I wonder how otl "westernization" will effect otl Africa in the far future compare to the Africa of the Maleverse far future?
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
An interesting development for bioengineering, one that I didn't expect. I wonder what kind of implications there will be...
Apologies for commenting so late, Jonathan!
To me, there are two points that stand out in the New Guinea update:
1) How educated everyone was. From the looks of it, this is a Papua New Guinea where the average tribespeople are not only knowledgeable about future-tech bioengineering, but also radical architecture, high finance, and even advanced chemistry to the point of crafting sensations from cheek-swab DNA! To come even halfway this far would mean that New Guinea must have also been in the forefront of progressive education. I’m guessing the Malêverse’s jaji system was augmented with more radical and experimental sorts of schooling for the tribal peoples – perhaps some sort of radio schooling (and later, internet colleges) augmented with progressive laws that enable wireless communication for free (or nearly free) nationwide – which would allow easier commerce and credit/debit transactions ala. Kenya’s M-Pesa. But on steroids.
2) How much relaxed everyone is towards bioengineering. Well, relaxed isn’t the right term, but it is really astounding how everyone has not only embraced the idea of utilizing nature to improve themselves, but accepted it as both a work option and a way of life. “Microbe shares? Sales territory? Experimental license?”, would infer that experimentation of the natural world (for the human body, no less) is an accepted thing here, and the cheek-swab DNA sensation-drug above also points to it being a leisure activity as well. And here and there are no moralizing preachers or imams calling it sinful. In the moral side, this is a New Guinea that hasn’t got the Christianisation or Islamization of the outside world, so general attitudes shall be loose(-r), but it is still astounding to see such radical boundaries be accepted by locals and travellers.
On another note, given that this thread has given some weight to the idea of “Super-Wood” , I wonder if New Guinea locals have also augmented local forestry and crafting techniques to produce ‘malleable timber’ that could be stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar, but also lightweight to lift and work with by hand. With 2100-style bioengineering, I can imagine rich tribes building impressive homes, structures, and buildings out of Super-wood that would astound outsiders.
Lastly, given the natural wealth of New Guinea and how it is utilized by treasure-trove laws, I wonder if other equatorial regions like Borneo or nations like Congo and Grao-Para have risen beyond their peers in wealth and experimentation. Or are they all hobbled in some way or another? I can see bio-piracy being a serious crime in 2100 Malêverse.
In all, an amazing update! It’s really something to think about how this all came to be.
To me, there are two points that stand out in the New Guinea update:
1) How educated everyone was. From the looks of it, this is a Papua New Guinea where the average tribespeople are not only knowledgeable about future-tech bioengineering, but also radical architecture, high finance, and even advanced chemistry to the point of crafting sensations from cheek-swab DNA! To come even halfway this far would mean that New Guinea must have also been in the forefront of progressive education. I’m guessing the Malêverse’s jaji system was augmented with more radical and experimental sorts of schooling for the tribal peoples – perhaps some sort of radio schooling (and later, internet colleges) augmented with progressive laws that enable wireless communication for free (or nearly free) nationwide – which would allow easier commerce and credit/debit transactions ala. Kenya’s M-Pesa. But on steroids.
2) How much relaxed everyone is towards bioengineering. Well, relaxed isn’t the right term, but it is really astounding how everyone has not only embraced the idea of utilizing nature to improve themselves, but accepted it as both a work option and a way of life. “Microbe shares? Sales territory? Experimental license?”, would infer that experimentation of the natural world (for the human body, no less) is an accepted thing here, and the cheek-swab DNA sensation-drug above also points to it being a leisure activity as well. And here and there are no moralizing preachers or imams calling it sinful. In the moral side, this is a New Guinea that hasn’t got the Christianisation or Islamization of the outside world, so general attitudes shall be loose(-r), but it is still astounding to see such radical boundaries be accepted by locals and travellers.
On another note, given that this thread has given some weight to the idea of “Super-Wood” , I wonder if New Guinea locals have also augmented local forestry and crafting techniques to produce ‘malleable timber’ that could be stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar, but also lightweight to lift and work with by hand. With 2100-style bioengineering, I can imagine rich tribes building impressive homes, structures, and buildings out of Super-wood that would astound outsiders.
Lastly, given the natural wealth of New Guinea and how it is utilized by treasure-trove laws, I wonder if other equatorial regions like Borneo or nations like Congo and Grao-Para have risen beyond their peers in wealth and experimentation. Or are they all hobbled in some way or another? I can see bio-piracy being a serious crime in 2100 Malêverse.
In all, an amazing update! It’s really something to think about how this all came to be.
For those who may have missed it, the latest update is at post 7299, and I'll post the second half of the story as soon as the real world stops interfering.
There's certainly more of a gradient ITTL - not only did more of the world remain uncolonized but many of the colonized countries were able to force better terms from the imperial powers. There are more countries in the position of OTL Japan and also more that were in the position of the Indian princely states, colonized but retaining some autonomy over their development. And the very fact that non-Western modernization was more widespread meant that there was more of a sense of other options and less of a sense that the West was the only possible future. All this adds up to a much more eclectic adoption of Western culture and Western political institutions, making highland New Guinea even more of an outlier than it would have been otherwise.
Africa is a big place, and Western influences have affected different parts of it in different ways, both IOTL and ITTL. The West is a big place too, for that matter, and the African countries that were part of (for instance) the British empire weren't influenced in the same way as those that were Portuguese or French or those that maintained their independence. There's also a lot of variation depending on whether the outside influences were mediated through Christianity or Islam - for instance, the Islamic north of Nigeria and the Christianized south were both under British rule and had common colonial institutions, but remain very different societies today.
If you want an idea of how Westernization will affect Africa in the future of both timelines, look to the political and cultural institutions of each country and to how much and what kinds of Western influence exist in each - those are the institutions that will continue to play a part in each country's development.
Watch this space - bioengineering is a major theme here, given that the life sciences have been a Malê interest from early on.
Not all highland New Guinea people are experts in biotech or finance, any more than all developed-world people IOTL are scientists or doctors, but enough of them are to permit the level of development shown in the story. The jajis did play a part during the 20th and early 21st centuries, and later, the universities that grew up in Akmat Ipatas' truce towns (of which Bandar Damai is the oldest and largest) and the spread of satellite Internet to the tribal territories have enabled a high level of education throughout the highlands. There's a lot of back-and-forth movement between the countryside and the city, with many tribespeople going to college there and coming back on occasion to work, and a century of this has given the tribes a great deal of financial sophistication.
The architecture is what might be called radically traditional - Kokopo House was one of my inspirations, the PNG parliament building (which was based on traditional tambaran meetinghouses, and which was the model for the bioexchange building in the story) another.
And on the second issue, not everyone is as relaxed as the New Guinea highland tribes - there are, as you say, a wide range of religious and ethical attitudes toward bioengineering, and many people are more skeptical, especially where the engineering affects the human body. In post 7256, it is mentioned that some people consider genetically modified people to be "allohumans," and even those who are more accepting will often draw a distinction between modifications that make people stronger and healthier within human limits and modifications that extend those limits. Modifying microbes or plant life is less controversial; animals, especially higher animals, somewhat more so.
For various reasons, some of which were explored in post 7299 and some of which will be touched on in the second half of the story, the people of highland New Guinea - even those who have adopted folk-Islam, folk-Christianity or syncretic Buddhism - are outliers in the degree to which they accept bioengineering, although they too have debates about the proper limits, and the DNA-specific drugs are a city thing, not a country thing.
Going by this Scientific American article, the creation of superwood involves chemical treatment, but in the future, it's possible that people might try to duplicate the process biologically or (IMO more likely) to bioengineer trees that are primed for treatment and can be strengthened more easily and effectively. And a place like New Guinea where hardwood is both economically and culturally important is certainly one of the places where I could imagine this happening. That, too, might feature in the second half of the story.
The story mentioned bioexchanges in Belém, Kampala and Hyderabad, and there's probably one in Johor too. Tropical biodiversity is a very big deal, and a lot of Consistory money and effort goes into preserving it. Much of the experimentation and development takes place outside the tropics, and the countries that have biodiversity-rich environments have taken advantage of it to varying degrees depending on local institutions, but they've all been able to monetize it to some degree.
What makes New Guinea different from the others is that Consistory bioethics (which are, at bottom, based on Abacarist bioethics) are much less influential there, and it has become a center for people who want to buy development rights or experiment with modifications that might be restricted elsewhere. The other bioexchanges largely follow a uniform legal code; the laws of the New Guinea exchange are different, and many of the customary owners have their own codes. And biopiracy, which is indeed a serious crime in the future Malêverse, is a not-unrelated issue.
There's certainly more of a gradient ITTL - not only did more of the world remain uncolonized but many of the colonized countries were able to force better terms from the imperial powers. There are more countries in the position of OTL Japan and also more that were in the position of the Indian princely states, colonized but retaining some autonomy over their development. And the very fact that non-Western modernization was more widespread meant that there was more of a sense of other options and less of a sense that the West was the only possible future. All this adds up to a much more eclectic adoption of Western culture and Western political institutions, making highland New Guinea even more of an outlier than it would have been otherwise.
Africa is a big place, and Western influences have affected different parts of it in different ways, both IOTL and ITTL. The West is a big place too, for that matter, and the African countries that were part of (for instance) the British empire weren't influenced in the same way as those that were Portuguese or French or those that maintained their independence. There's also a lot of variation depending on whether the outside influences were mediated through Christianity or Islam - for instance, the Islamic north of Nigeria and the Christianized south were both under British rule and had common colonial institutions, but remain very different societies today.
If you want an idea of how Westernization will affect Africa in the future of both timelines, look to the political and cultural institutions of each country and to how much and what kinds of Western influence exist in each - those are the institutions that will continue to play a part in each country's development.
Watch this space - bioengineering is a major theme here, given that the life sciences have been a Malê interest from early on.
Not all highland New Guinea people are experts in biotech or finance, any more than all developed-world people IOTL are scientists or doctors, but enough of them are to permit the level of development shown in the story. The jajis did play a part during the 20th and early 21st centuries, and later, the universities that grew up in Akmat Ipatas' truce towns (of which Bandar Damai is the oldest and largest) and the spread of satellite Internet to the tribal territories have enabled a high level of education throughout the highlands. There's a lot of back-and-forth movement between the countryside and the city, with many tribespeople going to college there and coming back on occasion to work, and a century of this has given the tribes a great deal of financial sophistication.
The architecture is what might be called radically traditional - Kokopo House was one of my inspirations, the PNG parliament building (which was based on traditional tambaran meetinghouses, and which was the model for the bioexchange building in the story) another.
And on the second issue, not everyone is as relaxed as the New Guinea highland tribes - there are, as you say, a wide range of religious and ethical attitudes toward bioengineering, and many people are more skeptical, especially where the engineering affects the human body. In post 7256, it is mentioned that some people consider genetically modified people to be "allohumans," and even those who are more accepting will often draw a distinction between modifications that make people stronger and healthier within human limits and modifications that extend those limits. Modifying microbes or plant life is less controversial; animals, especially higher animals, somewhat more so.
For various reasons, some of which were explored in post 7299 and some of which will be touched on in the second half of the story, the people of highland New Guinea - even those who have adopted folk-Islam, folk-Christianity or syncretic Buddhism - are outliers in the degree to which they accept bioengineering, although they too have debates about the proper limits, and the DNA-specific drugs are a city thing, not a country thing.
Going by this Scientific American article, the creation of superwood involves chemical treatment, but in the future, it's possible that people might try to duplicate the process biologically or (IMO more likely) to bioengineer trees that are primed for treatment and can be strengthened more easily and effectively. And a place like New Guinea where hardwood is both economically and culturally important is certainly one of the places where I could imagine this happening. That, too, might feature in the second half of the story.
The story mentioned bioexchanges in Belém, Kampala and Hyderabad, and there's probably one in Johor too. Tropical biodiversity is a very big deal, and a lot of Consistory money and effort goes into preserving it. Much of the experimentation and development takes place outside the tropics, and the countries that have biodiversity-rich environments have taken advantage of it to varying degrees depending on local institutions, but they've all been able to monetize it to some degree.
What makes New Guinea different from the others is that Consistory bioethics (which are, at bottom, based on Abacarist bioethics) are much less influential there, and it has become a center for people who want to buy development rights or experiment with modifications that might be restricted elsewhere. The other bioexchanges largely follow a uniform legal code; the laws of the New Guinea exchange are different, and many of the customary owners have their own codes. And biopiracy, which is indeed a serious crime in the future Malêverse, is a not-unrelated issue.
xsampa
Banned
This seems irrelevant, but since TTL deals with the effects of imperialism, I'd like to pose it here. Neither OTL or ITTL mainland China was ever colonized during the 19th century. Would China's history as a large, unified state make colonial rule there different from what it would have been in India or Africa?
Malêverse 2100: What Hides Below the Clouds (Part 2 of 2)
[Continued from post 7299]
#
Kere's words were kindly meant, but they gave me no confidence. She'd told me to come back when I had the money, and that was the problem, wasn't it? If I went home and returned to my job with Auki municipal biocontrol, I'd have to work for a decade before I could meet the asking price, and by then, the chance would be long gone. And I couldn't think of any other way to raise that kind of money in a hurry – banks weren't gamblers, and a cooperative wouldn't be enough even if I brought in everyone I knew. Maybe I could go to Yali country and offer to work out the cost, but that was the gift problem all over again – what skills did I have that they would value so highly?
I went to other brokers. Maybe there were other, better-hidden treasures; maybe there were more conventional rights that I could afford to bring home. By the end of the day, I was sure there weren't. There were items that came cheaper, but none that showed even the promise of being a treasure I could share.
At twilight I wandered out of the brokers' district, through the back streets and the neighborhoods near the wall. I was in one of the more settled parts of the city, a district of highland merchant families that had come from their valleys a century ago, modest houses built around fire-pit courtyards. The street wound past the smell of roasting vat-pork and the sound of conversation and into a small square planted with palm trees and tropical gardens; around it were an Ahmadi mosque, a Buddhist temple, a meetinghouse and a metro station.
People were flowing into the meetinghouse, and a sign said that a bangsawan of Akmat Ipatas was about to begin. There were worse things I could do with the evening than learn the story of the city's founder, and so I followed them.
There were no seats inside, but someone had scattered cushions on the floor; nearly everyone knew each other, so they gathered the cushions in familiar piles and continued the conversations that had begun outside the door. I didn't have such a group to join, so I found myself next to the only other foreigner, who introduced himself as Sergio Almeida and bore the stamp of all Portugal's nations.
"I studied civil engineering at Luanda," he whispered, "and I'm on my Wanderjahre – a job here, a project there. I'm working with the water department here, and in my spare time…" But whatever he'd planned to say next was cut off as the bangsawan began.
It didn't go as I'd expected. The highlanders used the Malay word for plays about their great people, but among the Malays, a bangsawan was an opera. Here there were no words; the story was told entirely through dance and through the music of hollow bamboo pipes. And all the dancers were dressed as mantises.
The mantis had been a headhunting symbol once – that was plain from the dances that showed Ipatas' earlier years. When he led raids, the actors struck and struck, biting down at the images of prey insects that stood in as enemy warriors, and in the next scenes when Ipatas had become chief of his tribe, the insects' heads adorned the wall.
But then it changed. Ipatas stood in ceremonial dress and addressed the quarreling chiefs, persuading them with hands and arms that they must face the Germans in the lowlands together, and at the critical moment, as the beating on the bamboo pipes grew louder, his mantis-head struck and he seized the prize of unity. Then the background took the image of the German government house and Ipatas wore Western clothes, and when the diplomatic dance grew discordant and it looked like he might fail, he struck again and held aloft the prize of peace. And when he marked the truce-paths and laid the city's foundations, he struck and seized wisdom from the very clouds before taking on the tasks of rulership.
Finally he stood by himself, old, blind, making his last journey to the mountains. The music of the bamboo pipes grew soft, and for the first time, the players spoke: strike first, strike first, strike first…
Was that what Kere had meant, when she called me a mantis?
The chant and the music died away together, and both audience and players went to sit around the feast that was being laid. I hesitated to join them; I realized that this was a religious pageant for them, an act of ancestor-worship, and the feast afterward wasn't something an outsider should take part in lightly. Sergio must have seen my hesitation, because he took me by the arm and led me out to the square. "Let's go get some real food," he said, and, the bangsawan's spell broken, I went with him.
Real food proved to be a fish restaurant on the other side of the city – something that might once have been an expensive proposition in the highlands, but fish could be grown from a vat as easily as meat – with a menu that was part Goa, part Mozambique and part Lisbon. A waiter put bacalhau stew on one side of the table, nsima with fish sauce on the other and kingfish curry in between; Sergio poured the beer and talked about mining.
“There’s gold all over the place out there,” he said. “Ancient stream beds on every mountainside.” He laid a datacloth on the corner of the table that was empty of food, and an image sprang up: mountains and valleys, with broken red lines tracing their way down the slopes. “I bought some satellite time, did some remote imaging, you see? These are where the old streams are. I’ve marked the ones most likely to have gold, maybe platinum-group metals too – none of them are worth the mining companies’ time, but one person with some rented equipment? Give it a few months – when I get tired of the waterworks, I’m buying a permit and going out there. You should go too. There are plenty of streams to spare.”
I leaned over in spite of myself. The kind of money I could make by wildcat placer-mining would be pocket change to a big company, but if I got very lucky, it might be enough to lock up those development rights. I motioned to the datacloth – I did use hand signals this time, and almost spilled my beer – and another set of dotted lines overlaid the image; the approximate boundaries of the tribes' territories.
Almost at once, something jumped out at me. The darkest of the broken red lines, the ancient watercourse that Sergio's imaging algorithm had judged most promising, was owned by the same Yali tribe that was preparing the fungus for offer on the bioexchange. Strike first, I remembered, and surely, coincidence though this was, the map had to be telling me something…
"I'd be careful about that one," Sergio said. "That tribe and this one" – he pointed to the next territory down the valley – "are at war."
War. We of Malaita had been a warlike people once. Before Hui'ehu's time, villages and Big Men had fought each other, and even after, our trading ships could turn pirate at the drop of a hat. We'd raided the New Guinea lowlands and skirmished with Roviana, and the last exchange of fire between a Roviana ship and one of ours was less than seventy years ago. But war was nothing that my generation or my parents' had experienced.
"Kere told me they were fighting over the rights," I murmured, "but she didn't say she meant that literally."
Sergio nodded. "It's very formalized – people aren't often killed. But outsiders like us don't know the rules, and we don't know what treaties we might break just by being there. And there are stories… they say the warriors have changed themselves, that they're more than human." He shook his head clear. "I'm going to that other mountain – maybe the computer says point-seven-nine rather than point-eight-six, but I don’t want to get caught in the middle of a battle."
I ate some nsima, washed it down with a long pull of beer, and agreed. But those broken red lines stayed in my mind, and again I heard the choral chant, strike first.
#
The airship that carried me out of Bandar Damai two days later was smaller than the one that had brought me, and it had only one other passenger, a tribesman returning to his home in the far west. It had a landing frame and didn't need a mooring post; it could drop me halfway up a mountain, and I'd hired it to make a detour from its route and do just that. My return passage plus the permit and the equipment rental had just about taken my remaining funds; the Yali sold mining permits cheaper than bioexchange rights, but cheap, in the highlands, was a relative term.
The airship followed one of the truce paths that Akmat Ipatas had decreed, and when I mentioned it to my fellow passenger, he told me why. "The air above the paths is truce ground too – if there's fighting, no one will attack us there." He gave me a sharp look. "You're going to war country, I hear. Mark where the truce path is, and if you get in trouble, run for it – once you're there, it's worth a banning to harm you."
It was late afternoon when I arrived and near nightfall by the time the unloading was done, and I made camp by a stream that ran two hundred meters from its ancient course. I lay awake that night, looking up at the stars and listening to the bird-calls. The next morning, I set to work.
The people who’d rented me the equipment had told me that once I set it up, the mining would be automatic, but I learned quickly that they’d lied. I had a machine for digging and drilling and another one for smelting, but I had to rig the sluice myself and run a channel from the stream to feed it. The work was hard at this altitude, in the cloud forest a thousand meters higher than Bandar Damai. It was three days before I was ready to begin mining; by then I was as exhausted as I’d ever been, and I knew that under the environmental plan I’d filed, I’d have to fill it all again and replant it before I left.
No doubt that was why I was alone here – the clerks at the mining office had told me that a few people went out each month, but I had this mountain to myself. There might have been a gold rush if Sergio had done his imaging two hundred years ago or even a hundred and twenty, but the world was too rich for that now. There were easier ways to make money than digging it out of the mountains, and maybe it only made sense to people who wanted to live alone or were looking for adventure – or to people like me, who were working on deadline.
Maybe it was even more than that – maybe wildcat mining only made sense to me because I came from a cargo-cult people. We were long past the beliefs that had built Hui’ehu an empire, but the cargo cults were still part of our civic ritual, and somewhere deep in our collective unconscious, the notion that wealth came to those who made the right motions was still there.
After a week of making those motions, I still hadn’t found the wealth. I’d dug up and down the streambed in the places that the algorithm recommended, but had found nothing other than dirt and stones. Sergio had said that there was an 86 percent chance to find gold here, but that meant there was a 14 percent chance of coming up empty, and at week’s end I was sure that would happen… but then, on the evening I was ready to give up, I struck gold.
The nuggets were three meters down, shining like stars of the underworld. Sergio had been right about the platinum-group metals too; they had a silvery tinge and assayed about three percent palladium. They followed a streambed that ran at a slight angle from the one Sergio had mapped – my best guess was that there was a layer underneath the one his imaging had found, but I didn’t really care. The ritual had worked; the cargo was arriving.
Through all this time, I’d looked for signs of war, but aside from a couple of drones overflying the camp, I’d seen none. I’d heard movement in the bushes at night, but when I crept out to check, the shapes that resolved in my infrared glasses were feral pigs, not warriors. I’d bought permits from both of the tribes that claimed this territory, and gold wasn’t what they were fighting over; I hoped that would be enough to stay out of the fighting.
Still, I felt safer after I flared down a passing airship and put the fruits of my labor into the purser’s hands; his commission for selling it in Bandar Damai was even more ruinous than the tribes’ royalties, but the money would be in the bank. I’d been in the mountains a month and was almost a third of the way to meeting the asking price; maybe Kere would have a fee to earn after all.
The attack came two days later.
It was a restless night – there had been many of those – and I’d given up on sleep. I left camp and wandered downstream toward a rocky outcropping where I would sometimes sit and look down to the valley. I doubted I’d see very far that night – the moon was new and a fog was settling on the cloud forest – but it was a good place to sit and think.
I was halfway there when I heard movement, many footsteps coming up the mountain. The sound was still distant, but when I put the night-vision glasses on, the shapes of the thermal signatures were unmistakably human. There were sixteen of them, moving purposefully and carrying weapons. A war party.
Run for the truce path, I remembered, but the nearest one was all the way down in the valley, and on a night as dark as this, that would be a good way to break my neck. Better to take cover where I was. There was a stand of bushes nearby and I dove into it and flattened; the ground was wet and chilly and drops of condensation fell on my head, but in the night and fog, and without infrared equipment, they’d never find me. I concentrated on keeping still and waited for them to pass.
The footsteps grew closer, and then they suddenly stopped. I raised my head as little as I could manage and saw them clustered ten meters away, gesturing and arguing. One of them pointed, and my heart stopped as I realized he was pointing directly at me. He broke from the group and marched unerringly to the edge of the bushes where I was, and the others followed.
I saw him raise a spear, and I saw something else: he had no infrared glasses. He’d seen me naturally. I remembered what Sergio had said about warriors who had changed themselves, and I remembered how I’d dismissed it at the time; those words sounded very different now.
“Nomin,” I said – friend, one of the few Yali words I’d learned. I got to my knees slowly, hands above my head to show I was unarmed, and then to my feet.
“Trespassers aren’t friends,” said the man who’d found me; he said it in Yali, and when he saw I didn’t understand, repeated it in the traders’ language.
“I have permits.”
“Maybe from those bugs over there” – he pointed – “or those forest grubs. But not from us.”
All at once I knew what must have happened. A third tribe had joined the war, maybe after finding the new fungus on its territory, and was showing its strength. And one way to show strength would be to wreck a mine that the other two tribes had permitted, and maybe to wreck the miner.
Outsiders don’t know the rules, Sergio had said, and we don’t know what treaties we might break just by being there. He’d left one thing out: outsiders didn’t know when they might become targets that no one would miss.
Someone called out a word that I didn’t understand, and the war-leader turned away from me for a moment and argued with him. I suspected I wouldn’t enjoy finding out what happened once that argument was finished. I would have to break past them; they looked fit and strong, but I was taller and faster, and that way I’d at least have a chance to make it to the truce path. I tensed, made ready to run…
And there was shouting and crashing through the underbrush, there was whistling of spears, there were ash-covered warriors in the fog, there was consternation as the war party turned to face a new enemy. I didn’t know who’d joined the fight – whether the new arrivals came from one of the tribes I’d bought mining permits from or whether they were yet a fourth faction – but this was my chance. I ran at the nearest of the war party. He thrust his spear at me but I dodged past it, seized the shaft with both hands, and slammed the blunt end into his stomach. He was strong, very strong, but he hadn’t expected me to put up a fight, and I dashed past him as he recovered his wind.
I was face to face with the war-leader now. He’d knocked down one of the new warriors, and he was flush with triumph and battle-rage. He shouted and lunged, and I knew I couldn’t outfight him if I met him on his terms. Strike first flashed through my mind, and I remembered the wrestling I’d done as a child; I ducked under his blow and threw myself at his feet, pulling back to take his legs out from under him. He kicked out and I felt a sharp pain. I pulled again and fell heavily beside me. I looked for an escape; then something hit the back of my head and I knew no more.
#
I woke in a house. The house was a single room ten meters square, with glass walls and a glass skylight occupying most of the ceiling. There were beds, although mine was the only one occupied at the moment; there were cabinets of medical supplies, the kind of diagnostic machines typical of a doctor’s office in Malaita, and behind a patterned curtain, an operating theater. There was also a woman, perched on a stool and looking down at me.
She was about sixty, wearing medical scrubs, short like most of the Yali but giving an appearance of compact strength. Her eyes were keen; I remembered the warriors who’d found me in the darkness and wondered what those eyes could see.
“Back among us, are you?” She gave me a crooked smile. “You had a bad concussion and a glorious bump on your head, and you broke a few ribs, but you’ll get better. I checked your nannies, and they’re well along the way to healing you – your nannies are as good as ours, and ours are used to patching people up after wars.”
At that moment, my head and chest didn’t feel like they were well on the way to healing, but I thanked her.
“Ninim ar,” she said. “You, Tautai, are very welcome.”
I felt a flash of surprise that the doctor knew my name, but I shouldn’t have. The mining office would have given the tribe my name when they sold me the permit – and, seeing my surprise before I could hide it, she added, “you’re the one Kere told us about.”
“But I lack courtesy – and to a man who made himself one of our warriors, too.” Her voice betrayed a touch of irony and more than a touch of amusement, but there was also something more. “I am Tayi, and you are our guest for as long as you want to be.”
I didn’t want to be anyone’s guest. I wanted to be back at my mining camp. But neither my current state of repair nor the now-three-cornered war would allow for that. I took the bowl of soup that Tayi offered and looked out at the fantasia houses, the gardens, the children at play and their parents on errands.
Soon enough – sooner than I should have – I went out to join them. I wasn’t up to working yet, but I could sit with the elders in the doorway of the meetinghouse and share their betel nut and conversation. They spoke the traders’ speech well, but it pleased them to teach me Yali. It pleased them, too, to tell stories – sometimes lies about their youth, but more often tales of the ancestors who’d made the land, tamed the beasts and fought great battles. “Nothing like the pillow-fights the young ones have today. It’s so easy for them, with all they’ve been changed…”
A while later, I was well enough to work. The old man who tended the thermal-depolymerization plant enlisted me to bring his charcoal to the composting machines that the tribe used to make terra preta. One of the elder women, the chief forester, took me to the white oak grove whose genes she’d spent a lifetime modifying, and showed me the chemical baths and pressure cooker that would make their wood as strong as steel.
Tayi caught me while I was unloading the cooker and scolded me like a wayward child.
“If you won’t rest, at least do something that won’t break your ribs again. Come with me. You can be schoolteacher for a day. The children have never met anyone from Malaita, so tell them – keep them and you out of trouble.”
And I did tell them – about our history, our customs, our ships, our plants and fungi and microbes. Tayi had come back by that time, and I noticed that she listened with real interest.
“Kere was right – you do know some things,” she said. “She said you were looking for treasure. Do you want to see more? There are more spirits in the forest than our ancestors ever dreamed.”
“And in your warriors?”
“Our warriors, all our children – we make them strong and keen. You don’t?”
“We do, but…” A thousand lectures from my bioethics classes came rushing to mind. “We respect human limits.”
Tayi laughed. “What are human limits? Didn’t you hear the old men talking? The ancestors who made the land – what were their limits?”
I wondered what my bioethics professors would have made of that, but Tayi’s voice rang with sincerity, and I realized that Sergio had gotten his stories slightly wrong. The highlanders weren’t making themselves more than human; they just had a more fluid idea of what humanity was. And if the fungus Kere had shown me lived up to its promise, if adults could be made capable of learning like children, how much would our idea of humanity have to change?
“I’ll show you things tomorrow,” she said. “Tonight – tonight they’re coming to talk peace.”
“Peace?”
“What else? We’ve tested our strength enough, we’ve had time to frame the dispute, and the battle at your camp made everyone realize things had gone far enough.” The laughter was back in her voice. “Not only a warrior but a peacemaker, you are.”
And as a peacemaker, I was bidden to the feast. The speeches before the meal marked the opening of formal talks, but it was obvious that behind-the-scenes negotiations had been taking place throughout the war, and indeed that the third of the Yali tribes had been talking even before it joined the fighting. Outsiders don’t know the rules, Sergio had said, and I wondered if that tribe had attacked my camp precisely because it had to be in the war in order to join the peace. The war had been a test of strength and a real threat, and that had helped set the terms, but it had also been a ritual; maybe the Yali were a cargo-cult people too.
That night I dreamed of a mantis, so swift and so dexterous that it could seize molecules from the fungus and arrange them into an elixir of learning. The next morning, I was summoned to the chiefs’ hall.
Tayi was there, and I wasn’t surprised; it had been obvious for some time that she was a power in the village. There were six others, seated in a row below the masks that hung on the wooden false wall.
“You’re so eager to work,” she said, “so maybe we have work for you to do. You were there for the speeches last night, so you know that the three tribes are going to start our own development company. Why sell those rights when we can invest in them here? Each of the tribes will sit on its board, but we also need someone to manage it – maybe someone who’s from a different country altogether.”
For the first time since I’d come to the highlands, I was without words.
“We’ll pay for you to study for your bioprospector’s license. The company will be set up by then. Come back help find, help develop, and if you stay fifteen years, and if you still want it, you can have the Malaita license for all the company’s products, free of royalties.”
The silence lengthened. I knew I could go back to the mining camp, and in a few months, if the deposit held out, I’d have enough to buy the development rights that Kere had offered. What Tayi had put on the table would take twenty years. But I would come away with much more, and with a bioprospector’s education and years of experience, I would be much more. I would still have a gift to bring home, a treasure to give away… if, after all that time, a captaincy was still what I wanted.
If not, then my gift would be for others.
Strike first.
“An ari nindi,” I said finally – it is to my liking.
“Fano,” said Tayi. “Good.” And her six fellow chiefs rumbled agreement.
There would be more discussion later, a ritual of negotiation to be gone through before the final terms were set, but the datacloth hung from the ceiling had recorded everything, and the contract was made.
#
The guard who checked my passport at the city gate was the same one as the first time, and he asked the same question.
"Tautai Belalang," I said. Not lord or captain, but mantis.
This time he didn't laugh.
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I have a feeling that transhumanism in the Malêverse has a lot more "groupings" than in OTL: those who seek to improve their bodies on a scientific basis, those who explore for the sake of curiosity/pushing human limits, those that do so for aesthetic reasons, and those who enhance themselves out of a socio-cultural link to indigenous tradition. Some of them may intersect, and others may be in opposition, but there's a lot more room for nuance on this as I can see.
And I see the knowledge of terra preta has also revolved around that world. How early did you think Brazilian/Graoparanese researchers cracked that out ITTL?
In any case, a nicely-read installment, Jonathan.
That isn't entirely unheard-of IOTL - at various times, cargo cults in Vanuatu, the Solomons and Papua New Guinea have had political parties associated with them and sometimes had de facto control of their home districts. The difference ITTL is that there were no opposing authorities in the southern Solomons, enabling Hui'ehu to use the cargo cults to become god-king of a Malaita-based trading empire (subject, of course, to the fact that his people didn't consider either kings or gods to be particularly absolute).
Truce paths aren't a thing in highland New Guinea IOTL, though - neutral market grounds or food-gathering areas do exist, and sometimes festivals also play the role of neutral ground, but there isn't a system of protected trade routes. That happened ITTL due to the internal reforms that the highlanders made when they were forming a coalition to negotiate with the Germans. Truce paths are something that I think could have happened IOTL - there's nothing I know of about highland custom that would preclude them - but they didn't. Traditional societies change, and sometimes their customs aren't as timeless as all that.
One thing I hope I conveyed in the story (and if I didn't, it's of course my fault) is that although the rural New Guinea societies in 2100 are tribal, they aren't static, and they're not in any respect primitive.
Absolutely, and there's also a lot more nuance in opposition to transhumanism. The plurality view is that people can and should improve themselves within human limits but shouldn't speciate, but definitions of speciation can be as diverse as definitions of humanity. Depending on their approach, any given group might accept what others forbid or vice versa, and they'll also disagree about biological versus nanotechnological means and how much to combine the two.
1960s or 70s would be my guess - on the one hand, the Amazon basin was more developed in the mid-20th century and social scientists paid more attention to it, but on the other hand, it's still tough country to do archaeology in, and TTL's archaeologists were as human as OTL's and would have difficulty giving up the fixed idea that Amazonia is unsuitable for large settlements.
Once they did figure it out, though, terra preta became part of TTL's Green Revolution pretty quickly. By 2100, the highland New Guinea tribes have been making it for more than a century.
Thank you!
_____
I notice that all but one of the Malêverse 2100 stories have been set in outlying areas of the world. That wasn't by design, but it wasn't entirely by coincidence either - outlying areas are often interesting ones - and I'll continue the theme in some of the future updates (for instance, I have a story in the works that's set partly in rural Russia and partly in orbit). OTOH, the more metropolitan parts of the Malêverse are also worth a visit - there are things to see in New York, Ilorin, Paris, Berlin, Kampala, Delhi, Melbourne...
So, assuming that there's interest, the next one of these will take place in a big city, or maybe in more than one big city.
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Then al-Iskandariyah it will be. Is there anything else y'all want to see?
Greece. No matter the fantasy general paraphrasing my name back in the 19th century
I'd want to see Berlin in the Malêverse just to see what's different but all the other suggestions are great too.
Kigali, Ilorin or Kampala would be nice. It'd be something to see how Hungarian Jews and alt-anarchist Islam are thriving in this era.
yboxman
Banned
"here was whistling of spears"
Spears? This really is ritualized combat. And I suppose that keeps the casulty count down, especially with the biomods.
I would be curious to see how Salonika is doing in the far future of the Maleverse and especially how its local mores of bioethics deviate from the consistory consensus.
Spears? This really is ritualized combat. And I suppose that keeps the casulty count down, especially with the biomods.
I would be curious to see how Salonika is doing in the far future of the Maleverse and especially how its local mores of bioethics deviate from the consistory consensus.
What about New York or Paris , I can imagine either is almost unrecognisable by now