CONTINENT 8: An Overview

This is the eastern edge of the huge tri-continental platform dominating the Inner Hemisphere, where Zeus is always above the horizon, causing a long noon eclipse and making the nights no more than dusk. During ice ages, when sea level is lower, Continent 6 and Continent 7 (just over the gulfs on the left horizon) fuse with Continent 8 to form a single mass with green coasts but a vast inland desert. In the current era, shallow seas break up the platform; less land, more biomass. In the high orbital photo below, Continent 8 is the long, two-lobed land on the upper left, with the Outer Hemisphere to the right. That's Continent 9 way down south; it's both geologically and biologically a land apart.

Continent 8 is nearly as big as Africa--bigger than both its close neighbors (Continent 6 and Continent 7) put together. It's a north-south strip cutting across many climate zones, much like Continent 3 or our New World.

Jared Diamond argues cogently in Guns, Germs, and Steel that people on such north-south strips often have diverse life-strategies and cultures, but that the new crops and domestic animals they breed can't spread quickly; climates and day-lengths and seasons are too different, just a few hundred kilometers up or down its long coasts. It took a thousand years to adapt Mexican maize to, say, Ohio; potatoes never made it. Meanwhile wheat spread from Spain to China! East-west is easy. Continent 8 may be handicapped.

Of course, moving a bit inland may solve the problem: Continent 8 has a sinuous mountainous spine its full length. Though not quite as tall as the Andes, it's tall enough to cause huge variations in temperature and rainfall. When it comes to crops, altitude (as the Inca knew) often conquers latitude.

Continent 8 may look like the Americas, but looks can deceive. The Aztecs and Inca never traded, and may not even have heard more than rumors that another great empire existed. Such isolation is inconceivable on Continent 8; in the low gravity and dense air, Pegasians will have evolved to fly. Like migrating birds on Earth, they'll follow hillcrests, riding the winds, slamming into windfarms... wait, we'd better not invent those. Lawsuit city!

So the rugged spine of Continent 8, standing across the trade winds, isn't a migration or trade barrier, but a flyway. You can ride its updrafts from equator to pole in a couple of weeks! And the people you meet, despite very different lifestyles, won't be strangers, but parts of a continental network of travel and trade and news. Even different species will all speak a common trade language along with their own.

NORTHERN CONTINENT 8

Continent 8 is split in northern and southern halves. The north isn't shaped like North America but has much the same arrangement: prairie heartland, wooded coasts, Canadian north, desert southwest. The eastern mountains are much higher--ice-capped in places--and they block eastern storms, so the inland east is perhaps drier than the eastern USA; but all in all the parallels are considerable.

Our tour of Continent 8 will begin in the far west, at the island-choked strait from Continent 7.

We head northeast along the shore of the cool 78 Sea, between Continent 7 and Continent 8. How's the climate here? Wet, I think; a strong current will flow north through this sea, though it'll likely hug the Continent 7 coast, with a weak southerly back-current along this shore. But the warm water will generate moist air: year-round rain, as in Ireland or British Columbia. Though the strait from Continent 7 is rather Mediterranean, the coast quickly turns to dense, tall forest as we ride the updrafts northeast. The only relief from the dark evergreens are bright flowering trees along rich valleys and on a few sunny ridges. These aren't natural: plantations! The local intelligent species, being arboreal, doesn't "clear" fields of trees (what a euphemism! Almost as good as "ethnic cleansing"!) but tends fruit and nut orchards as tall as the natural forest, and plants fruit-bearing vines that climb trees on the slopes, making the canopy quite productive while not disturbing watersheds. It's an inaccessible world for humans, who can't get around in tall trees; but these winged climbers rarely even visit the dark ground below.

I can tell you about the locals' sylviculture, and even a bit about their culture (they think in three-dimensional nets, like the branch-mazes they must get around in; to a human, odd leaps of logic) but nothing about how they look. You tell me. Invent a species. They'll have plenty of room: these unbroken woods stretch all the way to the Arctic! Even the northern tip of Continent 8 has low, sparse Alaskan woods in spots, beneath its snowy volcanoes.

But let's not go that far! It's a long detour and a dead end, unless you want to hop along the Arctic islands (the size of Japan and as rugged as Alaska) to northeast Continent 7. Brrr!

So around 45 north, we veer inland over the XXXX Pass, to the golden central prairies. They'd better be golden. I led you this far north to skirt the worst of the desert... Up here, rivers from the snowy mountains vein the prairie; travel won't be the headache it is in the southwest.

Who live on these plains? Not the forest people--almost certainly a different species. The economy will be based on harvesting the endless grass... but are they grain farmers, dairy herders, meat ranchers... or people able to graze the land directly? You tell me.

What's that old poem? The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown... Here, lions, unicorns, centauroids, and half a dozen others all seem like equal contenders... Of course, this whole notion of competition for a "crown" of dominance may be mere human prejudice. Why should one dominate? Maybe they're all winners. The local civilization could be a mixture of all of them--one or more local species plus settlers from the coastal peoples, each with a different, complementary adaptation. Such a society would be more robust than our thin, unstable (and destabilizing) monocrop: humans.

We head east to the coastal mountains--only a day or two, this isn't North America or Asia. The steppes stretch hundreds of km, but not thousands! It just feels long. No updrafts to ride, over the plains. Your shoulders are sore by the time we beat over a pass through the Eastern Range.

Below lies rich country. Green capes, blue sounds dotted with islands.

we ride the updrafts, sailing along this maritime slope for days.

Eventually whole paragraphs will be here, describing this fertile coastal strip in more detail. But for now I just ask: who lives here? Again, you tell me. All I'm sure of is that this easy flyway will encourage a single civilization all along this coast, not separate little cultures in each rivervalley and island--that's the pattern natural for flightless animals like humans, but here? I doubt it.

Two days later, around 30 north, we recross the Eastern Range and enter a broad hilly land. Kentucky? Arkansas? A bit drier than the coast, anyway--open woods and meadows.

A day later, water: the head of the central gulf, which we'll have to call the 8 Gulf for now. We skirt this inland sea, nearly the size of the Mediterranean, heading southwest for days, crossing occasional sounds. It's not too hard. There are updrafts over the hills. More than hills, soon; the mountains have bent west to follow us. The land is savanna, with clumps and veins of trees set in grassland. It's hot; we're no more than 15 degrees north now.

How are we going to explore this inland sea? Perhaps we need to visit a port town and meet some sailors. If people here sail. Probably: bulk cargoes can't be shipped by air. And it's a lot safer to sail on Pegasia than on Earth; with a crew that can fly, you're never lost, the weather never catches you by surprise (a weather scout two miles up can see storm-fronts 200 km away) and shipwrecks mainly mean a loss of cargo, ego, and reputation--not of life.

Good, so we're allowed sailors. Let's find a properly fishy, stinking, low-class tavern and let them describe, in thick, quaint, entertaining dialect (why do all sailors of all species on all worlds say "Arrrr"?) those desert lands to the northwest. Despite the smell and the spitting, I'd rather spend an hour here than days up there. or am I being unfair. It's hot dry country, but the long sounds cutting into it make this desert bearable. Here, people fish and/or raise sea crops. Semi-aquatic, though they may still be winged--like diving birds, though possibly six-limbed, giving them one limb-pair for walking and a small set for hands---perhaps folded inside their feathers or fur when diving. Pelicans, ospreys? Flying cats? Griffins? Small dragons? You tell me. Just no "arrrrr", please.

What else am I sure of? Up there, land farming is practical only along the few permanent streams descending from the northwestern mountains. Would those bold, winged coastal divers really stoop (literally) to such a humble, dull, mud-grubbing life? A different species entirely, perhaps--a burrowing, snuffling creature smelling a symphony in the rich soil. Oh no, pig people! Ewww! No, let's retreat into ignorance. I hear it's bliss.

I won't be repetitious and say that phrase again...

SOUTHERN CONTINENT 8

Here's a full-length view of Continent 8, shot from high orbit directly above the equator.

We fly west along the south shore of Gulf 8... it takes a week! This is a huge sea. The land feels African I think--hot, sunny savanna, with clumps and veins of trees along streams. Not terribly dry, just open compared to the forests of the east coast--or the rainforest to the south over the mountains. Maybe we should slip inland and ride the air over those mountains, in fact. Water's really not a problem on these plains, but the scenery gets monotonous. Depends how interesting the local culture is. Don't all say it at once, but... you tell me.

Hmmm, what now?

The analogy with the Americas still holds valid: the northern near-continent we just traversed lay well north of the equator and stretched into the Arctic, while this southern half straddles the equator and is mostly tropical, with a quite Amazonian basin in the east and Andean mountains along the west coast.

After a week of westward flight, we reach the mouth of the 8 Gulf, where it opens on the 678 Sea, that tropical lens-shaped sea at the heart of the Inner Hemisphere. From here, tourists can head west along the 68 Islands to Continent 6 or northwest to Continent 7...

But here we bank and wheel to the left, into the deep rainforest--the southern half of Continent 8 rivals the Amazon!

If they have any evolutionary sense, people here will live in the forest canopy, not on the gloomy floor... But who are they, what do they look like, how do they live?

Sing along, now! You tell me.

One difference from South America: southern Continent 8's west coast isn't as dry. West Africa may be a better analogy. Storms roll in from the southwest with fair regularity. And the broken ranges, much lower than the Andes, let some of the eastern rainforest's moisture through. There is a desert stretch analogous to Chile's Atacama Desert, or Africa's Namib; but it's still days away, and mere scrub and veldt, not bone-dry dunes. Before that lies a pleasant strip 2500 km long--open forest, coastal savanna, and lake-filled valleys below occasional snowcapped volcanoes.

At last we find a gap and climb east over the mountains, to see the savannas south of the rainforest. We're going this way partly to avoid the local desert around 30 south. These inland savannas are broken into several small basins; the mountains above trap rain, guaranteeing us drinkable streams all the way.

How far east should we go? There's a whole green subcontinent, after all. Will it be like Brazil's Northeast--tropical but prone to droughts, unlike the Amazon? I doubt it: this is a peninsula, open to storms off both the ocean to the east and the inland sea to the east. Rainforest as lush as the Pseudo-Amazon to the west, I suspect. Though ruggeder.

It's much broken up at the tip: at least three islands rival Taiwan. We certainly can't expect Brazilian Northeast droughts here--we're right on the equator. Rainforest, lush and warm. To the northwest is the leaf-shaped Isle of Y----, bigger than Java.

I don't think we'll go that far--let's stick to the mainland, flying south along the local flyway: the maritime slopes of the east coast. It's an easy run of a couple of days to our last stop.

The anomalous, Mediterranean southern tip of Continent 8 is an interesting land in its own right, an ecological island like California or coastal South Africa. But it's also the doorway--the only doorway--to Continent 9 and even the Outer Hemisphere, via the Rift-Junction Islands.

This means the region will only be ecologically isolated. Culturally, it's cosmopolitan. Ever since the trans-hemispheric flyway was discovered, fliers from around the world have been passing through. Society is not merely multicultural, but multispecific. At least one great port city will has no single species in the majority. Large, adoptive, eclectic clans will be common, with interlocking love- and reproductive- marriages, so mates of different species can have offspring. What species, how many? Last time, I promise! You tell me.

The gazetteer: will have a full index of native placenames, with descriptions--once the contests's over and we have natives to name them.

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