Invisible Worlds, part 1

Playing with Italo Calvino’s "Invisible Cities": Marco and Kublai in space!

Preface

As the title of this suggests, I’m playing with Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities. If you aren’t familiar with it, first of all, you should read it. It’s great! Second, a quick summary: Marco Polo is hanging with Kublai Khan (the one who ruled the China part of the Mongol Empire), regaling him with descriptions of the weird and wondrous cities he’s visited. Calvino sprinkled interactions between the two throughout the descriptions. Things get rather philosophical and dream-like at times, with lines like, “I, too, am not sure I am here, strolling among the porphyry fountains, listening to the plashing echo, and not riding, caked with sweat and blood, at the head of my army...”

Invisible Cities is the sort of book you can always come back to. Once you’ve read it a time or two, on subsequent reads you can dip into it here or there, visiting one of its fifty-five cities or various exchanges between the interlocutors at random, and finding some new grist for your mental/creative mill.

Calvino puts the cities under certain thematic headings: thin cities, cities and the dead, cities and names, and desire, and signs, and others. I’m only presenting the first two cities here, but they and the others I’ve already written have their phyla.

This being an homage, sci-fi aficionados will notice things plucked from various other books, shows, and movies. I note some of these, the bigger ones, but left others to be appreciated without advertisement.

So! I hope you enjoy these nods to various sci-fi worlds as well as this homage to Invisible Cities and the strange worlds of the Universal Khan’s realm as described by a strange voyager who heretically claims to be from beyond its frontiers.

Introduction

“The Traveler Pytheas, Empire,” the seneschal cried, ushering in an apparently human male in travel-worn, but clean clothing. He took measured paces down the center of the throne room, a wooden staff varnished and polished to a deep glow by long handling and the oils of his skin, which thumped with the regularity of a metronome until he stopped at the bottom of the dais before the throne. The seneschal withdrew, and the doors swung smoothly to close with a satisfying yet ominous thud.

To be alone with Empire was no privilege. Empire was not unprotected, and Pytheas knew himself to be the target of any number of weapons. Beyond that, imperial clones stood ready to take up the throne should Empire somehow be killed.

“Empire,” he said by way of greeting.

“Traveler, be seated.” Empire gestured at the various pillows.

“Yes, Empire.” He hated sitting amid the pillows, being never able to find a truly comfortable position. He did his best to fashion something that would allow him to sit more or less upright and properly support his back and face Empire, but not take so long about it as to irritate the sovereign.

As Pytheas settled into his makeshift chair, Empire set the agenda, as it were, for the evening. “Ridiculous and heretical as your claim to come from beyond my dominion is, let us set it aside. I do not fully subscribe to the notion that you should be allowed to believe what you want, but I’ve no plans to execute you for your heresy and do not wish to quibble.”

Pytheas skipped through a gamut of emotions as Empire spoke, each playing with his expression as they came and went: a brief smile at ‘ridiculous,’ a wince at heresy, resignation at the denial of free thought, relief that he was not to be executed — though he could not help but append a ‘yet.’ As manifestly untrue as Empire’s claim to rule all the universe was, one does not ‘quibble’ about this with the being who rules nearly all of it.

“You claim to have ranged far and wide, so tell me of some of my more worlds. Let us see if you have visited one I cannot also recall.”

Pytheas licked his lips nervously. Better to bore with what was already known, or to describe the obscure and fantastic at the risk of causing offense? In fact, it was not a dilemma for the traveler: he could no more do the former than he could stop wandering or cease eating. He could only hope that the longing for the novel he imagined such a being as Empire must have, would see him through the evening.

Artnoob100, Tytge Sea Leviathans, Cropped by me, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Worlds without Planets ▪ 1

A riff on Larry Niven’s The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring, which are set in a habitable ring of atmosphere around a star. Instead of air, my torus is of water. The physics of this is completely unworkable (whereas Niven’s gas torus seems plausible). A water torus would evaporate and so need constant replenishment; sheer forces between the inner to outer limits would cause a lot of turbulence, which wouldd would spell doom for the habitable bubbles within it; and natural orbital perturbations would degrade its large-scale stability. But these issues are nothing a bit of super-science can’t fix!

In the dwarf galaxy Thrice Lost, Twice Found, there is a world, perhaps one of the strangest in your realm. It is a water world, but it is no planet. It is round, but not spherical. Instead, immense torus of liquid rotates around a yellow-orange star. A moment’s reflection by one as knowledgeable as your eminence will bring one to the realization that the amount of material in this system far exceeds that of the norm.

The exotic physics of Waterwheel is undoubtedly the doing of the mysterious Shapers. Naturally, such aberrations cannot be allowed to come to light, for who knows what the people might do or think! And so, as with its kin, evidence of Waterwheel’s existence has been scrupulously purged. Nevertheless, rumors arise and are hard to put down. And the lucky wanderer may happen across it.

Like so much of what the Shapers wrought before vanishing, few today understand the fractional dimensions that were woven into the space around Waterwheel’s sun, modifying gravity and other forces in its vicinity, and none know how to replicate what was done.

Regardless, the alterations maintain a stable torus of liquid water. Its surface is uninhabitable, being exposed to space and temperature extremes. The inner rim simmers under the bare sunlight, releasing boiling clouds that sweep over the sides to condense and fall as rain and then snow on their way to outward-face. There, ice has accumulated in an icy band encircling the ring.

The inhabitants live in bubbles of atmosphere within it. They are technologically primitive peoples, owing to the scarcity of metals and even stone, most of which has settled into a thin hoop running along the core of the torus. The pressure there would crush most beings, and so Waterwheel’s peoples must rely on the impact of comets and asteroids for raw materials. The fall of such debris from the surface occasions an expedition to harvest what they can before it sinks out of reach. The people goad the lesser leviathans they have tamed into the debris field, deploying large nets strung between them to gather what they can to tow back to their home bubble.

Most precious of all is the soil coaxed from this debris, a process requiring many years. The composting and its product are sacred, above the rivalries and raids between bubbles. Now and then, disaster may befall a bubble — a downward current pushes them toward the hoop, an upward one too high, a collision with another bubble — and it must be abandoned. Then, all efforts are made to save the soil. Whether to start over in a new bubble or as gift to another tribe to sanctify a merging. Such joinings of a remnant tribe joining another tribe in its bubble are the stuff of sagas and songs.

Beyond the importance of soil, come the greater leviathans of the depths around the hoop. These mighty creatures they seek to appease both for the direct danger to people and bubbles they represent as well as other phenomena they might control. Stories abound about expeditions to the surface, daring attempts to reach torus core either to seek the favor of their gods or gather rare metals, and disastrous collisions between bubbles.

Worlds and Desire ▪ 1

In contrast to the exotic and esoteric Waterwheel, let me tell you of the lovely world of Aristoph, which circles a yellow star in the inner spiral arm of a neighboring galaxy.

With just enough axial tilt to give its mid-latitudes season, but not enough to make them too harsh, with a sizable moon to create modest tides that sweep the multi-hued rocks and sands of its myriad islands’ shores, it is hardly an exaggeration to call it a paradise.

Near the galaxy’s center as it is, a spectacular vista of the core graces the planet’s nights. Swathes of dazzling stars paint the midnight blue, swirling around the brightness where the spiral arms embrace across the galactic heart, a black hole swathed in the luminosity of the stars it shreds and the incandescent gases their demise leaves behind.

However, this world does not merely seem seductive, it is. And so, while travel to it is not strictly forbidden, at the behest of its rulers, the Diet of the Sapient, travel to it is highly regulated. The Diet has similarly requested that information about its true nature be kept sub rosa. One can discover it, but doing so requires canniness and diligence.

I see Your Augustness is increasingly curious about the reasons for this, so I will explain as concisely as possible.

If they stay long enough, visitors to the world will eventually meet someone with whom they will form an indelible bond, or, put more romantically, they will find their soulmate. Naturally, such a thing presents an irresistible lure to many, especially the disaffected, lonely, or depressed (of whom there seems to be more and more). Left unregulated and unchecked, visitors and immigrants yearning for an expedient resort to their unhappiness would soon overwhelm the world.

The bond can be of any sort. There is no guarantee that one’s soulmate will be one’s greatest romantic love. Deep friendship, creative partnership, mentorship, and more are all possible.

Naturally, the inhabitants desire to make this connection too, which is why there is a path to be found. The Diet has designed the path to discovering Aristoph to favor certain attributes they deem desirable, though no one seems to agree on just what those are. The Diet, naturally, is silent on the matter.

One may leave, though it is rare for one’s native soulmate to join them. For that and other reasons, few wish to do so. To turn one’s back on the bond, to renounce it, is to sentence oneself to a life of disquiet at best. Of those that leave, even in the company of their soulmates, nearly all return eventually.

Read part 2 here!