There’s also a stray network called Tare Displaced Channel which get together for mutual support and complaining about Tarens. Denasan and Purda gave me a formal invite to one of the get-togethers. The Channel apparently has tried to invite me before, and Denasan was rather huffy about it. I explained about me not getting mail from people outside KOTIS, and not being allowed to go out on my own, which I think may have changed Denasan’s attitude toward me a little. To the average stray I must seem hugely pampered.
I hadn’t really thought about the impact of the opening of Muina on other strays. Suddenly skills which were completely irrelevant on Tare are becoming valuable, and Denasan and Purda aren’t the only strays being recruited.
Tuesday, July 29
Urban Design
KOTIS is seriously gearing up settlement preparation. Today we skipped Mesiath and instead all five Setari squads spent the day assisting in the seeding of entire suburbs for Pandora, deep into the hills east of the old city and then along the lake to the north. Five squads of highly-trained killers clearing snow and lugging vats of whitestone seed and computer-constructed models and bits of equipment and chasing off hungry native wildlife.
I was along for enhancement, and learned all these details of urban planning and design which I’d never really thought about. It’s not just a matter of plonking houses and streets down. For the past five months, ever since they worked out that people could survive here, a fleet of technicians back on Tare and Kolar have been designing the city layout in terms of water and power and food production and drainage and waste and hospital services and fires and police and schools and transport and industry and shops and entertainment and defence and – my head just starts reeling when I try and think through the whole process. They’re preparing initial infrastructure for fifty thousand people, and have expansion plans for long into the future. I just can’t get over the idea of fifty thousand people living here.
Before the snows came the survey and geologist types had had a pretty thorough go at mapping the topography of Pandora’s surroundings. They selected sites for factories (an industrial hub inland along a river which lets out north of here) and the residential sections will checkerboard with farmland, which in the very long run will probably become parkland. The bit north where all the sheep live is going to be a particularly farmy area since it also brushes along the northern river – the sheep are being redomesticated and already have their personal set of highly technological shepherds – lots of Kolarens involved there, since Kolar deals with animals far more than Tare does. The old city (Aversan) is going to be part historical site and part working gardens. They don’t want to pull it down or alter it greatly, but it is a biggish chunk of land, so they’re going to use all the gardens either for produce, botanical research, or as a wildlife habitat for animals that they want to study. The plaza/piazza areas will be used as exactly that by the inhabitants of the wider area, and certain selected buildings will be converted to functioning use, particularly around the amphitheatre.
I’m very impressed by their plans. I would never have expected the Tarens, with their closed-off and blockish cities, to switch so immediately to creating a sprawling park with balconies. Given the pictures I’ve seen of Kolar, the Kolarens have definitely been a big influence – because of the heat, Kolarens sink their buildings, and only have parts of them out in the sun. Like the Tarens, Kolarens lived in caves when they first evacuated from Muina, at least in part because water on Kolar either drains underground or evaporates very quickly.
The Setari building is a prototype of what the buildings of this phase will be like, though most of them will be larger, built to accommodate dozens of families. No individual houses at this stage, just half-buried apartment blocks. The Kolarens and the Tarens have had to work together a great deal on this, both to avoid the Kolarens feeling excluded again, and because neither of their planets really fit the Muinan environment.
Back on Tare and Kolar they’re having huge arguments (discussions) about who gets to move in to all these buildings we’ve just planted – they’ve been having them for months, struggling over the big questions raised by two distinct cultures trying to settle the same home world. Is Tare or Kolar in control? Is KOTIS the right group to be leading the settlement? Will there be separate Taren and Kolaren settlements? A unified planetary government? Whose laws will be used? Which dialect? Whose technology? Do they build for complete interface integration, or actually step back in terms of technology? If all settlers have to have the interface, will it be the interface on Tare’s terms?
There are plenty of people on Kolar not keen to have the internal policeman which the Taren interface represents, and they find many of their laws horrifying. Of course, Tarens don’t think much of some of Kolar’s laws either.
Tare is winning a lot of the arguments, though. Nanotechnology is a difficult advance for Kolar to turn down, and it at least sounds like the Tarens are getting rather less anal about sharing their technology now that Muina can offer them the resources they’re currently dependant on Kolar to provide. Part of what they’re deciding will be temporary, just an initial structure so that they can get moving.
I just realised that all this rush and hurry mightn’t be down to population pressures or being so keen to embrace their home world. Tare and Kolar might be thinking of Muina as an ark. Because the Ddura will protect the platform towns even from massives, and a gate in the wrong place on Muina won’t bring a city tumbling down.
At least, not unless the gates get bigger than cities.
If that is the reason, they’re not saying it out loud. All the news stories about Muina are extremely cheerful and upbeat, and so are the KOTIS staff concentrating on getting whitestone seeded and design models placed. Over the next few weeks, with only a bit of monitoring from the technicians (who need to be sure the growing buildings don’t run out of readily-available food), a small city will quietly be reproduced. Lacking all the glass and fittings and furniture and energy generators, but with the bulk of the work done. Whitestone even extrudes certain metals and minerals, rather than absorb them. They don’t even have to dig to lay the connecting pipes. They’re going to grow a subway system.
I definitely chose the right name for the settlement. This isn’t a box I can close. I think all the Setari assisting were overwhelmed as well. Happy, though. Maze, particularly, really loves doing positive things rather than endlessly killing Ionoth, and it showed in everything he did.
Kaoren’s getting his way about returning to our main mission though. Tomorrow First and Fourth will take me into the Ena for a combination of me doing more testing and them trying to find Pillars. The fact that we can settle this world, that the Ddura will protect the sites, hasn’t removed the need to fix the tearing of the spaces, or found the reason why the Ddura started killing Muinans, and what exactly the Cruzatch have to do with it all.