#terhumene

[ Dept. of Dragomanry [ Reptiles' Required Reading - [R.W.P.Hwnerkamp]]]

+++ ATTN DOCENTS et al., mnemonic sequencing begins here:

Call the Amir the Cap'n: Zwawa Touareginald, comptroller of the blood of the house of Kha. Even though amir is the word in the primeval Clareloquence language for COMMANDER, one who commands; officer, administrator, & sooner or latter PRINCE sovereign ruler and supreme executive who does not need the noise of wearing "king." Very like Latin dux 'war leader, theatre commander in chief' -> duke, which was also very like a king, but not so in one's face. Military rank, position -> monarchical dictatorship, political and military power a type of inheritable property. The Cap'n is our amir, and never you mind that a commander with us is the Amir of smaller ships and less important missions!

Cap'n Zwawa held a book of the local style at arm's length, reading aloud in a hollow archaic chaunt. "...that polity, and the worlds of the star system of that polity, did however achieve a record, a wonder never recorded across the Terhumene diaspora: seven centuries, seven it was, seven were the centuries of respite before... COLLAPSE." The Amir vibrated the syllables of the baleful word like a sorceror invoking a fiend. "...And the record they did achieve was the... COLLAPSE... of their polity, and all the worlds of the star system of that polity, together with its peoples, and all their treasures, knowledges, and wisdom... COLLAPSED... together." He pivoted hips, torso and head to face the Dragoman directly again, and parenthesized, "A very shocking state of affairs, if true, but our Jaded chronicler is quite immune from shock -- shakes a doleful magisterial head and edifies us with an aphorism and a joke. Classical quotations, totally different style of orthography, or two styles? weird long word forms... you may take an full watch hermeneuticking each of 'em, Dragoman, and don't you pop in on me every twelve minutes with updates and ideas for active measures, hear me, Arxivist?" The Amir's smile flashed from the shadow of the azure hood and mantle of Burj Kha, letting the Dragoman know two or three capers each watch he would forgive, as being cunning strokes beyond the minds of mensch or machinic to sit on until change of watch.

"Certainly, Cap'n, quotations -- two quotations -- full watch per, and my clerks and droids to deal with the rest. Any departure from the narrative form is passing rare in the Chronicle, passing strange. A joke, my Amir? The Chronicler, and joking, is it now. It was not reduced to jokes and epigrams when that Flower of Parting xenodrome breached and killed a round two billion people inside a month, I believe. And yet, you know, the public speech of the Highest Jade oligarchs, the diplomats' conversation at table and the antiquarian one-upmanship that passes for parliamentary process, to say nothing of the manner of dialog in popular entertainment: sentimental declarations in the parlor, racy folk songs on the flight deck of the yacht--"

"I can well see it: the plucky comscan techs are both secretly oligarch brats slumming it to snub their families, and they make innuendo as they stick code cylinders into holes on their terminals."

"Just so. An aphorism, and a joke. I shall sit, as in respect for edification, and as precaution against the injuries of untimely hillarity."

"So," Cap'n Zwawa discarded the archaic singsong and went on,"'Never does a world Collapse, without it murders another.' Fair enough; nigh universally acknowledged, I believe. Going on: 'A witticism: The owner of a palace, its architect, and the chief builder watched the inspector of new construction. As the inspector climbed ladders and tapped walls, those inspected grew vexed with the prolongation of palpating and measuring.

"The architect knew the crack would appear because of discreet negotiations with the builder and with the mongers of metal and stucco, but had made piecemeal reinforcements as a salve to scruple.

"The chief builder had seen the crack, and ordered it concealed with paint, lest the architect discover the results of even more discreet negotiations.

"The owner of the palace did not have the means to finish paying the architect and builder, and had bribed the masons to discourage any gauchery on the part of their bosses, but meant to be taking the waters abroad when the next dispersal came due.

"The inspector despised the owner as a vain and showy arriviste, a rogue on the make ignorant of the douceur customary to an inspector of new buildings, without which there would be no vails for the masons. The inspector wondered if this would be a quick arriviste or a stupid one, and jabbed a probe into the crack.

"The crack opened instantly, down to the floor and up to the roof, and as the roof and the walls fell all about them, the architect cried out, "You fool! You've killed us all!"

[[ work in progress specifically to resume here, where I commenced writing. ]]

had nor wit nor stonesand the respite followed upon rockfall upon that planet, until the polity upon that to Collapse." Flimshaw! Poh! Okay, first, it wasn't a Collapse. It was bad, but not Collapse-bad, and second, this not-great-but-not-Collapse took seven hundred-odd of Highest Jade's long, long, tiresomely long orbits making for seven -- epocha, let's call them. I challenge you to tell me how much that is in real money without looking it up. I dare say a Jade century is exactly how long indifferent clever barbarians like Perpetual Secretary Shehnaz or I need to calculate it.

You & the Perpetual Secretary, maybe! What are the numbers? Yes, what ARE the numbers? Quick! Dragoman Ypse!

What, I'm right here. Uh, Captain.

Ypse bach, Ypseji, Terhumeneutics & Tactical Pragmatics specialist Ypse, Qorbin love...

No, Captain, we have no information on their calendrics, the charts they give us take no notice of the units of time such poor slobs as their trading partners and neighbors right here in the Lace use, their texts and discourse in general largely avoids quantifying time, names of days, months, or whatever their Short Great Year, Long Great Year, and Great Jade Years are, other than when certain spectacles and athletic events happen, and degrees of exaggeration when a shipment is late. How late? Shipping contracts specify due date, delivery time, variables, you would say. You would say that, Captain, you and Shehnaz-sama, but in the actual very fact, Highest Jade contracts do not specify time, they only penalize tardiness.

"The shippers and clients can both work out transit times. They understand their business, we're all in the where's-that-planet-now game, I believe. Just so, Captain bach, and as a pilot, or a former pilot, I should say, Captain, as an experienced observer of pilots and other personnel who do things like push buttons and read samples of Highest Jade legal documents in the Yakku language which is no biggie, written not in the Old Yakku figure, not in the Late Old, but in Early Late Old Yakku orthography..."

"I need one for my gre-gre-gre-grandam. This is just how she taught me to draw spiders and creepy crawlies, modulo if she'd taught me to draw very, very ill or intoxicated spiders. She's a cartoonist, you know, & shall laugh at all these sickly, stoned spiders cramming together in rows; with the blessing, and I don't fly us into a star."

618. As many as one star in twenty of FGKM types have autochtonous life. An Earthlike, shirstleeve-habitable planet has never yet been found in the [REDACTED] hundred decamillennia of the Diaspora. Proteins, trace elements, mutations and diseases particular to the interactions of two or more biologies all require either gear unique to a narrow class of planets, or surgical or genetic modification for shirtsleeve colonying up.

An alien biome requires centuries of domestication and typically results in the obliteration of 80% or more of native life. The modern Terhumene frowns upon such acts. Millennia and decamillennia are required for the typical unliving domestication targets, such as Venus, Mars, and Lune in the Zeroeth Age, and Sigma Draconica in the legend-haunted First Age. Domestication possibilities are dramatically sped up at the Fourth praxic plateaux, notably under the Machinic Secòndment, when slipstream mastery leads to deep galactic exploration. Famous worlds from the Second Age include New Caledonistan, Śkaś-Magog, Achernar Prime (Arhazrn), Ctaabrawk, Gishgish Gish, Tfvhahra, Diamondra Major, The Planet that Must Not be Named, and Kçhāraān: all successfully domesticated to suit archaic terhume life.

An ideal domisticator has sheltered valleys, craters, canyons, equatorial depressions, or other geography to constrain volatiles and temperature within a small region; the Chthonic mode of massive subsurface excavation often parallels and competes with planetary surface modification. Ironically, Chthonic cultures are often sufficiently Uranic in orientation as to preclude settling so close to a star that undomed life is possible.

The crop of green and pleasant worlds from the Sophontic Aera date to periods of rapid, advanced, and often violent domestication: the Revanche and the Discoördination in the Third Age, the Final Refluxion of Diamondra Major in the Fourth, and most critically, the Verdure Wars of the Sixth, when the Diaspora entered regions previous conditioned by long-extinct xenosophonts with a taste for water and oxygen.