Araminta Station
Table of Contents
| Araminta Station | |
| The Cadwall Chronicles [1] | |
| Jack Vance | |
| (2012) | |
| Tags: | Science Fiction Science Fictionttt |
The planet "Cadwal" is forever set aside as a natural perserve, owned and administered by the Naturalist Society of Earth, and inhabited by a very limited number of skilled human scientists and their families. But this system has been complicated by the passing centuries, and has become a byzantine culture where every place in the Houses of Cadwal is the object of savage competition.
In "Araminta Station", the first volume of "The Cadwal Chronicles", Jack Vance has constructed a brilliant, complex tale of revenge and murder, of love and alien intrigue, and set it glittering among the stars of the Purple Rose System.
Introduction
ODDMENTS AND NOTES, TO BE READ IF ONE IS SO INCLINED
These are excerpts from the Introduction to
The Worlds of Man
, by Fellows of the Fidelius Institute, and will assist in bridging the gap between now and then, here and there:
. . . In this work, now thirty years in preparation, we attempt neither exhaustive detail nor analytical profundity, but, rather, a pastiche of a million parts, which, so it is hoped, will coalesce into a focused picture.
. . . Order, logic, symmetry: these are fine words but any pretense that we have crammed our material into molds so strict would be obvious sham. Each settled world is
sui generis
, presenting to the inquiring cosmologist a unique quantum of information. All these quanta are mutually immiscible, so that efforts to generalize become a muddle. We are yielded a single certainty: no event has occurred twice; every case is unique.
. . . In our journeys from one end of the Gaean Reach to the other and, on occasion, Beyond, we discover nothing to indicate that the human race is everywhere and inevitably becoming more generous, tolerant, kindly and enlightened. Nothing whatever.
On the other hand, and this is the good news, it doesn’t seem to be getting any worse.
. . . Parochialism derives, apparently, from an innocent egotism, which, if verbalized, would express itself thus: “Since I choose to live in this place, it therefore and perforce must be excellent in all its aspects.”
Still and yet, the preferred destination of first-time travelers is almost always old Earth. Latent in all exiles, so it would seem, is the yearning to breathe the native air, to taste the water, to work the mother soil through the fingers.
Further, spaceships arriving at the ports of Earth each day discharge two or three hundred coffins of those who, with their last breaths, chose to return their substance to the dank brown mold of Earth.
. . . When men arrive on a new world the process of interaction begins. The men attempt to alter the world to suit their needs; at the same time the world, far more subtly, works to alter the men.
Thus the battle is joined, of man versus environment. Sometimes the men overcome the resistance of the planet. Terrestrial or otherwise alien flora is introduced and adapted to the chemical and ecological environment; noxious indigenes are repelled, destroyed or circumvented, and the world slowly takes on the semblance of Old Earth.
But sometimes the planet is strong, and forces adaptation upon the intruders. At first from expedience, then from custom and finally from innate tendency, the colonists obey the dictates of the environment and in the end become almost indistinguishable from true indigenes.
Chapter I
Chapter I, Preliminary
1. The Purple Rose System of Mircea’s Wisp
(Excerpted from
The Worlds of Man
, by Fellows of the Fidelius lnstitute.)
Halfway along the Perseid Arm a capricious swirl of galactic gravitation has caught up ten thousand stars and sent them streaming away at an angle, with a curl and a flourish at the end. This is Mircea’s Wisp.
To the side of the curl, at seeming risk of wandering away into the void, is the Purple Rose System, comprising three stars: Lorca, Sing and Syrene. Lorca, a white dwarf, and Sing, a red giant, swing close together around their mutual center of gravity: a portly pink-faced old gentleman waltzing with a dainty little maiden dressed in white. Syrene, a yellow-white star of ordinary size and luminosity, orbits the gallivanting pair at a discreet distance.
Syrene controls three planets, including Cadwal, the single inhabited world of the system.
Cadwal is an Earthlike planet seven thousand miles in diameter, with close to Earth-normal gravity.
(A list and analysis of physical indices is here omitted.)
2. The World Cadwal
Cadwal was first explored by the locator Rudel Neirmann, a member of the Naturalist Society of Earth. His report prompted the dispatch of an expedition which, upon its return to Earth, recommended that Cadwal be protected forever as a natural preserve, secure from human exploitation.
To this end, the Society asserted formal possession of Cadwal, and issued a decree of Conservancy: the Charter.
The three continents of Cadwal were named Ecce, Deucas and Throy,
1
each differing markedly from the other two. Ecce, straddling the equator, palpitated with heat, stench, color and ravenous vitality. Even the vegetation of Ecce used techniques of combat in the effort to survive. Three volcanoes, two active, the third dormant, were the only protrusions above a flat terrain of jungle, swamp and morass. Sluggish rivers coiled across the landscape, eventually emptying into the sea. The air reeked with a thousand odd fetors; ferocious creatures hunted each other, bellowing in triumph or screaming in mortal fright, as dictated by their roles in the event. The early explorers gave Ecce only cursory attention, and across the years others generally followed their example.
Deucas, on the opposite side of the world and four times as large as Ecce, sprawled across the north temperate zone. The fauna, at times both savage and formidable, included several semi-intelligent species; the flora in many cases resembled that of Earth - so closely that the early agronomists were able to introduce useful terrestrial species, such as bamboo, coconut palms, wine grapes and fruit trees, without fear of an ecological disaster.
2
Throy, to the south of Deucas, extended from under the polar ice well into the south temperate zone. Throy was a land of dramatic topography. Crags leaned over chasms; the sea dashed against cliffs; forests roared in the wind.
Elsewhere were oceans: great empty expanses of deep water barren of islands save for a few trifling exceptions: Lutwen Atoll, Thurben Island and Ocean Island off the east coast of Deucas, a few rocky islets off Cape Journal in the far south.
3. Araminta Station
At Araminta Station, an enclave of a hundred square miles on the east coast of Deucas, the Society established an administrative agency to enforce the terms of the Charter. Six bureaus were organized to perform the necessary work:
Bureau A: Records and statistics
B: Patrols and surveys: police and security services
C: Taxonomy, cartography, natural sciences
D: Domestic services
E: Fiscal affairs: exports and imports
F: Visitors’ accommodations
The original superintendents were Deamus Wook, Shirry Clattuc, Saul Diffin, Claude Offaw, Marvell Veder and Condit Laverty. Each was allowed a staff of forty persons. A tendency to recruit this staff from family and guild kinships brought to the early administration a cohesion which otherwise might have been lacking.