I’m not going to finish by the end of the month. Oh well— I’ll be sure to finish by the end of the year.
The Wandering Sea: part 2 |
It may seem that a race whose planet is washed twice daily by an unrooted ocean would have no opportunity to develop advanced technology, but it is not so. The sea flows in a thick belt around the equator and middle lattitudes, but rarely makes much of an excursion onto the poles. The north and south polar caps are arid places with craggy mountains, still gouged hollow from the loss of ice. Though the whole planet may look rocky and barren to us, its inhabitants see the channel carved by the Sea as a verdant wonderland, and the poles as lifeless wastes. The poles of our own planet seem inhospitable to us, simply for the sake of their cooler temperatures; just so does the stillness of the north and south seem to the people of our story. The unsmoothed rock hurts their feet, the lack of flooding can cause vitamin deficiencies, but what horrifies them most of all is the fact that they don’t have to run away from a tidal wave that would kill them.
Nevertheless, it is the only place still enough to build anything, the mining is easy, and smelted weapons vastly outperform anything made of bone. The ugly north and south caps were coveted and maltreated through all remembered history with the passion deserving of industrial parks. It was the only bought, sold, and stolen real estate on the planet, yet only slaves could be convinced to live there permanantly. In the time of King Aforementioned, the caps had been developed into vast military-industrial complexes, acquired through battles won in the valley.
(To be continued…)
(This section will be longer, but I’ll have to get back to it.)
