by Chris Wayan, 2005-6
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OTZ TRENCH AND ITS INHABITANTS
Otz Trench is one of the longest on Tharn--nearly 5000 km (3000 mi). Like most deep trenches, Otz creates its own climate to a large extent, but it runs from the equator up to 50 north, crossing climate zones as it goes. Thus, the southern tip is hotter and more humid than our Amazon, yet the central trench is quite dry, and the far northern branches (though surrounded by deserts, snowy peaks and windy steppes) are mild and fairly green--like great sunken terrariums.
Just as on Earth, regions of Tharn around thirty degrees north and south tend to be high-pressure zones with weak, dry winds blowing westward. If they cross a sea, they'll absorb moisture and generate rain downwind--that's why Florida's green. But if the winds blow from land, even a seacoast at these latitudes will be dry--like Mauritania or Namibia or Western Australia. The middle of Otz Trench is analogous--most of the year, cold dry winds descend from Thuvia Upland to the west, keeping rain away. But in orbital summer, the high pastures of Thuvia warm up and the winds reverse. Storms from rainy Barsoom Basin to the west rain directly into the trench and snag on the bordering mountains, feeding hundreds of steep short streams. Thus, even the central stretch of Otz supports a vibrant ecology--and culture. No, make that cultures.
Deep in the trench, the shores of Lakes Hinla, Teina and Foosh are the very heartland for one intelligent species, wingbok, a shy, nervous people resembling winged deer--but with forked prehensile tongues--a hand, in fact. Clumsy? Limiting? But "Many tongues make skilled work," as the wingbok say...
Otz would be ideal for lebbirds too, but very few of that second flying people have trekked into this hemisphere over Trunzip Pass yet.
Well, trekked is the wrong word. Trunzip has a dire reputation among lebbirds--with good reason. The pass is nearly 10 km above their native trench, and the air-pressure drop feels much like a climb from Terran sea level to 20,000' does for us. The few lebbirds to dare the pass collapsed; most were carried back out. Only a stubborn handful insisted on being carried through, on animal-back. Most survived without permanent brain damage, but they never dared return.
Thus, their descendants in Otz Trench and Heloon Crater are essentially island populations, slowly diverging from their ancestral race to the east; and their numbers are still quite small, except in the south around Lakes Hinla and Foosh.
On the other wing, flyotes are everywhere on Tharn, of course. The only uncertainty is whether we should call them people. The flyotes living down in Otz Trench itself are quite large (and thus large-brained); but packs dwelling in the surrounding mountains and plains are (like plains wingbok) dwarfed and childlike.
If only Tharn had had a little more air! Flight and intelligence wouldn't be quite such... not quite mutually exclusive options. Let's say... competing.
The chief wingless species found in Otz Trench are centahs and veltaurs in the drier stretches, along with bos in the rainy southern end of the trench. Thotters, of course, live along all the lakeshores.
We'll start our tour at the north end, where Otz frays into three arc-basins, analogous to island arcs on Earth: Tlikki, Roop and Hai Lek.
Tlikki Basin is the northern tip of Otz Trench, where it fades into the Gwaa Desert. Lake Tlikki in its center is some 320 km (200 mi) long, but narrow and shallow. Lying only 1.5 km below datum, Tlikki barely qualifies as a trenchlake. The shores are semiarid, with tufa towers up to 100 m tall, much like Pyramid Lake in Nevada. Packs of flyotes have burrowed into these natural castles and turned them into surreal skyscrapers--the rock is soft and the work half done by nature. Despite their impressive homes, these are simpleminded folk, for in such thin air, local flyotes and trench wingbok must stay small to be flightworthy--only 20% larger than their kin up on the plains, who most Tharnians consider merely bright animals. Tlikkians are in between: not quite animals or people.
Places like Tlikki are why no Tharnian religion has any parallel to the human denial of evolution. On Tharn the Missing Links aren't missing; they live down the block. It's built into the language: instead of two words, "animal" and "people", Tharnians have a spectrum of terms to describe creatures with various levels of peoplish behaviors, such as:
The list is endless--dozens more, and each has qualifiers for weak, moderate and strong. And then there are the terms denoting specific clusters of these peoplish traits. One short word can mean "A creature with poor grammar but strong spatial skills and a heliocentric cosmology, considerable empathy and a strong sense of humor, an eye for beauty, and the urge to shoplift it." That word is "flyote"... sorry, I couldn't resist. But there really are such words, shading in the spectrum of wingboks and flyotes, from the bright animals of the plains to fully peoplish subspecies in the trenches. They're freely used to describe and flatter and insult individuals of other species--just as we use animal metaphors about each other.
Now where was I? Oh, right, among the sort-of-people of Lake Tlikki... So are they? Now you know the answer: your very question marks you as a tourist. A native asks "how peoplish?" and shades the answer, noting their intermediate brainsize, appreciation for the weird beauty of the tufa palaces, ability to tell simple stories and to plan irrigation ditches, inability to anticipate salt buildup until they see the first signs, the use of ochres for adornment, and so on.
I don't mean to imply that these primitive fliers are the only inhabitants of Tlikki. Small numbers of camaroos and mop herders live here as well--both flightless species whose size isn't restricted by the thin air.
Over the mountains east of Tlikki is Roop Basin, warmer and more fertile, since it's also further south--and in places much deeper. Lake Roop, a shallow irregular lake 500 km (300 mi) wide, lies at the far northern end where the spur of Otz Trench creating the basin trails off. It too is only 1.5 km down (only a mile below "sea level"), so it's inhabited mostly by mops and camaroos. The shores are flat, without coastal bluffs or tufa towers, so flyotes are rare. Full-sized trench wingbok visit and do business, but find flight quite difficult here. They must take care to return home to raise young, further down the trench, lest their fawns turn out stunted and retarded like the Tlikki wingbok.
Not far to the south, Lake Alinne is another world: no mere outpost, but a vibrant civilization. This lake's 480 km long (300 mi) and 3 km below datum (10,000' down). Roop Spur is well-developed here; the trench has air dense enough to support full-size wingbok and large flyotes; mops, thotters and camaroos live here too. This diversity of viewpoints has made the shores of Alinne a cultural hotspot.
It's well worth continuing downstream to Lake Yikla, the southern trenchlake. Though Yikla's small, only 320 km long (200 mi), it's fully 3.5 km below datum, agriculturally rich, and as progressive as Alinne. Roop Basin narrows just south of the lake, but Roop Spur continues to deepen; and here the Roop River has cut a spectacular canyon down to Lake Hinla in Otz Trench, the "parent" trench. Holes dot the red walls of the gorge, some black, some silvery: windows and doors of flyote cliff-palaces.
Yes, those windows have glass--crude, bubbly, but transparent glass. These are tall, big-brained, sophisticated flyotes, and their spectacular eyries, terraced cafes with panoramic windows, streamfed showers and composting toilets are a far cry from the simple tufa caves of their Tlikkian cousins. As are their brains--twice the size, and then some.
Even twins separated and raised at different altitudes look like different species--from gracile (slender, leggy) and shorthaired, to stocky and shaggy. Lebbirds vary less, but still substantially.
On Earth, species rarely or never spread from one climate to another; and while diet certainly affects a youngster's growth (my home town's full of immigrant families with kids a foot taller than their parents) natural selection is the main driver of species change. But on a tiny, jagged moon like Tharn, even a flightless creature can walk from Martian to Amazonian climate zones in a day or two. Tharnian phenoplasticity is a huge advantage, well worth the expense of some complex genetic machinery. What surprises me is that it goes no further: no adult Tharnian vertebrates change size, even over years, in response to new surroundings. Shows you just how difficult/expensive that particular trick is!
Huge Lake Hinla stretches from 30-40 degrees north--some 1100 km (700 mi). Its warm, dense-aired, fertile shores, 6 km below datum (one of the deepest trenchlakes on Tharn) are a world center for wingbok civilization. Lake Teina and Lake Foosh to the south are slightly higher but still have fertile dense-aired shores where wingbok civilization thrives--and here, especially in the south, the culture's enriched by a minority of lebbirds, that second flying species--relatively recent immigrants from the east. They specialize in orchard-tending and fruitpicking: four clever paws with opposable digits make them far more comfortable up a tree than wingbok will ever be. You try climbing with hooves!
You'd think the two species would rarely even meet. Lebbirds are arboreal forest- and jungle-dwellers who rarely descend to ground level; wingbok prefer grasslands, and besides, they're shy. But in larger towns, relations between the two species are slowly changing from businesslike distance to a warm intimacy. Lebbirds are omnivores quite capable of cooking for herbivores, and have a sunny, outgoing temperament, so lebbird cafes are popular all over Tharn; around Lake Foosh, many music and poetry venues have lebbird hosts and wingbok performers. Interspecies friendships are no longer rare, though affairs still are. Lebbirds find wingbok sexy (like everything that moves), but wingbok find lebbirds sexy but scary (like everything that moves!)
In contrast to these sophisticated lake cultures in the rich depths, the Hai Lek Basin, a second arc basin south of the Roop complex and east of Lake Hinla, over the Yikla Range, also is a spur of Otz Trench... but shallow Lake Hai Lek on its floor is barely below datum. The Hai Lek River flows from the Thuvian peaks at the basin's north end down to the lake, which is 350 km long (220 mi), then on south to Lake Teina in Otz Trench; all in all, the Hai Lek flows 2100 km (1300 mi).
Culturally the region is a frontier; too hot for mamooks, dry for camaroo, and too high for lebbirds or wingbok--only a few herds of their dwarf cousins the plains wingbok roam the basin. The contrast with Roop Basin is extreme. On Tharn, altitude is destiny.
In fairness, if population or cultural innovation determined how much detail each region got, two-thirds of this article would be on Lakes Hinla, Teina and Foosh. But I've described two similar lebbird-dominated civilizations in Mrr and Yoof Trenches, so here I'll focus on what makes Otz Trench different: the wingbok.
First, they're a savanna species, like humans; while lebbirds build tree-towns high in the branches of jungles or (in a pinch) irrigated groves, wingbok like open spaces and settle drier lands, building modest, hidden homes (usually by improving rock overhangs or digging into cliff walls like flyotes)--little more than camps and storage sheds, really. They prefer to sleep outside in anything short of a storm.
Days are spent browsing the land in a mystical communion. The Grass Doe, their version of Mother Earth, speaks to them in tongues--wingbok tongues, I mean. Both taster and hand, it's a sacred instrument--they're nursing from their Mother Tharn, and tasting her will.
And they seek to taste not only their god. When unfamiliar wingbok meet, they tongue-kiss, tasting each other: the basic gesture of trust.
Shy, nervous and introspective, wingbok communities are an elusive net of sidelong words and glances. Not for them the pomp and roar of mamooks--wingbok fear to scare off the Grass Doe, their mother goddess, who they (naturally) conceive of as a still larger, still smarter, still more sensitive wingbok, with lush grass for fur--a shy goddess frightened of mortals' crudity, one to treat gently as a friend, not worship as a creator.
They also have a male god, the Thunderbuck, all flash and roar, bringer of fertility and rain, but also danger: lightning out on Tharn's great plains can be deadly, for there's little shelter. Wingbok ambivalence toward their Thunderbuck should be familiar to Terrans: it's remarkably like the stormy (oops) relations between humans and their own Hairy Thunderer--whether you call him Thor, Zeus or Jehovah.
But the shy Grass Doe, the wingboks' image of Tharn itself, is their first love. For thunder and rain are sometime things; but the grass goes on forever.
Wingbok of all herds love singing and poetry, and spend days at it. Narrative choral singing, in which each singer adds a line in rotation, is a curious mixture of cooperation and competition--you want to come off as creative, yet not disrupt the group effort.
Individual creativity goes all out in dance-poetry festivals, where wingbok dance and chant original stories--subtle tales with little external action but full of complex inner feelings, intuitions and dreams: novelistic, we might say. It's not pure art: there's a practical agenda. Social standing and mate selection is largely based on impressions gained from song, dance and poetry--wingbok of both sexes want a sensitive, flirtatious, humorous, subtle, shy but articulate mate. Yitlaki is their term for this complex, ambivalent virtue-cluster.
These competitions aren't like Terran rap or poetry slams: it'd violate yitlaki to diss others directly, and besides, wingbok are too high-strung to tolerate open conflict--the whole cafe will bolt in a panicky storm of wings, leaving their (probably lebbird) host to sweep up the wind-blown salads and scold the erring performer--if he or she hasn't already fled in equal panic. So direct put-downs are as rare and shameful as fistfights at the opera. Yet there's no question that these quiet, friendly events are subtly competitive.
Of course, there's competition and... competition. No wingbok song-dance night compares to the roaring song-duels of the mamooks, at any midsummer chong-ma!
THE FOOSH FOREST
The trench around equatorial Lake Foosh is hot, for the dense air traps warmth; rainy, for this moist air hot air rises, to cool and drop rain year-round; relatively wind-sheltered, down in the canyon, and even this trench air is only half Earth's pressure, so wind-shear is weak; and gravity of course is low. The result? A forest topping out near 140 m (460'), taller than redwoods, and much friendlier, for these canopies are fruiting, flowering trees carefully tended, lived in, loved.
If heights like these seem excessive, consider: a century or two ago, before logging, there were certainly redwoods and eucalypti topping 400'. The tallest known survivor is 380', but loggers went after the biggest trees first; remnant populations aren't representative.
Even 140 meters isn't Tharn's record. It's still a mystery why temperate rainforests, like the redwoods and the Olympic Douglas-fir forests, have higher biomasses and taller trees than equally rainy tropical forests. Giants just seem to do better in cooler weather. Less evaporation, slower rot? Not sure yet. But the same pattern can be found on Tharn. Its highest trees are all in cool, rainy stretches of trench, like northern Yoof--low-gravity cousins of Earth's temperate rainforests.
THE DUSAR PROBLEM
High above Lake Foosh in southern Otz, a time bomb called the Dusar Sea ticks away on the Barsoom plain. Dusar straddles the equator in a region humidified by three huge seas, so rainfall is heavy. That rain makes Dusar dangerous. Only modest hills separate the sea from Otz Trench, where steep streams drop to Lake Foosh, 2.5 km (8200') down. These rivers gnaw away at the eastern trench-slopes faster than the meandering streams of the plains. And meanwhile, the plate holding Dusar is creeping toward the trench, and as it bows up into the hills and tilts down into the slope, it tends to crack into canyons and mesas. If a stream feeding Lake Foosh ever cuts through the hills, with or without the help of cracking, the Dusar Sea will start draining into the trench, probably in a great cataract. The Dusar region's rainy enough to constantly refill its sea, falls or no falls; Lake Foosh will grow until it drowns much of Otz Trench, devastating wingbok civilization. The flooding of the Black Sea probably led to the diaspora of the ancient Caucasians; but wingbok need dense air to fly in; they can't just pack up and move to the plains.
And the catastrophe won't just be cultural; the trench may fill to the brim, so the new Otz Sea will merge with Dusar, creating a deep, swollen birdsea, with wide, shallow wings out on the Dusar plains and a long deep trenchlake-body. Such a deep sea is a climatic disaster for all Tharn, for it can hoard a large fraction of the world's water without offering much extra surface area for evaporation. Tharn can survive one or two birdseas (there's one already, the Ghasta Sea), and birdseas do eventually self-destruct (see Black Hole?), but until it does, Tharn will suffer a Dry Age--in some ways worse than our Ice Ages, for at least our climate shifts are cyclic, and our biota's had a chance to get used to them. But Tharn's separate, irregular Dry Ages each cause a massive die-back. This one's still a million years away--but geography says it's coming.
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