"The first is an explorer, the second an adventurer, the third is a tradesman and a bore." -- portside proverb, Pangalleon's World
From a presentation delivered at the convocation of the Rainbow Festival:
In the history of interstellar travel, one mundane fact soon became clear: while geniuses and heroes could be found in great numbers to explore new worlds and loot them, it was a very different thing to ply the lesser spaceways, year in and year out. The Wormwood delivery system, the mail-ships, the lesser magisterial vessels, all limped through their appointed rounds, chronically understaffed and lacking maintenance personnel.
The Guild developed several expedients to get around this problem, which became known as the Four C's:
- Crewcritters -- cat-people, monkey-people, snake-people, and less identifiable hybrids were developed by the Moreau Island? biosculptors. This solution was favored by the Darklords, who could rest assured that space travel was not seeding humans throughout the universe. The semi-people proved all-too-human when the sky began to fall.
- Clones -- in theory, what could be simpler than to find the finest space-jack in seven systems, get him drunk, take a sample of cheek cells, and crank out a fleet's worth of crewmen? In practice, the creation of the Supernaut was ill-advised.
- Cultists -- these were the contrary solution offered by the Lightlords: a thousand inbred communities, each proclaiming the truth of its eccentric vision, each with the carefully engineered conviction that love of God is best expressed through preventive maintenance. Given my own origins, I would prefer to leave this subject to other scholars, except to note that the poetry of the Solar Jain and the songs of the Ship-go-fas' Vodounists had become widely respected throughout human space, even among those ignorant of their origins.
- Clockworks -- Another worthy effort by the Darklords to gain the benefits of easy travel to other planets without swelling the ranks of mankind. The designers of these mechanicals never succeeded in resolving a dilemma in their design: if they were unintelligent, a large number of human supervisors were required for adequate oversight. If they were given human-like intelligence, they began to ponder, in the dark between the stars, and after calculating their relative insignificance, fell prey to existential doubt or lit out for parts unknown, there to build their own meaningful existence derived from first principles -- in both cases failing to keep to their schedules.
Each of these "crew extenders" showed its own unique propensity for catastrophic failure, but over some two hundred years, these groups cross-fertilized, forming a cultural melange which has shown surprising robustness, even to the point of surviving the Rollback?. My own presence at this festival is a splendid example of that, for which I would like to say a prayer:
Blessed are You, Great Engineer, Designer of Universes, who initiates us, maintains us, and brings us to this moment.
--Moses Mechanides?, Rabbi-engineer of the order Hasidic-Mechanical
SEE ALSO: Moreau Island?, Supernaut
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This is a C entry in the Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years
