Another View From Outside

Some comments excerpted from an early edition of “The Lonely Galaxy® Unofficial Guide to Working with the Empire’s People”:

General

  • Augmentation is a way of life in Imperial space, and there are probably millions of different augmentations on the market. Do not rely on knowing what one of them ought to be able to do; be sure about what that one is able to do before you throw out a challenge.
  • Death: they don’t. They find it very silly that you do. Do not get into this argument.
  • Death: do not lose, bury, or incinerate that little marble. That contains their most recent backup, and you will not be popular if you make them use a cold backup instead. Treating the restored backup as a different person will also not go over well, and these people treat philosophy as a combat discipline.
  • Don’t take them to the fixed-price all-you-can-eat buffet. All those augmentations take energy, and that comes from food, and you are definitely underestimating how much all they can eat is.

    This also applies to open bars.
  • Every Imperial has a high-powered quantum computational device optimized for an information-dense society in their head. Try not to be alarmed if they accidentally decrypt all your secure networks by accident. For them, this is the equivalent of accidentally reading a sign when looking at it. It’s very difficult not to do.
  • They will be armed, which they think is something all good neighbors do. Do not attempt to take their weapons away. At best this will be taken as a personal insult, and not a reason to hurt you.

    Don’t attempt to hint at them making you uncomfortable, either, or you might be inviting a race to see just how far the definition of “sidearm” can be stretched.

    Historical evidence suggests that it’s a long damn way.

Ciseflish

  • Don’t attempt anything tricky when writing a contract with a ciseflish. Trade is their life, and they’ve seen it all. They will walk right through your own carefully-hidden loophole, then celebrate over drinks you weren’t expecting to have paid for.
  • Never, ever gamble with a ciseflish unless you’re prepared to lose everything you bring to the table. The little guys are basically magic when it comes to memory, probability, and anything else involving numbers.

Dar-Bandal

  • Don’t confuse them with their non-uplifted ancestors, the bandal. This isn’t a particularly easy mistake to make, since they’re larger, wear accessories, and talk, but it’s worth mentioning anyway since it’s also a particularly stupid mistake to make when dealing with a highly successful apex predator’s smarter cousin.
  • If you’re not convinced yet of how stupid that mistake would be to make, these were highly successful apex predators who, post-uplift, are also one of the most socially adept species in the galaxy. Two words: social predators.

    Give them enough reason to be furious, and even hitherto uncontacted species in the Ancíël Clouds will giggle when they see you walk by.

Eldrae

  • All Imperials are prickly to one degree or another about trespasses on their person, property, or reputation, but the eldrae turn this up to thirteen. Avoid playful punches, don’t try a friendly insult, and for the love of sanity, ask before you touch their stuff.
  • They often travel with companion animals, called bandal. They will expect to be able to take them everywhere, and will not be happy if this is not permitted. The bandal themselves are usually friendly, and making friends with them is often a good way to make friends with their person. On the other hand, harming them, especially the young ones, is quite definitely a good way to bring down an entirely disproportionate reaction on your head. Be nice to the puppies.
  • If you are their manager, try to remember that you’re in charge. It may be hard to do in the face of unbounded self-assurance, but they will give you whatever is in the contract.

    Don’t micromanage. You contracted them to do a job, they believe, not to listen to your uninformed opinions about their profession. Basically, whatever they’re actually doing, imagine that you’re trying to teach your high-priced corporate lawyers how to lawyer, then don’t do it.
  • If you are their manager, remember that they don’t have to give you anything that isn’t in the contract. Requests outside its scope will be treated as “asking for a favor”, with reciprocation expected, and sticking your nose into their affairs outside the job will likely result in having it chopped off.

    (Metaphorically. For a first offense.)
  • They get bored quite easily. This boredom rapidly turns into either seeking new experiences, or tinkering with things. If you find yourself assigned as minder, escort, or guide to a visiting eldrae, make sure you have a lengthy list of approved activities lest they start making their own fun.

    If they are hired to work on equipment that belongs to you, make sure that it’s clear where the boundaries lie. The resulting improvements are usually beneficial, but it’s something of a surprise to take a day off and come back to find that your corporate network’s been completely redesigned just because your on-duty sysadmin had time to have a better idea.
  • What another species might turn into a sexual harassment case, they’ll turn into a knifing.

    Honestly, we can’t find it in ourselves to criticize this much.
  • Yes, they’re incredibly smug. It’s a racial trait. You aren’t going to be the one to change this.

Esseli

  • They will probably comment on various bits of your biology that could be improved, possibly while coming uncomfortably close to your personal space. They really can’t help it, but will usually back off after one or two reminders. If only because they find people who aren’t interested in their biological Art quite boring.
  • They are every bit as good at biotechnology as they think they are, and can probably deliver on whatever improvements they suggested. However, as their current form suggests, they have a great deal of trouble understanding why anyone might prefer retaining their current appearance instead of having the six awesome new organs they just dreamt up. Caveat emptor!

Galari

  • They absolutely are as serene as they look all the time, and simply will not seem as passionate, especially angry, as you think they ought to be about things. It probably comes from not having glands.

    This having been said: the galari love and hate as strongly as any other sophont – they just don’t become overly heated about it. Do not make the assumption that they aren’t wrathful just because they aren’t yelling at you about it, lest you find yourself on the wrong end of a calm, serene, and entirely cold-blooded destruction of everything that made itself sufficiently distasteful.

Kaeth

  • Don’t accept drinks from them, or get into a drinking contest with them, unless you know that your liver is rated for what you’re getting into and/or your incarnation coverage is paid up, preferably both. Kaeth booze hits the average liver like a toxin-carcinogen-acid cocktail garnished with ground glass, and on fire.
  • Don’t steal their lunch, obviously.

    But actually, don’t stand even next to their lunch. It is almost certainly poisonous. It is probably radioactive, and may be alive. All three is not off the table.
  • If a kaeth has a companion animal, it is quite likely to be an extremely dangerous large carnivore. Do not attempt to pet, feed, or stand close to Mister Snugglescales without checking first.

    If said companion animal appears to be small, cute, adorable, or harmless, the odds are good that it’s even worse than that.
  • The full-contact body-check is just how they say hello. They are doing their best to keep it turned down around all the squishies, and request your forgiveness for any accidents that may occur.

Summary

No, you can’t take ’em.

Tech Disparities

LOT #7233-9985

A PAIR OF RED LEATHER RADIATION SHORTS WITH GILT TRIM AND JEWELED EMBELLISHMENTS

Estimate: Ex. 920,000 – Ex. 1,280,000
Lot closes: 0.896 Kp

Description

Lot #7233-9985 is a pair of protective shorts designed for a non-tailed, digitigrade species (the entark) fashioned from red leather taken from an unknown animal, with a lead-impregnated lining of imported pseudosilk. The shorts are trimmed in gilt with metallic gold thread, with ruby embellishments set into the waistline, and carved-ruby buttons along the fly.

A unique item acquired in the liquidation of a private collection, lot #7233-9985 is the sole remaining example of its kind left over from the Ental Throne’s ill-fated war rocket program. Having been contacted in their early industrial period, a number of misconceptions existed in the entark mind of the era concerning the design and operation of starships and, in particular, atomic rocketry. As such, virtually all materials connected to the Throne’s war rockets were destroyed in an attempt at historical erasure. Indeed, it is believed to be the sole item remaining intact.

This item, recovered from the Throne’s personal flagship by person or persons unknown, is a set of leather stoker’s dress shorts impregnated with lead for radiation protection when shoveling radium into the war rocket’s atomic furnaces. (An extremely limited protection, since in accordance with the Throne of the time’s personal proclivities, such shorts comprised the entire uniform for the crew of the flagship.)

Condition Report

The item is fully provenanced and in excellent condition, having been well cared for in its time in various collectors’ hands. The leather remains supple, and all embellishments are intact. A detailed report on gem quality is available on request, but the majority of the value of this item is a product of its unique historical circumstances.

Since the Ental Throne’s war rocket program was never completed, the item was never exposed to significant levels of radiation. Routine checks were nonetheless carried out and show levels not exceeding normal background.

Words That Can Hurt You

Whatever one’s position on the dubious assumptions behind the cliché “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me” and its unfortunate persistence in many societies, these are not assumptions which the Empire shares. Indeed, it has a fine selection of words to describe an entire taxonomy of words that can hurt you, sorted by the specific manners in which this is so.

Today, though, we concentrate on one specific subset of these: the traälathkháln laras (from alathkháln, “the pain of new understanding”, and laras, “word”). These are the words which can hurt you because, Eldraeic being a precise language, they require you to confront and resolve the fuzziness of your assumptions in order to voice them.

Specifically, let us consider the English word “hypocrisy”, “the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform”. This is a term which in one word combines motivations from peccadillo to abhorrence, and acts from near-passive to motivated malice, and one whose broad spectrum is leveraged in many a motte-and-bailey argument with the intent that one’s conscious fraud will be considered an unconscious peccadillo, and one’s opponent’s vice versa.

Eldraeic, meanwhile, has three top-level terms which cover this territory, and does so in such a way that while one might argue over which is in play in a given instance, it is at least clear which claim you are making.

These terms are:

qané tracorlíë niril (lit. “insufficiently robust soul”): that hypocrisy which derives from weakness; giving in to a forbidden temptation. Usually albeit not always a peccadillo – let he who has never sneaked a second doughnut cast the first stone – but in any case, not involving any deliberate intent to deceive, nor implying that your commitment to the principles you espouse is insincere. Merely that you struggle to be perfectly adherent to them.

tracorlíë maurqártill (lit. “soul-fraud”): that hypocrisy which is deliberate; espousing one thing and choosing, in a state of talcoríëf, to do another. Not a peccadillo, as you might expect of any compound word which has the component maurqártill in it. Definitely implies insincerity and false commitment; almost certainly fighting words.

traürlis corlíë (lit. “false-soul”): Implies that you would have to have principles in order to falsify them, and therefore that you cannot be a hypocrite since no-one would ever have believed anything you claimed about having them in the first place. A verdict of damnation. Break this one out, and someone’s walking away from the conversation dead.


Other Related Words

  • urlis: false, logically untrue; oppose talis.
  • maurlis: from mahar “make” + urlis, therefore “manufactured falsity”, or lie
  • maurqártill: from maurlis + qártill “price”, therefore “liar’s price”, or fraud1
  • corlíë: soul, (poetic) mind-state
  • niril: robust, durable

  1. Obviously, not all fraud is as simple as “lying about prices”, but ultimately, all fraud does involve deceiving someone about the exchange-value of something, even if not directly expressed in monetary terms.

The Heat of Battle

“Next in our study of how climatic and ecological events affect military and logistic strategy, we will be studying the Cold War.

“Taking place on Qern (Aris Delphi), in the years 7199-7223, the Cold War was directly caused by such an event. Following the asteroid impact of 7197, the ensuing particle winter caused catastrophic temperature drops with associated crop loss, glaciation, power grid failures, thermal infrastructure inadequacy, and so forth all across Qern’s southern hemisphere.

“In response to this, the southern powers – initially independently, but later united as the Austral Alliance – waged war against first the tropics, and later the more southerly regions of the less-affected northern hemisphere – in an attempt to seize territory that was both warm enough to allow food production and relatively survivable conditions, and which was not in imminent danger of being buried under a mile-high ice sheet.

“At first, the war was inconclusive and poorly prosecuted on both sides, with the shattering of the northern powers’ economy by the impact – immortalized forever in the term Qern cost center – and the increasing failure rate of the southern powers’ equipment as the temperature fell, not to mention the disruption of both sides’ command and logistic chains by the increasingly harsh weather.

“However, with the ingenuity of desperation, the southern powers in particular devised a range of cold-adapted military technologies, including snowdrills, ice-boats, bergpiers, and more, as well as crude but serviceable adaptations to existing technologies compensating for thermal embrittlement, frost- and flood-damaged terrain, and the erosive, corrosive environment of a particle winter. It is these technologies, and the modifications they imposed on logistics and strategy in the latter period of the Cold War, that we shall be examining in these next four lectures…”

– from a lecture series delivered at the Imperial War College

Essential Services

Transdivine Tectonic Computation Array: The supercomputers that manage attitude control and station-keeping of the Cirys swarm, thus ensuring that the orbits of god’s planet-sized organs never intersect and collisions are appropriately averted. While its original and primary node is buried deep in the substructure of the Centropolis of Cal Secalár, secondary elements of the Array are located in multiple hexterranes distributed throughout the body of the swarm.

– A Theoanatomic Gazetteer, 3rd ed.,
Coricál Ailék Board of Applied Geography