Chujo pair has a center of mass that orbits Murasaki at the given mean distance of 0.2233

a.u. The eccentricity is about 0.02, slightly more than for Earth but its effects small compared to those of other factors. Pre-cession and nutation of the combined orbits and the plan-etary rotation axes must be considerable and have important effects, such as changes of regional climates, over geolog-ically short periods of time. Being larger, Genji is propor-tionately closer to the center of mass and swings through a smaller course.

The mutual orbit of the planets is not in the same plane as that of the center, but is in the present epoch inclined 4°29’ to it. The planets are separated by an average distance of 156,262 kilometers, about 40 percent of the Earth-Luna figure. The eccentricity of this orbit is 0.06, which means that, although they are in locked rotation facing each other, they librate somewhat. This has effects on their atmos-pheres, hydrospheres, and lithospheres. The period is 3.78 Earth days, or 90 hours, 43 minutes, 12 seconds. Thus the year = 17.6 planetary days.

Their tidal forces on each other are huge. The locked rotation minimizes the effects, but they are there, both be-cause of libration and because of their action on air, water, and rock. The tidal force of Murasaki on either amounts to 13.6 times that of Luna on Earth, and this is of course fully manifested in the course of a rotation period.

Hence Genji and Chujo cannot always have been in locked rotation and will not always continue so.

Genji es-pecially is being slowed down by frictional losses in its seas, driving the two globes farther apart.

However, pre-cisely because the forces are so large, straits where the losses are especially great are geologically short-lived. On a human time-scale, Genji and Chujo have been as they are with respect to each other for a long time and will stay that way for another long time.

I will now discuss the general physical characteristics of the two planets separately. Some of the quantities already—mentioned, such as the shared rotation period, derive from them.

Genji

This is the larger partner. Letting “E” stand for “times that of Earth,” it has a mass of 2.77 E and a mean density of 1.1 E, which means its mean diameter is 1.36 E, or 17,349 km. Like Chujo, it is little flattened by its rather slow rotation, but has been measurably (though not percep-tibly by the unaided eye) deformed by the gravitation of the other world, so that it is slightly egg-shaped with the point toward the latter. Escape velocity is 15.98 km per sec; cf. Earth’s 11.2. Standing on a level plain, a person of average height would see the horizon about 5.6 km off, compared to 4.8 on Earth. The surface gravity is 1.50 E. Humans in good condition can tolerate this, though they have to be wary of falls—indeed, acquire a whole new art of walking, running, and throwing—and cannot carry loads as large as they could at home.

The inclination of the axis to the shared orbital plane is 3°17’. Even taking into account the inclination of this orbit, it does not lead to much in the way of seasons any-where. At sea level, climates range from hotter than Earth’s tropics to coolish-temperate in the polar regions; there are no ice caps. Given the lesser irradiation, slower rotation, and denser atmosphere compared to Earth, winds are gen-erally light, though they have more force for a given speed. Spectacular lightning storms are quite common. Other things being equal, waves on deep water travel some 20 Percent faster than on Earth, which joins with the powerful, complexly shifting tidal forces to make for violent, treach-erous seas.

The distribution of water and land surface is similar to Earth’s, 0.8 to 0.2. There is more cloudiness and precip-itation. Given the greater density gradient of the atmos-phere, clouds do not generally form very high up. What uplands exist are therefore usually clear-skied, and overlook extensive lowland *cloud decks—which, however, are not permanent like Venus’, but change and often break up for a while.

Highlands are comparatively few, though, and no mountains are as tall as Earth’s best. Plate tectonics and other diastrophic processes operate more strongly, because of the greater planetary mass, generating many earthquakes and pushing strata up; but they have a stronger gravitational field to work against, and erosion by the heavier atmos-phere helps bring down their creations faster. Most coast-lands are regularly inundated by the enormous tides, which often produce savage, dangerous bores.

The sea-level atmospheric pressure is 3.1 bars. Given its Earthlike composition, this is too much for humans, un-less they have devices to reduce it before they breathe. The lowest endurable altitude, and it not really safe, is about 2,100 meters, where pressure has fallen to 2 bars, and you don’t get a comfortable 1 bar till you’re at about 5,800 meters, an altitude seldom found and a cold, arid, sparsely begrown environment. Because Murasaki light contains much less blue than Sol’s, the sky looks darker than Earth’s, dusky grayish. From sea level, on a clear night, you see far fewer stars even on “starside,”

the outer hem-isphere, while on “moonside” the brightness of Chujo washes nearly all out of vision.

The tidal drag of Chujo = 917.3 times that of Luna on Earth. Though the locked rotation minimizes the con-sequences of this, you, do get tremendous slosh effects in some seas as Genji librates, and of course big tides follow Murasaki around the world. Because of gravitational de-formation, most of the highest country on Genji is on moonside, concentrating around the area below Chujo.

Seen from Genji, Chujo has an angular diameter of 4°24”, which is 8.5 times that of Luna or Sol seen from Earth. When it is full, it gives 66 times the light of full Luna, or about 0.0001 that of Sol on Earth. It does not eclipse Murasaki every noon, and some eclipses are partial or cover the sun only briefly.

Maximum eclipse durations occur twice a year, 1 hour 6 minutes during which the sun is entirely hidden.

(The time from first to last contact adds about 20 minutes.) At such times the darkened planetary disk is surrounded by a red ring of refracted light.

Chujo

I will run through the features in pretty much the same order. Both its mass and its density are appreciably less, especially the former. (As for the latter, I was guessing again, but guessing on the basis of what we observe in the solar system.) The mass is 0.758 E, the density 0.9 E, lead— ing to a mean diameter of 0.94 E, or 11,922 km. Escape velocity is 10.05 km per sec. Flat horizon distance is 43 km, substantially the same as on Earth. Surface gravity is 0.85 E, which poses no physiological problems for humans. The inclination of the axis to the shared orbital plane is 25°28’. Taken together with the inclination of the orbit itself, theoretically this increases summer temperature by some 34°C and reduces winter temperature by some 19°C. These figures must not be taken literally; the calculation is exceedingly crude, and among other things, the short-ness of the year will prevent such extremes. However, it does join with the generally dry surface and thin air to indicate violent swings of weather. Windstorms are fre-quent and strong, though lightning, rain, and snow are scarce. •

Land and water distributions are almost the reverse of Genji’s: 0.72 to 0.22, with polar caps and other ice fields covering the rest of the surface. Clouds are slight and the ice is generally dusty; together with the desertlike ecology of most regions, this accounts for the low albedo. Skies are usually clear, except when dust storms arise. Sometimes the dust is glittery powdered ice, at least in part. What clouds occur are oftenest cirrus, high and thin in a dark purplish sky. Starside nights are wonderfully starry.

In general, Chujo is a world ranging from chilly to intensely cold, though temperatures about like a warm sum-mer day in Earth’s temperate zones can be briefly experi-enced in the lower latitudes. Most of the water is locked in permafrost and buried glaciers. Topographical and geolog-ical evidence indicates that this was not always the case and will not always be so. Much less well buffered than Genji or even Earth, this planet is subject to effects of or-bital and rotational shifts, which, astronomically speaking, go on rather rapidly. It has had its warm, wet cycles in the past and will again in the future.

With almost as much tectonic activity as Earth and with less gravity and erosion, Chujo has many elevated ta-blelands and great mountain ranges, some of which exceed anything Terrestrial. In the present epoch there are no proper oceans; seas are small and mostly wide-scattered. A number of them are intensely briny, as are many marshes. Dried riverbeds and sea bottoms are common. Although Genji’s tidal force on Chujo is about 1,210 times that of Luna on Earth, its effects are mainly apparent in the moun-tainous character of moonside and in the frequency of volcanoes, a “ring of fire,” girdling the planet on the border between moonside and starside.

The sea-level atmospheric pressure is 0.71 bar. This is equivalent to 3,660 meters on Earth. Not all humans can acclimate to it, and everybody finds its dryness uncomfort-able. Nobody can go much higher without artificial help. At an altitude of some 6,000 meters pressure has dropped to one-half, quite insufficient for us.

Genji has an angular diameter in the sky of 6°20’24”, about 12.27 times that of Luna seen from Earth, and when full gives 321.6 times the light, about 0.0006 that of Sol on Earth, ample to read by and even see colors. It eclipses Murasaki oftener than Chujo does, the maximum duration of totality being 1

hour, 35 min, 12 sec. The red ring then seen is somewhat thinner and fainter than it is around the eclipsed Chujo.

Life

Although organisms and, indeed, ecologies are quite dif-ferent on Genji and Chujo, it is astounding how similar the biochemistries are, beginning with the genetic codes, The variations are not much more than would be expected on a single planet such as Earth. It is thought that this is due to primitive spores having been carried between the planets, from high in the atmosphere, by light pressure, the Arrhe-nius process. Murasaki light and wind would be less dis-ruptive than Sol’s. Which world life started on is debatable, considering how Chujo, especially, has changed with time. Perhaps it began independently on both and swapped around; there are some anomalous life-forms, especially on the microscopic level.

Fundamentally this biology involves proteins in water solution, as on Earth, but for the most part they are not the same proteins or even all the same amino acids, while such classes of compounds as lipids, sugars, etc., that life also uses are still more different from ours. In a general sense, the key molecules are more labile than on Earth, as they must be to use the lower-energy quanta that this sun mainly offers.

Ultraviolet is as deadly to Murasakian life as hard X rays are to Terrestrial. Since the planets have no ozone layers to speak of, the—fortunately infrequent—large flares on the sun can bring disaster to exposed regions.

Fire might be thought to be still more of a hazard on oxygen-rich Genji, but most plants there have evolved to be not readily combustible. Some,,are, their reproductive cycles depending on it. On the whole, animals are apt to be worse injured by a burn than we are.

Obviously, humans and other Terrestrial creatures can get no nourishment from this life, and most tastes terrible while some is outright poisonous_ The converse holds, of course. Thus people need fear no native microbes, and any damage suffered from large animals will be essentially accidental.

On both planets we get vegetable and animal king-doms as on Earth, with corresponding ambiguities.

(In their book Five Kingdoms, Margulis and Schwartz recognize that many on our planet.) Most vegetation photosynthesizes, thereby supplying the atmospheres with their free oxygen. For this it does not employ chlorophyll, but a molecule activated by red and orange light. Consequently most leaves, stalks, etc. are yellow. Humans have dubbed the compound “xanthophyll.” Strictly speaking, there are two distinct forms, one found on Genji and one on Chujo, which gives a clue to early evolution on those worlds; but the variation between the molecules is not great. The shades and tones of yellow are as many as are the greens on Earth, and just as with some Terrestrial plants that are not green because of pigmentation, some here are other colors, es-pecially blue.

Presumably due to the shortness of the year, no decid-uous plants have developed on either world.

The botany of both is as complicated and fascinating as ever Earth’s was. Some Terrestrial adaptations are lacking, and some here have no Terrestrial counterparts.

However, I will concentrate on the animal life of Genji. It is every bit as various, intricate, and alien as the vegetation. As was to be expected, nothing has evolved that can properly be called a fish, reptile, bird, etc. Still, form follows function, and many structures are analogous to those on Earth.

This includes the basic design of many multicellular creatures. Like ours, they are essentially cylinders, taking in nourishment at one end, where the major sense organs are, and excreting wastes at the other end, with appendages in between that are more or less cylindrical, too. (I am reminded of the childish riddle, “What is the difference between a stovepipe and a crazy Dutchman?” Answer: “One is a hollow cylinder, and the other is a silly Hollan-der.”) Such organs as male and female gonads, eyes, ears, lungs, etc., together with such structures as exo—and en-doskeletons, scales, teeth, wings, horns, etc., have evolved. The endoskeletal animals all have just four true limbs, the same as on Earth. Yet differences of detail are countless, especially when one studies what is below the surface,.and often these differences are quite radical—as they can be on Earth.

Two things immediately strike the human observer newly arrived on Genji. One is the vast proliferation of winged creatures, of every size from nearly microscopic insectoids to hoverers larger than our ancient Quetzalcoat-lus. Although the planet’s gravity is higher than Earth’s, the great air pressure more than compensates, making con-ditions very favorable for flyers. All classes have represen-tatives, even the ichthyoids, some of which have developed oxygen storage enabling them to leap from the water and flap for a while.

The other feature is the absence of anything at all anal-ogous to our mammalia. Live birth and a primitive sort of homeothermy do occur in some beasts, and one order com-bines them, though it is no more conspicuous than mam-mals were in our Mesozoic; but placentas, lactation, and hair are quite unknown. There has been no “reason” for them. Despite regional climatic changes through geological time, Genji seems never to have had any glacial era; prob-ably the dense atmosphere and huge hydrosphere are too good a buffer. Also, given the small axial tilt and the dearth of any real highlands, there is much less zonal variation than on Earth.

(Where mountains do exist, conditions change far more rapidly with altitude, because air pressure drops fas-ter. Thus uplands become populated by specialized, plants and animals, often in successively higher ecological belts that have relatively little interaction with each other. Moun-tains being short-lived, these organisms have not had the chance to evolve much beyond their special adaptations; they are mostly small and rather primitive.).

Nonetheless, animals have developed numerous re-markable features—in two species, actual intelligence. I will discuss these species at some length. Not only are they of particular interest to us, but each typefies its general kind in the same way that we typefy the less specialized mammals.

The Land Genjians

Also known as Ihrdizu, and sometimes by other names, all names being in some degree inaccurate, these are the more numerous race, probably the more advanced, and certainly the easier for humans to make contact with. Temporarily, therefore, I shall just call them the Genjians, as if they were the only sapients on the planet.

The ancestral form originated in a coastal area. It has been pointed out that the gigantic tides inundate most lit-torals. The water is turbulent and tricky, but by bringing up minerals from below—as well as by receiving material brought from inland by erosion—it supports a rich variety of life. The proto-Genjian lived an amphibious existence, going ashore at low tide or swimming up to the marshes; it nested and hunted in the great mats of “floating forest”; it dived below in search of prey, but also climbed rocks and cliffs when these reared above high water. This life put a premium on,agility, the capability of grasping and hold-ing, sharp senses, and quick wits.

The modern sapient is a quadruped, with five clawed, prehensile digits on the hind feet. The four on each forepaw have smaller claws, almost like nails. The blue-gray, smooth-skinned body is somewhat torpedo-shaped. At the rear is a strong tail with two muscular horizontal flukes. It does the propulsion when the Genjian swims, whether on the water surface or below; the limbs then act as rudders. Ashore, the being uses the tail as a support when it sits upright, or as a formidable weapon in case of need. The head is continuous with the body; there is no neck. The lipless mouth has front teeth meant for snapping and slash-ing, back teeth meant for grinding; this is an omnivore. An adult female is about two meters long from snout to tail end, and masses some 100 kilos. The adult male is seldom more than a meter and a half long and is rather slenderer.

The beings are not amphibians like frogs or toads, but perhaps they are more analogous to these than to anything else Terrestrial. Ordinarily they are poikilothermic, seeking either sunlight or water to regulate body temperature; but they can “turn up” their metabolism to a high rate and commonly do, being on the whole as active as humans, though better at sitting still when that is called for. Activity helps keep them warm. At need they can “burn” fat di-rectly for heat energy or to support a burst of furious mo-tion, when their speed can be cheetahlike. Lacking sweat glands, they could not survive long in a hot desert, but there are hardly any such on the planet. Nearly all lowland en-vironments offer water, shade, or mud for wallowing.

The head also bears the signs of the breed’s aquatic origin. On top is the “snorkel,” a small trunk that can be lifted for breathing while the being is submerged; valves can close the passages. It is not the olfactory organ, but it does have a certain thermal sensitivity, helping to track down prey or find one’s way in a dense fog. A tympanum on either side responds to sound waves; leathery flaps can be drawn across for protection. This is not as efficient at hearing as the human ear—for one thing, it has poor direc-tionality—but the thick atmosphere, conducting sound fast and well, compensates to a sufficient degree. Four eyes are spaced around the head behind the mouth, thus giving full vision even though the head cannot turn. They are round, have a variety of colors in beautiful agatelike patterns, and possess remarkable dark adaptation. (Many nights are cloudy, Chujo shines on only one hemisphere, and to this day Genjians are often well underwater for many minutes on end.) The eyes are set in telescoping sockets and can be extended several centimeters, enabling the owner to see both above and below water at once or to see past his/her own bulky body when sitting on shore. After being brought down flush with the skin, they can be covered first, by a tough, semitransparent protective membrane, then by opaque lids. Often, wishing to concentrate on something, a Genjian has only one or two eyes open.

Two slender tentacles, each terminating in three digits, grow from below the tympani. These were originally sen-sory palps somewhat like the whiskers of catfish, for use deep in the water, they developed into food collectors and so eventually into boneless but fairly strong “arms” with “fingers.” Neither these tentacles nor the forepaws are by themselves as good as human hands, but when a Genjian sits upright the combination is at least as dextrous, and when he/she is being four-footed the tentacles serve per-fectly well for such jobs as carrying things or, for that mat-ter, throwing a missile or wielding a simple tool.

The tongue is a larger and more complex organ than ours, with a variety of functions. Its rough upper surface cleans, up meat like a cat’s; its sides are covered with ciliary chemosensors, so that it both tastes and smells; and it is the male organ of copulation, by which he passes his gametes into the female reproductive tract. At such times its secre-tions pleasure him as the friction and subtler chemical cues do her. Before you think this is disgusting, consider that our, male organ doubles as a sewer pipe.

The female lays an “egg,” a soft though tough bag about the size of a man’s fist, at fairly regular intervals. Despite this equivalent of menstruation, Genjians do not seem to be permanently in low-grade rut like humans; xen-ologists have seen nothing to suggest purely recreational sex. Desire seems to originate in the female, who courts the male in ways that vary from society to society. After the first adolescent experiments have led to an infant, this arousal apparently is triggered by the stage of development of the youngest offspring; its death leads to the quick pro-duction of a new one, whereas if it is in good health there will be a few Terrestrial years between reproductions. This spacing is, however, quite variable, and dependent on a nutnber of factors understood little or not at all. Genjians enjoy sex when it happens, though, inevitably, they sur-round it with still more mystique than humans have done.

They are about as monogamous by nature as we are, what-ever that means. Care of the young clearly has more to do with pair bonding than sex does.

A fertilized egg-sac contains the zygote afloat in fluid and the rudiments of certain simple chemical-processing or-gans. It has been dubbed an “external uterus.– The female places it in some kind of small, quiet, watery environment such as a pool or a hole scraped in marshy soil. Both par-ents then

“feed” it, putting organic matter in the water. This includes food scraps, rotted vegetation, etc., but much of it is their own excrement, which during this stage con-tains nutritious matter. (Rabbits on Earth have a similar ability to vary the quality of their droppings.) The female exudes a fluid from her genital tract containing enzymes that help break it down, and symbiotic microbes are also involved. Otherwise, the male is mainly in charge. As an intelligent being, he gets the satisfaction of doing his duty, but his ancient ancestors must have been responding to stimuli that still have their subliminal effects on him; per-haps odoriferous compounds act as pheromones. Thus both parents are, so to speak, directly involved in gestation, and this undoubtedly has profound psychological consequences.

Blotting up the nutrients from the degraded organic matter, the egg grows and develops together with the zy-gote. How long until –hatching” depends on conditions. Ideally, it is just a matter of a Genjian year or two; but nourishment may be scarce or it may be necessary to carry the egg away from danger. In such cases, development can be suspended for a considerable time without harm. The male normally does the guarding and tending, and, in prim-itive milieus, the fleeing or hiding. This may be one reason why he is smaller and more agile than his mate, who in most cultures has been the one to go out and hunt or work the farm. When the young finally claws the, sac open and emerges, it cannot quite be called either altricial or preco-cial. It can eat solid food and move around freely from the start, but is small, ignorant, and dependent on its elders for a long period of care.

In their wet. Urheimat, the proto-Genjians never mas-tered fire and made rather little use of stone.

Shells became the principal material for tools and weapons. Some were of animals, some were of plants, especially a genus of large nuts that spread themselves by floating freely about within flinty casings.

Instead of fire, perhaps the key invention was footgear. Evolved for swimming and climbing, the crea-tures were now enabled to walk far inland, encounter new challenges, and spread across the globe.

Eventually they did start to use stone and fire, and some got to metallurgy.

For communication, the Genjians make considerable . use of body language, notably the flexible tentacles. Since the dense, humid, usually warm air carries odors well, body exudations and even fragrances artificially produced have a certain importance, too, particularly for conveying emo-tional subtleties. Mainly, though, like us. they talk. We hear the speech as a set of grunts, barks, coughs, belches, rum-bles, and quavers; the Genjian voice lacks the range and precision of ours. Nonetheless it can evidently say anything for which a concept exists.

One can no more generalize about Genjians and make sense than one can about humans, but xenologists have got-ten some preliminary impressions, subject to correction as more is learned. They have many cultures around the planet, technologically ranging from “paleolithic” upward. Most are based on agriculture and—more importantly-aquaculture, raising both domestic plants and animals in lakes, marshes, estuaries, and bays. In some areas they have draft animals, but none for riding, which is to be expected; some of the draft animals are swimmers pulling boats or small ships, though sails are also known. Considering their anatomy, they have not been very successful with oars. For details about those of them that have reached an industrial stage, see Frederik Pohl’s.contribution.

Nowhere is there a city. In the more populous regions, single homesteads and thorps that seem to house extended families are spread through an area. Its inhabitants fre-quently get together at a “fair,”

which can roughly cor-respond to the old Icelandic Thing as well as being a mart and social meeting ground.

Individual Genjians, especially females, can quarrel; the quarrels can become deadly; in a number of cultures, apparently this can lead to clan feuds, and homesteads bris-tle with defenses. Yet war as we have known it seems un-heard of. Therefore, so is the nation-state; after all, preparing for wars and waging them is its raison d’etre. Genjians of the more sophisticated societies do have loy-alties beyond immediate kin, but these seem to be relatively abstract: religious ties, trade links, and relationships less comprehensible by us. Public works such as roads, dikes, and harbors are carried out and maintained in these socie-ties, but not at the behest of kings or bureaucrats. Instead, such activities appear to be, by some kind of traditional consent, the duty and prerogative of certain organizations whose membership is hereditary, though adoption into them is a solemnity often performed; they are supported by “user fees”

in kind or, in a few regions, coin.

This does not mean that Genjians are natural-born lib-ertarians. If anything, they are more obedient to a set of rules and rituals than most humans, and transgressors are subject to sanctions ranging from payments to an aggrieved party to outlawry and death. Social relationships are intri-cate. Perhaps the fact that they never live together in crowds helps preserve the prescriptions for interaction when they do meet.

Their religions are, so far, still less understandable by us. Advanced cultures studied to date seem to have had their philosophers but never any prophets, and nowhere are there indications of god-persons; yet a sense of pervasive spirit appears to be universal. It has been ascertained that in societies that live near mountains, these are always re-garded with awe and veneration, and many aged individuals ascend them to die.

More About Genji

Geography

Most of the land surface is on “moonside,” the Chujo-facing hemisphere. The huge continent that English-speaking humans call Nighland does extend an arm into northern “starside,” the opposite hemisphere. South of it are the somewhat smaller continent Southland and the con-siderable land mass Great Island. These have their plains, mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, etc., as on Earth. No moun-tains match the highest of Earth’s, though some are tall enough to have snow and glaciers. Because of the rapid decline of air pressure with altitude, such ranges often form sharp ecological borders, with plants and animals quite dif-ferent on the two sides, as well as climates—weather bar-riers, too, being more marked than on Earth. Occasional deep valleys have been thus isolated for long times and curious developments have occurred in the life-forms there. However, except for certain desert regions near the middle of Nighland, most lower-lying country is rather uniformly cloudy and rainy. Along the coasts there is much fog, and frequently wind and the great waves of the tides will act to fill the air with drops of brine.

Starside is largely oceanic, like our Pacific basin on a bigger scale. It, too, is surrounded by a “ring of fire,” many volcanoes and islands of volcanic origin along the boundary between the hemispheres. This is the result of Chujo’s pull, varied by libration, on plate tectonics. (The same effect occurs on Chujo, but much more marked.) Near the middle of Genji starside is the continent called Farland, a little larger than Australia. Archipelagoes and isolated is-lands are found in both hemispheres.

Ocean currents, westerly winds, and cyclonic winds are less plentiful and strong than on Earth; a real cyclonic storm is a very rare event. Global air circulation is domi-nated by the tendency to form Hadley cells versus the ten-dency for air to move from the night to the day side. The slow rotation does provide some westerly component. (By convention, humans define “north” and “south—in a given planetary system so that all, or most, bodies rotate from west to east.)

Life

The vegetable kingdom has developed analogues of gymnosperms and angiosperms, trees, shrubs, vines, flow-em, etc. Trees are generally short and stout, to resist the slow but heavy winds and the pull of gravity. There is no worldwide equivalent of the grasses. In some regions, stalky plants with certain similarities of appearance, ex-cept for the color, occur; but the most widespread and diverse family is that of the yeisenae (named for Mamoru Yeisen, the botanist who first described them). Low-growing, with small leaves, these commonly cover the ground with a tough mat, through which only certain other kinds of plants are able to pass seeds—usually by way of some animal that grazes or burrows—and thrust up shoots.

Some plant names, bestowed by humans or translated from a native language, which suggest appearances and functions: redlance, clinger, nightwort, groundvine, sha-dowfruit, cat-o’-nine-tails, bluecap.

Actually, the traditional Terrestrial system of king-doms, phyla, classes, orders, genera, and species does not work very well on Genji. Perhaps because its thick atmos-phere and vast seas buffer it efficiently, the planet does not seem to have suffered much if anything in the way of mass extinctions like Earth, and evolution has radiated from a wild diversity of primordial types. Herewith brief mention of two conspicuous “superphyla,” with a third to be dis-cussed later in more detail.

The moonside sapients already described belong to the tetroptes (singular tetrops), characterized by the basic cy-lindrical, four-limbed, four-eyed body. One phylum within this possesses a true neck and thus a distinct, movable head. This phylum contains most of the tetroptic bipeds and flyers.

The astromorphs have a basic shape suggestive of a starfish, though one “arm” is actually the head and there is an internal skeleton. They include both quadrupeds and bipeds, aquatic and land species—all, however, air-breathing and two-sexed. (I almost wrote “bisexual,’.’ but that’s another word whose proper meaning these days is slipping from our grasp!) To them belong the largest flyers on the planet, the dinopteryxes. The truly huge ones, out-doing our own old Quetzalcoatlus, are essentially hoverers like our condor, but some raptors are not much smaller and correspondingly formidable.

Certain arboreal forms are comparable to our simians, perhaps even in intelli-gence. The astromorphs occupy parts of Nighland and Southland, and all of Great Island except for what the sap-ients introduced when they arrived there. In general, the tetroptes are more successful and have displaced most of the astromorphs except for those that took to the air or the trees.

Some animal names (including entomoids, ichthyoids, etc.): silverbuck, slithe, buzzbuzz, mountain dragon, spitcat, skyranger, nightghost, fenris, joker.

The Maonside Sapients

Already described, these tetroptes are commonly known to humans as land Genjians and Nighlanders—both misnomers, since they are not exclusively dwellers on land, they are not confined to Nighland, and they are not the only intelligent Genjians. In one of their major dialects, the word for

“person” is, roughly rendered into our alphabet, “ihrdizu,” which is used by many humans, generally cap-italized. Plurals are formed according to complex rules; that corresponding to “people” is approximately, “io-ihrdizu,” but most humans simply make the singular dou-ble as the plural, analogously to English “deer.”

Although technologies and ways of life differ widely across the planet, there is only one language, admittedly with a range of dialects. Fred Pohl discusses this and other details at length. Otherwise, remarkably from our view-point, little cultural leveling has occurred. The species just doesn’t seem to breed missionaries or conquerors. Of course, societies do borrow from each other whatever they find attractive, especially in arts and philosophies.

This degree of mutual tolerance probably does not spring from natural-born saintliness, but from instincts formed in the course of evolution. Perhaps ancestral ani-mals operated more in family groups like lions than in gangs or packs like Terrestrial simians. The Ihrdizu do all seem to be less aggressive when acting collectively than humans generally are; the demands of the collectivity on the individual usually appear to be less, though individuals are amply aggressive and self-aggrandizing. Yet they can’t really be called a race of individualists either. In many ways they cooperate more readily than we do.

The Ihrdizu reached starside in prehistoric times by migrating to the far end of Nighland, but not until well into their Iron Age did they begin navigating the world-ocean there. When they hunted the carpet whales or killed off himatid calves and tads (q.v. infra) wholesale in the course of planting colonies on Farland, it was largely because they did not recognize these as intelligent beings. The realization came very gradually. It was accompanied by neither racist rationalization nor liberal guilt. Few if any Ihrdizu felt the slightest inclination to make recompense, let alone restore any territory. However, most found the himatids interesting, which alone gave reason for preserving them, and as time went on, some Ihrdizu established mutually profitable part-nerships with groups of calves for the exploitation of littoral resources.

Efforts to communicate with the carpet whales have not yet gotten far, perhaps because most of their thinking involves concepts for which no Ihrdizuan language has any words—or perhaps because the carpet whales aren’t inter-ested, or perhaps because as they grow old they actually do sink, into intellectual sluggishness.

The Starside Sapients

As said, the starside of Genji is essentially oceanic. There are many islands besides the small continent Farland, but they are proportionately fewer than in our Pacific basin, because tides flood the lower ones and wear them down to reefs—geologically speaking, about as fast as tectonics can push new ones up. Thus isolated, whole kingdoms and su-perphyla have been free to develop without being overrun by others perhaps more efficient. The most interesting an-imals among them are the himatids.

The basic form is neither the cylinder nor the starfish but the ribbon or plate, an organism just a few cells thick, taking in nourishment and oxygen on the lower (ventral) side and excreting on the upper (dorsal) side. Most such creatures live in the water, which supports their weight, but forms somewhat analogous to slugs exist on land, and there are many kinds of airborne “flying wings.” (The most beautifully colored of these are apt to be extremely venomous.) The largest are the “carpet whales,—which grow—to enormous sizes, grazing on the equivalent of plankton and—krill. They concentrate toward polar waters, where currents bring up the most minerals, but certain kinds migrate and thus may be seen throughout the hemisphere. Several dis-tinct orders of these exist, the result of convergent evolu-tion. The following is the sapient.

Like others, it has a rudimentary homeothermic ca-pacity, burning food energy fast at need to keep warm, but usually it gets along well enough; the upper layers of sea on Genji never do grow as— cold as on Earth. The sketch shows the basic shape, a smooth, glistening black ribbon, bluntly pointed at the ends, with fifteen “arms” on either side, each slightly more than half as long as the body is wide. The fore and aft pairs are specialized for communi-cation. Between each set of two arms is a simple

“pinhole-camera” eye. (It is lidless and subject to damage or loss but, being simple, can readily be regenerated. Though a single eye gives a poor image, the ensemble supplies plenty of information for the neurons to process) Wastes come out of exudant cells on the back or top side, in the form of gases and liquids that air and waves bear away; the manner of this provides important sensory input. The belly is cov-ered with “mouths,” which are actually more like the sto-mata of Terrestrial plants, each supplied with a “tooth.” More on this later. Here it is worth observing that, in a way, the himatid perceives the world through its entire body to a degree and in a fashion not really imaginable by humans.

One could call the creature hermaphroditic, since there is only one sex, but it takes two to reproduce, by a process somewhat analogous to bacterial conjugation. Both partners then bud off their young.

Mating takes place in arctic wa-ters (for the sapient species), after which a herd migrates south and buds near the shores of Farland and neighboring islands. (Farland has evidently sat on its plate for an enor-mous time, with shield volcanoes replacing what erosion washes away.) A reproductive cycle takes several Mura-sakian years, the actual length depending on how favorable conditions are: a carpet whale mates and buds when it has accumulated enough reserve tissue.

The young come off a parent by the scores, tiny wrig-glers that swim ashore by the same undulations as their—elders but then crawl up on, land and adopt a sluglike ex-istence, feeding on vegetable matter, small entomoids, car-rion, and whatever else they can get. They hook themselves along by the

“scales—at their “mouths,” which will grow much less in proportion and eventually function entirely as teeth. A himatid can wrap its ventral side around, or against, anything—a small patch of itself for a small object, a larger patch or the entire body for a larger object. Tubules among the dorsal cells then grow rigid by turgor, which change in osmotic pressure controls, to give a strong grip. The sapient kind and its near relatives can also clutch with “hands,” to be described later. The teeth tear as the belly ripples, and the mouths exude acid and enzymes to dissolve food, which is then blotted up. Also, “arms” and “hands”

can press food against “mouths.”

English speakers refer to this stage of the organism as the “tad.” Naturally, it is a prey for other animals, and the great majority perishes. Meanwhile, though, the survivors are growing, and as they do, they develop better organs and a whole new layer of cells in the middle of their leaf-thin bodies, which will eventually combine the functions of our brain, spinal cord, and higher nervous system. The tough-est, most alert, and luckiest live until they have grown too big to get around readily on land. They then make their way to the tidewater regions. There chemical cues, com-parable to those that call a salmon back to its spawning grounds, bring them to the older juveniles already living in the water. English speakers call these the “calves.”

They are of every size, depending on age, from the newly arrived recent tads—perhaps 40 cm long and 10 cm wide—to the preadults, 4 or 5 meters in length and corre-spondingly wide. At first the new tads grow fast, acquiring MI intelligence, then the rate of growth slows down, and it takes some thirty Earth years to reach the next stage. The calf can move through the water remarkably fast when it wants to. It can dive and it can climb onto rocks, clinging by some of the arms, lifting the upper part of the body into the air. It can clamber around in the “floating forests,” which are also found on this side of the planet.

It can go briefly ashore, and can function out of the water indefinitely if at least half the body remains Submerged.

Except for the two pairs fore and aft, each flexible arm ends in a circular “palm” surrounded by eight boneless “fingers” with “pads” on the ends. A palm is covered with hairlike processes making a surface akin to fuzzy Vel-cro, while a pad is covered with others that can be stiffened by turgor to make a surface like hook Velcro. Thus the himafid can grasp fingers-to-fingers or, more strongly, fin-gers-to-palm, in a variety of combinations. The clasp is harder to break than one might expect—weaker, of course, than that of a human hand or an Ihrdizuan tentacle, but then as many as twenty-eight can be brought to bear. It should also be remembered that, on the whole, himatids have evolved in competition only with other him-atids. The prehensile body, with its rasps and solvents, is a formidable supplement.

The two front and two rear arms have basically similar ‘hands– that can be used to grasp at need, but

,

less effec-tively, because they have specialized to produce sounds. The calf snaps fingers, scratches them together, rubs them across palms or across arms; etc.; hardening or softening the ciliate hooks as desired. The resulting language(s) is (are) in principle not altogether unlike the “talking drums of old Africa. Water carries the sounds well, and the him-atid hears, in effect, with its whole body. It can also hear, less well, through the dense air.

In general, besides the eyes, sensory information comes in through the entire “skin,” tactilely and chemi-cally. There is no brain as such, but the neural cell layer, and more rudimentary cells elsewhere, do the job of one, as well as handling other nervous functions. The himatid probably thinks more slowly than a human, but perhaps more profoundly, with more nuances.

The tidewater regions are a changeable, often violent, always challenging environment. In the present case, nat-ural selection has led to actual intelligence—by way of “manual” dexterity, the coordination and the wits to, make good use of it, linguistic ability to warn others of danger and cooperate with them. The sapients obviously have nei-ther fire nor metal, but they make use of animal tissue, wood, stone fragments, shell, etc.

Obviously, too, the “selfish gene” doesn’t work here. No concept of kinship exists. Tads arrive anonymously and are received by the calves, who raise them in a sort of extended family. Small and agile, the young can go where older, larger individuals cannot, to flush out small game, harvest sea plants, and so on. In return, the older calves protect them from perils and educate them. The more a young calf has learned, the better it can in its turn help provide and protect. Predation is a constant menace, not only by locally evolved beasts like the “carpet shark” but also by tetroptic and astromorphic swimmers whose ances-tors came from moonside.

Calves habitually live in bands, each occupying its own territory, such as a given fjord or the waters around a given island. In many cases, a band has pretty well suc-ceeded in clearing its territory of dangerous animals, though of course from time to time new ones swim in from outside. They have developed arts and ceremonies, about which hu-mans so far know virtually nothing. Likewise mysterious are laws, customs, religions, etc. Trading goes on between communities; there is probably no single organization trade ing far, but sometimes goods pass “hand to hand” from end to end of Farland or throughout an archipelago.

Growing all its life, eventually a himatid gets too big for the rough, reef-choked tidal waters. It moves out to sea and becomes a carpet whale, growing larger yet, apparently indefinitely. When it has reached sexual maturity, the life cycle begins anew.

As huge as they are, and traveling in herds, the carpet whales have essentially no natural enemies other than par-asites and disease. They no longer hunt but graze, and have no further use for tools or weapons. It is not known to humans or Ihrdizu just how they do spend most of their time. They do not

,

seem to interact with the calves in any way. Yet probably they don’t drift off into animal otium, unless perhaps at great ages. After all, it is they that do the reproducing, and sexual selection has probably been a stronger factor making for intelligence, as well as the sur-vival pressures on tads and calves. Could the carpet whales be a species of philosopher?

When the Ihrdizu arrived from moonside,, it was a ca-tastrophe for the himatids. They were killed wholesale, driven from their home grounds, sometimes enslaved if they were sapients. Eventually there began to be some con-cern for them, practical rather than sentimental—as dis-cussed earlier.

Technological civilization is utterly alien to them, and aside, from the occasional working partnerships they have assimilated no important part of it, just such tools and gadgets as they can use in otherwise unchanged lives. This leads many Ihrdizu to maintain that the himatids are, after all, merely clever animals.

Other Ihrdizu, though, be-lieve the carpet whales possess mystical insights.

Chujo

Life

Although in general there is much less life on Chujo than there was in the warm, moist part of its cycle, it is, after all, an entire world, with enormous variations between regions. Moreover, here on Earth life is actually more abun-dant in some areas than it appears to the superficial ob-server—for example, in the Arctic or in the deserts of the southwestern United States. Chujoan ecologies have under-gone a terrible winnowing, with many forms becoming ex-tinct; but others have survived, and some are actually doing better now than before—those suited to cold, aridity, briny water, etc. The transition was apparently quite rapid and happened not so long ago, perhaps ten thousand Earth years, so evolution has not had time to make radical adap-tive changes. However, a number of distinct new species have already developed out of older ones as modifications of size, color, diet in the case of animals, and so on.

Macroscopic animal life does not have the diversity of basic types found on Genji, and indeed exhibits the same fundamental structure as that on Earth: cylindroidal, with a head containing a brain, two eyes, two ears, a mouth; the limbs are four and the sexes two; tails are usual though not universal. The most striking difference is in the air intake. Rather than possessing a nose, the ordinary animal has two slits on either side of the neck. Protected by flaps of muscle like opercula, they somewhat resemble gills, but except on the aquatic types they are not. Among land animals, usually the tongue, partly covered with ciliate chemosensors, de-tects odors as well as tastes.

At present the herpetoids and other poikilothermic sorts are not doing so well, their survivors being found mostly in the tropics, but many theroids are widespread. These are not actually mammals, the differences in anatomy and chemistry being manifold, but are in effect rather sim-ilar. Homeothermic, they give live birth and the female lac-tates. Hair has not evolved, and quite a few species have scales, which in some cases are so delicate and intricately barbed as to suggest feathers. Temperature regulation is as-sisted by a vascular network just below the skin analogous to the rete mirabile in the feet of our birds; and a furry covering is not needed against the feeble ultraviolet of Murasaki.

Like mammals on Earth, the theroids have proliferated into a variety of herbivores and carnivores of all sizes, shapes, and functions; they include the flyers. A human gets an overall impression of a tendency toward gracile build, emphasis on speed and agility, but this is only a tendency and graviportals do occur, some larger than on Earth (as the lower gravity allows).

Some animal names: highjumper, hellbat, tricorn, dune tiger, gigantothere, ripper, snakehound, burrowbunny, ko-bold, peri.

Only one society of the sapient Chujoans appears to remain, numbering perhaps a million individuals though it is impossible for humans to conduct a census. Thus we have just a single race of them to describe.

At first glance the being looks humanoid. It (he or she) when adult stands quite tall, averaging two meters or a little more, though much of this is in the long, thin-spanked but strong-calved legs. The chest is broad and deep, padded out by adipose tissue in both sexes; at the center is a single nipple, nonfunctional in the male but of similar appearance. The soles of the feet have thickened and the three remaining toes grown short and stubby so that the foot, almost always kept bare, somewhat resembles a hoof. The hands each have four digits; controlled by a muscular pad in the palm, either of the two outer ones can serve as a thumb; the blue “nails” are actually the last of the ancestral scales. Oth-erwise the skin is smooth, of a dark golden-brown hue that varies with blood flow just underneath. All excretion is through the same tube. The male genitals are retracted when not in use. Above the neck and its air slits, the head is ovoidal, with two large, scalloped, movable ears, two large eyes that seem to be all iris (of assorted colors) and have a nictitating third membrane, a mouth with lips, and with teeth mainly designed for meat although the being is an omnivore (cf. our bears).

Obviously, the voice sounds nothing like ours. We hu-mans hear the language—seemingly the only remaining language—as a set of trills, twitters, and occasional growls; but it is quite as complex as any of ours, phonetically and perhaps also semantically. Almost as striking to the human is the relative lack of sexual dimorphism. Male and female look almost identical except during mating. Yet no signs of homosexual behavior have been noticed. It appears that the Chujoan is not permanently rutty like a human, but desire in the male is aroused by certain odors given off by the female—who also does most of the courting, which involves singing and dancing suggestive of Terrestrial birds. What arouses the female is uncertain; it seems to happen fairly often, more than reproduction requires. Prob-ably she has some kind of internal cycle, which may be regulated by nutrition, state of health, etc., and probably, as among us, sex is as important for its pair-bonding effects as for producing offspring. Chujoans seem to mate for life and stay pretty monogamous. The sexes seem to be equal socially, with perhaps a slight female dominance; however, they do have various rites (and celebrations?) that they carry out separately.

The species was once found all over the planet, like mankind on earth, and has left countless relics, small and large. Shortly before the global climate began to change, the most advanced societies had reached a technological state more or less equivalent to our Hellenistic era and/or its Chinese contemporary. There was one very important difference. The society that dominated northern starside had developed clear glass, which led to optical instruments, and, probably aided by this, a remarkable practical knowledge of genetics, which it put to intensive use.

Its abandoned cities still stand, some of them in rec-ognizable condition. Not much metal was used in construc-tion, given the low gravity, so the successor society has not plundered them for this, nor has it any need to quarry the stone. Wind, frost, drifting sand, invading desert brush and animals have not yet leveled all these wonderful buildings. They include low, colonnaded structures with high-pitched roofs and soaring towers, in a style suggesting some blend of our classical, Oriental, and Gothic motifs. (Not gro-tesque, however it may sound. In the Oakland Hills is a Greek Orthodox church whose architecture is equally eclec-tic—one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen anywhere.) Agriculture had replaced much industry. Plants were bred to produce great varieties of food, plus fibers either strong or elastic, ready-made textiles and writing materials, pharmaceuticals almost anything; some actually extracted metals from lodes of ore or natural aqueous solutions.

Cor-respondingly specialized animals existed. Then there were the plants, animals, and microbes to meet various needs of these, maintaining an ecological balance. (For example, ground cover kept out weeds, fungoids made otherwise de-fenseless leaves distasteful or poisonous to browsers, small burrowers loosened the soil for roots ... and, of course, all these required their own nourishment.) The most spectac-ular “caretakers” were the “trolls,” as humans have called them. These were bred from the Chujoan equivalent of great apes. They occupied territories in the vast agroforests, living in bands like chimpanzees, eating fruits and leaves and small creatures; but plants valued by the Chujoans were not, to their liking, and disease was set to break out when-ever their numbers grew too great. Their function was to attack and drive off any large animals that appeared before much damage could be done; they were more xenophobic than pit bulls, and a lot smarter.

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).

Any other rational or nonrational reasons for such a venture that might occur to any of you are, of course, your own to play with. It is very unlikely, however, that anyone could hope to make money out of such an expedition, in view of the terribly high cost and long travel times. No one is likely to find spices; pharmaceuticals, or rare gems worth the cost of shipping them back to the Sol system; though, of course, some people might hope to.

Outposts (as on Antarctica) are likely on both Genji and Chujo, for long-term research; self-supporting colonies are not. On these planets, the colonization imperatives that drove Europeans to Asia, Africa, and the Americas don’t apply: because of transportation time and costs, there is no hope of finding markets for Earth products or cheap plan-tation labor to produce raw materials to ship back. Nor is there a “frontier” to attract pioneers. The environment of neither Genji nor Chujo is benign enough to support home-steading. (Though, here again, some people, driven to es-cape from some form of political, religious, or other persecution, might try.)

Human beings visiting Genji or Chujo arrive there after a very long trip in crowded quarters, and few of them will ever return to Earth. Their contact with family and friends left behind is either tenuous or nonexistent. These facts will have psychological effects on your char-acters, no doubt exacerbating interpersonal relationships. A certain amount of personal screwiness seems probable. And all of this is of course made worse by the environ-mental adversities they experience after landing on Gcnji or Chujo.

Human Technology

Generally speaking, human beings are still human beings, not physically much different from ourselves. There have been very great advances, of course, in such things as molecular biology. Most diseases have been prevented or cured. Healthy life spans go up to nearly a hundred years.

However, humans do not change their gender at will or grow extra limbs, etc. They look much like us—rather, they look pretty much like our movie stars. They select for benign genes in their offspring, of course, but have not bred a race of supergeniuses or physical freaks.

That’s for Earthlings. It is a little different for Spacers. In space, people may be richer, but Earth people live longer; they’re not exposed to the risk of lethal solar radi-ation from flares, or to all the other probable stresses: dietary. circulatory, bone-mass loss. And, as mentioned above, although space people don’t necessarily have more accidents than Earth people, the ones they do have tend to be more probably fatal.

Computers are far advanced. “Fuzzy” programs make reasonable deductions from incomplete evidence. Smart machines, which rely on quantum-effect devices, or QEDs, are damn smart. (The QEDs are about 1/100 the size of current chip technology and roughly 10,000 times faster and more powerful.) This has made possible very small, and therefore relatively cheap, interstellar probes. They have a pretty good idea of what the Murasaki System is like before any human being actually gets there.

However, the people are not cyberpunks. There is no direct human-to-machine linkage, and they do not wear computer implants in their brains. (Perhaps there was a fad for that sort of thing a century or two earlier, but the people using such devices went psychotic. Or at least socio-pathic—or both, like the characters in cyberpunk novels.)

The Interstellar Ships

As Foul has informed us, these are propelled by antimatter drives, perhaps very sophisticated versions of the Augen-stein (porous tungsten blocks through which liquid hydro-gen is diffused, reacting with streams of antiprotons) or Morgan (pion-exhaust) drives. If the Augenstein, or any other drive in which the matter-antimatter reaction is used primarily to heat a working fluid to exhaust, then a working fluid is needed; probably this will be hydrogen, and unless the ship is to store great quantities of it, the ship will need something like a Bussard scoop to collect interstellar gas along the way.

This makes several design problems. One is that the same thrust engine is used for both acceleration and decel-eration—meaning, no doubt, that at the halfway point the ship has to be turned around, proceeding stern first toward Murasaki from then on. But the scoop must always face forward; so at the turnover point it must be rerigged from bow to stern—not necessarily easy to do.

Another is communication with Earth. The ship’s communication antennae have to point toward Earth, and during the acceleration phase are trying to get a signal through a cloud of very hot plasma from the drive’s ex-haust. I doubt this is going to be easy, and it may not be possible; so the ship may be out of touch with Earth for some years.

That’s not the only communication problem, however.

During the flight, communications will be hampered also by Doppler frequency shifts (not a big problem, just requiring careful tuning), but far more seriously by time dilation. Messages from Earth come in at half the speed of messages to Earth, if they are possible at all.

Power is also a—problem. At interstellar distances any signal is going to be seriously attenuated, and the ship (and even the “colonies” at destination) will have limited, though considerable, resources.

Probably at the. Sol end of the line a large orbiting dish, roughly Arecibo-sized, will have to both receive and transmit; either it will have to be a dedicated antenna, or transmission and reception time schedules will have to be worked out in advance.

Voice communication will be digitalized and sent slowly (probably even redundantly), to be reconstituted at destination. Pictures will be even slower. Receiving them will be not unlike watching the probe pictures come in at JPL, as they build up line by line. “Motion pictures” can be sent in either direction, but they will take forever to transmit. Arbitrarily let us assume that one hour’s trans-mission back to Earth can yield a) maybe twenty minutes of voice transmission, b) a few hundred still photographs, or c) about thirty seconds of videotape.

If explorers on Genji or Chujo wish to send a one-hour National Geographic-type film back to Earth they can certainly do so, but it will take five days of continuous transmission time. And it will take twenty-one years to get there.

There will certainly be no face-to-face conversations by means of interstellar videophone. Apart from the prob-lems of slow transmission, anything anyone says on Earth takes twenty-one years to get to Murasaki and just as long for an answer to get back.

Presumably the first few ships, at least, to carry people to Murasaki will be as small as possible, for economic reasons.

That is not, however, really very small. Assume a ca-pacity of maybe twenty-five crew. (It would not help much to make the capacity smaller, because of all the things they have to carry with them.) The ship then needs to carry everything these people will need for an essentially indefinite period: food, air, and water (no doubt recycled, perhaps even with food synthe-sizers—but the food has to be synthesized out of some-thing); clothes; books; tapes; pharmaceuticals, surgical stuff and other medical needs; cosmetics; games; etc.

It also needs everything they will need during explo-ration. Small items they will generally carry with them, like scientific instruments, probably weapons (for use against predators, if for nothing, more sinister),—trade goods”—things like pocket calculators, maybe solar-powered (but maybe they don’t work well in Murasaki’s light), toys, flashlights (but their yellow-green light hurts the natives’ eyes?), beads, etc., wristwatch radios, etc. Larger things for exploration: probably a couple of light planes for surface exploration, and no doubt a few moon-buggy things for the same reason; a food synthesizer (or a lot of food); a power plant to drive all their equipment; pressure-reducing suits and helmets for exploration of Genji, and air masks for exploring Chujo. They will also need at least one !ander shuttle.

And the ship itself will need everything to make it run, plus spare parts for repairs and tools to make the repair with. This is a job for considerable mass. No small inter-stellar ships need apply.

(Later on, of course, ships might be really big. Prob-ably some group of spacers may well decide to hook an-timatter drives onto a self-sufficient 100,000-person habitat and launch it toward Murasaki. No doubt this would be much slower than a purpose-built ship, but it would sure carry a lot of people. That might be the actual ultimate “colonization” of the Murasaki System.) A Puzzle For Planetographers

Although probes and space telescopes have identified other planets in the galaxy, Genji and Chujo are the only ones that seem to have life of any kind.

Is this because Genji and Chujo are co-orbiting twins, as the Earth with its moon? Is it necessary for a planet to co-orbit with another body of similar mass, with its con-sequent great tidal forces, in order for life to develop on it?

Some astronomers have speculated that this is true. (In fact, they have done so even in our own twentieth century.) They suggest that life cannot evolve on any planet that lacks the equivalent of a Van Allen Belt, because ionizing radiation would destroy it; that the Van Allen Belts can’t develop without a strong magnetic field; that there cannot be a strong magnetic field without a molten core; that only a nearby co-orbiting large mass, constantly churning up the interior of a planet, can keep a large core molten after the surface of a planet has cooled long enough for liquid water to be stable for geologically long times.

Genji and Chujo almost support that theory. Genji and

Chujo are the only known planets, other than Earth/moon, with co-orbiters; they are also the only known planets, other than Earth, that support life. That is too much of a coin-cidence to be purely coincidental.

But neither Genji nor Chujo has a strong Van Allen Belt. It is only one detail, but that’s enough to wreck the whole chain of deduction.

So human planetographers are puzzled. Perhaps this is one reason why some people are anxious to study the Mu-rasaki System at close range.

A far stronger reason is that Genji/Chujo are the only other planets anywhere in the universe so far known to harbor life. If humanity is to meet any intelligent aliens anywhere, the Murasaki System is the only place to go.

How Humans Live On Genji/Chujo

As Poul has explained, human beings cannot get around on either planet in shorts and solar topis. On Genji, they es-tablish “settlements” on the high plateaus. Even those are not comfortable: they’re cold, dark, and bleak, but at least there they can breathe the air.

To explore the sea-level surface of Genji the humans need something like rigid diving suits. The partial pressure of oxygen at 2,000 millibars will do irreversible damage to airways and lungs if endured too long.

They may, however, expose themselves to the sea-level air for brief periods, though they risk nitrogen nar-cosis. It is possible that some bored humans use sea-level Genjian air as a recreational drug, enjoying the “raptures” as a kind of high. (“Low”?)

Human Life, on Genji

Genji is no more than marginally habitable for human beings. Their most difficult problem is food: they can’t eat Genjian organisms, and, they can’t easily establish farms to grow their own food. The high altiplanos where they live lack the rain and warmth necessary for farming. Conceivably they could bribe natives into farming for them at lower levels, where crops might grow, but there isn’t enough blue-green light for Earthly chlorophyll to work well; ar-tificial lighting would probably be necessary (and expensive), and minor variations in the soil chemistry would probably cause crop failures anyway—at least until some high-powered agronomists worked out ways of deal-ing with them.

The same food sources the people had on their eleven-year (subjective) flight from Earth would have to feed them once they land: I presume some sort of closed-cycle system using their bodily wastes to nourish plants. Such recycling systems can be quite efficient (this is far enough in the future to allow for considerable improvement in using de-signer genes for food plants and animals), but they would probably need constant attention; if the system fails, the people starve. (No doubt there will be redundant systems, so the people might not starve but would have to eat un-satisfactory diets.) At 1,000-millibar elevations, the Genjian biota (as Poul points out), is sparse, tough, and small.

Stunted plants, things like mosses; possibly when (very infrequently) it rains there is an explosion of

“flowering” plants, as in Earthly deserts.

Getting to Genji

The interstellar ship itself does not land on a planet but orbits somewhere—around Chujo? around Genji? around both of them? The landing crews come down in smaller craft, perhaps like shuttles or the Spaceplane.

Most travelers probably leave Earth when they are twenty-five or thirty. When they reach Genji they are push-ing forty (though their twins back on Earth, if they have any, are nearly fifty).

According to Poul’s stats the interstellar ships travel at a uniform 1-g acceleration. Actually, I think they tend to increase the acceleration slowly. Spacers would probably want to start out at lesser thrusts; both Earthies and Spacers would likely want to build up to 1.5 g in the final decel-eration period, so that by the time the adventurers reach

Genji they have become more or less accustomed to its 1.5—g conditions. This need not shorten the total travel time very much, and perhaps not all ships will do it—those heading for Chujo have no need to.

The condition of the explorers when they arrive on Genji depends on how successfully they have managed the stresses of the long trip: living in each others’ pockets for a decade is likely to bring out any latent psychoses. Some ships will do better than others, but the worst of them may have had mini civil wars, murders, vendettas, etc., which may carry over.

No doubt by this time in the future there will be phar-maceutical (or other) treatments for most forms of loopi-ness, but it is fair to assume that the treatments carry side effects (lethargy, confusion, depression—take your pick). So the voyagers do not step off onto the soil of Genji as hale and well balanced as when they took off from Earth.

Physically, both Spacers and Earthies will probably take some latter-thy analogues of steroids and calcium-binders, to help stand the 1.5 g.

All Genjinauts are aware that their voyage will be long and most likely one-way. (All right, fellows, why do they let themselves in for this? Do some of them want to convert the heathen to God? Are some social misfits, even crimi-nals? Are people drafted for this? Are they paid so hand-somely that they can get their families out of poverty into affluence forever?—their families rather than themselves, because whatever the voyagers themselves are paid, they can’t spend it. Is this part of the story material you will invent?) Still, some of them can return. It is probable that at least one or two ships will return to Earth at some time, perhaps five years after landing: they will probably want to bring specimens of some kind back for study. This means that a lucky few can go home. When they get there, those who started out at twenty-five will now be fifty or more. (Their cohort-mates left on Earth may well be pushing eighty; so no one comes back to the girl he left behind him.)

How do they decide who goes back? I think it depends on each separate shipload; perhaps there are stories there. Maybe the decision will be made by a lottery. Maybe by political decisions and various forms of skulduggery. Maybe by force majeure; or maybe whoever survives gets to return.

I assume that almost everyone would volunteer to re-turn to Earth, since certainly those few who get back, es-pecially the first few who get back, can look forward to fame and fortune—may even be elected to whatever the Senate is like at that time. Those who stay on Genji may get rivers and mountains named after them so their names will live forever, but the ones who get back to Earth will get all the chicks. (Or cocks, as the case may be.)

Of course, a lot of humans who get to Genji will die there before their normal time, by accident, exposure, vio-lence, or simply exhaustion.

I’m not sure how much attention people on Earth pay to what’s going on on Genji. After all, by the time the first ship reaches there, and the first messages come back to Earth at light speed, more than forty years have passed: half the human race will not have been born when the ship departed. And by then humanity may have other things on its mind....

The Ihrdizu

Before I get very explicit about the manners and customs of the Ihrdizu, let me go over and perhaps expand on some of the points Poul has already made about Genji.

“Sea level” on Genji is a fairly ambiguous concept, because of the vast tides; nevertheless, most Genjians live somewhere near it (partly because of their amphibious or-igins). Humans, on the other hand, are comfortable only at great elevations. Ships from Earth will ordinarily land on high plateaus and will establish bases where they land; so Earthmen can be on Genji for some time without the Gen-jians’

being aware of their presence.

Humans can go to sea level if they wish, but not easily or comfortably. The easiest way would be to travel in sealed aircraft, which they would never leave, doing their exploring (and communicating with the Genjians) through robot proxies or just looking out of the windows. They could leave the aircraft for at least brief periods, but they would run the risk of nitrogen narcosis, or “rapture of the deeps,” if they stayed unprotected at sea level for any length of time they would risk bends; and probably if the exposure were of long duration or frequent there would be damage to their lungs. (Their situation at sea level is anal-ogous to a Terrestrial skin diver working at a depth of about thirty meters.) If they wish to walk around the surface of Genji at sea level they need to wear a sort of diving helmet, at least, with an air pump to reduce the pressure inside.

Alternatively, a human could wear an all-metal diving suit. (It could not be flexible, as were the rubberized suits with metal helmets human divers used to wear, because those suits were pressurized from within.) Both the helmet and the full suit would be cumbersome (especially in Gen-ji’s higher surface gravity), uncomfortable, and generally unpleasant, though in somewhat different ways. Some hu-mans would prefer to go out unprotected and pay the pen-alty of short excursions and slow decompression, or to take their chances.

It is even worse for Genjians who might wish to visit the Earth landing ship at its altitude of 5,800

meters or so. Not only do they need something like space suits, to let them breathe; but the suits must be heated, since the Gen-jians are not normally homeothermic. (As specified by Poul, they do have internal temperature sources, but it is a stress on the organism to try to maintain a proper body temperature for very long.) Without artificial heat supplies, if Genjians were to remain for any length of time at such altitudes they would slow down, their ability to think would be impaired, and before long they would die.

(In fact, climbing a mountain is a recognized method of suicide. As Poul points out, sometimes aging Genjians climb mountains to die: they climb, using up their stores of fat and energy, until breathing becomes too difficult.

Then they settle down, ultimately relapse into coma, and pass away peacefully.) Genjian Villages

The largest communities of Genjians amount to fewer than two hundred individuals. It is basic to the Genjian nature to be essentially self-sufficient, especially in growing their own food; a large Genjian

“village” would comprise a dozen clusters of six or eight homesteads each, sur-rounded by their equivalent of farms, fish ponds, breeding ponds, and so on.

Their most densely populated areas (not very densely—five or six Genjians per square kilometer taken over a whole region, no more than ten times that even in a “village”) are near the seashores. They can only be on fairly high hills or mountainsides, since the great tides in undate everything within some tens of meters of sea level regularly, and at peak tides can go considerably higher.

Genjian homes anywhere near sea level are unheated, at least by day. There are no winters, and the principal function of a house is to keep the rain and wind out. (Re-member the vast storms that are common.) Perhaps in many of the less-developed societies the Genjians live in tents, and perhaps use that advantage to migrate when they feel like it. (More-civilized Genjians stay put, because their farms and ponds can’t be moved.)

The more technologically advanced Genjian societies have much larger and more solid structures, though not nec-essarily to live in: factories, particularly metalworking forges and foundries, may be built with solid walls. (Or may not?)

I think in the case of the most advanced Genjians, they are building rather sophisticated structures.

For example, they probably build tidal electricity generators, with dams and barrages.

This probably produces strains on their social patterns. Not cities, because Poul says not, but at least large-scale industrial areas, to which Genjians perhaps commute.

Genjian Prehistory

The history of technology among the Ihrdizu is a lit-tle more complicated than that of humans. It goes like this:

Shell Age. Earliest settlements; tools and weapons made of shells; invention of agriculture.

Stone Age. Brief transition period, reconstructing shell tools in more refractory (but better) stone.

Invention of fire.

Bronze/Glass Age. Beginnings of industry; invention of writing; more sophisticated social, organizations. This is a long, long period of Ihrdizu history.

Iron Age. Brief transition period, marked with begin-nings of use of electricity and magnetism—but the more primitive Ihrdizu are still in it.

Aluminum Age. The Ihrdizu go rather quickly from iron to aluminum; with abundant tidal power and wind power, they can generate electricity on a fairly large scale without burning large quantities of fossil fuel. This is the stage of the most advanced Ihrdizu at present.

These may also use electrolytically derived hydrogen for fuel.

Ihrdizu Social Institutions

Poul says they are not organized as nations, but through interest linkages.

Perhaps all left-handed Genjians have something in common.

Perhaps the males and the females, though mated, have different loyalties.

Perhaps there are “fan groups”—as tightly bound as, say, s-f fandom, but organized around different common interests. Sports fans? Shell collectors?

Whatever the interests are, they are as important, to the Genjians as, say, religion is to us; which means that al-though a community of fifty or so Genjians may get along well enough most of the time, they will from time to time have pogroms or IRA-style action groups.

Gender Differences

The females are larger and stronger than the males; perhaps they are the “heads” of the families.

Courtship is at the instigation of the female. When she reaches sexual maturity she leaves her home to visit other communities on her trek to find a mate. The unattached males in the community look her over, but wait for her to make the first move.

A mate-questing female first and foremost wants a mate; but she wants a particular male, one she can get along with, and one who is by Ihrdizu standards good-looking if possible. She also wants a congenial commu-nity—where the living is easy, and where conditions are interesting to her. Another important factor is whether there is room in the community for a new household, since Ihr-dizu don’t like to be crowded. This is a judgment call. The female may think there’s room, but others in the commu-nity may disagree.

When a questing female shows up in a commu-nity, she is taken in by households that have unattached males.

Assuming a 1:1 sex ratio at birth, there will generally be more mature males than females, because males mature earlier, and therefore the female is in a better position to pick and choose among possible mates than the male. For the same reason, in most couples the female is older than the male. Assuming the male and female average life spans are about the same, that means there will often be a number of widowed males looking for new mates. Per-haps in some households a father and son compete for the same female.

However, at some point in their adult lives females lose the capacity to reproduce. At this point they may be “divorced” by their mates—or the mates may choose to continue with them for the sake of the bonding that has developed over the years. This is a fairly new problem for the Ihrdizu society; until fairly recently mothers didn’t usu-ally live long enough to reach “menopause.”

Males are probably more prized than females as chil-dren, as on Earth, though not for the same reasons: On Genji, immature females are only temporary members of the community and spend a lot of time and energy thinking about where they will go on their mate quest. “A daugh-ter’s a daughter till she becomes a wife, but a son is a son for all of your life.”

The questing female probably stays at each household in the new community for a few days, getting to know the males; this is the Ihrdizu form, of dating. When she is about to enter her first real sexual phase (as distinguished from the “false heat” described elsewhere) she makes her choice of males, and they set up housekeeping—either starting a new household, or perhaps taking over an abandoned one. If the male’s family is small, they may live with the in-laws for a while.

This is the basic rationalized mating procedure. However, Genjians are not all that much more rational than humans, and sometimes they fall in love, passion-ately and romantically and without much thought for what is socially acceptable. A female may fall in love with a male in her own community, but it is a star-crossed love. If they mate, then either they do not migrate (in which case the community thinks of the female as the Genjian equivalent of a scarlet woman and the male as the victim of an immoral female), or both she and the male leave, perhaps to try to set up a new household in an uncultivated area.

Although it is usually the female in a couple who dies first, sometimes it is the male: then the widowed female has a hard choice. She can either remain in the community, living celibate, or she can migrate like a newly mature girl. Neither course is attractive.

The attitude of a village toward a new questing female depends partly on the female, who may have special virtues (wealth? skills? personality?), and even more on whether the community considers there is room for a new house-hold. Households with unattached males will always take her in for a visit, however.

Diurnal Variations

Genji has no real seasons, but it does have day and night; the daytime temperature averages some ten degrees Centigrade warmer than night, as on Earth.

Genjians who wish to be active at night heat their homes. They don’t need a lot of heat—only enough to raise the temperature ten degrees or so, rather than the much larger spread between inside and outside that humans need to make the inside of a house comfortable in winter. They may use fire, in which case they perhaps have floor-heating devices like the Roman hypocaust, but that is a fairly recent development and is considered effete, as central heating was in England until quite recently. More likely they em-ploy special kinds of vegetation, which rot and give out a little heat, like a compost heap.

However, night is still a time of reduced efficiency for the Genjians; since they are pretty poikilothermic they have had millions of years to set their body clocks to operate better by day than by night. Even the most advanced Gen-jians are not at their best at night.

(Where predation is still a problem for Genjians, as in the case of the “savage” tribes on starside, the predators are homeothermic carnivores that do their hunting at night. This is discussed in more detail below.)

Manners and Customs of the Ihrdizu

The land Genjians, known as the Ihrdizu, are a single species. They can certainly interbreed and do so on occa-sion, but they are not a single community. They do not divide themselves into “nations,” nor do they have more than one real language. Nevertheless, there are differences in customs and lifestyles among them. These are not marked by national borders but change gradually with distance. So do local dialects of the one common lan-guage, so that a land Genjian whose home is on the shore of an inland lake would have some trouble communicat-ing with one living in an elevated valley or on the tidal shores of the ocean. (He would also find some of the cus-toms surprising.) Some “tribes” are quite advanced in machine-using and metallurgy, others relatively primi-tive.

(Pout comments that a planetwide language requires special explanation—why didn’t it diverge into mutually incomprehensible tongues, as on Earth? The principal rea-son is that the Ihrdizu females in particular do a good deal of migrating, sometimes over long distances, and that works against the differentiation of language.)

The first land Genjians humans encounter call them-selves the Ihrdizu. Human explorers use that name for all members of that species. This is an error, actually, since different varieties of land Genjians call themselves by dif-ferent names; but humans stick with that name for all of them. (Just as Europeans called all Native Americans “In-dians,—regardless of whether they were Algonkians or Navajo.) Pours description of Ihrdizu ways is gospel. However, what he describes is not necessarily universal; it is the norm, and, there may well be individual variations—“per-versions,– perhaps. For example, some male Ihrdizu will want sex even when it’s out of season.

Ihrdizu, like humans, use a variety of recreational drugs. Some, like caffeine, perk them up. Some are intox-icating; some are hallucinogens.

In some Ihrdizu societies there are modesty tabus. Because the tongue is a sex organ, it is concealed.

These Ihrdizu don’t smile; they are shocked when hu-mans do. Possibly the more prudish Ihrdizu do not eat in public.

The farther apart the tribes are, the more their norms of behavior may vary. The starside Ihrdizu and the moon-side Ihrdizu may be quite different in many ways. The dif-ferences among them are as marked as the differences among, say, a shopkeeper on Rodeo Drive, an Inuit, a Har-lem street-gang kid, and a Tibetan.

However, Ihrdizu aren’t xenophobes. Au contraire. They are • attracted to, rather than repelled by,

“foreign-ness.– This is probably the result of the nature of their mating customs, as will be explained below.

The following material applies particularly to the moonside Ihrdizu, and among them to their most advanced communities.

Ihrdizu Names

I agree that Earthmen will name features for them-selves once they get there, but I think on occasion they will use Ihrdizu names, too.

Some Ihrdizu names, I think, will be common words (after the Earthly example of “Painted Desert,”

“Death Valley,” “High Tor,” etc.), and Earthmen will simply translate the names into English. Other Ihrdizu names they will attempt to reproduce phonetically. (No doubt with only partial success. I am reminded of the story of how the state I live in got its name. Some French travel-ers asked the natives what they called .this place, and the Indians obligingly told them: “Ee-en-wah.” So the trav-elers, being what they were, wrote it down phonetically as “Illinois.”)

As to what names the Earthmen will invent for them-selves, I think that depends on what sort of society they come from. If from religious communities, perhaps saints’ names; perhaps names of their own home localities (“New South Tokyo,” etc.); perhaps after historical figures. At least in the early stages, probably each expedition will have some features of its own to, name.

The Ihrdizu Family

Since the Ihrdizu young need parenting, but not suck-ling, they can be taken care of by either parent or, indeed, by Ihrdizu other than their biological parents. This frees parents to do other things: they use baby-sitters. They take turns with each other’s children: the hippie communes of the sixties would be at home here.

When Ihrdizu, grow up they either take over the duties of their parents (if they are male), or leave for another com-munity (if they are female). Ihrdizu females are in heat only at certain times; when a young Ihrdizu female is almost adult she experiences a “false heat.” This is the signal for her to leave and seek a mate. It becomes a ceremonial occasion, as her family and friends bid her good-bye: some-thing between a bar mitzvah and a bridal shower.

She then wanders until she reaches a place where she knows no one; then she looks for a mate. She may have to travel a hundred kilometers or more.

Ihrdizu Political Institutions

Ihrdizu grow up without the model of the nuclear fam-ily, and especially without the image of a particular adult as lawgiver and family head. As adults, they do not look to a chief or head of state for authority. If you can say “Take me to your leader” to an Ihrdizu he will, perhaps, take you to the person who beats time for a local orchestra.

Ihrdizu do have elections or town meetings to decide on public matters, but they don’t vote for individuals. They vote on issues, and.voting “yes” implies a commitment to the action decided on. For example, they may vote to dam a river, and then those who voted in favor must help.

The results of a vote are binding on all Ihrdizu af-fected, but in different ways. Those who have voted against the dam are required only to refrain from interfering in its construction. Those who have voted for it are obligated to contribute to it, either by labor or by money. (This is their only form of taxation.) The “elections” may affect everyone in a particular area, in which case all Ihrdizu except immature females vote. (Even the youngest males can vote as soon as they are old enough to get about on their own; but the immature females are going to leave the area as soon as they are sexually mature and are not permanent members of the body politic.) Some elections are on specific issues that affect only people who work at a certain trade, or have certain special interests in common, and then they are the only ones who vote.

Rarely, an issue may arise that affects all Ihrdizu everywhere—the first contacts with, Earth people may cre-ate such issues. •

Voting is done by individuals—when possible in the same place at the same time; if that is not possible, by radio, so that everyone votes at once, perhaps all over the planet, regardless of local time.

Ihrdizu Laws

There are two basic civil laws:

I .”Pay Back.”

2. “Don’t Interfere.”

Both mean just about what they say. An Ihrdizu who borrows something, or asks a favor, must repay it; it is a terrible offense to fail in that, and an Ihrdizu’s word is his bond. That’s “Pay Back,” and it also applies to injuries.

Noninterference means toleration of almost any kind of behavior—except where it interferes with one’s own life. (For example, an Ihrdizu who chose to take drugs could do so freely; but if his behavior bothers someone else the other person can require him to stop or go elsewhere.) There are also “religious” observances and trade cus-toms that have the force of law, but only for those who subscribe to them.

Crime and Punishment

A few Ihrdizu are sociopaths; they break the laws and try to get away with it.

These are caught and punished. Capture is done by groups of neighbors, as a kind of posse (but limited in its powers by the basic “Don’t Interfere” injunction). Punish-ment is neither imprisonment nor a fine. For comparatively minor offenses it can be a beating. For the worst crimes (for example, a long record of lawless behavior), the offen-der’s snorkel is chewed off by one of the persons he has harmed.

Since the snorkel is important to an Ihrdizu’s well-being, he is then left seriously impaired. Among other things, it is the snorkel that does the scent-marking (see below).

There are no Ihrdizu police. If someone commits a criminal act any other Ihrdizu can apprehend him, and call on all other Ihrdizu to help if necessary and to decide on punishment if that is indicated.

However, there is a class of Ihrdizu who function as circuit judges—or, better, as rabbis. They travel around, interpreting and expounding the law. They are the guests of any Ihrdizu they choose to stay with, for as long as they wish to stay.

Queerly, they are almost always former criminals. They are also widows or widowers with only grown chil-dren; they have no family.

They have no authority to make any decisions, but only to clarify the interpretation of the laws. They do not touch on matters of “religion.”

Property

Ihrdizu mark their property by scent-marking its pe-rimeters. They also scent-mark their possessions.

They can leave, for example, a valuable tool out in the open for long periods of time and no one will touch it, as long as they visit it to refresh the scent marking as needed.

Entertainment

Ihrdizu get together for dances; and to sing in eistedd-fods; and to witness (and act in) sort of Greek plays. Each play is based on a historical incident, and the audience al-ways knows the lines as well as the actors: they function as a chorus, and sometimes like the audience at a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Their dances are very athletic, within the bounds of their physiques, and they involve a certain amount of pouncing from concealment.

Their singing is quite horrible to Earthly ears. So is their music, which is largely percussive. But the sound of the words in their songs is quite beautiful: much use is made of onomatopoeia, rhyme. and alliteration.

Ihrdizu Games and Recreations

Many Ihrdizu enjoy hunting, even when they don’t need to do it for sustenance—like humans. They hunt (as their primitive forebears did) by lurking in the shallows near the edge of a body of water, with only the snorkel exposed, waiting for some unwary prey to come by. (The Earthly analogy is to an alligator, waiting mostly sub-merged, with only the nostrils and eyes above water as it hunts.) When prey does appear they burst out of the water in a flurry of spray and foam and grab it, again like an alligator.

Young Ihrdizu do this as play, sometimes in their do-mestic food ponds—perhaps upsetting their parents.

Adult Ihrdizu recreations are related to this wait-and-pounce strategy. Their games, which are not card or board, are something like a sophisticated form of hide-and-seek. The principal one, which is like bridge or chess in the.West-ern world of Earth, involves each player taking a small object (they are special game pieces, like carved chessmen) and hiding it in a game area. It is usually played by two to five Ihrdizu. The players are allowed to move their pieces about, and as soon as one player has located all of his opponents’ pieces he pounces and grabs them.

The name of the game is “Find.” Some Ihrdizu play it a lot, obsessively, like chess nuts. Depending on the num-ber of players it is called “A Find of Two,” “A Find of Five,” etc.

When a lot of Genjians get together, at perhaps their equivalent of a fair, some of them will play a Find of Twelve or more. This game will go on for a long time, and spectators watch avidly as the players move about, trying to deceive each other with bluffing moves and conversation.

Ihrdizu Fashions

Ihrdizu do not generally wear much in the way of clothing, except to protect themselves against inclement weather (heavy rain or strong winds). They do ornament their bodies in the way Moroccan women use henna, draw-ing complicated designs over all exposed flesh.

When they are heavily ornamented they are more likely to cover themselves with some sort of garment out of doors—to protect the ornamentation, as some humans wear hats to protect their hairdos.

Sexual Characteristics of the Ihrdizu

In addition to the traits already described by Poul, there are a couple of others that need to be mentioned.

When male Ihrdizu reach puberty their tongues swell, making their speech thick and harsh until they get used to it. (Like an adolescent boy’s change of voice.) This is em-barrassing to them, and they try not to talk much in this period.

Female Ihrdizu have a “sexual skin,” like the flushing posteriors of some Earthly primates: it changes color when they are about to come into heat.

Lower Orders

Poul has, given us a number of other Genjian organ-isms, to which I wish only to add a few notes.

One of the prey animals is a sort of large-jointed beetle, ten centime-ters long; it has flexible joints between the sections of its carapace that it can inflate. It swallows air when threatened, and does so occasionally for the sake of spreading to new territories: when inflated it is blown about by the strong winds.

A big herbivore has what appear to be feathers for skin covering. It does not fly; the feathers are its armor against predation. (Feather armor was used by the warriors of the Shoguns; closely layered feathers absorb a lot of kinetic energy.)

Major predators are homeothermic carnivores. They do their hunting at night, when the poikilotherms are rela-tively immobile.

There are whole species of special starside predators that operate in total darkness (rare on moonside. Genji). These have evolved echolocation to help catch their prey. (This is a pretty probable evolutionary development, since on Earth both the suborders of the bats, micro—and mega-. chiroptera, have this trait, although they appear to have evolved independently of each other, as do such more dis-tantly related animals as some birds, shrews, toothed whales—and blind human beings.) Extrapolating a bat’s echolocating capacity to an Ihrdizu-sized animal, the predator would be able to detect an object a meter in diameter at two hundred meters distance in total darkness.

A few predators may also have heat-sensing organs, like some Earthly snakes, but they would not be very useful in locating poikilothermic prey. Perhaps more likely, some prey animals may have them as a defense mechanism, to warn of the approach of homeothermic enemies.

There are some Genjian animals as similar to Ihrdizu as apes are to us. The Ihrdizu call them

“not-men” in their language. They, too, have the sexual tongues. As—these or-gans are very strong and agile, they use them for feeding.

Certain “plants” have co-evolved with the Ihrdizu, and these plants have come to rely on the Ihrdizu, the “not-men,” and similar organisms to fertilize them (as insects fertilize Earthly plants). The basic process of fertilization is pretty much the same as on Earth; the male and female gametes unite to produce the zygote. They secrete a kind of tasty mush deep inside their fleshy “petals”; it is rich in proteins and vitamins (or their Genjian equivalents), and very important in the diet of the animals.

The civilized Ihrdizu also cultivate these plants. They can be prepared in many ways in their cuisine, but they are most relished when eaten raw and indeed still on the vine.

These plants come in two main varieties. One is called “malefood” and can be eaten on the vine only by male Ihrdizu. Another, with its “nectar” less deeply concealed, is called “motherfood.’

‘ (The tongues of female Ihrdizu are smaller and less muscular than those of the males.) When a male Ihrdizu eats malefood, some male gam-etes (like pollen) stick to his tongue as it rubs against the equivalent of the “anther.” When he eats another, the “pollen” is carried to the –pistil” of the other plant, where some of the male gametes unite with the female gametes of the second, plant to produce cross-fertilization. (Of course, these structures are not the same as in Earthly plants, but they fulfill similar functions.)

The “flower” of malefood resembles the sexual parts of a female Ihrdizu. The taste is like the taste of the female in heat—think of it as resembling both caviar and champagne. Eating malefood is both a kind of masturbation and a limited aphrodisiac; it is what keeps the male Ihrdizu going when his female is not interested, or when he has not yet obtained a mate.

Of course, a female Ihrdizu could cut a plant open and eat any part of it she wishes, but the flavor is not as at-tractive to her as to the male.

Motherfood is also a plant, fertilized in the same way, eaten indiscriminately by both sexes; but it is particularly important for females since it contains nutrients necessary to the production of progeny.

A proper Ihrdizu household has malefood and moth-erfood plants growing all around it. Because of the lack of seasons there are always a few ripe fruits, and these are delicacies. served to honored guests.

The Ihrdizu Diet

In addition to malefood and motherfood, they eat a great deal of a kind of primitive plant that resembles ter-restrial algae. (Of course, it isn’t algae; but it has a number of characteristics in common. It doesn’t store energy in spe-cialized structures like seeds, fruit, or tubers, so the whole thing is eaten. It is slimy to the touch, quite featureless, and grows on stagnant water rich in nutrients; so human beings will call it Genji-algae, or just algae.) Genji-algae is nor-mally eaten raw and fresh, but can be dried and preserved as a kind of biscuit.

An algae pond, too, is found in every proper Ihrdizu household. It is generally fertilized by the Ihrdizu’s own excrement and general household wastes. (The birthing pond described by Poul is a smaller and more carefully tended version of the same.)

Ihrdizu eat other plants, and fruits and nuts, and meat. They eat almost any kind of meat. They may even eat each other; there are no cannibalism tabus. When an Ihrdizu dies, the funeral ceremonies are related to the possibility of eat-ing him. First he is ceremonially bled and gutted. The blood, along with his intestines and digestive tract, is cooked into a sort of paste that is then deposited in the family’s algae pond. The rest of his body is ceremonially smoke-baked: placed in a sort of smoker oven and left there overnight. (By that time most organisms, including disease germs, have been killed.) If the Ihrdizu was in reasonably good shape, his flesh is then removed from the bones. The meat may be eaten (then or later—the smoking preserves it fairly well), and the skeleton ceremonially sunk in the nearest good-sized body of water.

Dead relatives are eaten as a kind of ritual meal—at the funeral, or on special occasions: the eating of the dead is to the Ihrdizu something between the eating of the Host at Communion and the Thanksgiving turkey. There is one other important ritual meal. As Poul has described, the Ihr-dizu can alter the composition of their excrement to nourish their offspring. They do something of the same sort at their mating ceremonies: the male and the female each produce an edible turd and exchange them.

These customs do vary somewhat from group to group. The exchanging of turds is pretty universal.

Funeral ceremonies are more flexible. More primitive Ihrdizu. par-ticularly starside Ihrdizu who generally live near the shores of oceans or large tidal lakes, may simply tie the body of the deceased to heavy stones and sink it in shallow water, where the crablike “crustaceans” will eat it (after which they eat the crustaceans).

Ihrdizu Gender

The Ihrdizu recognize three sexes: male, immature fe-male, and mature female. Immature females are called . “girls,” mature ones “mothers.” This is reflected in their language, which has four genders in pronouns: it, its; he, him, his; she, her, hers; and a set that does not translate well into English but is taken to be little-she, little-her, and little-hers.

A female Ihrdizu who has passed the time of fertility can be referred to as either “she” or

“little-she.”—The for-mer is honorary, the second pejorative.

Male Ihrdizu are sexually mature almost at birth. By the time they can walk, talk, and feed themselves they can impregnate a female—though they can’t ordinarily find a mate until they are several years old.

Genjian Diseases

Genjians, including the Ihrdizu, are subject to the same range of disease organisms as humans, and are infected in much the same way. A common disease like a cold affects the snorkel, making it tender and inflamed as a human nose. This is particularly unpleasant for the Ihrdizu, who depend on the snorkel for many things. (An Ihrdizu with an in-flamed snorkel can’t scent-mark his possessions properly.) Ihrdizu are prone to bone and joint disPases—arthritis and osteoporosis in particular, which are especially handi-capping in their higher surface gravity. Old Ihrdizu have to be very careful of falling, and their joints hurt. Their joint diseases are aggravated by certain diets; malefood is par-ticularly bad. (Like Earthly gout, this never kills but only causes pain and limits mobility. An Ihrdizu with arthritis may be a subject of ridicule.)

Genjians, including Ihrdizu, frequently suffer from in-ternal wormlike parasites. The only way to get rid of them is to starve them. The Ihrdizu restricts his diet until he is rather anemic and the parasites die—but he almost does, too.

No Genjian disease is normally communicable to hu-mans, but one might imagine a mutant virus if necessary.

Poul did not go into Genjian cytology, so he did not mention that Genjian organisms often have multiple nuclei, like human osteoclasts. This leads to a Genjian disease un-known on Earth. In the Genjian equivalent of mitosis, or cell division, each of the nuclei separates as fine threads and migrates.

Sometimes not all the nuclei are included in a cell division, with unpleasant consequences: this is their equivalent of cancer.

Ihrdizu Views of Chujo

Ihrdizu will be fascinated by Chujo, since it is about all they can see in their skies other than Murasaki itself. (There are not many stars even on their starside, because of the dense and cloudy atmosphere, and essentially none at all visible from their moonside.) They will recognize it as “another Earth.” They will be very curious about its starside, and there will be a lot of mythology/religion about it. (Primitive Ihrdizu may think it is where they go when they die. The more sophisticated ones probably have tele-scopes—though not very good ones, and seldom with good seeing. Still, with them they have possibly detected at least some very large artifacts on the surface, of Chujo (ruins of cities?) and may think that the surviving Chujoans still live on the starside.)

Since no Ihrdizu have achieved spaceflight, this pent-up curiosity makes them very interested in their human vis-itors from space. Probably they think at first that the human beings come from Chujo’s starside; then, when they un-derstand that the humans come from a quite different part of the universe, the Ihrdizu beg to be told about (or even taken to) Chujo.

The Ihrdizu have long-established names for the visi-ble features on Chujo. Many of these names will be because of fancied resemblances to something familiar in Ihrdizu life. (Perhaps “The Egg Pond,” a craterlike feature, “The Horny Tongue,” a mountain range, etc.) Which leads to

Telling Time on Genji

Moonside Ihrdizu don’t usually carry watches. They don’t need them; they’ve got Chujo and Murasaki. From Murasaki-rise to Murasaki-set they tell time by Murasaki’s elevation in the sky; it is easy to estimate how far it has risen, because Chujo is hanging there to measure it against. If they want more precision, they could create their own “clock—anywhere. Since the axis of rotation of the two-planet system has little inclination relative to the pole of the ecliptic of their joint orbit around Murasaki, all days are pretty much the same length, so a stick thrust vertically into the ground would be a pretty accurate sundial.

However, they don’t really need even a sundial. They have one up in the sky. The Ihrdizu can trace the passage of time by the progress of the sunlight terminator across the face of Chujo, all through the night and indeed through most of the day. Each “hour” has a name, depending on which prominent feature of Chujo the terminator has just reached; the hour is named after the object, (All of this is limited by their heavy cloud cover, but still, even a glimpse of the sky will tell them what they want to know.)

The starside Ihrdizu, who are perhaps more primitive, don’t carry watches either. By day they mark the passage of time by the elevation of Murasaki in the sky, and they sleep at night.

The Deep Sea

Ihrdizu, like humans, cannot dive too deeply in the sea, even with their equivalent of scuba gear: they, too, suffer from nitrogen narcosis. They get delusional.

This leads them to superstitious beliefs about the depths of the sea. As with the surface of Chujo, the deeps have mystical meanings for them.

The Biomes of Genji

Pout has already described most of this, so I will just add a few additional remarks.

One can distinguish twelve main biomes on Genji: up-land, lowland, tidal, and deep-water, each differing with climate (tropical, temperate, cool), though the temperature differences are not nearly as marked as on Earth.

On Earth, the separation of continents has meant a good deal of local diversification. On Genji, this is less marked. Because so many species are at least partly aquatic, and because there are stronger winds and so many flying animals to carry seeds, spores, etc., around, there is much more transport of new, species from one part of the planet to another. So a biome on the starside of Genji has organ-isms very like those on the inoonside.

Adaptations of Gentian Plants

As on Earth, some plants have evolved defenses against being eaten by animals: stinging cells (which may or may not be effective against human beings), foul (to a Genjian) odors—humans may be crazy about them; thorns: sticky secretions, etc.

Adaptations of Genjian Animals

Defenses against predation include mimicry, hard shells, electric shock, poison glands, etc.

The Himatids of Genii

As Poul points out, the himatids are poorly understood by either the Ihrdizu or humans. It’s not at all easy for humans to study them anyway. Since they by definition live at sea level (or below), humans can visit the habitats of the him-atids only by teleprobes or in considerable risk and discomfort.

The other way to look at it, though, is that it isn’t much harder for humans to study himatids than to study Ihrdizu; very possibly before long the humans will know more about some aspects of himatid life than the Ihrdizu do.

Ihrdizu and Himatids

As we know from Poul’s writings, the Ihrdizu en-slaved himatid juveniles when they first encountered them. Enslavement was not easy. The Ihrdizu could not really chain the himatids, nor could they hold their families hos-tage for good behavior, since the himatids have no concep-tion of kinship. The Ihrdizu had to work harder for their slaves. They controlled many shorelines. They captured tads as they came ashore and began training them, by pun-ishment and favor, as dogs are taught tricks. Many tads could not or would not learn, and those the Ihrdizu killed. The others did simple work for the Ihrdizu, helping to tend the algae plants, driving prey to Ihrdizu hunters, and so on by the time they were juveniles, these trained tads knew no way to live except to serve the Ihrdizu.

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.