Bzńdo and chooshany: galactic feels
Bzńdo, bzando, vghāannou, apzaan: The unfulfillable longing of one who gazes upon a star but a few light-years distant yet without slipstream links known or accessible within a lifetime of travel.
Bzńdo, apzaan also for hssa, nge-pando, pvaantt: reckless, tragic, melancholic heroism in confrontation with death, between species competing for the same precious planetary ecologies, and other nemeses.
New cultures and environments create new ideas and associations. What would it be like to be in a starfaring civilization, but to see brilliant and amazing sights in the sky that remain beyond your reach? And what bold, foolish, suicidal, daring, occasionally triumphant risks would people run in worlds where their cultural record and the dead hand of the past stretches so far beyond any individual, even any civilization? In some cultures, the obsession or unfullilable yearning would take the form of culturally-defined maladies, .
To clarify bzando more, I'll be specific: you live around a star only a few light years from a brilliant luminous star. It is as bright as the moon, or brighter; the poets of your world compare their love's eyes to this star, it is the symbol of political success, it is rumored to be haunted by pre-human ghosts that give nightmares to anyone looking directly at it. There is no slipstream link to this star; sublight travel is something akin to a Spanish galleon -- understood in principle, but requiring the resources of a major power, and many of the specific how-tos have been lost. So you look at that star openly, some nights; or you steal a glance out of the corner of your eye. It is beautiful, and forever beyond your reach.
***
Some planets in the Diaspora are settled for their proximity to a giant or supergiant star: a sort of claim on the universe, a boast that civilizations may come and go, but THIS world shall prosper with the radiance of yonder star!
This is an iffy practice with red and orange giants, which may go cablooey in mere unpredictable millennia. A giant star visible in local day is a splendid thing: the Archive is full of praises for this or that star from such and such a moonlet or epochs-destroyed station, with hints and allusions to the great stars of the galactic core, to the fraternal stars of globular clusters, nostalgic rage for long-novaed and super-novaed bright ones.
Mhastōn, yuse̋ên, chooshany, the blissful serenity of infinite grief for worlds destroyed by novae; chooshany particularly expresses a salvific, purifying grief at the burning away of artefactures of intelligence (choosh-k) in habitats too close to an enticing giant star (tsān; ӯkrog, bauwlrphān, sa -- Terhumenic languages are rich in words for the deadly company of stars too large to ignore, too beautiful to insult with the prudence given mundane hazards.)
"The captain wept their way through the ballad of Geminorem. By the seventh or eighth verse, their eyes were shining with chooshany light. 'Aren't ALL our lives Theta Geminorem? We live and love and build and then -- ' <wipes eyes, overwrought>"
Bzńdo, apzaan also for hssa, nge-pando, pvaantt: reckless, tragic, melancholic heroism in confrontation with death, between species competing for the same precious planetary ecologies, and other nemeses.
New cultures and environments create new ideas and associations. What would it be like to be in a starfaring civilization, but to see brilliant and amazing sights in the sky that remain beyond your reach? And what bold, foolish, suicidal, daring, occasionally triumphant risks would people run in worlds where their cultural record and the dead hand of the past stretches so far beyond any individual, even any civilization? In some cultures, the obsession or unfullilable yearning would take the form of culturally-defined maladies, .
To clarify bzando more, I'll be specific: you live around a star only a few light years from a brilliant luminous star. It is as bright as the moon, or brighter; the poets of your world compare their love's eyes to this star, it is the symbol of political success, it is rumored to be haunted by pre-human ghosts that give nightmares to anyone looking directly at it. There is no slipstream link to this star; sublight travel is something akin to a Spanish galleon -- understood in principle, but requiring the resources of a major power, and many of the specific how-tos have been lost. So you look at that star openly, some nights; or you steal a glance out of the corner of your eye. It is beautiful, and forever beyond your reach.
***
Some planets in the Diaspora are settled for their proximity to a giant or supergiant star: a sort of claim on the universe, a boast that civilizations may come and go, but THIS world shall prosper with the radiance of yonder star!
This is an iffy practice with red and orange giants, which may go cablooey in mere unpredictable millennia. A giant star visible in local day is a splendid thing: the Archive is full of praises for this or that star from such and such a moonlet or epochs-destroyed station, with hints and allusions to the great stars of the galactic core, to the fraternal stars of globular clusters, nostalgic rage for long-novaed and super-novaed bright ones.
Mhastōn, yuse̋ên, chooshany, the blissful serenity of infinite grief for worlds destroyed by novae; chooshany particularly expresses a salvific, purifying grief at the burning away of artefactures of intelligence (choosh-k) in habitats too close to an enticing giant star (tsān; ӯkrog, bauwlrphān, sa -- Terhumenic languages are rich in words for the deadly company of stars too large to ignore, too beautiful to insult with the prudence given mundane hazards.)
"The captain wept their way through the ballad of Geminorem. By the seventh or eighth verse, their eyes were shining with chooshany light. 'Aren't ALL our lives Theta Geminorem? We live and love and build and then -- ' <wipes eyes, overwrought>"
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