I would suggest that if you (royal you here) have the time and are looking into alternate history stories, that you check out the story updates that way, if you are so predisposed. Male Rising is indeed a great work.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Speaking of which, I now have to update the list for the new chapter. To the editing link!
Last edited:
Several hours of distraction and back-reading, and the list is now updated! Reading the installment, what Raymie experienced was a tragedy, and no one should've butted their way into his works like George did. I'm also reminded of another installment regarding the Shelterers in West Africa, and how freedom for some is limiting (or constricting) to others.
Another impeccable work, Jonathan.
Another impeccable work, Jonathan.
Thanks for bringing the list up to date!
What I hope came across in the story was that the council's intentions weren't bad - they butted in because they considered the memorial a collective project and thought that their expert sculptors' design would improve it. Everyone in South Carolina after the war is learning to live very differently from how they did during and before, and that always means some people won't fit in and others will make mistakes. And freedom certainly means different things to different people, which is why SC during the Circle period both is and isn't the promised land.
Next up will be a Malêverse 2100 update, and while I won't spoil the story, it starts like this: "There was a tree twenty thousand miles above the earth, and it grew like nobody's business."
Bulldoggus
Banned
Taking Brazilian Civ this semester, and one of the books I'm going to need to write an essay on is about a certain incident in Bahia.
So cheers for the prep assistance @Jonathan Edelstein
So cheers for the prep assistance @Jonathan Edelstein
Last edited:
Malêverse 2100: Where the Gods Grow
There was a tree twenty thousand miles above the earth, and it grew like nobody’s business.
Tatiana’s parents had planted it fifty years ago, when Gajah Mada Station was new and when the Majapahit – the inner fluoride-nanoglass torus through which the beanstalk would one day be threaded – had just been designated a public park. The debate on the park resolution had been close, so the winning side made damn sure it stuck – they moved heaven and earth, quite literally, to bring soil and seeds up through the lock, and they made a ceremony of the planting. They’d watched every day for the seedling to emerge, and fifty years ago today, it had.
And it grew. Trees on earth could only grow so tall before they could no longer lift water to their branches and leaves, but here there was no gravity to set limits. And with no up and no down, its branches sought the sun in all directions. A silver birch might reach twenty-five meters down below, but in twenty years this one grew to fifty, in thirty years to a hundred. After fifty, this single Siberian birch was taller than any redwood, broader than the largest banyan. It occupied most of the Majapahit and the station’s citizens knew its major branches as city-dwellers might know streets; everyone knew which were lovers’ retreats and which were the ones where families picnicked among chittering insects and the shouts of freefalling children.
It had a name – it had many names, as many as it had branches. Yggdrasil was the most common; a Danish engineer named Vestergaard had used it first and everyone did now, whether or not the Aesir and Vanir had ever visited their homelands. But everyone had their own names for it too, and Tatiana’s parents had named it years before Vestergaard had – Tunya, god of the universe.
They’d carved an image of Tunya forty years ago on one side of the main trunk, and they’d made the shape of Tunya-Ava, the Universe-Mother, on the other. They, and Tatiana after they’d retired and gone home, had deepened the carvings as the tree grew, added detail, tended them as a private act of worship. The tree was a worship-place now for all the Mari who visited the station – even for some who weren’t Mari – but it had belonged to her family first. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t prayed there.
But she didn’t know what prayer to say today. She’d spent the morning gathering seed pods, and she sat against the trunk now looking through branches and glass at the earth and stars, and no prayer came to her. What prayer could she say, when both earth and tree were things she would see only one more time?
#
She wanted to stay forever, but she couldn’t – the shuttles to the surface departed twice a day, and if she didn’t get up, the next one would leave without her. The docking bay wasn’t far and the staff were efficient; Tatiana was in her seat, with the seeds in her pocket, almost before she’d finished realizing that it was time to go. She slept, and woke at Pontianak Terminal.
As always, the gravity was what she felt first. Gajah Mada’s outermost ring – Srivijaya, where people lived – was spun to half a gravity, but the sensation of weighing sixty kilos rather than thirty was both startling and unpleasant. She was most of the way across the terminal before she could shake it off.
The second thing that struck her was the price. She queued up behind the onward-travel kiosks in the concourse and, with deft finger movements, zoomed the world map to her destination; there was a few seconds’ pause while the kiosk plotted a route and made its queries about tickets, and then a flashing number on the screen: 196,831.50. She looked at the number in shock – that was two months’ salary – but then she realized that the kiosk must have read her Mari identity card and given the price in rubles.
She’d become used to thinking in dollars and had to mentally translate, but when she did, the figure was much more reasonable. She could probably make the trip for less if she took a less direct route, and with the kiosk as intermediary, it was sometimes possible to haggle, but the savings wasn’t worth the extra time, and she would soon have little need of money. She swept her hand across the screen in an affirmative gesture; somewhere, her bank account was debited, and a diagram appeared on her wrist datacloth that was both a ticket and a schematic map of where to go.
The map took Tatiana to a waiting room where a flight to Singapore would leave in two hours; from there, she boarded another flight to Moscow and a third to Kazan, caught a hovercraft up the Volga to Kakshania where she changed for another up the Izi Kakshan to Yoshkar-Ola, and finally the Great Mari Republic Central Bus 47, which took her east into the countryside and left her at a shelter ten kilometers outside Shernur. From there, it was catch-as-catch-can. The kiosk had arranged a ride from a farmer for the last leg of the journey, but as sometimes happened, he had discovered more urgent commitments; Tatiana’s datacloth registered a refund of eighteen hundred rubles and contacts for several other people who might provide transportation.
She thought of calling one of them. But the nearest was half an hour away, she had only seven kilometers to go, and her pack was light. And it was the afternoon of a Mari summer day with endless skies above and endless meadows all around. She started down the track and let her eyes dwell on fir copses by glacial kettle lakes, ancient motor-wagons filled with hay, brightly-painted houses with carved windows, animals grazing amid solar collectors.
At last there was a lane that led to a wooden house, little different from the others, and a sign at the turning that said “Eshpai.” The door was already opening when Tatiana turned off the track, and her father – his datacloth alerted by hers – stood in the doorway waving his hand.
The house was 250 years old and Vadim Eshpai a third its age. At a meter sixty-two, he was a throwback to the twentieth century; his hair was sparse and gray, his hands gnarled, his face inherited from a distant Muscovite ancestor. He’d put on weight since his retirement but looked fit, and he came to meet Tatiana halfway up the lane.
They embraced, and he must have felt something, known that this time was different. “It’s soon then?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
“Yes. In nine days.” It was strange, Tatiana thought, how the prospect of departure was becoming real only now. She had watched the habitats on Callisto grow for half a decade, seen through the eyes of the machines that were building them, seen those machines respond to her commands, but only in the days just past had she understood that she really would be leaving, that she would be on the ship that took humanity to the outer system at last. Even when she’d seen the last of the xenon pumped into the fuel tanks and the last of the supplies loaded, it hadn’t quite been real… until it was time to gather seeds from the tree.
She stepped back from the embrace, pulled the pouch from her pocket, and pressed it into her father’s hand. “Is Ava inside?” she asked.
Vadim nodded. “She’s working on flower mods again. She already wants to plan next year’s garden.” A picture of a woman bent over her datacloth, deaf to the world, came unbidden to Tatiana’s mind; this had been how her mother had spent much of her spare time on the station as well. And when she followed her father to the workroom at the back of the house, it was just as she had pictured.
Natalia Eshpai was not so preoccupied that she didn’t notice her daughter’s entry, and as she turned on her stool, her face formed a gentle smile. Where Vadim’s face was the map of Moscow, hers was that of Kazan, the marriage of steppe and taiga; she was tall and straight, topping Vadim by ten centimeters as she stood and rested her hand on his shoulder. She was the one Tatiana had always taken after, and as always after a long absence, Tatiana felt that she was looking into a mirror.
“Sit down,” Natalia said. “Look at the cloth and I will show you.”
Tatiana sat on the stool, and Natalia transferred her hand from Vadim’s shoulder to hers. With her other hand, Natalia made motions above the datacloth and conjured up a tree.
It was a silver birch – the smooth white bark and the shape of the leaves put that beyond doubt. But the leaves were much broader than any earthly birch, the better to capture sunlight just four percent as strong. Their color was subtly different, stained slightly blue from the more efficient chlorophyll, with darker, fractally patterned veins. The branches spread wide, presenting as much surface area as possible to the pallid sun, The trunk was thin and wiry; it would stand straight as any tree in the one-eighth gravity of Callisto, but if need be, it could be trained like a vine.
It was beautiful – where Vadim had studied biodesign as an engineer, Natalia had gone to university at Ilorin and learned it as an art. She had made a worship place.
Tatiana reached her hand into the image – her datacloth didn’t have the enhancements that would convert it directly to sensation, but she could feel it anyway. It seemed she could smell it as well, the image changing to an springtime scene, the tree hung with fragrant catkins, the pollen a harbinger of seeds in the making – Tunya’s children, the seeds of distant worlds.
“This is the edit?’ she asked, but that too wasn’t a question.
Natalia nodded. “The primary one. It works in all the simulators, but your father and I worked up some alternate patterns just in case. You brought the seeds… good, I’ll take them to the shed tomorrow. You’ll be here a few days – there’s plenty of time to put the edits in.”
They stayed together in silence a few more moments before Vadim dismissed the image and broke the spell. “It will be evening soon,” he said. “We should eat.”
The resolution was adopted by unanimous consent, and the three adjourned to the kitchen. Tatiana’s parents had always liked to cook with their hands rather than letting machines do it for them; even on Gajah Mada, they’d improvised a kitchen, and some of her earliest memories had been helping them prepare family meals. Those memories came back through her hands, through her nose, as she chopped marinated vegetables and pickles; beside her, Vadim made vat-lamb stew with potatoes and mushrooms and Natalia made layer after layer of koman-melna wheat pancakes and honey-cakes for after.
They were all hungrier than they realized, or perhaps more afraid of conversation than they would admit, because for a while they had eyes only for the food. When conversation did come, though, it flowed freely. All of them had two homelands and all had been away from one for a long time, and they were eager to share news and gossip. And from there, the talk turned to Callisto, and Tatiana grew animated as she spoke of exploring Jupiter’s moons, following up on what the probes had discovered on Europa and Io, taming the outer system for the expeditions that would follow.
But they all knew what remained unspoken. The Consistory Space Section wasn’t going to send a mission out on a two-year journey just to turn around and come back. The six hundred members of the Callisto expedition had signed up for thirty years; they would be as much settlers as explorers.
In thirty years, Tatiana would still be in her prime. But Vadim and Natalia had married late. Both of them were in their eighties, and while living to a hundred was common these days, far fewer people lived to a hundred and fifteen. And after thirty years, a place became home. Many settlers never returned.
Tatiana wanted Callisto more than anything. She’d prayed many times at Tunya’s trunk that she would be selected. But now that her prayers had been answered…
“There will be a service at the grove tomorrow,” Vadim was saying. “The whole district, and two others besides.”
“The kart called one?” Tatiana asked. She was genuinely surprised; village services at the sacred groves happened four times a year, and the next one wasn’t until harvest time.
“No. The priest will be there, but all of us called for it. We’re sending one of our own to the heavens, and she’s bringing a god with her – how could we not send her off with a blessing?”
The pouch of seeds on the workroom table, a god? But that was what they were. Tatiana’s workmate Midori had said there were kami already waiting for them on Callisto, and maybe there were gods there too – but Tunya could only go there if he were carried and planted.
“We’ve had a long time to plan this," Natalia said, and Tatiana heard the reassurance in her words – we know you are going, we are proud of you, we bless you and send you with a gift.
“But I haven’t,” Tatiana answered and suddenly fought tears. Her departure had become real too late; she would be sent off tomorrow as the bearer of a god, and she still didn’t know what prayer to say.
#
The next day dawned early; this far north at this time of year, it was only dark for a few hours. Vadim roused Tatiana at six and after a bowl of kasha, they went out to fix one of the fertilizer plants. For a bioengineer who could take apart and put together life forms like they were children’s toys, Vadim was hopeless with machinery; he could understand how it worked, but anything on a scale he could see was too big for him to manipulate. Fortunately, he’d always had Natalia, and in this too, Tatiana took after her mother.
The work was done by noon and Tatiana walked through milling geese and ducks and found Natalia in the shed working on the seeds. She’d made a few changes to the design – that always happened when a project moved from the simulators to actual life – but they were minor; the genetic patterns that flickered above the editor while Natalia did the fine-tuning were, to her untrained eye, impossible to distinguish from those she’d seen the afternoon before. And now Natalia was blind to the world, so Tatiana sat and watched until the work was done, finding the patterns a calming distraction as she had found the farm-work.
At fifteen, the seeds were finished. There was time for a quick meal, and then it was an hour’s walk to the sacred grove.
Half the district was already there, gathered in a stand of old-growth birch and linden in front of the loaves of bread and bowls of kvass; more than one called greetings. The kart was there too in his traditional white tunic and cap. He also wore a cross, and he wasn’t the only one. Many of the people assembled at the grove had gone to church that morning or to the mosque two days before; Tatiana herself had been baptized, as had her parents. The hundred and forty gods of the Meadow Mari weren’t jealous ones; they knew their people would always return to them.
The smell of cooking spread across the grove – it was still tradition to offer a goose to the gods, even if it was now a vat-goose rather than one of those from the Eshpais’ yard. The kart intoned the ritual words of the sacrifice and invoked the gods’ blessing on the gathering. Kugu Yumo, the chief god, was first as always; in the kart’s invocation, Tatiana recognized threads of Tolstoy’s Christianity and Abay Qunanbauli’s jadidist Islam. The Mari might always return to their gods, but they were good Tolstoyans, good anarchists; they never let those gods limit them.
The kart’s axe and hammer struck, concluding the prayer, and the next gods to be named were pointed ones – Kava, god of the skies; Keche of the sun; Shudyr-Shamich of the stars; and of course, Tunya.
“Trees are Tunya,” the priest said, breaking from his formal prayer-voice and touching the century-old birch at the center of the grove. “Their branches are in the skies, their trunks in the earth, their roots in the underworld. And their seeds can carry life to the ends of the universe. It was a seed of this tree that grew into the great tree of Gajah Mada station, and now a seed of that tree will go among the planets. Who knows where its children will go – maybe to the stars?”
He turned to where Tatiana stood. “Let the carrier of our gods be protected. Let no evil touch her. Let evil melt away like the dawn and the dusk, like the mist and the dew. Let no evil touch her unless it first outruns the forest elk, makes butter from a hare’s milk, cools it with the gale’s wind, serves it on golden plates with golden spoons…” The litany of impossible tasks went on to its conclusion and the axe and hammer struck again, and then it was time for embraces and congratulations and feasting.
It was late, even for a summer evening, when the family began the trip home. A mild breeze was blowing; the sky had turned indigo; the stars would be out soon; the meadows and forests buzzed with life. Tatiana felt a sensation she didn’t recognize, and suddenly she knew: a contentment deeper than she had ever imagined.
“You look at peace,” Natalia said. “Did you find your prayer?”
“Yes. But not any of the kart’s prayers.” They walked in silence for a moment past a rocky knoll. “Or maybe it was. It was the impossible tasks, you know. We have always called upon evil to do the impossible before it touches us, and the same with sorcery – er-kechym kunam posharen kertesh, tunam iže posharen kertse.” When the sorcerer is able to bewitch the morning sun, only then let him bewitch me. “But we can bewitch the sun and stars now, and I have been bewitched by them.”
“We brought you to them,” Vadim said. “Are we the sorcerers?”
“All of us are. We embrace the impossible tasks now, because they have made us.” A prayer formed in Tatiana’s mind, and slowly she said it aloud. “Let Tunya’s light bathe us until we can outrun the light. Let Shudyr-Shamich hang his stars in the sky until we can go to visit them. Let Kava open the sky to us, that we may pray to her in every part of it. Let Uzhara’s dawn be a dawn of learning and discovery for all humanity.” It was a sentiment, Tatiana felt, that Tolstoy and Abay would approve, and she was sure Tunya did too.
They had reached the lane and they turned to walk the last hundred meters to the house. The grove was just visible to the west in the twilight shadow, and above it, Jupiter had risen in the western sky. Tatiana couldn’t see Callisto, but she knew where it would be, and she felt for the seeds in her pocket one more time.
Soon they would take root there, and so would she.
Last edited:
There's nothing about "space exploring, ecologically minded, syncretic pagan anarchists" as a concept that doesn't damn-near bring me to tears. This world you've created continues to be nothing short of amazing.
I think I've mentioned before that the Mari ITTL have even more pre-Christian continuity than OTL - Russification under the Tsars still happened, but there was no equivalent to the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet era, and after the Tolstoyan revolutions (especially the second one) they were pretty much left alone. There is still enormous Russian cultural influence and syncretism, and there will always be, but the percentage of Mari who are baptized is probably lower in 2100 than in 2000.
Of course, in many other ways, they are model narodniks - culturally conservative, rooted, and wedded to the Gemeinschaft. They aren't Bazembe, and families like the Eshpais who go to space are probably rare. But that makes it all the more of an event when their gods are carried to distant worlds.
Diversity in the Malêverse is generally just something people do, not something they're self-conscious about - there are exceptions, but the Russian union isn't one of them.
Yes, gods too can pray.
There will be more to the Malêverse - I can't say when, but I'm not going to let the thread die again, and the feeling of having stories to tell after a very dry year is more of a blessing than you can imagine. @Goldenarchangel, I haven't forgotten that I owe you al-Iskandariyyah, and I have a few more half-baked ideas for 2100 or gap-filler stories that may see print sometime soon. Watch this space.
Stretch
Donor
This world is basically a bunch of more efficient and equal HRE-like entities copy and pasted around the world in an overlapping fashion. I just spent about a week on and off binging this timeline and it was beautiful to see it evolve into what it has become. Would it be fair to say things in 2100 are utopic for the most part?
Utopia is in the eye of the beholder. There are certainly some utopian aspects to the 2100 Malêverse - it's verging on a post-scarcity living standard (at least if you're not too demanding), there hasn't been a major war in a long time, and most people are living in societies where their rights are respected. But that doesn't mean everyone's happy or that there's no petty tyranny or social repression - in fact, the localism of this world sometimes facilitates those things. There's still plenty of conflict; it's just that most of it is driven by the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy. In the words of the master, I'd call it an ambiguous utopia; the individual reader's mileage may vary.
Last edited:
Longtime lurker here! I'm really glad that you continued your amazing story, your tale is one of the best alt-hist stories out there. I just wish I could visit your parallel universe. On a side note: Do you plan on publishing your story some day?
Thanks for reading! Your question has come up before, and I don't think the format of this story - excerpts of in-universe "academic" works interspersed with narratives - lends itself well to print publication. Also, it isn't the kind of format that readers look for in published AH. At the end of the day, print AH and forum AH are different genres, and this is very much a forum story. And besides, why would anyone pay for what they can read here for free?
This timeline did, however, lead to some spinoff stories that have been published. Remember the in-universe SF novel excerpt from Kazembe? I've published four stories from that universe - First Do No Harm (Strange Horizons, 2015), The Starsmith (Escape Pod, 2016), Iya-Iya (Kaleidotrope, 2019), and The Stranger in the Tower (Andromeda Spaceways #77, 2020). And there's also an expanded version of the original story that I put out there as a donation to the public at the beginning of the pandemic. I've got some other genre stories out there as well if you google my name.
And now those entries are updated into the side-stores record of Malê Rising. If only I could get the Stranger in the Tower, but nevermind.
Besides that, the main installments list has also been updated with Tatiana's as the latest entry.
Yet another long-time lurker here, who has just finished reading this amazing timeline.
The thing that made the greatest impression on me were the continuing narratives, the Abacar family history , and especially the story of András Weisz marching across a continent to find out that his homeland had ceased to exist.
Malê Rising reminds me a lot of the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Both are multigenerational sagas that creates a whole world, and religion and political ideas is a central part of the story. But Malê Rising is better.
I am looking forward to reading more of your work.
The thing that made the greatest impression on me were the continuing narratives, the Abacar family history , and especially the story of András Weisz marching across a continent to find out that his homeland had ceased to exist.
Malê Rising reminds me a lot of the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Both are multigenerational sagas that creates a whole world, and religion and political ideas is a central part of the story. But Malê Rising is better.
I am looking forward to reading more of your work.
Authors are, as ever, free to put their work into whatever format they like; however, I would really love to have a PDF or EPUB version of the story so I can take it with me on long flights, for example. It would lose some of the delightful Q/A back-and-forth of the forum thread, but it would make rereading easier and ensure there's a copy out there if the forum goes down.
It's up to you whether it's worth the time and effort, of course. But it wouldn't be so much about print for me as offline access and preservation/portability, and I'd be willing to pay for those.