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

[Buster's Uncle]

Hey - problem straight from Niven's oversight; how the hell do telepaths communicate with a Bandersnatch, a creature that after its size is most notable for not being extinct because it's immune to that sort of thing?  He repeatedly mentions telepaths doing that -Larry Greenberg was on his way to Jinx to do that when the Crazy Eight malfunctioned- pre-dolphin hands 'snatches not having a lot of other options for communicating besides giant letters on the ground in an incredibly dead language.

[Rusty Edge]

Hey - problem straight from Niven's oversight; how the hell do telepaths communicate with a Bandersnatch, a creature that after its size is most notable for not being extinct because it's immune to that sort of thing?  He repeatedly mentions telepaths doing that -Larry Greenberg was on his way to Jinx to do that when the Crazy Eight malfunctioned- pre-dolphin hands 'snatches not having a lot of other options for communicating besides giant letters on the ground in an incredibly dead language.

Uh... I assumed telepath's  couldn't, didn't and didn't even try. 

That bit about the telepathic hunter, well she was human, so maybe there's a difference. Or maybe she only thought she was reading the snatch's mind, rather than accept the fact that she couldn't.
OR maybe that's the other problem with Color of Sunfire.

I'm worked on the re-write last night. Going to Silvereyes to speak with Mann instead of Wunderland caused a ripple, but I was liking the story when I went to bed.

In my story the 'snatch used the sensory bristle clusters at the corners of their mouths to communicate with one another in a sort of sign language. The tnuctipun could do the same with them, and the Thrint observing would simply see it as scratching and herding the beast, much as if it were an ox. The sign language being too abstract in an algebra sort of way for the Thrint to recognize as meaningful communication. Terribly boring nonsense, like babytalk. Or horse talk.

[Rusty Edge]

Greenburg... Oh.

Alright. Maybe the snatch don't go insane from lack of stimulation because mostly they don't think.
They are totally Zen and one with the yeast mostly, until they bump into another 'snatch. They only think or communicate when they want to. You can't read a blank slate. You can't hypnotize someone in a coma.

How about that approach, Bandersnatchi as zen masters, grazing on autopilot?

[Buster's Uncle]

I dunno - it would ask for a zen far beyond imagination, or a lot of races would have a few resistant individuals.  They're Immune, which I've always taken as absolute - it really needs to be absolute for story-logic reasons.

Greenberg never made it to Jinx to prove it could be done, COS can be discounted if you want to, and I can't be absolutely sure of anything else from memory - though it seemed clear in The Handicapped, for instance, that more communication with snatches had taken place than a threat written in a field before Hands were invented for them.  Hmm.  Maybe googling Bandersnatch and telepathy together would be fruitful...

I like your ideas about bristle-wiggling.  I'd say that's a lock.  You know, you might be able to get anything a snatch could do done simply by playing on their boredom and being entertaining with entertaining chore requests for chores that aren't just rolling along eating yeast.  I bet they never thought to try that on Jinx...

[Rusty Edge]

Okay. Good. Less of a re-write, then, although as far as a character voice, I'm thinking that making it  zen-like is a flavor to try.

I did find this with Google-
http://aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Bandersnatch

[Buster's Uncle]

I saw that, another known space wiki and the Wikipedia article in a cursory search - no joy on the telepathy question so far, but there's some interesting speculation about things Bandersnatch and Slaver era in this chat log - http://www.larryniven.net/chatlogs/dec2009.shtml  -Searching some key terms on the page will save you a lot of time.

The problem is, though, that there IS a clear implicit assumption in the corpus that telepathy with 'snatches works, even of I can't find an explicit statement that made it into print besides a short in a con program.

[Rusty Edge]

Read a lot of that chat log last night. Interestingly, they reached some of the same conclusions and speculations I did. I intend to finish it.

I forgot to mention Man-Kzin III arrived, but I only read a couple pages of the pertinent story.

I reworked the story to include Silvereyes rather than Wunderland. It's longer, but I like it. I've got time for another re-read right now..

The climax is going to be long. Well, I guess the answer is always start writing, and I can always edit and re-sequence later.

I'm not going to mess with the 'snatch does/does not have a readable mind thing. The Thrintin couldn't read it, that's all that matters.

[Buster's Uncle]

I agree. 

-But it has to be something like they had Shields, better than even mature Thrintun, that are only down when they will it (which bored contemporary 'snatches on Jinx probably do all the time, just in case a telepath shows up to entertain them)...  No reason to think Tnuctipun and other races didn't have telepaths, as long as none managed Slaver-proof shields (or none ever got caught having them, which may have been key to the rebellion) which Larry Greenberg, using Kzanol's memories, established is possible...

Well, I guess the answer is always start writing, and I can always edit and re-sequence later.

Strongly agree.  The first thing a writer does is write.  Generating the basic copy is job one, and it can always be fixed later.  Very few people anywhere ever were just compulsive writers whose problem was they wrote and wrote and wrote, never doing second drafts to shape up their crap.

[Rusty Edge]

Busy day, back to writing.

[Buster's Uncle]

Writers write.

[Rusty Edge]

I've still got a lot to spit onto the page in the Bandersnatch interview scene.

Meanwhile, I haven't changed much on the Schultz-Mann interview rewrite in the last two days, so here it is-  Correction, I haven't tweaked it until I put it down here.
****

Silvereyes:

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.

Since Jason and Anne-Marie wanted to conduct an experiment with the liqueur to discover the effects on men when they drank it, and I was pretty curious myself, but since I didn't have a partner here, I gave them the bulb I poured the other night, and let them stay aboard.

I got a good view of a couple of shimmering silver-green sunflower patches the size of countries on Earth when I took a shuttle to the space port, a simple customs check when I landed, and then a displacement booth to the home of Dr. Richard Harvey Shultz-Mann in Bradbury's Landing. He was expecting me.

He had a head of close cropped hair, and an asymmetrical beard with a waxed goatee on the left side of his chin, all of it sandy or white in color. It gave him a very striking aristocratic appearance, but it showed his age and revealed his poverty. He'd been off of booster spice for decades. He'd been discredited for misusing a spaceship belonging to the Institute. He was rendered unemployable and unpublishable, even though he was perhaps the leading  xeno-archeo-bontanist in Known Space. So he was akin to the Bandersnatch who had intelligence and nothing to do with it. He was willing to pontificate for a price paid in advance.

We spoke of the Grogs at length. Then about the book he intended.

"Was there any possible revolutionary purpose for the bio-relics?" I asked.

"I can speculate," Dr. Schultz-Mann began, "but I don't have scientific proof. My intuition indicates that the key to understanding the Tnuctipun is that they were inherently duplicitous, that everything they created was designed with an ulterior application for their eventual revolution. They always played the long game. The stage trees could easily be repurposed as rockets, explosives, or IPBMs." Mature stage trees were like multi-stage solid fuel rockets, 800 meters high. They were designed to lift ships and payloads out of planetary gravities.

"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 Thrintin ate the last Bandersnatch brain.  So while they are examples of Tnuctip genetic-engineering, they aren't relics in the true sense. We only know of them from stasis box records and Kzanol. They would have been the obvious choice for spy creatures, but perhaps excessively obvious." Racing beasts were like greyhounds without digestive tracts, to save on weight. They were fed refined liquids and beloved by the Slavers.

"What about those air plants," I asked? Air plants were botanical, (not mechanical ) plants 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 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 that scenario. The discovered specimens vary significantly. They've probably mutated considerably over 1.5 billion standard years. There may be examples which we don't even recognize as being of the same taxonomical division. Most evolved to not only create air, but to store it. 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 unattended, not even for one one- thousandth of that. That's the beauty of bio-engineering!"

"And the sunflowers?", I suggested. Deep space 'sunflowers' resembled sunflowers on Earth, but they were stunted, and had parabolic mirror-like heads, which turned easily and accurately. Normally they focused all of the sunlight onto the black bulb in their center, but they could focus on a threat, such as a bird, and blind or burn it, depending how many of each there were. They could turn predator into prey by broiling it into dry fertilizer.

"The sunflowers were planted on the estates, surrounding the Slaver mansions, as a solar powered "laser" perimeter defense. Devastatingly powerful in daylight, useless without the sun. Best suited to some planet or moon with a light side and a dark side. We know that the Tnuctipun used them as weapons against the Thrintin.  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.  Or some combination of oxygen enriched air from the airplants, stage trees as fuel/explosives and sunflowers as a detonator. Nobody actually knows why the Thrintin used the sunflowers as a defense, or how the Tnuctipun utilized them against them, only that they did."

"As a perimeter defense." Mann stated, "they are excessively hazardous to have adjacent to populated areas, with the significant probability of some inhabitants being burned or blinded. Death to humans is a lesser peril. Intelligent life can flee or seek cover when they begin to be targeted at the range limits. As a defensive system, the sunflowers could be rather easily neutralized by lagomorpha leporidae... "

"Leopards?!"

"Bunnies," Mann declared. "Bunnies love to eat sunflower stalks. They live underground. They are normally active at dusk and dawn. Raptors are primary predators of rabbits, but the sunflowers would burn the birds out of the sky. Bunnies tend to run in zigzags too quickly for the sunflowers to track, run into cover, and circle. In other words, when the sunflowers would attack the bunnies, they would end up burning each other. When things get too hot for the bunnies, they would duck underground, and when they have a plentiful food supply they breed like clichés."

I laughed at the picture he painted of an estate security system overrun by rabbits. "Hardly a credible deterrent, but couldn't a slaver stop the bunnies?"

"Certainly, but if you need a security guard just to guard the security system, it defeats the purpose of it, doesn't it?" Mann countered.

"Well, I gotta admit a system that dangerous and ineffective doesn't seem sensible, not at all. Was that how it was a Tnuctip trap?"

"My research over the decades here suggests that the sunflowers were originally designed as a terraforming tool," Mann continued. "Seed the continents with sunflowers to clear the land, and colonize the oceans with yeast as a future food source. Both could be delivered by stage tree rockets. The sunflower patch expands like a toadstool ring, or perhaps a toadstool ring within a grass fire, killing and burning all before it, then dying off from the center as the nitrogen in the soil was depleted, and leaving organic matter behind. The growing ring stopped when it reached naked rock, water or salt. I think the Tnuctipun devised these for their own use, before they became enslaved. They started with fresh seed from the original source for each application. The plant was designed to self-destruct rather than evolve.

"The sunflowers you see here today have mutated to fix atmospheric nitrogen in the soil by means of symbiotic bacteria, so that the center of the patch continues to live. That's what enables them to thrive in various soils. I've determined that they must have been trapped beneath an ice shelf in seed form until relatively recently- say a million years ago, and evolved thereafter. Stopped by a blizzard, most likely."

"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!"

****

Aboard Court Jester in close orbit of Silvereyes: 

I really liked Mann, and I certainly believed him, but not enough to take a risk and offer him a job with responsibility. There was something slightly suspicious about him. Perhaps he was a little too greedy or clever to trust. I wouldn't have showed him the stasis box contents, even if I had them on me. I had a feeling his pomposity was his way of withdrawing from his imposed poverty to protect his pride. But I liked him enough to buy him a booster spice subscription, and call it a retaining fee for a consultant. He was due for a big surprise tomorrow!

The Popandreous confirmed that the Liqueur worked much the same for Jason as it did Anne-Marie, who was able to duplicate her previous results. It cleared his mind, it gave him sexy breath and bedroom eyes, it made him amorous and improved his stamina. I was really looking forward to using it to celebrate my marriage engagement on Down at the end of this trip.

[Buster's Uncle]

Running comments as I go:

-"xeno-archeo-bontanist" -typo.

-I think from the way you put things that you may have missed that the (vrprin?) racing beasts were (the other) utterly Power-Immune species ([they would have starved a LOT faster than the Thrints around them in hard times, because intravenous feeding was necessary, exCEPT they were {scant} food owned by always-ravenous {now starving} carnivores] which was another Tnuctipun sly economic attack, though I forget just how) with any brain - had to be, as they were bet upon and watched racing by crowds of Slavers interested in the outcome.  If you did get that, a handful more words would make it clearer.

-"Racing beasts were like" starving see-through anatomy models of alien "greyhounds without digestive tracts".   I think Niven said they looked "flayed" because of the (thin, frictionless) see-through skin and lack of anything but skeleton and muscle needed to run.

-I always thought "air plant" was an inept name because plant means flora or mechanical factory, and which would you more expect on a spaceship?

-Deep space 'sunflowers' - instead, Slaver Sunflowers, 'cause deep space sounds like they're in asteroid fields defending the air plant bubbles - and possibly the stage trees that got them there and are growing inside w/ the sunflowers.  (No-longer-running-comment inserted:  that was sarcasm, but you couldn't be sure that wasn't the a Tnuctipun plan, pre-Slaver, possibly, for them to work in concert to build habitats that could be moved into at will if you could control the sunflowers at a distance, which it's explicitly assumed in canon they could -eternal sunshine on the light side, so much more reliable defense/light environment for the sunflowers, possible light-pressure drive, [could there have been a light-sail stage to their lifecycle under the right conditions?] focus light and heat where needed in the habitat - stage trees for launching everything there from a planet, gravity well/orbital maneuvers, and emergencies/get-the-move-done-in-this-lifetime.  Probably endless other biological pieces to the hypothetical whole [mining/soil-creating organisms are missing, you'd want food to live there, etc], including a rudimentary coordinating intelligence [Thrint vulnerable?  Is that why no space collectives have turned up - the 'tips had to get rid of them?],  but those three in concert could take you very far towards making a place to live among asteroids and facilitate mining.  Story idea, I guess - somebody Touring Exploring the Thing is the Niven standard, not the exception.)  I promise that the "Deep space 'sunflowers'" phrasing has thrown me for a bit both times.

---

YAY!  You got Richard Harvey steady boosterspice!

---

There's charm to the Popandreous offstage sexy love time - but I don't believe in (a nivenism) G-Squared's super-delicious love liquor, IF it's really G² being clever and not actual Slaver stuff (which I wouldn't believe in working on Humans or tasting good).  You're probably going somewhere with that, so take this with a grain of salt, but you make it sound effective enough that I suppose it works so well as sexytime love potion that it would immediately be declared incredibly illegal by every human government in Known Space for the mind control potential and sex slavery possibilities - but why isn't Garvey Limited banking trillions of sols selling a taste-alike version with no teeth, if it tastes so good?

So if it's just for the Popandreou sexy love time and such for color, it's cute, but problematic and needs scaling back - if it's in the 'snatch resolution as I expect, well, party on, dude.  -I wouldn't have caught most of this reading the whole story at one sitting, I expect, other than not believing in the Wonder Love Booze...

[Rusty Edge]

I'll have to read your post a few more times to absorb the nuances.

You have a much better memory for the Niven stories than I do . Whether it's due to more frequent or recent reading, or a flat out better memory, I don't know.

The love potion is integral to the story. Well, perhaps not. Wait till you see how the whole thing hangs together, and then we can talk about the potential rewrites.  Just going with a whiskey that causes blackouts reminded me of the Old Janx spirit from Hitchhiker's Guide, and I didn't want to go there. One universe at a time.

SPOILER-

To kinda reveal the thrust of my premise- The Slavers had big brains for mind control, the Tnuctipun had them because they were smart. Snatches had them for memory. Alcohol from the yeast diet and hormones/ pheromones  were things they sorted into an organelle and discharged, because they interfered with normal memory. Commerce in the liqueur gave the Tnuctipun, a reason to travel to the lowlands of Jinx. The one inhabitable place in the universe too disgusting for the Thrint to read minds for more than a moment.  Snatches were the bioengineer's version of a database and back-up system for a species that couldn't keep a secret from a Thrint. They weren't spies so much as the network into which spy reconnaissance was fed, serving more like combination drop boxes/analysts/controls than field agents. It's more complicated than that as far as how it worked ( I guess spy things usually are).
Bandersnatch sex wasn't about sex, but data transfer through rna transfer as in the story "Rammer", but the Slavers didn't know that... They approved of Bandersnatch breeding.

Consider that.

 

[Rusty Edge]

-Deep space 'sunflowers' - instead, Slaver Sunflowers, 'cause deep space sounds like they're in asteroid fields defending the air plant bubbles - and possibly the stage trees that got them there and are growing inside w/ the sunflowers.  (No-longer-running-comment inserted:  that was sarcasm, but you couldn't be sure that wasn't the a Tnuctipun plan, pre-Slaver, possibly, for them to work in concert to build habitats that could be moved into at will if you could control the sunflowers at a distance, which it's explicitly assumed in canon they could -eternal sunshine on the light side, so much more reliable defense/light environment for the sunflowers, possible light-pressure drive, [could there have been a light-sail stage to their lifecycle under the right conditions?] focus light and heat where needed in the habitat - stage trees for launching everything there from a planet, gravity well/orbital maneuvers, and emergencies/get-the-move-done-in-this-lifetime.  Probably endless other biological pieces to the hypothetical whole [mining/soil-creating organisms are missing, you'd want food to live there, etc], including a rudimentary coordinating intelligence [Thrint vulnerable?  Is that why no space collectives have turned up - the 'tips had to get rid of them?],  but those three in concert could take you very far towards making a place to live among asteroids and facilitate mining.  Story idea, I guess - somebody Touring Exploring the Thing is the Niven standard, not the exception.)  I promise that the "Deep space 'sunflowers'" phrasing has thrown me for a bit both times.

That sounds like a story.

 Here's a theory on Slaver sunflower control ( did I get the term right this time?) Working from "Mann's " blizzard theory, it follows that approaching snow and ice would be a perceived threat. It would kill plants and render parabolic mirrors non-reflective.  Simply squirting a compressed gas at something would turn it into a cold/frosty spot, and cause the flowers to focus on it.

[Buster's Uncle]

There IS no set term for the sunflowers, IIRC - just, if you're go to bother to make the distinction from the earth flowers in a Known Space story, Slaver works better.

So - for the space habitat, some sort of missile to make a distracting ice cloud in the other direction while you fly up and dock?  Maybe - lotta situations where that wouldn't be practical.  It could work better on a planet, especially with a strategic rise at the approach point.