Part 1, which used be known as Book 1, Asdrale Cimatir, needed a climax. I decided that leaving Rei behind on Dara while Rome flies the Algol off to safety would be a heart-breaking conclusion. That is until we discovered that Rome, in fact, had not left.
But then I got stuck. If Rome stayed behind, why wouldn't she just radio Rei and tell him she stayed behind? I guess I could have said the radio malfunctioned but I took it one step further. I postulated that the spacesuits didn't have radios.
But why? Why wouldn't they? I then said, OK, the Vuduri are from the future, maybe they are mind-connected. From there, it was a simple leap to create the Overmind.
At that point, I had to go back to the beginning and create an entirely new culture, centered around the Overmind. More on that profound change tomorrow.
But all of this because I wanted Rei to run up a ramp...
Entry 1-065: February 28, 2013
How the Overmind shaped Vuduri society
Once I had to postulate the existence of PPT transceivers and the Overmind, I had to reinvent the entire Vuduri culture. I thought long and hard about what a society would look like if there were constantly people inside your head.
The whole concept of privacy was out the window. If you had a wrong, or worse, an impure thought, everyone would know. Thus the Vuduri became very clean of thought and in many ways naive. Also, the concept of lying went out the window. Who was there to lie to when everyone knew the truth?
The inability to lie and quite frankly not fully grasping the concept was a flaw that the Essessoni used to manipulate the Vuduri throughout all the books. This will be discussed tomorrow.
Another implication of having someone inside your head is the desire to create and have original thoughts is mostly drained from you. By the time you thought of anything, everyone already knew it. So the Vuduri just gave up on creativity. This includes interest in the arts, reading and even interpersonal relationships.
In an earlier incarnation of a book (since discarded), I even had the concept of "mind court" where Vuduri battled it out to prove ownership of original thoughts.
However, there is a difference between thoughts, emotions and sensations. Rome discovered that sensation was something that she could keep to herself. Others could try and leach it from her but it had no meaning. It was something she experienced for herself and it was irrelevant if others tried to grab it.
This led to her (from the Vuduri perspective) irrational attachment to her half-mountain lion, half-tabby cat named Skodla. Sadly, to cut the size of the books down, Skodla had to go but he is not forgotten. I'll pull out some of the stories about him in a future post.
Entry 1-066: March 1, 2013
Lies, Part 1
Because the Overmind is always looking inside your head, as a good Vuduri, you would never master the concept of telling a lie. You might be able to keep a secret but you could never tell an untruth. Only mandasurte (mind-deaf) can lie.
Our people, the Essessoni from the 21st century, have completely mastered the art of lying. As a culture, this makes the Vuduri virtually incapable of discerning if the Essessoni are telling the truth or not.
Here are some examples:
1.Rome and Estar, just before Estar injects Rei with the prosthetic PPT transducers:
“All right,” Rome said, resignedly. "Here is the truth. We actually did make it to Deucado but crash-landed. VIRUS units got loose and caused our tug MINIMCOM to evolve into an invisible spaceship that can travel at 1000 times the speed of light. He transported us here in eight days. MINIMCOM was the one who crippled the engines to make it look like it took longer.”
“Eight days?” Estar said, incredulously. “And then crippled your ship? Why would he do that?”
“To hide the fact that I had the baby and he is still alive.”
“This baby of yours,” Estar said with disgust. “Where is it?”
“He is invisible, too,” Rome replied. “He is wearing a cloak given to us by the Erklirte who have been living on Deucado for the last five hundred years.”
“You are not a very good liar,” Estar spat. “Your story is beyond ridiculous. It is preposterous. That or being mandasurte has driven you insane.”
Bottom line: Rome was telling the truth.
2.Rome tells Captain Keller the truth about the Virus 5 vessel being fake.
“Captain Keller, there’s no need for weapons,” Rei said.
“The vessel is not real,” Rome interjected. “It is merely a replica. There is no virus within. You are wasting your time.”
Keller laughed. “Right. How stupid do you think I am? You’re telling me that you flew to Earth, dug under the Tevatron only to find a fake canister? So where’s the real one?”
MINIMCOM flew it into the sun,” Rome said. “It is gone.”
Keller looked around. “I don’t see him around here.”
“She just told you,” Rei said. “He flew it into the sun. He burned up.”
“What? He committed suicide? You’re both a bunch of goddamned liars,” Keller said.
Bottom line: once again, Rome was telling the truth.
Tomorrow, some more lies or least stretching of the truth.
Entry 1-067: March 2, 2013
Lies, Part 2
Rome does know how to lie. She learned how from Rei. She lied to the Overmind of Deucado about the destruction of the Ark II. The Overmind assumed she was telling the truth because she was Vuduri and he was in her brain. It is a novel skill that Rome developed.
There are other examples, too. When Rei was first captured by the Ibbrassati, he told them about the Stareaters. They did not believe him. As mandasurte, they were familiar with the concept of lying. They assumed he was lying and threw him in jail even though he was telling the truth.
On the other hand, Rei has told some whoppers and gotten away with it because the Vuduri have no clue. For example, he told Virga he used a code-phrase that was about to instigate an interstellar war. She believed him. He also told MASAL's samanda that his son was dead and he put the body in the disposal unit. MASAL believed him because he was in Rei's mind but did not believe Rome when she told him that Aason was still alive. MASAL got both wrong.
Even OMCOM has been known to stretch the truth a bit. When he first contacted Rei and Rome after the Stareater was destroyed but that there were mutations. He preempted the discussion by saying, “There were some, perhaps you would say unforeseen, circumstances.” Note that he qualified the statement by saying "you would say unforeseen" - that didn't mean he didn't foresee it.
And even MINIMCOM gets into the act as they were trying to escape Helome. He announced to the Vuduri, “The cannons you see extended from the front of my fuselage are wide-angle, multi-phase PPT throwers. They are capable of leveling a square kilometer in less than one second.” Not exactly the truth. Call it a stretch?
So, in the end, both Rei and Rome have lied, MINIMCOM and OMCOM have stretched the truth, but it was always to accomplish their goals which are almost invariably noble.
Entry 1-068: March 3, 2013
More on missing Winfall
In a previous post, I discussed why the Vuduri missed the disappearance of Winfall since it was the crucial plot element that launched the entire book series.
Well, I was thinking about it the other day and came up with a thought experiment that might explain it better.
Say that you had nearly omnipotent powers and could somehow arrange stars into the equivalent of a cosmic digital clock. Say you started the clock on January 1, 2000 at 12 midnight. If you were one light year away, you would not see the clock starting for a year. If you were 100 light-years away, you wouldn't see it start for 100 years.
So Winfall disappeared on a certain date
and time according to the observers on Earth. They flew to Tabit, at 100x the speed of light, before the electromagnetic wave front got there. The gigantic digital clock would be farther back in time because the light rays displaying it didn't get there yet.
But what the Vuduri didn't understand was that time flows at a constant speed. If you fly away from "time" faster than the speed of light, your now relative to where you came from, goes into the past by the amount of time you flew FTL. So they actually flew into the past. If this gigantic digital clock had been visible, they would not have seen the time and date they expected but rather many weeks earlier.
While the Vuduri are not impatient, the amount of error in their calculations was so great, that even they gave up and packed up just before the electromagnetic wave front arrived. Too bad for them, great for us because it launched Rome's Revolution.