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tlb
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 3924
Joined: Mon Sep 03, 2012 11:34 am
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tlb wrote:Grayson started down on the planet and eventually rebuilt technology to move to space, including developing chemical rockets. They are only now coming back down, because the domes offer a cheap way to control the heavy metals. It is certainly not because space is at a premium; space is huge compared to the planetary surface.
cthia wrote:Did Grayson start out on the planet? I thought they had to live on their colony ship until it began to break down, then they moved down on the planet. An uninhabitable planet supporting a bolthole may not have that option to go down to the planet until they can get their shit together to move back into space.
From chapter 1 of The Honor of the Queen: “At any rate, the Church of Humanity Unchained was the product of a fellow named Austin Grayson—the Reverend Austin Grayson from someplace called the State of Idaho. According to the Foreign Office, there were hordes of lunatic fringe groups running around at the time, and Grayson was a ‘back to the Bible’ type who got caught up in the ban-the-machine movement. The only things that made him different from other crackpots and bomb-throwers were his charisma, his determination, and his talent for attracting converts with real ability. He actually managed to assemble a colony expedition and fund it to the tune of several billion dollars, all to take his followers away to the New Zion and its wonderful, technology-free Garden of Eden. It was really a rather elegant concept, you know, using technology to get away from technology.”
“Elegant,” Honor snorted, and the Admiral chuckled again.
“Unfortunately, they got a nasty surprise at journey’s end. Grayson’s a pretty nice place in many ways, but it’s a high-density world with unusual concentrations of heavy metals, and there isn’t a single native plant or animal that won’t kill any human who eats it for very long. Which meant, of course—"
“That they couldn’t abandon technology and survive,” Honor finished for him, and he nodded.
“Exactly. Not that they were willing to admit it. In fact, Grayson never did admit it. He lived another ten T-years after their arrival, and every year the end of technology was just around the corner, but there was a fellow named Mayhew who saw the writing on the wall a lot sooner. According to what I can dig out of the records, he more or less allied with another man, a Captain Yanakov, who’d commanded the colony ship, and the two of them pulled off a sort of doctrinal revolution after Grayson’s death. Technology itself wasn’t evil, just the way it had been used on Old Earth. What mattered wasn’t the machine but the ungodly lifestyle machine-age humanity had embraced.”
--snip--
“That wasn’t quite as funny as I thought it would be. But the situation’s even less funny. You see, Masada, the habitable planet of the Endicott System, was settled from Grayson, and not exactly voluntarily. What started as a schism over the retention of technology turned down other paths once it became clear they couldn’t survive without it. The original pro-Tech faction became ‘Moderates,’ and the anti-Techies became ‘the Faithful.’ Once the Faithful were forced to accept that they couldn’t get rid of the machines, they turned to creating the perfect godly society, and if you think the present government of Grayson is a bit backward, you should see what they came up with! Dietary laws, ritual cleansing for every imaginable sin—law codes that made any deviation from the True Way punishable by stoning, for God’s sake!
Note that the first generation deaths would not have been so severe if they stayed on ship, but a colony ship does not have facilities to house all those people ; unless most are in cryo-chambers. I do not have an electronic copy of The Honorverse Companion (published with House of Steel), but the sections in Grayson History on "Colonial Period" and "Consolidation" make it clear that the ship was only preserved against opposition and the original shuttles only worked for about 50 years (but the lab in that ship may be the source of the genetic engineering that gave people a chance to live on the planet). It was only in "Expansion" that Grayson began to reaquire a space presence that had been lost when the shuttles died. "Civil War" nearly destroyed all the space based industry, but one orbital remained and could deliver kinettic strikes against the Faithful. That ability enabled the agreement to send the Faithful to Masada. From chapter 8 of The Honor of the Queen: He paused and sipped at his brandy, then sighed.
“We’ve had almost a thousand years to adapt to our environment, and my tolerance for heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium is far higher than your own, but look at us. We’re small and wiry, with bad teeth, fragile bones, and a life expectancy of barely seventy years. We monitor the toxicity of our farmland daily, we distill every drop of water we drink, and still we suffer massive levels of neural damage, mental retardation, and birth defects. Even the air we breathe is our enemy; our third most common cause of death is lung cancer-lung cancer, seventeen centuries after Lao Than perfected his vaccine! And we face all of that, Admiral, all those health hazards and consequences, despite nine hundred years—almost a millennium—of adaptation. Can you truly imagine what it was like for the first generation? Or the second?”
He shook his head sadly, staring down into his brandy.
“Our first generation averaged one live birth in three. Of the babies born living, half were too badly damaged to survive infancy, and our survival was so precarious there was no possible way to divert resources to keep them alive. So we practiced euthanasia, instead, and ‘sent them home to God.’ “
--snip--
“Exactly,” Yanakov sighed. “Understand me, Admiral. The Founding Fathers weren’t monsters, nor am I trying to excuse my people for being what they are. We’re no less the product of our past than your own people are. This is the only culture, the only society, we’ve ever known, and we seldom question it. I pride myself on my knowledge of history, yet truth to tell, I never thought this deeply about it until I was forced up against the differences between us and you, and I suspect few Graysons ever really delve deep enough to understand how and why we became what we are. Is it different for Manticorans?”
“No. No, it’s not.”
“I thought not. But those early days were terrible ones for us. Even before Reverend Grayson’s death, women were already becoming not wives but chattels. The mortality rate was high among men, too, and there’d been fewer of them to begin with, and biology played another trick on us. Our female births outnumber male by three to one; if we were to sustain a viable population, every potential father had to begin begetting children as soon as possible and spread his genes as widely as he could before Grayson killed him, so our households grew. And as they grew, family became everything and the patriarch’s authority became absolute. It was a survival trait which tied in only too well with our religious beliefs. After a century, women weren’t even people—not really. They were property. Bearers of children. The promise of a man’s physical continuation in a world which offered him a life expectancy of less than forty years of backbreaking toil, and our efforts to create a godly society institutionalized that.”
--snip--
“After the first three centuries, things had changed. We’d lost an enormous amount of our technology, of course. Reverend Grayson and his First Elders had planned for that to happen—that was the entire point of making the journey—and they’d deliberately left behind the teachers and text books, the essential machinery that might have supported the physical sciences. We were fortunate the Church hadn’t regarded the life sciences with the same distrust, but even there we were desperately short of the specialists we needed. Unlike Manticore, no one even knew where we were, or cared, and because they didn’t, no Warshawski sail ship called here until barely two hundred years ago. Our colony ship left Old Earth five hundred years before Manticore’s founders, so our starting point was five centuries cruder than yours, and no one came to teach us the new technologies that might have saved us. The fact that we survived at all is the clearest possible evidence that there truly is a God, Admiral Courvosier, but we’d been smashed down to bedrock. We had only bits and pieces, and when we began to build upon them we found ourselves face to face with the worst danger of all: schism.”
--snip--
“My own ancestor, Hugh Yanakov, commanded our colony ship, and he tried to hang onto at least a limited space capability, but the First Elders had smashed the cryo installations immediately after we planeted. It was their equivalent of burning their boats behind them, committing themselves and their descendants to their new home. I doubt they would have done it if they’d been more scientifically educated, but they weren’t. And since the ship couldn’t take us away, our desperate straits left us no choice but to cannibalize it.
“So we were here to live or die, and somehow, we’d lived. Yet by the time of the Civil War, we’d reached the point where we could once more build crude, chem-fueled sublight ships. They were far less advanced than the one which had brought us here, with no cryo capability, but they could make the round trip to Endicott in twelve or fifteen years. We’d even sent an expedition there and discovered what today is Masada.
“Masada has an axial inclination of over forty degrees, and its weather is incredibly severe compared to Grayson, but humans can eat its plants and animals. They can live without worrying about lead and mercury poisoning from simply breathing its dust. Most of our people would have given all they owned to move there, and they couldn’t. We didn’t have the capability to move that many people. But when the Civil War ended with a handful of fanatics threatening to blow up the entire planet, we could move them to Masada.”
He laughed again, harshly and more mirthlessly even than before.
“Think about it, Admiral. We had to cast them out, and the only place to which we could banish them was infinitely better than where all the rest of us had to remain! There were barely fifty thousand of them, and under the peace settlement’s terms, we equipped them as lavishly as we could and sent them off, and then the rest of us turned to making the best we could of Grayson.”
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