"Reasons" as stated and believed are seldom true, and their seniority is illusory. Rather, intentions and events, in their order, precede the reasons perceived and give them birth. The most common order is intention, event, reason, but it may also be sometimes event, intention, reason. Be aware also that the operative intention may not be apparent, even to its originator, on this side of reality. On this side he may not be aware of his actual intention, which, of course, originates on the other side.
You may ask how an event can precede the reason. And this brings into question the nature of reasons. More instructive is the question of how the event can precede the intention, which brings into question the nature of time, and once more of reality. But the latter question could only be posed from a this-side viewpoint, which is, of course, very restricted.
—Master Fo, speaking to Barden Ostrak in the peanut field behind the Dys Hualuun Monastery (unedited from the original cube).
It would be Varlik Lormagen's first time off planet. Space travel was expensive, and why should an Iryalan leave the queen of worlds if he didn't need to?
He sat in the small observation lounge with the vessel's two other civilian passengers, watching a phlegmatic ground crew clear hoses and conveyors, then move aside on hover carts, away from the impending AG distortion that occurred when a large ship activated. The ship moved, almost imperceptibly, the ground crew pausing to watch. One tall heavy man, arms folded high on chest, left a brief image on Varlik's mind as the ship raised. Liftoff was gradual but acceleration constant. The ground fell away, the spaceport shrinking. The city spread its pattern, a grid of indistinct transitways with "villages"—function centers ringed by apartments—at intersects.
Smoothly, with increasing speed, surface features drew together, lost resolution, until the continent spread white and green and tan to a perceptibly curving horizon. Lake Kolmess was a cold-blue, two-hundred-mile pennant far to the south—poleward here, for Landfall was in the southern hemisphere. Then the cobalt ocean, marked with white, appeared over a horizon whose curvature grew as he watched.
He continued watching until their trajectory had left the planet out of sight of his large bulging window, then looked around him. The other two in the viewing compartment were a man and woman—a news team from Iryala Video. He knew who they were, had seen them occasionally but had never met them. There was no hurry to now; he had twenty-six days. He got up and left, not even nodding to them.
There were two men in the officer's lounge, an off-duty mate and a warrant officer. Varlik struck up a conversation. The ship was army, the mate a genial captain in rank who was happy to give him a brief tour. His name was Mikal 676 Brusin. And yes, it was perfectly all right to use any of the ship's library consoles. There would probably always be at least one available. Varlik got the feeling that Brusin was pleased to have him there, that he liked to have new people to talk with.
When they parted, Varlik went back to the library. The consoles were Standard, of course. The entire ship was the Standard military cargo design. He'd now be able to find his way around any H-class military cargo ship. These things never crossed his mind, though; he took them for granted.
Sitting down, he called up the file on Kettle by its official name, Orlantha. He'd given even less time than intended, the previous day and a half, to background study for the assignment. Mainly he'd reviewed the archives for the little that Central News had said about the war. Even less had been said about it on video, which was understandable. There were always wars of one sort or another on the trade worlds—presumably, it was even worse on the gook worlds—and only devotees paid much attention. But Kettle wasn't your ordinary gook world, sitting out there with no one caring much one way or another. Kettle was where technite was found, the source of the technetium used in steel manufacture throughout the Confederation. The amount used in making a pour of steel was tiny, but it was used in every batch of every alloy; that was Standard.
Kettle had been assigned as a fief to the Confederation planet Rombil, and Rombil had been mining technite there for 279 years—since the Year of Pertunis 432—apparently without earlier trouble with the natives. Now the Rombili had more trouble there than they could handle, and Iryala was bailing them out, obviously because of the importance of technite.
Varlik called up Kettle's planetological parameters and read over them. Most were meaningless or unimportant to him, but some stuck. Surface, 86 percent water. Surface gravity, 0.93—that sounded nice. Rotation period, 0.826 Iryalan Standard—pretty short days. Axial tilt only 2.01 degrees—no seasons, apparently. Briefly, a map appeared beside the text. The inhabited continent, which was the one with the mines, extended from the high middle latitudes in the north to the low middle latitudes in the south.
And hot! Representative daily high and low temperatures on land were, at the equator, 120°F and 105°F respectively; at 25° north latitude, 125°F and 105°F; and at 52° north latitude, 110°F and 90°F. And those temperatures were ordinary! Varlik could imagine what a hot spell would be like. In addition, with so much ocean, the humidity would generally be high; the place was virtually unlivable.
He scanned the summary on bioclimatic zones. The equatorial zone was defined by unbroken jungle, and extended north and south from the equator roughly fifteen degrees of latitude. "Jungle in the extreme," the summary called it, especially in the zone between 10° north and south. Rain was frequent and heavy all year.
As on most free-water planets, planetary circulation made even Kettle's subtropical latitudes relatively dry. The semiarid zones extended roughly between latitudes 20 and 30 in both northern and southern hemispheres. Some semiarid land was desert grassland and some was scrub woodland, grading into forest toward both equator and middle latitudes. Its higher mountains and plateaus were forested.
The middle latitudes lay above about forty degrees latitude, and much of it was jungle or other forest. Some, in the rainshadows of mountains, was savannah or prairie.
According to the summary, the only cool climates on the whole planet occurred on mountains and plateaus above about 12,000 feet. These areas were described as generally extremely wet and misty, an "incredible tangle of smallish trees, standing up at every conceivable angle or lying down, overgrown with vines and lianas and slippery with mosses and saprophytes."
That didn't sound very good either, he thought, then read on. "The exceptions are certain high mountains and plateaus in the arid zone, where the climate tends to be quite pleasant and the landscape ruggedly attractive."
He knew automatically where the Romblit planetary headquarters had to be. And probably the army's.
He skimmed down over material on the geology, flora, and fauna until he came to a summary of Orlantha's history. Very little was known of Orlantha until Y.P. 422, when a survey team found technite there. It wasn't even known from which Confederation world Kettle had been colonized, or at what remote date. The people had sunk into stone-age primitivism, and severe environmental selection, perhaps combined with genetic drift, had produced a very distinct species of Homo.
Varlik thought he knew what had happened. Most gook worlds had been settled by one Confederation world or another using them for human dumping grounds—cost-free prisons—long ago. Even several trade worlds had gotten started that way, though in cases where they'd been colonized before the Amberian Erasure, there was only folklore or learned supposition to tell of it. Ordinarily the exiles had been sufficiently equipped to maintain some technology, but Kettle's breeding stock seemed to have been cast away with very little.
Convict dumping had been outlawed when most of the habitable planets in the sector had been settled.
The rest of the historical material on Kettle dealt briefly and summarily with the subjugation of tribes and with mining, and he only skimmed it. He decided to give it a more thorough read tomorrow. Right now he wanted to look into the T'swa mercenaries, and their homeland, Tyss. It was beginning to seem to Varlik more and more that the T'swa were the element to stress in his articles. It was they who would capture reader interest.