Copyright © 1999 by Lenna A. Mahoney

# Capture 3. Gregaria

How does Gregaria work? According to experts, it doesn't work. It plays.

Thalp: The Rule of Six holds the basic cluster of definitions for all sapient activities.
Play: A sapient's activity that is its own reward and goal.
Work: An activity made to acquire some goal or reward not itself.
Art: Play that must require intersapient communication.
Labor: Work that must require intersapient commmunication.
Faith: Completely consistent art.
Struggle: Completely consistent labor.

NeuroGod: What is it with you and the letter m?..

Sabre: One good hummp deserves another.

Aquinas: Imagine my surprise and disappointment at discovering that the 'DMs' in their supranatural wisdom did not see fit to provide me with even one 'dopple'. How woefully I perceive that I must forego the sweet but perilous pleasures of intergalactic narcissism.

Free Meson: I really tried to get into "Gregaria", really I did, but my poor beleaguered mind keeps crying, "Aiee! Yet another version of the infantile fantasy of the cornucopia, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, Cockaigne, the ever-filled breast!" There are certain kinds of mistakes in this fiction that show very little respect for the reader's intelligence. What payback do the GW pushers -- pardon me, suppliers -- get from Gregarians? How demeaning a view of intelligent life -- that it requires only material comforts to end its strivings! And how little self-control these "Gregarians" have, lecturing us about everything but the mystical hyperdrive spacewarp kitchen-synch. Has their inventor never heard of the esthetic principle of parsimony?

NeuroGod: parsimony, parsimony... parsimony has principles?.. isn't parsimony the frilly green crap that restaurants hide the real food under?..

Beach BEM: No, comrade, that's persiflage you're talking.

Planets: Sapients historically held or presently hold 126 worlds:

| Exhabited | Pre-GW | Shock | Archecultures
Aa | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6
Cancrines | 0 | 5 | 6 | 6
Cats | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3
Humankinds | 15 | 16 | 20 | 13
Mantiaurs | 3 | 12 | 8 | 15
Omegans | 1 | 0 | 2 | 2

Some planets are shared by more than one sapient species; the most durable such matrimony has been that of the Aa and the Ailurosi (the latter being modified humans). An additional 5 planets' worth of mixed sapients (based on the average planetary head?count) live offworlds as raumstamm in lone GWs, or in the conglomerated GW farms and eidolons.

Theofe: My captor the Hand wanted to find out where the Oncoryans had vanished to about a thousand years ago, why they'd gone. The Oncoryans had left their planet relatively intact, like most exhabited worlds. Uniquely, they'd also left their planetary puter active. Even so, investigators during the last few centuries couldn't find out what had happened. The spells that kept the puter alive bound it to serve only as a toy. Immemorially, eternally. So archaeologists enjoy Oncoryan studies about as much as trying to hypnotize a Talky Terri doll.

Ethnic groups: There are six sapient species and it couldn't be any other way, or so the Hexists playfully insist.

Omegans. To visualize our correspondent Thalp or any other Omegan, imagine a hopping, or dog-riding, giant tumbleweed with a detachable tuber. You still want detail? Masochist. Try starting with something like an open bamboo framework for an icosahedral gaming die. It's irregular and subgeometric in shape, it's thorny, and it's criss-crossed by things like large rubber bands (the whole structure is some feet across). This part of an Omegan is the skeleton and muscles that move yt. When the Omegan wants to detach ytself from yts main root (which is yts primary brain) and move around, yt does it by pulling the corners of this framework in and popping them out, letting yt bounce around. That's also how yt throws seeds.

Imagine that inside this tough framework several living tumbleweeds have been packed, leaves and all. This potpourri contains the main organs for photosynthesis, optic sensors and nerves, resinous reproductive network, and so on. You won't often get any glimpse of an Omegan's tendrils, some of which are used for attaching to symbionts, others for temporary rooting. These members do a lot for Omegan survival; yt keeps them tucked in for safety except when in use.

Finally, figure that at the core of this conglomeration is what looks like a dense ball of lacy dark-green lichen. This is the portable brain, a porous, low-density, lightweight item. It can handle the demands of moving, launching seeds, finding and catching symbionts, that level of intellect but not much more. The Omegan's main brain, a tuber about the volume of a human torso and shaped rather like a mandrake root, does yts serious sapient thinking.

On their origin planet, Omegans evolved on the sidelines -- they didn't constitute a major part of any animal's diet. The early stages of Omegan intelligence were used to hurl seeds into bogs or briar patches or the tops of sand slides, or other places difficult for animals to attack. This required a type of vision, the ability to choose a likely spot, and good strong aim. Their ability to communicate over distances began as chemical interchange with enormous subsurface mycorrhizal masses that had grown for centuries, some of them bigger than a city block (as on Earth). Next came the use of chemical lures to attract carrion-burying insects, the Omegans being opportunistic saprophytes, and an increasing ability to control the small predatory animals that hunted herbivores. That control was derived from psychoactive chemicals the Omegans extracted by tapping into the mycorrhiza. The Omegans next used their animals to build forts of small rocks and briar stems around themselves.

Insect and animal symbionts have become the Omegans' "horsies", their tools for traveling and for manipulating heavy objects. The Omegans use their beasties' senses through a direct link between their nervous system and the Omegan piercing tendrils. Omegans also chemically control their symbionts by exuding pheromones and injecting psychoactive compounds that are produced by certain funguses that live upon the Omegans' bark and flowers.

Thalp: Our sap is of a pungent dungenous kind. I feel assured you would dislike the taste.

That prudent fear of being harvested by other sapients, then juiced for psychoactive cocktails, might very well be a racial trait.

Why you should take any interest in a plant's sex life I don't know, but you probably do. In fact, you may well take more interest than Thalp.

Thalp: The ways humans have of establishing their sex work "poorly" for me.
Definition 1) "Female": the one that provides the most direct food and protection to the offspring. By standard (1) I must be male. I presently carry no seeds. Most planets I visit have too many herbivores for me to kindly leave seedlings. In addition at our last bloomatchings I've added only about 10% of the nutrient resin (thereby genetic "makeup") to our loop seeds.
Definition 2) "Female": the one that only or predominantly gets sex pleasure from an unpursuing "sex role". By rule (2) I am female, as are all Omegans. We Omegans have merely mild and equivalent pleasure from seeding and dripping. The sensation is relief about equal to your violent sneezes.
Definition 3) "Male": the one that is the better at fighting than serving and at leading than following. According to criterion (3) I'm no thing. I appreciate fighting, serving, leading, and following in equal quantity but neither possess them nor the reverse. You say, "Lead, Follow, or get the Hell out of the Way," in which I take the third.
Definition 4) Human genital trademarks pertain to Omegans under no conditions. Factually, they seldom pertain to many Gregarian sapients who combine advanced med skills with esthetic preference.
Please excuse me for not arriving upon the intentionally human topic of sex sooner. It fled my attention. Seeding works very fluently for Omegans and we need to think about it seldom. Our "drives" for symbiont contact are more needed for survival and innately stronger. We maintain large harems of symbionts. I am having a highly fine ride on sbat as I or we write.

Cancrines most closely resemble blue-and-green pentagonal crabs. They are hard-shelled and have all the concomitant physical and psychological problems with shell-molting. The five legs are all roughly the same, each three-taloned. The leg at the back point of the pentagon is specialized for jumping, being more muscular and much broader of talon. An eye, and a set of axillary grasping tentacles, are located beneath each leg. There are also two major eyes deeply set on the front side of the pentagon, with a sucking proboscis beneath them. Mounted in a row behind the fore-eyes are three jointed stings, which are of course venomous and can be used much like sharpened chopsticks for manipulations requiring more strength than the armpit tentacles can manage.

Cancrines reproduce egg-wise. They also do something much more curious and intriguing: when food is short, instead of laying eggs they lay detachable memory nodes. In effect, they copy and jettison their experiences in a form that other cancrines can consume and incorporate into their own thinking. Father Evolution apparently thought that in hard times it might be handy for at least one kind of people to be able to learn directly and forcefully from others' mistakes and successes.

The Aa (singular Adt) are fully arboreal. They have two offset flexible spinal columns linked by tough loops of tendon. On the outer end of each spinal column is a single long prehensile arm; in the palm of each hand are closable openings to ear passages which also contain scent organs. The loosely-webbed fingers often fall into an "ear-trumpet" (or "nose-trumpet") shape when not in other use. See the modest illustration, please.

Aa reach sexual maturity long before physical or intellectual maturity. Initially, all Aa are of the bearing sex, effectively female. At maturity, an Adt resorbs her pre-uterine membranes; they are replaced by gene-contributing porous bodies that produce cells not so mobile as sperm; therefore all mature Aa are male. In coitus, each Adt inserts a hand well into its own genital opening, stimulates the pre-uterine or seeding membranes, scoop outs a smear of gene-contributing cells, clasps hands with its mate(s), and re-inserts the hand -- directly exciting the senses of touch, smell, and sound. The genetic contributions are stored in the mother's body until fertilization is stimulated by the bursting of a small gland, one whose gradual filling parallels the growth of the pre-uterine membrane.

The nature of Aa sex -- always between adult(s) and child(ren) -- strongly affects their other behavior and interests. Teaching is a profoundly emotional business to them. Teacher and student are almost always lovers. To avoid inbreeding, parents teach their friends' children but seldom their own, although incest is considered no outrage. This drive to teach and guide is probably part of the characteristic Aa preference for sharing planets with other sapient species of less magical aptitude or sophistication.

Mantiaurs look falsely familiar, like a chimaera of a preying mantis and a centaur; hence the dopplEnglish name. A mantiaur's arms bend like a mantis', with those same Popeye muscle bulges and that same ferocious grip. But the body and legs have thicker proportions, like the centaur. And the skin plays chameleon, and eventually grows shaggy with little porous odorous tendrils.

Mantiaurs evolved from beasts that hunted by stealth. They made their living not by shape-changing, but by scent-changing and sound-changing. They stayed motionless and lured their prey close enough to be seized. They imitated the scents of mates or food plants and the sounds of harmless, empty grassland or the playsounds of their prey. They needed to handle scents, sounds, and sights all at once, and create them at once. That started the proto-mantiaurs on the way to their parallel-processing brainpower and multiple personalities. Eventually they began to hunt actively, in groups. Then their legs adapted for moderate speed as well as for bracing against victim struggles.

Mantiaur cities are thronged with paired towers connected by heavy cables. One tower of each pair is very tall, one short and broad. Suppose a mantiaur wants to cross town. He picks up a piece of grabbing gear from the ground around the nearest low tower, then goes up the elevator to the top of the tall spike, attaches the gear to the right cable for his destination, and slides down until he reaches the short spike of his goal tower. You can bet he lands running. You can also bet acrophobia is as rare among mantiaurs as a strong grip is common.

Theofe: No, you have it all clear, I don't take much interest in nonhumans. I go swervy when I socialize breathwise with ETs. Except for the lategen raumstamm, Gregarians usually only want their own kind up close. Smells interfere. Eyes, if any, don't focus to the right place. The rhythms of speech, if it comes by ear, sound wrong. So IVEmeets feel less uncomfortable. There we can arrange filters to morph across the sense gulfs.
When I last visited friends in a mantiaur family, we did well. For a while. We floorstuck the link to hold down sensory alienation. So a six-legged beast the size, shape of an Earth refrigerator, ran up to me. Jaws like a fridge door. It tasted my head. We humans cringe a lot like mantiaurs, so our hosts didn't need to smell fear. They said, "He only wants you to scratch his tongue." I forget after that. The family and I still get along fine, entirely IVEmentally.
Oddly the Cats bother me the most. Not only allergies. The Cats think it polite for any human to lie down, sit low, to talk with them. Feline, human faces must come out level. So anytime a hefty cat looks right tight at me, eye level, while prowling toward me, it looks exactly like the last thing a mouse ever sees.
I do enjoy the Cats, their twilight fever, their quirks. They have a common farewell. "I have to go now, the grave-farmers are short of work." Or, "the sextons need to eat." Duellist jokes. A Cat who won't duel might as well suck mouth-flavored candy. Only an old Cat has no new scars.
The Cats have an enormous plant like a Venus flytrap to use up their corpses. Why bury bodies, if not to fertilize? The plants bloom year-round, opaque six-branching spikes. The flowers turn transparent when grubs, brightly metallic colored, bore into them. The grubs' shit keeps the blooms from wilting. So Cats grow the grave-plants in the central courts of their subclan dens, put their dead there. They admire the pretty borers in the flowers, nibble the catnip-like leaves. Sometimes squeeze out the grubs for a snack.

Languages: too numerous to mention and often too strenuous to speak.

Ponder nonhuman nomenclature, specifically Omegan. If you're what I think you are, you could not pronounce Omegan names; being sapient plants, the Omegans have gotten into the habit of doing without voices and ears. Instead, they communicate using 19 kinds of stem touches and 7 pheromones. Fortuitously, there are 19 consonants and 7 vowels in our Earthuman Greek alphabet. Thalp, like many another Omegan dealing with voiced sapients, used the local alphabetic symbols that matched the standard teaching sequence of Omegan signals. It's an acceptable solution, but demmed artificial: Omegans receive many simultaneous touch and scent signals in parallel, whereas Greek letters are unavoidably inadequately serial.

In this flawed but approximate system, our vegetable visitor's name is theta alpha lambda pi and yts home planet is a single basic odor, Omega.

Religions: Primarily Hexism, in both its sapiomorphic (org-based, Low Hexist) and inchoate (coterie-based, High Hexist) forms. Most post-GW worlds tend toward mythomane sapiomorphic Hexism. Absolutely the only mono/duotheistic faith that has maintained any substantial number of Gregarian adherents is Cachinnodeism. Mono/duo faiths don't travel well. They generally preach one God coupled with one Devil, one Holy Book, one favorite sex and gender, one Saviour who came to one (and only one) Blessed Planet and Chosen Species. That insistent deliberate insularity doesn't carry much conviction offworld.

Though the content of worship varies stupendously from planet to planet to raumstamm, the format of worship has been found to develop through the same six stages in every culture. One, hylolatry, the worship of material forms and events, often incorrectly referred to as animism. Two, idolatry, the worship of mindmade images and talismans that, in the beginning, as hylolatry passes away, are found objects. Three, hierolatry, worship of an elite of leaders or experts; the elite begin by being felt to possess a kind of talismanic value, reflecting late idolatrous thinking. Four, semiolatry, worship of sets of symbols such as holy books, national constitutions, quality maps, and statistics. All of these initially derive their importance from some sacred hieratic elite with whom they originated. Five, idiolatry, worship of one's own or one's species' abilities. Symbol-manipulation ("reason") is typically the first such knack to receive reverence, under the declining influence of semiolatry. Six, pantolatry, worship of all the processes of the Whole; the process of sapience comes first, following from idiolatry.

Gregarian religion can be best oversimplified as idiolatry tinged with pantolatry. By comparison, our Earthuman Western Civ falls in a confusion between hierolatry (e.g. Catholicism), semiolatry (e.g. Protestantism and Orthodox Judaism), and idiolatry (e.g. Marxism and other Utopian rationalisms).

Governments: On pre-GW worlds, the governments are functionally exactly the same as those of Earth: that is, there is a strong correlation between the average age at death (A3D) in a group and the amount of resources the group has been able to control. The more resources you control, that is, the closer you are to the governing class, the older you die, and this is what pre-GW government is all about. On worlds suffering GW Shock, no amount of resources suffice to keep the A3D from decreasing sharply for all the classes. On post-GW (archeculture) worlds, the A3D for almost all the population is near what is presently believed to be the species maximum lifespan limits -- which may be infinite, if you include the VRevenants in the average.

Heads of State: None that matter. Unless you credit the three Archangels of Unaccountability: no one can account for them, neither can anyone call them to account. A popular raumstamm ballad calls the Archangels "Laughing Chuck, Legendary Joe, and Mythic Jack". Theofe said the most popular names for the Archangels in her Earthiedopple crowd were the Siren/the Roadrunner/Chance the Gardener, Baron Munchausen/Ulysses/Prester John, and Harvey/Puss in Boots/Murphy. If you hunt, the Siren will be out in front of you; if you stand fast, the Baron will be beside you; if you attack, Harvey will be here and there, now and then, and in your way all over. So they say.

Theofe: That reminds me of one of Baron Munchausen's experiences. While avoiding the Throku Fibrillators, he came to a double-planet system. One planet's humans lived in a nasty state of splinter factions, pointless battles. These folk, call them the Onesies, at once took the Baron for a god. He denied it. Crustily. Somehow every incident where he tried to show himself merely human, feeble, ignorant, impotent, redounded in his favor. So he resigned himself to godhead.
The Baron found his proteges had no fortunetelling skills at all. He manifested full-strength noblesse oblige. Taught the Onesies about the various precog recog spells, sideromancy, pyromancy, all the mancies. Then he found the Onesies already knew much of their own futures, by intuition. Usually bloody, crafty futures. Their idea of virtue, to go willingly to one's known fate. Their idea of courtesy, not to tell their new god how many of his prophecies turned up wrong.
On the other planet, the sapient Twosies fell into fits of astonishment. They had stable rulers, they had religions. They had the psychic power to live in, more like through, the non-sapient Onesies. Making them act sapient, using them for all kinds of strategy games. But the Twosies had never once thought of fortune-telling. Immediately they wanted some specific predictions for themselves. Demanded them through the Onesies. The Baron became puzzled, then suspicious. He discovered the inaccuracies in his earlier predictions. Found he couldn't fit the calamities in his interlocutors' claimed pasts into the record of Onesie eclipses, comets. But they did match Twosie astronomy.
So the Baron went to Twosie. He astonished the Twosies by fending off their Control. Then he taught them foretelling. They, he parted on the most agreeable terms. To top it off, the Baron drastically improved the Onesies' lives. You see, he also taught the Twosies a new game, much more popular, less damaging than the old bloody strategic ones. "Hide and go seek".

Economy: intermittent. Gregarian Wealth comes in your basic one-piece two-door flying (purple?) peoplefeeder. This is a drab smooth box the size of a large truck trailer, and around the box is a resizable spherical field capable of displaying an enormous variety of elaborate holo-illusions. The box contains an FTL drive to which Relativity is merely a trivial faux pas, a geminator to copy items including the GW itself, an IVE-netted computer-mediated bodymindlink to people in all other GWs, an as yet immaculate defense and life-support system, and viewalls (the better to see you with, my dear).

Theofe: If Ixy, I had polished the Inthit world to bedrock instead of civsabbing it, we'd have pulled more interest. Most Gregarians would have seen that as more dramatic, slightly safer for Gregaria. A Survival issue, full of gut impact. Dopple deaths, GWarlordism have Survival interest. So Ixy, I get some extra interest by having escaped an exhabited world, doing work related to dopple-saving. Civsab, like pranking, interests few. It falls into the category of strictly intellectual exercise, slightly futile, like pure research on Earth.
As it stands, Ixy, I have acquired the interest of relatively few. They include several highly respected members of mage-craft, medicine, fraternal coteries. People on Aorbavri, one, two of the Cat worlds.
So our cosmetic magery experiences can show you what interest means on Gregarian terms, how it moves the "economy". Ixy, I went to an interested Ailurosi cosmage on Aorbavri. If he hadn't known, felt intrigued by what we'd done, he'd have refused to meet us, no deal. We talked a while about civsab, Oncorya. Then we brought up our interest in removing Ixy's acne scars, performing some touch-up on me. I wanted no more than hue, tint adjustment. Blonder hair, more smoothly colored skin, no dark arcs under my eyes, deeper blue irises laced with fine, symmetric, sparse gold lines.
Our cosmage thought these boring requests, virtually unworthy of his reputation. Ixy's acne rarely appears among Ailurosi, sometimes troubles the magically feeble. My prettifications, trivial. The cosmage's interest in us made the difference that induced him to do the work.
So some years later I brought Elaine to the same cosmage. We talked about the Offset World, some other odds and ends. Not for local courtesy, for an interest payment to his curiosity. So Elaine told him she wanted her cicatrices removed, her burn scars too. He practically thanked her on his knees.
Her ritual scars had some very unusual features, like the embedded gray diamond dust. It hadn't fallen out even when she left the macopave's space domain where Offsettian magic held. Her cheeks, some elsewheres looked made from coils of glittering rough silver rope. The cosmage acted more than interested, fascinated by the challenge of clearing those scars. Even though that took much more effort than my reworking. So by bringing Elaine to him I'd more than paid him back for what he did on Ixy, me.
He told her, her gembedded scars would have had great chic on Rimn, which hasn't left Shock yet. Part of their glamour, the fact that she could pull enough interest to get the scars removed after the fad passed.
One Rimnish expatriate I met had ribbon loops perpetually flowing through gold rings embedded all over hisher body. Gold didn't matter for wealth, only for chemical stability. Another had a snake grafted coiled to her body. Too bad we missed feeding time. One had an optical crystal rod through his skull, front to back. He kept putting a little periscope to one end of it. Apparently watching himself think. Every so often his slave tapped the rod to make it chime.

NeuroGod: instead he should have made the rod from lodestone... then he could always get a job as a compass...

Bill Inconnu: That would have weighed too heavily on his mind.

Sabre: All the better for a traveling man. Then any place he hangs his head is home.

Theofe: A raumstamm once proposed a currency for Gregaria. Something denominated in fractional planets, too big to geminate. So redeem the money by receiving a planet, part thereof. His scheme would have required some central authority to standardize values of planets, prevent trespass, act as Bank. No hope. The idea did get adopted in some IVEworlds. Also, it led to the founding of the Journal of Blue Worlds, Journal of Green-Gray Worlds, as catalogs of good, not so good planets.

One problem with GWs is fortunately limited to the pre-GW locales: GWemlins, which interfere reprehensibly, though not consistently, with most of a GW's functions. What are GWemlins? Probably a malfunction of whatever it is that makes GWs work, huh? Duh. They could be something as simple as a GW sulking at finding itself on a pre-GW world with very few of its friends around. Or they could be the immune system of a planet that isn't yet thoroughly infected with GW.

Industries: GWs and what they geminate come first, naturally. Second comes qualsci, which Earthumans like me call "magic". Third comes quantsci, or nullsci, or null magic (what Earthumans preemptively regard as the only form of science).

Qualitative science is a systematic method for controlling and understanding processes that by their nature can't be represented by a number measure. For example, you can set a number measure on the particular capabilities that Western Civ recognizes as intelligence, and use it to predict a number measure of economic success in Western Civ. But you cannot quantify Sapience; it is a quality, not a quantity. It's a little like what Earthumans mean by "soul" or "individuality", but it has not a thing to do with anyone's function, morals, corporeal sheath, or afterlife.

Every shape, number, animal, plant, mineral, sound, color, odor, emotion, body part, and sapient, among other "things", is possessed of one or more qualities that allow it to be used in or affected by spells. Either a given item has the quality in question or it doesn't, no intermediate degrees of quantification. Qualsci isn't affected by time or distance, at least to the extent that those are quantifiable dimensions. Nor does qualsci care about conservation of quantities, or about returning a result proportioned to the input effort. "What you give is what you get" and "nothing comes from nothing" are mottos of pop quantitatism, plain and simple and inaccurate on the qualsci side.

Spells don't depend on the target beliefs. Spells don't have to rely on help from supernatural personalities, "gods" or "demons". But it does help to cast a spell that's compatible with the planetary macopave -- which can be dryly defined as the set of forbiddingly complex rules by which quality changes occur over time, and the set of subsets of qualities that are available, all of which vary from planet to planet. More provocatively, the macopave is called the Sapience of a planet, and the planet's dwellers, sapient or not, the macopave's children.

There are a stupendous number of different qualities to be considered in assembling spell ingredients, allowing many possible worng combinations. Worse. The qualities of any given item can change suddenly in ways that are perversely acausal (and the timing is experimentally nonrepeatable). There is no known way to predict such a change, save that it has to be contained within certain subset chains, or sequences, of qualities. Alleles, as it were, of the original quality.

And then there is remagic. Newton would have remarked that "every magic has an equal and opposite remagic", and then he'd have gotten a baaaad visit from the Fool Killer. "Equal" and "opposite" are damned and foolhardy words to use about qualsci. What you can soundly say is this. A spell requires qualities to impel it, and a sapient's magical will to target it. The remagic that inevitably emerges from a spell rederanges the qualities of the things (and sapients) that or who made it up, and also tends to distract or suppress the magical will. Bad shit, that remagic.

Almost as much trouble as psychic powers which, I'm told (but do I believe it?), are virtually non-repeatable and so can't be "proven to exist" by scientific method. For the same reason, even successful psychism can't go industrial. The glitch is that psychic actions require total self-motivation. "Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Intentions that are defined by others, and by the conditions they impose, do not resonate with the Great Gift. That makes it hard for a psychic to get money and attention, or demonstrate his ability under lab conditions, or for that matter assist anyone. Unless he does just enough careful faking to fill in the holes. Psychics undergo twisted temptations that normals know not of.

Free Meson: For some reason I'm reminded of the principle of Laplace, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Ruby Arsenic: For some reason I'm reminded that some people don't believe the extraordinary moon walks ever really happened.

Theofe: Gregaria hasn't ever seemed real to me either. If it did, why would I hang around Earth when I can only live on it in a few inadequate spots?

Sabre: Certainly "inadequate" is an overstatement. Learn to cope.

La Belle Dame Sans Souci: I don't see the point then. What good are psychic powers if you can't use them whenever you want them?

Theofe: If you recognize a clairvoyant flash when you get one, it can help you even though it won't come when you whistle. If you can tell it from self-delusion.

Transport: You guessed it, GWs. And DMs, too.

Theofe: Dopplemachers act more like panspermia. Also to apportation between, across planets. (Small objects often accompany doppled people, animals, plants.) You can find Earthish animals, plants, knickknacks all over Gregaria. Bear in mind, an "Earthish" creature may not have originated, fully evolved on Earth.
Doppling does occur between locations on the same planet, not only between planets. Sometimes dopples, their companion objects arrive underwater, inside solid rock. Gregarian miners have found embedded bodies on many worlds.
In spite of this one coterie of raumstamm feels sure that Gregaria needs more DMs. They want to re-introduce DMs in strength. To do this they plan to encourage a strain of DMs attracted only to worthwhile likely survivors, not to the usual marginally matures. The cot suggests encouraging experienced adults to test hypothetical DM attractants. Maybe abreaction to adolescence, neurochemicals that compel re-thinking their youth, certain sound/sight mandalas in theta rhythms.
This cot believes DMs benefit from having sapient life cached all over Gregaria. If DMs gain at all from their copying, then they, the dopples would both find aid in the change. Our coterie disagrees, wanting more study before interfering with the DM lifecycle. Some of theirs think dopple survival has little importance in the Grand Scheme. Others, like us, think dopples would get better aid from GWer help.

Beach BEM: Wouldn't there be a very high incidence of communicable disease in the doppling situation you describe, where copied individuals are transferred to other worlds whose populations have no acquired immunity to the doppled diseases? Naturally this same objection could be raised regarding time travelers, if any: the antique diseases have mutated into less virulent forms in our time, while our ancestors could have had no immunity to our ailments of modern vintage.

Theofe: Dopples, GWers do spread diseases. Ask any victim of AIDS, Kawasaki Syndrome, toxic epidermal necrolysis. Ask Herod Agrippa, who died of necrotizing fasciitis, "Herod's Evil". Remember, DMs have gone a-doppling as far back as we can trace. GWing, only a couple of millennia. Most modern populations have gotten, out-evolved their exposures to most diseases.
Our biodiseases have caused less fuss than nanobots, which got loose about 2,400 years ago. They focused on wiping data, which can't replace themselves, more than people, who can. They did large damage before golems took them out, forced them to quickevolve to innocuous forms.
This whole topic gives me a fractionating pain. Researchers say their calculations show unexpected low disease transmission in Gregaria. The discrepancy correlates with dopples, not GWs. Epidemiologists guess that DMs must modify dopples to remove most contagions. I don't like this. If the DM that doppled me wiped my residents, augmented my disease resistance, what else of me did it change?

Beach BEM: A plague of nanobots is easily conceivable, but not when all the useful forms of 'bots are absent. Your Gregaria might as well expect to have mosquitos without bees! A plausible galactic society must include and describe the extensive use of nanotechnology in all engineered construction, resource extraction and processing, medical care, education, espionage, terrorism, and so forth.

Theofe: We have very little nanotech, genetech. The complexity barrier has flapped them out. They have to consider too many permutations of interactions, require too many researchers to work together effectively.
No nanobot makers have found lasting ways to keep the self-perpetuating bots from mutating into nasty self-serving parasites. DNA, among other megamolecules, has had a long time to become a sufficiently perfect copier. The botboys haven't tied off that knot yet.
So the non-multiplying nanobots have worked more reliably. Frustratingly, they consistently cause allergic reactions in more than half the creatures exposed to them. It only takes a small percentage of straybots to cause major misery. Even without straybots, a sizable minority of Gregarians have all sizes of allergy problems when on unhome worlds.
Genecraft, it works for disease cures, outside of that it causes almost nothing but troubles. A few groups can tailor a body to make some changes in itself during its life. The other types of post-conception automorphs don't work, the bodymind blocks them, the body-image revolts. The tailors have made some cosmetic morphs work. Plumes, scales, talons in place of hair, semen flavored like chocolate wine, those sorts of things.
Deep changes in germ plasm have consistently gone awry. Too many moving, diffusing, interlacing processes in the genetic copy machine. Magical influences play a part too. So far the only successful major redesigns of sapients have stayed within the limits of releasing blocked zauberstamms. The Ailurosi, the Immerlindesch otterkind, the patterners, vampires of the Offset World.
The Offsettian diviners have gotten their successes with a mancy well suited to genetics investigation, pilomancy. Blindfolded, they stir several strands of hair about on a wet surface. So they can determine genome layouts for the hairs' author by looking at the twists the hair takes.

Communication: Right again, GWs.

Thalp: You allude to mass media. Our Gregarian media are the masses, so they say everything. I mention IVE, Interstellar Virtual Experience, which you call a "VR network" in Western Earth terms. GW (Gregarian Wealth) technology includes a direct induced mental emotional also somatic linkage into the IVE net. Everyone in a GW can link to everyone else. This stimulates a wide range of what you call self-exgression.

Beach BEM: I believe it. Socially speaking, I suppose, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Brownian motion.

Paisley is My Friend: Eek! How depressing! You make it all sound so pointless!

Life Expectancy: Sapients can't live forever, but do live healthier and longer lives offEarth than on. The Gregarian human A3D runs at 140 Earthyears even in archecultures where medtech development simply isn't done. If that seems odd, note that even in the Egypt of Ramses the ?Great? those people who had plenty of food and peace, kept active, and could move away from contagion, often lived into and past their 70s. Not so much a question of medtech, you see; long life depends largely on freedom of action.

Theofe: A mantiaur made a yarG nairoD "deal with the devil" (with a macopave). Chose to carry someone else's aging along with his own. He doesn't personally know the other, a cancrine. He's sworn not to try to affect the other's life in any other way. The beneficiary does nullmagic research. He believes that as an immortal he'll accomplish great things. So he'll need to keep locating whole-life donors to find out.

The GWer finds self-diagnosis easy: scans himself from the mindside out while in IVE, checks IVE soma-files of diseases to compare them with his own imperfections, reviews the remedies, and inloads them for his GW to cook up. That may include radiation treatments, mechanical restraints, and such like. And the GWer can then search all through IVE to find and contact a live or VRevenant medder for further advice, if he can get them interested in him.

Gregarian healers unmagically stimulate the patient's own ability to heal himself: his self-cognizance and self-acceptance. This healing ability has limits; it's just as overabstract and inadequate to treat all ailments as being solely state-of-mind or state-of-soul problems as it is to treat them like mindless biochemical reactions. That means Gregarians also need and have nullmagic prescribers of advice, exercise, chemicals, and demolition, like our Earthuman doctors, nutritionists, herbalists, aromatherapists, surgeons, and phlebotomists. Diet and other chemicals can reset some of the chemical cues in the body fluids. Then the structures, organs, and glands don't realize the time has come to collapse, that the all-important, all-justifying reproductive period has passed.

NeuroGod: I bet there's a gene that works just on old people... when they can't have kids or fight or do all that other useful stuff any more to help their relatives, all they can do is pass out the info... they remember their young days the best because that's what the junior part of the family really needs to know about... anyway how long have old folks got left to do anything with anything they hear?.. see, the gene means they have to talk a lot and don't listen much...

Bill Inconnu: What's that you say, sonny?

The Gregarians have medical sorcerers, too, playing a rather mixed role. Not what you might think; hexing scaled-up models of germs never works because germs don't have Identity to target. Medical spells benefit a subset of ailments: the ones that involve the body, as a system, behaving in a manner that is not consistent with the intransformable Life of a living creature. One such case is cancer, where the body can't keep from overrunning itself (a prime restraint on any living thing). The immune system diseases fit in here too. They make the body unable to distinguish between itself and outside enemies, another basic requirement of the Life intransformable.

Theofe: Gregarians don't usually treat cancer after it nodes. They prevent, tame it by early immune-system exercise. Cancer, allergies, often start with immune-confusing experiences in childhood, infancy, the womb. Immune systems have memory, like mind, mislearn, like mind.

But using spells to restore someone's Life Identity may well change their personality. Some methods of thinking and habits consist of systematically refusing to behave as something that has a Life Identity. These traits are adjusted or removed by Life spells. Some people don't want to run the risk of personality change and won't take major magical treatments: for example, people who have a marriage or a child to keep won't often risk fundamental changes.

Do what he, she, heshe, or yt may, the GWer undergoes corporeal death as certainly as do we.

Theofe: The would-be corpse imprints his mentrix in IVE one last time, then IVE converts death into no pain no brain. So I've never heard of VRevenants causing anything more than nuisance. They leave a lot of messages that take time to sift through. They get first dibs on most of the open IVEnatures, games, competitions, they keep on the lookout for anything lifelike. They offer great downloads of advice about how to do the living they can't get at. They can't grab any control of GW actions, that requires physical contact of nerve plexi. Unless someone explicitly lets a ghost channel him to control a GW. So some charity cots practice that to assist the boxdead.
Ixy, I have a few VRevenant coworkers, who do dopple-data hunts. They work for the interest of dealing with living minds. Only a few live GWers will associate with the dead. Fear of contagion, perhaps.

Timeline:
100,000 BP | The Neanderthals are spreading on Earth.
60,000? BP | Ancestors of Cro-Magnons are doppled to Einvij in the first great wave of life-doppling in Gregaria.
33,000 BP | The pre-Einvij are doppled back to Earth.
13,000 - 7,000 BP | Several regional remagic dumps are set up on Earth by offEarthers. The Neolithic Revolution begins.
10,000 BP | The first wave of doppling ends; there are only sporadic occurrences during the subsequent Mirror Gap.
5000 BP | The Cats leave Earth.
2400 BP (400 BC) | The nanobot doomsday plague begins. It eventually wipes out two multiplanetary civilisations and begins the destruction of computerized records, paper, cloth, and dead wood throughout Gregaria. Pity the poor sad historians and the termites. The Great Library at Alexandria was full of wreakage even before it burned.
100 BC | The Age of Pisces begins, along with total remagic dumping on Earth and Tau Ceti 4. (The early tests and attempts at total dumping and setting the remagic clock had begun several hundred years before.)
3 AD | The first known GW is found on a planet of the (loosely translated) Green Bell Empire.
200 AD | The Green Bell collapses; some of its refugees land on Adt seeking sanctuary. They covenant with the Aa to accept having the instinct of emulation removed from their genes and become the ancestors of the Ailurosi.
400 AD | The nanobot plague is mostly neutralized; GWs have spread to 11 planets. The first two exhabited planets have become known.
1100 AD | The second wave of life-doppling begins.
1300 AD | Remagic on Earth reaches global equilibrium. There follow the declines of the Nan Matal, Maya, Hohokam, Moundbuilder, Amazonian, Anasazi civilisations (et al.).

Theofe: I've heard seen IVEd a bazillion theories about GWs. Alive, intelligent. Alive, unintelligent. Incomprehensible tools of some race gone beyond fleshly form. Physical forms of the memons ("mind parasites", "upper four circuits", as some Earthumans call them). Nodes of "reality tech", tech so advanced it successfully says "make it so" to physical, magical law. GWs originate the "reality flux" that keeps Universe running. GWs wandered in from outside the Gregarian volume, leftover Doomsday Machine change-seeds of a war that neighbors fought by altering each others' laws of quantsci, qualsci. So if enough GWs accumulate, our natural laws will change too. Intelligent nanobot colonies formed into GWs. Someone invented GWs to relieve our sapience of survival needs so that it can neotenize faster. Someone devised GWs in defense, to stifle our potentially threatening tech development, nanobots, travel outside Gregarian space. Someone gave us GWs to keep us from reaching the technical knowhow to be able to do literally anything, then spiritually perishing of too much freedom. GWs by plan create the remagic that swamps Earth and mantiaur Tau Ceti 4, keeping those weltstamms from destroying, saving Gregaria. To good, bad purpose, the GWs consumed the populations of exhabited worlds, the fifth-generation GWers. The missing generations finally found a way to escape the Gregarian volume of space. After four, fewer generations of contact with GW, IVE accelerated evolution into someone immaterial. So the vanishers spiritually, mentally evolved into something that couldn't stand contact with prior forms of life. Only a few come back to make sure the rest of us get our chance to go on. Among them, the possibly three Archangels of Unaccountability.
A bazillion theories.

Thalp: No, I mean no self-exculpation from Earth's remagic poisoning, but I find most evidence favors that GWs depend on "reality technology" rather than qualitative science. This makes five different means of understanding and manipulating the universe, quant sci, qual sci, psi, free will, and reality tech. We still have one more method for us to discover.
I prefer symbiosis as a primal paradigm. Physical life began when varied microorganisms dependent on quant and qual sci evolved to endosymbiose into one mutually teamed self-reproducible lifeform. Sapient life began when inherently irreproducible lifeforms dependent on free will began to symbiose with physical life. Now when GWs and DMs have joined us, a new form of life has appeared in which reality tech life symbioses with sapient life. It presents us sapients with telesma, that which disconnects us from each other to allow us sideways evolution.

Ruby Arsenic: Maybe GWs were intended to keep people from sinking without a trace in VR of their own invention. Once computers are invented on a world, I'd guess VR is the logical, inevitable next step. If people only had VR, without any power to do large-scope things in "real life", most people would have chosen VR over CR, consensus reality. The GWs allow some CR powers too, maybe reducing the net VR addiction.

Free Meson: Really, of course, the object of GWs is to permit their users to live their lives in a womb with a view, accomplishing nothing, facing no challenges of any kind, and developing no stick-to-it-itiveness whatsoever. How could this be justified by even a bazillion bazillion theories?

Thalp: How must happiness depend on accomplishment? That asymptotism is a niche for only one or two genders of sapient. It could not work that way for all of us. Think how many of us there are.

Theofe: Any Gregarian who wants challenges can get them free, fast, furious, fantastic. So when people avoid GWs, it mostly doesn't come from the idea of rotting in a big flying coffin. Instead they avoid GWs for fear of living on the outside, not the inside. Anyone who doesn't literally depend on people, sapients, for his lifeline becomes a high-albedo outsider. Only people who unavoidably need each other understand each other. Not much maybe, enough though.

Free Meson: That simply is not a good enough rationale. We all must live in a complex adult world of international aggression, political compromise, and economic constraints. Not only does your vision of Gregaria not recognize such realities, it does not even present an attractive prospect to anyone with mature self-respect.

Thalp: Please aid me to study why you name your complex world "adult". It has "precisely" the traits that make life least adult, these are the stratagems, negotiations, and brutalities that come upon us when sapients are immmature and do not recognize the difference between their Inner Worlds and the Outer World. Warfare and economics must spring out from each one's attempts to force or persuade yts Inner World to surround the Outer others. This is the recognizable "womb with a view", the immature Inner World that attempts to engulf the Outer.

Sabre: You have been talking chiefly about the benefits of GWs. How could they be anything but a trap? Someone invented them and someone had a reason. You mentioned lack of "progress", wars, and lost future generations. Who cares? Any truly intelligent species could manage those with no GW help at all. It happens all the time. I want to know what GWs are doing to Gregaria that could not be done any other way. There is your key to the inventors and their motives.

NeuroGod: Quicherbichin, dude, it's just like shareware... you get the travel, network, and goodies part of the package for free, and if you want the rest of the program you have to pay for it... like what was that about the missing fifth generation?.. or you can pirate it, muhahaha, for all you know I've done it already...

`Common sense: the Immaculate Preconception. Familiarity goeth before a fall.`

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