Genesis Planet

(This is one of two write-ups of Luciverine (Eponian Cluster), in response to reader request. This is the purely canon version, rather than that found in the Friendship is Sufficiently Advanced shardverse.)

Every colony exists for a reason.

Which is to say that these are no longer the wild days which almost every species and polity seems to have when they first expand into space, when it is absolutely imperative to grab hold of every rock on which they can land with the cunning and strategic use of flags.

At first glance, the reason for the Empire's acquisition of Luciverine (Eponian Cluster) - a prebiotic eosylithic world now in stage-one ecopoesis - is obscure. After all, it's unlikely to be a pressing need for mud. We've got lots of that.

Don't look soilward for answers. Not to the colonists, spreading out from the colony spires of Landing in a tangle of domes, skeins, and estates, who came here seeking adventure, or a change, or a challenge, or even a sky just the right shade of violet. Not to the ecotects, drawn by the challenge of sculpting an entire new ecology's life-web from nothing. Don't even look to the spacers, the habitat-dwellers high above, or those even now spreading out to mine gases from resource-plump Thúär.

Instead, draw a line, following a direct route from the edge of the Cluster to its center. Along that path, following the stargates, you'll come first to Luciverine, then to sooty Irifel, and finally to Phosphoros. Now, if you were standing on one of Phosphoros's worlds, and looked to the spinward sky, you could see a diamond formed by four bright stars, and in their center, if you had good eyes, red Irifel illuminating a wisp of cloud.

That wisp is Luciv's Veil, a nebula which we believe to once have been torn by gravity's whim from a larger protostellar nebula. Rich in volatiles and carbonic molecules, the Veil spans almost the full distance to the Irifel System, and wraps closely around Luciverine itself, held back only by its weak solar wind.

Knowing this, you will understand the implication of the Luciverine colonial corporation being sponsored, initially, by the Extraplanetary Life Project of Kythera. Theirs was the reason for the colony: having progressed as far as they could in their design of simpler cosmozoa: beginning with simple regoformer lichens (the basis for mycofibrillin) and asteroid potatoes, and moving on to such designs as the silicon-based shíníléris, they sought a greater canvas for their work. The Veil, they deemed, would serve this purpose admirably.

And so, even as the Luciverine colony grows on the planet, the Project germinate a habitat tree in the outer system. Soon the first breed of space plankton will be ready for release into the nebula, to feed on the faint starlight and multiply until they're ready to support a population of higher forms.

In all their explorations, the people of the Empire have never yet come across majestic star whales ploughing the trackless void of space.

But the Project will fix that.