Michael Brachman's Blog: Tales of the Vuduri, page 179

Rei's Disorientation

In Rome's Revolution, when Rei was first awakened by the Vuduri, he was extremely disoriented. It seems natural. After all he was frozen for 14 centuries. That's a long time. But is it? Especially from Rei's point of view?

Remember, he fell in love with Rome within 24 hours of his awakening. But from his perspective, he had just seen Sally Reynolds, the former love of his life, six weeks earlier. At that time he claimed he would never love again.

When you go back and do the math, things changed fundamentally for Rei even though his subjective time was not very long. The day after he said goodbye to his parents and Sally, he flew to Houston and spent 30 days in quarantine to make sure he was not harboring any diseases or noxious germs. He then spent two weeks enduring the grueling dehydration protocol prior to being placed in cryo-hibernation.

The fact that 14 centuries passed would mean nothing to him. The reality was, he was in his world, he spent six weeks in isolation and then he was thrust in the 35th century world of the Vuduri. He had to come to grips not with the unfathomable passage of time but with the radical change in human nature.

You want him to feel like the passage of time is enormous but the reality is, it was just a number. What was enormous was how much the world and Rei's view of the universe had to change.

Vuduri Entertainment

As a people, the Vuduri are deadly dull. They do not enjoy music, art, dance or athletic competition. So what do they do for entertainment?

Nothing, really. They get up, they eat, they go to work, they come home, they exercise and they go to bed. That is their life. The Overmind is always in their head and it has a way of discouraging independent or even creative thinking.

There is one exception, though. The Vuduri believe in physical exercise. There are certain jobs that demand physical strength and dexterity. The Vuduri start out very young trying to ascertain their strengths and weaknesses through certain athletic endeavors.

One such activity, competition really, is called the dadar-fo. It is a three-legged trestle, similar to a see-saw but with three arms balanced about a cone-shaped pivot point. Each arm ends in a flat metal plate and the match starts when four children step upon the flat metal plates at each end.

The idea is to knock the other children off the device and end up with your "team" occupying all three plates. It teaches teamwork, strength and agility. There is a rubberized mat underneath to soften the blow when you get knocked off. Sometimes the competition gets a little violent, especially as the children get older.

There are no prizes. The winners feel no outward sense of accomplishment but you wouldn't know it if you ever watched one of the matches. Maybe there is hope for the Vuduri after all.

Vuduri Government

Since they are all mind-connected, the Vuduri do not really need a government as such. They do not have a very formal penal system. Crazy people and criminals are simply Cesdiud (cast out) and no longer part of the whole.

There are a few exceptions, especially when the Vuduri and mandasurte interact. You will recall that in Rome's Revolution, Rome committed a crime by allowing PPT transducers to be integrated with memron units.

Because of the horrendous toll the Robot War took on mankind, this exact procedure was banned. It was a capital crime, punishable by death. So when Rome returned to Earth, she was arrested immediately. Rei was able to convince them to have a trial. We discovered there were Vuduri individuals trained to listen to facts called Juoz (judges). Rei was not able to get Rome absolved of the crime but he was able to get her sentence commuted to exile.

On Skyler Base, Commander Ursay ran things and later, in The Ark Lords, you can see he can exercise that title and force underlings (in this case Grus) to follow his commands even if they go against the Overmind. No one ever considered how such a thing was possible but after all, the books are called Rome's Revolution for a reason.

Vuduri Spaceships and Starships

The Vuduri have a variety of spaceships and starships but all use the same fundamental principles. All use EG lifters to get them off the ground and to the edge of space. All of them use plasma thrusters as their main impulse engine and PPT tunnels for hopping long distances. All use trim-jets to adjust their pitch, roll and yaw. All have small airfoils, insufficient to produce lift but aerodynamically sufficient to produce a control surface within the atmosphere.

For short excursions, the Vuduri use a variety of space-tugs. In Rome's Revolution, we saw several of these in use in the Tabit system. One of them crash-landed on Deucado and evolved into MINIMCOM the starship.

Other ships are small crew ships. They are just for getting people from one place to another. They have cargo ships as well.

The Algol was one of their most sophisticated designs. At its heart, it was a large, very powerful starship for transporting a crew of 80+ to a star system 26 light years from Earth. On the trip out there, the rear of the ship was fit with a set of cylindrical containerized storage units for transporting the tugs, construction materials, scientific equipment and so on.

The cylinders could be detached. One of them was cut in half and used as the staging area between the Algol and Skyler Base on Dara. For the return trip, the storage cylinders were left behind.

All Vuduri spaceships use a landing technique called aero-braking which was covered in an earlier post. The Vuduri determined it was the most efficient way to return to the surface of a planet. So set in their ways, that is why they selected Dara as their stellar observatory; because it had an atmosphere which would allow them to aero-brake. Admittedly, it was also easier to build a base on a world where there was some atmosphere but that was secondary.

Once the Vuduri had come up with what they considered the optimal design elements, they never varied from that. It took MINIMCOM to invent the continuous PPT-tunnel projector which allowed him to travel at nearly 1000c. It took him several years but he eventually shared this design with the Vuduri who started building a fleet of what they called fastships.

Not to be outdone, (with OMCOM's help), MINIMCOM implemented the null-fold drive which boosted his top end by a factor of 15X. In the next book in the series called The Milk Run, OMCOM rolls out an improvement, the null-fold Drive II which can go twice as fast allowing Aason and Junior to move along at 30,000 times the speed of light. That is pretty damned fast!

Vuduri Transportation

Vuduri society is beyond communist. No one owns anything. Everything is community property. If you need an air car to get from point A to point B, you just take the nearest one and leave it wherever you go. If you need a starship and the Overmind sanctions it, you get it and the crew.

Most vehicles are powered by electro-gravity (EG) lifters. Electro-gravity is generated when you spin superconducting magnets very fast. However it only produces a repulsive force, that is, it needs a true gravitation field to push off of. But as a lifting device, it works quite well. The Vuduri have adapted it to most of their vehicles including personal cars, transports, airships and boats.

Their transports are divided into cargo carriers which resemble large, flatbed trucks and people carriers. Their people carriers look a lot like the fuselage of a tandem rotor, military style helicopter (think Chinook) but without the rotors. The cylindrical body has four stalks, two in the front and two in the back which extend and end in large EG lifters.

EG lifters can be used to do a lot of things but they are only truly effective in a gravity well. They can be used to get a spaceship to the edge of space but then their effectiveness drops off. You can close the magnetic shields and their backwash creates a low-level of artificial gravity which is useful on long space trips. I'll cover their starships tomorrow.

Vuduri City Layout

The Vuduri are nothing, if not unimaginative. Everything in their lives is intended to be predictable and non-stimulating. So the only shape they could use to lay out their cities would be a circle. It is the only geometric shape that has no features.

Actually, their cities are laid out as a series of concentric circles with main thoroughfares running east-west and north-south and minor boulevards running southeast to northwest and southwest to northeast. Thus it is possible to get from anywhere to anywhere in a minimal amount of time. All cities have all surfaces paved, no vegetation anywhere.

The only feature that literally ever sticks out of any Vuduri city is the central tower, usually very tall, called (unimaginatively) The Tower. This building is used for observation, weather measurements, anything that requires elevation.

The first city the Vuduri every built, essentially the capital of Earth, is called I-cimaci which means The First. The second largest city is called E-brixome which means The Second. It looks nearly identical to I-cimaci but its tower (also called The Tower) is just a bit shorter.

Usually the Vuduri put housing to the southwest, administration to the southeast, science and engineering to the northeast and civil services (power grid, waste management, food distribution) to the northwest. So you can go to any Vuduri city and know exactly where you are headed.

There are a few deviations. On Deucado, the Vuduri built their city as two overlapping triangles, like a Star of David and on Helome, their capital has twin towers and vegetation throughout the city.

Coming full circle, when we first met the Vuduri on Dara, at Skyler Base, in Rome's Revolution, their starbase was built exactly the same way their city was. Rei found it confusing at first but once he got the hang of the layout, he did find it easy to navigate.

The only difference was they did not have The Tower, instead they had a central common area for meals and some specialized rooms on the outskirts. This includes the tug hangars, the stellar observatory, the docking port for the Algol, storage for OMCOM's core, central recycling and the power plant.

Vuduri Housing

In Rome's Revolution, we first encountered Vuduri housing within Skyler Base, on the moon Dara. The entire base was built as a series of concentric rings with apartments lining each corridor.

Each apartment consisted of a sitting area, a work-station, a bed and a refresher, aka bathroom. That's it. Because of the geometry of the base, some of the apartments were larger than others but it was not on purpose.

On every world where Rei saw Vuduri housing, he was appalled to find it never changed. Vuduri housing is a cross between a rowhouse and prison cell block. Each apartment/home consists of a sitting room, complete with workstation, a kitchen/dining area, a place to sleep and a refresher. The Vuduri never thought about adding a spare room and I suppose they never worked from home.

Even on Helome, with its more flexible form of Vuduri, the housing is still the same. The Vuduri have no hobbies, they never entertain or enjoy entertainment.

At least on Deucado, they have helped build housing which differs from their own ideal design. The very first house built on Deucado for the Essessoni (Rei and Rome's house) was U-shaped with a sitting area, a dining area, a kitchen, a bedroom for Rei and Rome and a bedroom for Aason. The Vuduri even took the time to build an in-law suite for Rome's parents on the far side of the courtyard.

Rome's parents built a solarium while they were living there but eventually moved into their own home. After they moved out, Rei and Rome converted one of their rooms into an office/study, another into a playroom and Rome converted the solarium into her studio.

Progress!

Clothing in the 35th Century, Part 6: The Deucadons

The Deucadons have the most interesting clothing of all. Think Darth Vader only comfy. Much of the clothing appears black, somewhat like leather. There are a variety of devices integrated within the costume including communication devices.

Due to their circumstances, the Deucadons had to master conduit science. They need this to bring fresh air down from the surface and expel carbon dioxide. They also have to bring in water and remove waste from their underground city.

They also learned to apply their conduit technology to an invisibility cloak that conducts light from the front to the back and side to side. This means when you are looking at them, you only see what is behind them making them functionally invisible. The cloaks also suppress IR. They dampen sound to some extent but they cannot suppress the fact that they are a solid body and sound waves must travel around them. That is how Rei was able to discover them with his sonar-vision even though they were invisible to the naked eye.

That's about as much as I know. I haven't spend much time with a crowd of Deucadons. The only ones I have met are Bukky, Melloy, Triden and Steben. Steben returns in Rome's Evolution as he gets involved in the discovery that there used to be sentient life on Deucado millions of years earlier. We'll also meet a Deucadon merchant and a casino dealer.

Clothing in the 35th Century, Part 5: The Ibbrassati

The Ibbrassati (The Oppressed) are the splinter group of the mandasurte who live on Deucado. The first wave were transported against their will when Deucado was still a prison planet. These people were made up of the best and brightest of the mandasurte. MASAL had calculated it was most important to wipe them out first. They only needed to be imprisoned on Deucado until the planet-killer asteroid hit in 19 years.

When Rei and Rome first met them, the Ibbrassati were dressed in rags made of rough cloth. Cane-tree bark could be stripped of its fibrous inner coating and those fibers could be woven into cloth. It was rough and scratchy but it was the best the people could do there with no other resources.

After Deucado was liberated, while a number of mandasurte returned to Earth, a large contingent elected to stay on Deucado as free men. Many of them had their families come and join them on Deucado, at first, courtesy of MINIMCOM's "stealth taxi" service. Later, this migration was encouraged and supported by the Overmind of Earth.

Once they were freed of the shackles of their oppressors, the Ibbrassati started wearing more "normal" clothing which is to say made of normal cloth. However, they had no such compulsion as the Vuduri to wear identical outfits. The only thing you could say about their clothing is that they were comfortable and typically of natural tones. Rarely did they seek bright colors or fabrics.

Once they learned to trap and kill "falling blankets" they expanded their repertoire to include leather made from the skins of the slow moving animals. All in all, they looked like a relaxed and comfortable group who were building world, side by side with Rei's Essessoni and the Deucadons and even, to some extent, the Vuduri contingent who decided to remain on Deucado as well.

Clothing in the 35th Century, Part 4: The mandasurte

The mandasurte are the forgotten people of the 35th century. The word mandasurte means mind-deaf and it isn't a race or a culture as much as it is a definition. They are considered handicapped by the Vuduri. Those that are mind-deaf because they only have 23 pairs of chromosome (like us), are considered not-fully human.

The only distinguishing external characteristic between the Vuduri and the mandasurte is their mode of dress. Of course, they speak, they have feelings, etc. But up until the invention of the 24th chromosome, they were the exact same people as the Vuduri.

There is no overriding trend or characteristic in the method of dress of the mandasurte. On Earth, many of them have flocked back to Havei (Hawaii), which is where many of them hale from. When the Great Dying wiped out nine billion people, the only two significant pockets of life remaining were Hawaii and Portugal. These two groups eventually merged and became the Vuduri.

That is not to say that there weren't any people left in North America. There were plenty but they never advanced past an agrarian way of life. As the not-yet-Vuduri pursued science and technology that was not banned, they eventually returned to North America and retrieved most of the inhabitants. Thus in the 35th century, North America is largely unpopulated. I have no idea what happened to South America.

Back to their mode of dress, the mandasurte, at least the ones in Hawaii, dress in very comfortable, natural clothing. They don't have high style. They still wear Hawaiian shirts occasionally although their core technology is right around where ours is today. They have retained ties to their historical past. They still have Hula dances, still wear leis, still have luaus. They fish, they farm, they have art and music. They take care of themselves. Their most important distinction, though, is that they think for themselves. But most advanced thinking was inhibited by the overwhelming Vuduri presence.