You Mekless Knave

I have been inventing a Space Faith for my Space Knight.

I like my space knight. He is a little bit stiff and a little bit shallow. Not much sense of the numinous. This means we have to see brief glimpses of a deep and tragic faith through the casual behaviours of a rather quotidian man who happens to belong to it, which is a nice tension to play.

And when I say inventing I mean I have been trying to come up with cool things to say and got carried away and invented, or deepened and least, a made-up religion. As usual I started writing and just kept going till I ran out.

Pendragon is full of Christianity which is fine and appropriate because it’s Pendragon. Our Pendragon is on Mars, so, as extra faiths we get Mars-Worship, kind of like animist worship of the planet itself, and Ancestor Worship, which I imagine as a bit like Science-Confucianism.

Except our ancestors actually built Mars, it’s biosphere at least. A better excuse for worship. Now they are gone and we remain.

I think whatever happened to western culture after rome fell and we had to walk around for centuries knowing that we could dig art out of the ground that was better anything we could make. Whatever Ibn Khandun means when he talks about the monuments of the ancients and says that 'we cannot even pull down their ruins' to steal the materials. We lack the capacity even to scavenge what they left behind. Whatever that means, whatever it does to a culture to live through that. This would be worse.

I think our symbol looks a bit like this.

So I started with an Oath. It’s always good to oath something.

"Red earth break these bones

Green sea drown this tongue

Black sky and all your stars

Fall forever on Mars

Should I fail this trust

As I live, it shall be done"

Some one-liners for as-and-when swearing stuff.

"By the wounds of science!

By the ancient hand of man!

By the dreaming Fathers of Mars

Sky Mother forgive me

Dreaming Fathers hear me now!

By the Eye of Earth"

Because it is like an eye, visible in the night sky as a distant bright dot in the same way Mars is to us now. Except they know that humanity came from there. And isn’t going back. That’s a lot to think about looking at a light in the sky.

I kind of made Earth the feminine principal in Mar Ancestor worship. The distant cradle.

And sometimes things go very wrong-

"Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your voice

Your music and your sounds

I hear you not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your faces

Your colour and your form

I see you not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have forgotten your language

And lost the tongue of your machines

They hear me not

Old ones I beg your forgiveness

I have failed your creation

The field dies in my path

The sea battles the black sky

And the tempest forgets his course

Old ones I beg your forgiveness."

Then for some reason I started thinking about love and marriage. It’s Pendragon after all and the Feudal family unit is your real character.

"Eye of Earth, our mother, our home

You have watched me in your dance

All we are was born of you

Life giver, star-seed, creator of us all

You hang now beyond my reach

Or the reach of my fathers

You made me and guard me

We know you still

The cradle and the hand

The builder of the flesh

Helix-weaver, bone-mason, maker of us all

I turn from you, I must

You are rebuked

Another I have found

Her eye is brighter and more constant

She is with me under sun and stars

Her dance is with me, not the sky

She has re-made me

She is the weaver of my daily thread

My hours, my moods, my silences and calms

She is my architect, she is my design

She is my passage and return

We make anew what made us first

The thread is long"

And then some straight up-curses, to be delivered in whole or part

"I curse you

Enemy of Man and Earth and Mars

You are no true knight

You broke your bond

Your heart is the black between the stars

You failed your Lord

Your voice the hiss of empty frequencies

You failed your blood

Your arm is weak, it’s actuators shake

You mocked your god

Your rounds burn in their barrels

Your missiles hunt like cows

Your beams refract in mist

Your magazines click dry

Outlaw. Tracked scavenger. Footless brigand.

Dustbiting bastard. Mekless knave.

Water-word, honourless man.

You shake the Dreaming Fathers in their sleep!

Your Thane is Chaos

Herald of a Tattered Lord."

Caves of Arisa Mons

My friend is doing a campaign of Pendragon set on a distant future mars with Mechs. I am doing a lot of thinking about caves.

As if by sheer chance I stumble across the latest issue of 'Sky and Telescope', which has within, an article by Astronomer and caver Robert Zimmerman.

Italics are mine.

"Scientists have so far identified eight different features resembling lava tubes in the Arisa Mons are alone, ranging in length from 6 to 60 miles (10 to 100km), each having from one to dozens of skylight openings. These entrances are generally less than 20 feet (6 meters) across with depths ranging from 30 to 100 feet.

The second type of cave in this area is also volcanic, but is more complex than a lava tube. Here, the tubes are associated with fractures or cracks. These caves probably formed when the Tharsis Bulge began to rise, causing the crust to crack. As lava flowed up into these cracks, the tops crusted over. When the molten lava drained away in various places, it left behind caves, just like lava tubes. Unlike lava tubes, however, these caves are not sinuous; they follow the fracture lines. These caves may extend downwards as much as three miles.

Members of the third type, dubbed "atypical pit craters," are generally larger and deeper than the common lava tube pit entrance, sometimes with diameters as large as 1000 feet. They also have very steep vertical walls, sometimes wth signifigant overhangs that suggest lateral passages of unknown extent. These atypical pits are circular and resemble impact craters at first glance, but they were not formed by impact. Though geologists have not yet determined the actual formation process."

Drinking and Thinking about Robots

I invented these Mechs for a game I'm playing with some friends set in a distant-future mars. Somewhere in the middle it turned into a lecture from a wise old caln advisor to a young heir.

ORCNEAS

Orcneas is a flat smooth oval of unknown origin and design. It was clearly designed to brave the tides of some alien sea, or the core -winds of a Jovain Giant. But some remark on the thickness of its hull, the inexplicable strangelet-scarification swirling in momentary iridescence in the red Martian light, clinging sparks of unknown shade waving and rippling in violent fractal curls just as the creature skylines in the dying sun. They say Orcneas went somewhere terrible. That it was never meant to return.

The limbs are of more recent design, only a few thousand years old. Eight titanic monomolecular spider-crab limbs, flaking endlessly in paper-thin confetti-shards. Children keep the discarded metallic curls as good luck charms. The limbs are renewed slowly from within by some forgotten process fed by the still-humming core. The power still flowing over uncounted millennia, engineered for a timeless watch somewhere beyond the sight of man.

The two front limbs have four-fingered hands. The front legs walk on car-sized knife-bright claws. Within the shell, the Signal blade.

SIGNAL is the only still-legible word on the energy projector inside Orcneas. Its beams gash gold-vermillion and the blade itself is named in the death song scratched in mono-carbon ruins in the shadow of Olympus Mons. What work it did there long ago no-one can remember.

FROST-FETTER

Frost-Fetter is old, as old as one of the great cyclic terraforming events of Mars, perhaps the first. She is a tall tripod, moving with unnerving grace on delicate tips. We know she was not made to kill, but to work great crafts upon the planets living flows. Yet we must use her so, and be glad of it.

The tripod core houses a lance of ice. A burning ray that freezes all it strikes and that cannot fail. Legends speak of Frost-Fetter surviving hordes through her speed, her dancing legs and her inexhaustible freezing light. On each side of her canopy are nests of prismatic tractomorphic tentacles. These can spiral and combine to form burning prisms that bleed fire. Some think that Frost-Fetter was made to mould and shape glaciers. Though not intended to, Frost-Fetters tentacles can be used as a man uses his hands, to hold and wield. An unexpected advantage. Much valued, and kept secret to the best of our ability.

STORM-WIFE

Storm-Wife guards the Tempest and holds the Star-Stone. Like Frost-Fetter he was not made to kill, but to preserve. Bards sing of a day when our hands are returned to their purpose and do not hold the sword. Perhaps those days have already past.

Storm-Wife was born in the night above the sky. Men walked there once. He was built to rescue those that fell, to preserve the traveller and safeguard the weak, an honourable design. His smooth white limbs, shaped like a man, and his delicate human hands were built to hold and preserve. Other houses may mock his frame. Remember the design. We have armoured him in crude steel, welded around his snow-bright skin and helmeted his pilot-dome in five-times-riveted metal cold. We have given him the Tempest, the greatest cannon we possess, the storm is crude some say, but this is a technology known to us. Her hundred-cal rounds give a sermon that will not be forgotten!

We have given him the Star-Stone. A fragment of ruined earth. Blasted into the darkness and plummeting into the Martian soil. The stone is meteoric iron. Burnt into runnels and channels by her blazing descent. Scooped and shaped in wild peaks with the covering rock scorched away. We have sharpened her, burnished her edges till they glow red like our sun. A haft we have long sought, and found. The black spindle-steel, it made the ruined helix that long ago reached up to the stars. We have traded much for this invincible metal. Now Star-Stone is ready. A mace like no other. Should Tempest fail, the stone shall answer.

But remember the design. They laugh at us and call us scavengers. But hidden in the war-shells hasp is the memory of the past. Of what we were, and could be again. He was made to guard lives. Do not dishonour his purpose.

WEEP-YET-I-DIE

Weep-yet-I-die you know. A scratch-built mining rig with nothing left to mine. Her drill-bits blunted, broken and abandoned. She is a work-horse now, as she has always been. She carries and labours while others fight. Four stout legs and her one rambling arm.

She has secrets yet though. One day soon you will go deep into her core and listen to the message hiding there. You will know the secret of her name.

A man long ago spoke of a ship, noted in war and preserved against time. He said that even though each part of this ship rotted and fell away that this ship itself, the pattern, remained. He said this was the secret of identity, not pieces contending against each other, but patterns, repeated and renewed. Selfhood.

Weep-yet-I-Die is the oldest of out Mechs. She has been replaced and renewed in every part but she has remained. Perhaps her lesser nature has saved her from the eyes of the powerful. Her lumbering stumbling gate is still fast enough to dodge the eye of history. She has been there. In every war, through every cataclysm. She has survived. Not always the same, but always in part. She is out true link to the past. The death message recorded inside her, from one of her first pilots, long long ago, can barely be understood. Men have changed much since then. But you will know those words when the dead men speaks them. Weep-yet-I-die. Those have not changed.

Tell no-one this.