The Billion Year Backup System (working title)(Workshop & Comments thread)

[Rusty Edge]

Not a lot of relevance to your story probably, but a sequel by Niven to Relic of Empire set on Silvereyes, the planet in known space with sunflowers.  -I can't quite spot what made it non-canon, but it had to be some detail about the Puppeteer worlds/migration...

http://www.larryniven.net/stories/color_of_sunfire.shtml

HAH! as it happens, entirely too much relevance. Well, I'll show you what I have written before I figure out a re-write.

[Rusty Edge]

****

Wunderland:


We decided to keep the Jester in orbit and take a shuttle to the surface, that way we didn't have to deal with space harbor pilots or customs officials coming aboard and finding a stasis box. That could only lead to uncomfortable questions and undesirable outcomes. A simple security check when we landed, and then the Popandreous could go visit Anne-Marie's family. I took a taxi to the prominent mansion of

Dr. Richard Harvey Shultz-Mann, the galaxy's most fabulously wealthy author, and Slaver Empire authority. He had a head of close cropped copper colored curls, and an asymmetrical beard with a waxed goatee on the right side of his chin, with a white streak running through it and continuing on his scalp, as if it were a scar. It gave him a very striking aristocratic appearance. We spoke of the Grogs at length. Then about his book.

"How did you safely launch the mature stage trees?" I wondered, "You didn't exactly explain."

"I didn't ignite them, Captain Kidd did."

"Captain Kidd? Like the notorious pirate?" I asked.

Dr. Schultz-Mann gave me a blank stare. "Uh... What's...What's a pirate?"

"Seriously?"

"Frankly," said the Dr., "I must have lost my equilibrium and suffered a concussion while observing that glorious launch, because I don't recall anything between then and the day I returned to Wonderland with my notes, and a lucrative advance check and book deal from Piersen's Puppeteer Publishing Company. Did you know my definitive treatise became the all-time best seller among the Puppeteers? 

"I had no idea." Then I asked, "Was there any possible revolutionary purpose for the bio-relics?"

"I can speculate," Dr. Schultz-Mann began, "but I don't have scientific proof. My intuition tells me that the key to understanding the Tnuctip is that they were inherently duplicitous, that everything they created was designed with an ulterior application for their eventual revolution. The stage trees could easily be repurposed as rockets, explosives, or IPBMs."

"IPBMs?" I asked.

"Inter Planetary Ballistic Missiles," Shultz-Mann explained. " There are no surviving racing beasts, they all would have starved with the Slavers, after the slaves committed suicide and the Thrint ate the last Bandersnatch brain.  So while they are examples of Tnuctip bio-engineering, they aren't relics in the true sense. They would have been the obvious choice for spy animals, but perhaps too obvious."

"What about those air plants," I asked? Airplants were biological systems that recycled the air on space ships, or in the mansions of the Slavers in less than ideal worlds. "What was duplicitous about them? Could they be turned off and cause suffocation?"

Dr. Schultz-Mann pondered the problem and stroked the waxed spike of his asymmetrical beard. "There's no method to shut down the biological air plants remotely. Anything that would terminate them would terminate the passengers and crew as well, so suffocation by air plant failure would be redundant in such a scenario. The discovered specimens vary significantly. They've probably mutated considerably over 1.5 billion standard years. Many were contaminated with dormant viruses. I can't generalize, other than to say that they are remarkably reliable to still be producing breathable air in our lifetimes. Certainly no machine could function for such an extended duration."

"And the sunflowers?", I suggested. Deep space 'sunflowers' resembled sunflowers on Earth, but they were stunted, and had mirror-like heads, which turned easily and accurately. They could focus on a threat, such as a bird, and blind or burn it, depending how many of each there were.

"The sunflowers were planted on the estates, surrounding the Slaver mansions, as a solar powered "laser" perimeter defense. Devastatingly effective in daylight, useless without the sun. Perhaps the sunflowers could be queued, or re-trained to become dormant, or even to perceive the Slavers as a menace, and prevent them from entering or leaving their homes at a critical juncture. That would be insidiously problematic.  Nobody actually knows."

"Last, but not least..." I suggested, getting to the point of my quest.

"We all know the Bandersnatchi were spies," stated Dr. Shultz-Mann. "We academics haven't determined how they could have procured anything of use as information. They lack psychic aptitude. They can't see in the least, and never could until you built prosthetics for them. They're tactile. The brain organelles were certainly capable of storing data, but the neurological sensors were certainly inadequate for gathering it. It remains an unanswered question. I might well have gone to the lowland wilds to interview one for myself, rather than accept some Jinxian brute's word on the matter, but the gravity of that mutant moon was torment enough on it's own. The equatorial humidity would have been unbearable. My beard would have curled out of control!"

[Buster's Uncle]

[ninja'd]

[shrugs]  Again, a detail about the Puppeteers makes it non-canon...  You'll find Down in Flames on the same site - definitely irrelevant, but an interesting take on all the Slaver stuff...

[Rusty Edge]

****

Orbiting Jinx:

I was standing next to the air lock, awaiting the authorities, when Anne-Marie placed a drinking bulb filled with golden liquid in each of my hands and winked her eye, then stepped away.

When the door opened and the Jinxian officials, a female harbor pilot and a male customs agent entered Court Jester. They were massive, just like the moon they lived on. I placed drinking bulbs of liqueur in their powerful hands. "Welcome aboard! Garvey of Garvey Limited, at your service."

They looked at each other, preparing to politely refuse, when Anne-Marie rushed over, and seized them by the wrists- "Hey! Don't be givin' away the reserve vintage stuff, it's too good for them. Let me have it!"

The Jinxians just lifted the bulbs to their mouths, and Anne-Marie off of her feet, to re-assert control, taking long draughts. They grunted. "I'd like to see the manifests," said the pilot, placing Anne-Marie aside.

..."And I'd like to see all of the contents of that vault labeled 'DANGER! Airlock Out of Order' because I know this spaceship model, and it only has the airlock by which we entered!" said the customs agent, shouldering past Jason.

Uh-oh, I thought, they are going to find my stasis box with the hyperspace pocket phone, and start confiscating, fining, and asking awkward questions. From there it will go from bad to worse.. Their weight must make them resistant to the liqueur.

I stalled..." What'd you think of  the drink? "

"It tastes and smells delicious, best thing I ever drank, thank you mister....  uh, What was your name again?"

I showed him my passport and credentials.

"Now let me get this straight.." said the agent, loud enough for all to hear. "Your name is
Marvin Gardner Garvey the fourth... Can anyone tell me what a Gardner does?"

"He gardens?" quipped Jason.

"Exactly!"  said the agent. "That means that the guy who has the Monopoly on dolphin hands was named for Marvin Gardens, a location in Atlantic City!"

The two Jinxians doubled over in laughter. Always trust a Jinxian to spot a pun. When they finished slapping each other on the back, they were sweating, holding each other's muscular arms, and gazing into each other's eyes.

"Uhh..." said the pilot, "Look at the time! I think we're finished here, aren't we Attila?"   

"AGREED!" he said, and they left arm in arm.

****

The Institute of Jinx:


The Bandersnatchi Specialist, Dr. Pablo Singh, was bored to tears. He told me the facts I already knew and ignored my perplexing question about Bandersnatchi brains. He droned in a monotone as if he were reciting a memorized speech. He said they are intelligent, but not intellectual. They have remarkable memories, but they're such boors.  All they want to talk about is sex and food, and the sex is kind of biologically pointless because they are all genetically identical. They can talk for weeks about their ancestors and how the texture and flavor of yeast has subtly changed over the millennia. He didn't know who that would be of interest to besides somebody studying the evolution of yeast!

"Taxonomically, except for the shell," said the biologist, "they resemble the Earth protozoan brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, in my opinion. Those are particularly interesting, and the reason I came here to study the Bandersnatch. T. Gondii has all kinds of fascinating abilities. They can go dormant, and they are practically incurable in that stage. Maybe the shell is just a variant of the cyst. They can alter the immune system, to weaken the host in order to spread the infection, or they can boost the host's immune system to fight off competing parasites. Infection is passed from mother to child, too. They infect multiple species, but they prefer to reproduce in cats, and to that end they can dramatically reduce a rat's olfactory sensitivity to cat urine, so that the infected rat will likely be eaten by a cat, which will in turn become infected. When T. Gondii infect cats they can reproduce and shed cysts through the feces, which are incredibly durable and infectious...


Ick! I got out of there quick. The professor wasn't much more interesting of a conversationalist than he claimed his subjects of study were. I decided to take Dr. Schultz-Mann's suggestion, and find out for myself. I made some arrangements.

[Buster's Uncle]

[ninja'd again - this is reaction to the previous story post]

...It does seem better than otherwise to follow something by Niven (even with the Puppeteer canon problem - which is irrelevant to your story).

(I still don't believe in biological artifacts -even less than intelligent beings like Slaver/Grogs who might have controlled their own evolution- that haven't evolved beyond recognition in the 1.5 billion years since while everything else evolved all the way up from food yeast.  I think there was a huge Slaver thing full of Slavers and their stuff in stasis until only a million years or so back.  Had to be, for all the plants and such to have evolved so little, and a scant million is plenty of time for the observed adaptions - with all the scattering of this and that over 60 light years of space, there's probably a whole story in it...)

I don't think your fix is all that tough, anyway; put Shultz-Mann on Silvereyes and poor -no lucrative book the Puppeteers loved (if that was even true in the first place and not a cover for blackmail)- and maybe work in a mention in the air plant passage of the bit in COS about remnants in  asteroid belts, and then it's consistent.

[Buster's Uncle]

...Could a couple of five-foot Jinxians reach high enough to lift a Wunderlander bumping seven feet tall off her feet?  What the hell were they standing on?  Was she grabbing wrists from a sitting position?  I take it she was pretending to be drunk - did she fall as she rushed in and was lying on the floor, maybe?

[Rusty Edge]

...Could a couple of five-foot Jinxians reach high enough to lift a Wunderlander bumping seven feet tall off her feet?  What the hell were they standing on?  Was she grabbing wrists from a sitting position?  I take it she was pretending to be drunk - did she fall as she rushed in and was lying on the floor, maybe?

Yeah. I knew that was a problem after I wrote that one, but I kept writing to get the rest of it recorded. Then got caught up in other details on the re-reads.

The point was the salesman's take-away trick- reverse psychology. Otherwise, why do the authorities drink on the job? I got an idea for that fix. Make it about mass, not height.

Well, Maybe I better re-write from the beginning, and fix the discrepancies between parts and with this new-to-me story.

QUESTION- grammatically, what's the difference in usage between Thrint /Thrintun  and Tinuctip/Tinuctipun ? I'm confused and suspect it may not be used entirely consistently between canon stories. What's your sense of the grammar here?

[Buster's Uncle]

...My sense is that it's exactly the same as Kzin/Kzinti - if Niven had a consistent idea what form was plural or what the heck the difference was, it's always gotten past me...

(I'd say the prior form is singular in all three cases and the latter plural, but Niven screwed up which was which right left and center for all three.  He's clearly got a little mental blank there.  You can pick and be consistent, at least.)

-Writing past a problem with intent to fix later and get the first draft generated now is always the right answer, provided you don't forget to fix later.  Maybe asterix that sort of thing when you go on, next time...

[Rusty Edge]

[ninja'd again - this is reaction to the previous story post]

...It does seem better than otherwise to follow something by Niven (even with the Puppeteer canon problem - which is irrelevant to your story).

(I still don't believe in biological artifacts -even less than intelligent beings like Slaver/Grogs who might have controlled their own evolution- that haven't evolved beyond recognition in the 1.5 billion years since while everything else evolved all the way up from food yeast.  I think there was a huge Slaver thing full of Slavers and their stuff in stasis until only a million years or so back.  Had to be, for all the plants and such to have evolved so little, and a scant million is plenty of time for the observed adaptions - with all the scattering of this and that over 60 light years of space, there's probably a whole story in it...)

I don't think your fix is all that tough, anyway; put Shultz-Mann on Silvereyes and poor -no lucrative book the Puppeteers loved (if that was even true in the first place and not a cover for blackmail)- and maybe work in a mention in the air plant passage of the bit in COS about remnants in  asteroid belts, and then it's consistent.

Yes, that was my nod to successful blackmail of the Puppeteers and memory removal, and perfectly legitimate income with no cause for suspicion.

**

Not a tough fix. It's just the ripples. DARN! It's like there's a time traveler messing with my facts. Not that I want to go down the time traveler rabbit hole, just that occurred to me that maybe that would be a way to approach a time travel story- write it, then change a basic premise, watch the ripples, and take it from there.

**

The evolution of bio relics.   I take your point if we presume known space evolved from yeast. But an ark tale is another story.

Bandersnatchi were designed to be immutable. So they're an exception.

Racing beasts are extinct. Not an issue.

Grogs changed a lot, but nothing like yeast to lions. Problem.

Stage trees and air plants and sunflowers. How long can the seeds lie dormant? Or do they wait for an event, like a freshwater flood?, a fire, solar flares, a volcano? Something that would wipe out competing life forms? A certain atmosphere ?



**

I'm blanking here. "COS" ?  What's that refer to?

[Buster's Uncle]

Color of Sunfire.

And okay - one could argue that all known cases of stage trees, and airplants taking over asteroid fields, involved long, long, long dormant periods necessary to outer space life in transit - easily 10,000 years traveling to each year alive and active, so those aren't all that many generations along, 1/10,000th, as planetary life would be.

Bandersnatches have chromosomes the size of your little finger, and may have 100,000-year generations or something for all we know.  No way there'd be no evolution just because it took so much radiation to damage a chromosome, but maybe the Tnuctipun built in other anti-mutation mechanisms for God-knows-what reason.  (Good point about what crap spys they'd make - maybe they were really for attacking the overseer's house at the key moment on all the yeast worlds.  How would you kill things w/o the Power that big trying to crush your base when they attacked en mass?)  (I doubt they have sex, if their genes are as you describe - budding.)

But Sunflowers, I don't believe in - they're just flowering plants with a gimmick - they'd evolve.  -I also don't believe in them taking over such large areas on Silvereyes; the Ringworld is so big there'd always be birds coming over the edges, but you'd get border with a dead interior even there - nothing to replenish whatever Sunflowers take out of the soil.  And in as little as 10,000 years, you'd have life adapting to live near/in/among them - and eventually symbiotes and what-have-you.  But only if the Sunflowers survive long enough, impossibly.  Despite COS and Louis Wu's observations and speculation, it has to be not-solid patches, always moving year by year leaving devastated dead zones behind - and still the evolution question. 

It all has to be recent, by geological timescales, but you should probably ignore all that for this story...

[Rusty Edge]

Well, the Bandersnatchi mysteries are the point of my story. The known space canon repeatedly says they are immutable. I have an answer for them.

Sunflowers.... don't exactly make sense to me either....


 

I have it in my head that the stage trees became obsolete about 15 or 20 years before the end of the empire. I think it was mentioned in Relic.  Let's use that as a working premise.


Okay. How about this.-

So the Tnuctip built the Thrintun castles/mansions with mirrored surfaces. The Tnuctipun planted the sunflower perimeter defense. The only access to these homes was through long underground tunnels.

They also created the stage tree plantations, which continued to grow after the Tnuctipun introduced a gravity polarizer drive which made them obsolete.

As the sunflowers expanded there perimeter..  maybe it was because of  birds in the stage tree foliage, and the sunflowers attacked them. When entire plantations launched and detonated.. the few surviving dimwit Thrint thought it was the long feared slave rebellion. That sort of answers the question- If the Tnuctipun were such genius prodigies, how did they botch their revolution so badly?
It surprised everybody.

Most of the sunflowers were completely annihilated in the searing heat of the rockets skittering across the ground and exploding, but on Silvereyes, the soil was quite sandy. In a few patches, the sand was too dry for sunflower seeds to germinate when they were sealed in by sand above them melted to glass in the intense heat. Time capsule.  Only when there was a powerful earthquake to break the glass and let in rainwater in that spot, were the sunflowers able to germinate again. So it required a sequence of perfect conditions.

[Buster's Uncle]

Kzanol was planet-prospecting because in his youth, his family were major stage tree plantation owners and got wiped out in the antigrav changeover, which caused a major depression along the way.

Hmm.  You know, sunflowers would make a crap defensive asset 19 different ways -underpowered against advanced technology in the daytime, completely helpless at night, to begin with- but maybe they were created as a terraforming tool and Kzanol was too dumb to know that there's sunflowers when you grow up on a frontier planet, or believed a lie.

Consider:  you've got an easily-converted live planet with no native slaves, but life that's poisonous, or ugly or Thrintun want gone for whatever reason before they settle in - Tnuctipun slaves drop sunflower seeds in a choice location -maybe several- come back a decade later and plant whatever needed to start a compatible biosphere going in the dead zone inside the sunflower patch parameter, and build the owner a house before he arrives to move in...

You'd have to strategically napalm sunflower patches every few years from high altitude to keep them under control -or just lots of slaves with slings at night on a smaller scale- but they'd take a long time to wipe out the native biosphere for the whole planet...

[Rusty Edge]

Terraforming.

Interesting. They would follow the fungal fairy ring model, expanding from the center. Burning brush, grass, and forests before them. They could be fenced in with salt, riverbanks and canals.


 The ones on the Ringworld have since mutated.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's a really Niven-sounding model, isn't it?

I really do need to find World of Ptavvs and re-read for you - ISTR Kzanol spoke as if sunflowers were a defensive perimeter close in to the house - that the Tnuctips (might work as a lesser plural for more than one but far less than the entire race like those on his family estate staff) knew how to control and he didn't.  Really; hard to see a sunflower barrier around the big house thick enough to be dangerous yet not more trouble that it's worth as a fire hazard and so forth - or else nothing but a getting-blinded nuisance at more than ten feet back...

The seed-and-come-back-later thing could be made to work (badly, but still) as a biological warfare eco-sabotage weapon in a war against other Thrints, too.  -I sorta doubt those happened, though, or the Tunctipun would have stirred one or several up as part of the revolt.  Maybe Kzanol just didn't know about that, 'cause it hard to believe they spread so far and didn't have wars with each other.  I would suggest it against hostile Power-immune races, but the Tnuctipun would have recruited those if there were any they didn't make, and they would have made more, more useful and versatile than the Bandersnatchi, if it wasn't very hard to do.

-You could also fence in/wipe out sunflower patches with just something like nocturnal goats - no shepherd needed if wiping out is the goal.  The more I think about sunflowers, the less impressed I am at the danger they pose, not even bringing Thrintun IQs of 80 to bear on the problem.  Nature would find a way quick, if some nocturnal herbivore didn't turn out to be already in place.  (The Ringworld is a special case with an eternal noon sun and short, 1/3rd of the day, nights that makes it unusually well-suited to sunflowers.)

[Buster's Uncle]

I love, love, LOVE kicking this stuff around, BTW.  This is my idea of fun.

Larry would love this conversation, too - I'd be tempted to try to contact him if not for the story and if he had a different attitude about his copyrights.  -I suspect his real attitude is that it's fine, but if anyone knows he knows about a fanfic, he has to say no for legal reasons.

(We've generated enough ideas for a bunch of stories, you know -the sunflowers as land-clearing tool alone could be a whole story- Niven wouldn't blow them all on one Slaver stasis ark story unless he just couldn't figure out how to break them separate more finely...)

He's from a very wealthy robber baron oil trust family and takes money/business-related matters like that very seriously, by intense childhood training, apparently - there's busted rich people in various of his early works -a frequent repeat bit like all the places he's put Cziller's Bar, or used that biker friend as a character- including Kzanol and Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann, so I have a theory about something he worried about - and perhaps had seen or heard of happening to relatives...