Mardak Vol (planet)

"Is the garden for everyone, or for the members that have ships?"President of the Central African Confederation, address to the Chamber, 2317

Mardak Vol is the third planet of the Daranma system, about 13 light years north of the Sun, and the most habitable world humanity has found. It is a world of forests and grasslands at 1.05 gravities, with a 27-hour day, air that a human can breathe without aid and an ocean over 60 percent of its surface. It was the garden the Mardak Vol searched three hundred years for. They settled it about 100,000 years ago, lived there for four to six centuries, and died there with the rest of their people. The world is named for them.

The survey ship Gagarin under Tian Shen found the world on 2 November 2308, on a course read from the Mardak Vol's own records, and landed on 3 January 2309. Its pictures, published at Sol on 8 February 2309, produced the change in the federation's mood its histories call the Eden turn. The UNS Legacy landed 100,000 colonists from Lagos, Kinshasa and Kigali at the Harbour on 4 January 2323, and they named their capital Nkrumah. Mardak Vol was humanity's fifth settled world.

The Red Khanate never reached Mardak Vol. Between 2441 and 2446 it took in 500 million refugees from the burned worlds, and by 2460 it held 600 million people and was the Republic's second world after Earth. Its people's long fight for a census and for seats in proportion to their numbers, the Apportionist cause, dominated the Second Republic's politics, and the Senate sat at Nkrumah from 2505.

Name

The world was named in 2309 for the people who had searched for it. The Republic's histories write "the Mardak Vol" for the people and "Mardak Vol" for the world. The Gagarin's survey designated it Daranma 3. The era's press called it Eden from the first pictures, and the Republic's histories call it the garden. Its people call themselves Mardakene, a word the founders' children coined in the 2340s.

Description

Physical characteristics

Mardak Vol orbits a yellow star a little cooler than the Sun, in the system's third orbit. Its surface gravity is 1.05 g and its day is 27 hours. Its air is 24 percent oxygen, enough that a fit human can run in it. Sixty percent of its surface is ocean. Its year is 341 days, its mean radius about 6,550 kilometres, and its axial tilt about 19 degrees, which gives it mild seasons. It has one moon, which the Gagarin's crew named Shen for their captain.

Geography

Mardak Vol has three continents, all of which bear Mardak Vol ruins, and a scattering of islands. The founders named them in the languages they brought.

• Kwanza, the largest, in the northern hemisphere, named from the Swahili for "first". It holds the Great Forest, the Harbour, Nkrumah and most of the world's ruins. The Gagarin's landers came down on its southern grassland in 2309.
• Ubuntu, to the east across the Inner Sea, a continent of grassland, lakes and lower forest. Its western coast holds the world's second city, Lumumba.
• Sankofa, in the south, named from the Akan word for going back to fetch what was left behind. It holds the largest of the Mardak Vol's terraced gardens and the city of Sankara.
• The Nwosu Islands, a chain in the Long Ocean between Kwanza and Sankofa, named for the Gagarin's executive officer.

The Long Ocean covers most of the southern hemisphere. The Inner Sea, shallow and warm, lies between Kwanza and Ubuntu. The Legacy River rises in the Great Forest and reaches the Inner Sea at the Harbour.

Life

Mardak Vol's grasslands roll from the coasts to the forests without a break. Its forests are of trees that reach 200 metres, in a canopy so dense that the ground beneath is a permanent dusk. The dusk is lit by a bioluminescent understorey of fungi and epiphytes, which the Gagarin's biologists spent 2309 cataloguing and did not finish. Its lakes are fresh and clear to 40 metres. Its fauna, which ran to 3,000 vertebrate species on the first year's count, is placental, warm-blooded, structurally convergent with terrestrial forms and biochemically compatible with terrestrial digestion. In February 2309 the Gagarin's crew ate a creature the size and shape of a deer. Nothing on the world had ever hunted a human, and nothing on it, in the first decade, learned to.

The colonists call the deer-like grazer the swala, from the Swahili for an antelope. It is the world's commonest large animal and was the founders' first meat.

The survey found every niche filled and no species in outbreak. The Institute of Xenology's position, the most respectable in a century's argument, is that the balance was made, and the ruins are the reason. The Mardak Vol brought orchards of trees the forest's own species did not include, and the orchards' descendants grow wild across the continents. The colonists call them wayfinder trees. Their fruit is edible, and the Office of Settlement's charter of 2318 forbade their felling.

Locations

Nkrumah

Nkrumah, the capital, stands at the Harbour, the valley where the UNS Legacy landed in 2323 and where the Gagarin's survey had found the wrecks of three Mardak Vol ships. It held 2 million people in 2441 and 40 million by 2461, and it was the Republic's second city by 2470. Its universities kept the inheritance reading of Mardak Vol alive for a century and a half, and the Inari Ascension Movement began there in the 2350s. Mardak Vol's assembly sits there, and the Republic's Senate has sat there since 1 January 2505.

• The Harbour is the old town, built around the three Mardak Vol wrecks, which the founders called the Three Ships. The wrecks stand under a glass shell raised over them in 2340, in a park at the valley's head, and the Institute of Xenology's Daranma station is beside them.
• The founders' quarters, Lagos Quarter, Kinshasa Quarter and Kigali Quarter, run down the valley from the Harbour to the river mouth. They hold the founders' first houses, built in 2323 to 2330.
• Legacy Hill, above the river mouth, holds Mardak Vol's assembly and, since 2505, Senate House, built by the assembly for the Senate between 2500 and 2504.
• The University of Nkrumah, founded in 2338, stands on the valley's eastern rim. Its school of the inheritance, the Mardak Vol's study and the reading's home, is the oldest in the Republic outside the Institute.
• The Refuge Rings are the districts built in rings around the old city between 2441 and 2446 to house the refugees. Each ring is named for a world the refugees came from: Landfall, Bounty, Circumstance, Theia and the Sun.

The Nkrumah yards in orbit built a tenth of the Repatriation Authority's ships after 2460, on the assembly's revenue.

Other cities

• Lumumba, on Ubuntu's western coast, was founded in 2361 by Nkrumah's second generation, and is the world's second city.
• Sankara, on Sankofa, was founded in 2442 for the refugees of the Sectors and Landfall, and held 60 million people by 2460.
• New Zhangjiajie, on the Inner Sea's southern shore, was built by the refugees of Landfall's Zhangjiajie from 2441 and keeps its Cantonese name and speech.

Ruin sites

The Gagarin's drones found the first ruin on 19 January 2309, 30 kilometres into the forest from the landing site. By the end of 2309 they had mapped 400 sites across three continents: settlements, roads, and terraced enclosures the survey called gardens, in the grey alloy, buried under a forest that had grown over them for a thousand centuries. The settlements had held perhaps 2 million people. Under the Ancient Sites Act of 2308 every site is in the Office of Settlement's custody, and later the Institute's.

• The First Garden, the ruin found on 19 January 2309, is a settlement of about 20,000 with an orchard garden of 140 hectares on its edge.
• The Terraces of Sankofa are the largest garden enclosures on the world, a stair of terraces of about 600 hectares on Sankofa's northern slope. The last of their orchards had been pruned before the end.
• The Long Road is the best preserved of the Mardak Vol's roads, an 800-kilometre line of alloy paving under the Great Forest that joins the First Garden to the Harbour.
• The Three Ships at the Harbour are the wrecks of the only Mardak Vol ships found on the world. They had not left. Their lattices held the 400-star maps whose far edge carries the symbol the Institute has not read.

The Great Forest

The Great Forest covers the centre of Kwanza and holds most of the world's ruins. The Office's charter of 2318 made it a preserve, and the assembly has kept it one. Settlement within it is forbidden, and visits are made on foot along the Long Road. The colonists call the forest floor the Dusk.

History

The Mardak Vol garden

The Mardak Vol surveyed worlds for three hundred years before settling them, and they searched for a garden. The Tadasca colony ship was bound for a world its builders called the promised garden, and the Yildun capsule's chart marked Daranma with the garden's symbol. They arrived and stayed for four to six centuries. They brought their orchards, built settlements and roads, and planted terraced gardens on the edge of every settlement. They stopped in the same century in which Tadasca's dead died and Yildun's pilot turned to his viewport, about 100,000 years ago. The settlements were not burned, the gardens were not abandoned in a season, and the ships did not leave. The Mardak Cluster expedition of 2502 to 2505 found that the fleets of the Fevarian golden age had destroyed the Mardak Vol's worlds. See Mardak Vol.

Discovery, 2308 to 2309

The Gagarin arrived at Daranma's edge at 1410 ship's time on 2 November 2308, six hours after leaving Tadasca, on a course computed from a hundred-thousand-year-old lattice and Petrenko's key. The first thing its forward telescope resolved, at 40 astronomical units, was a blue and green disc in the third orbit of a yellow star. The ship fell into the system for seven weeks and entered orbit on 21 December 2308. Its landers went down on 3 January 2309, on a grassland at the edge of the largest continent's forest. Shen went down with the first, against his executive officer's advice and the standing orders, and stood, on the recording the era's schoolchildren watch, for four minutes without speaking. His crew, who had spent five years wanting to go home, spent a month on the surface and did not want to.

The Eden turn, 2309 to 2318

The Gagarin's first report reached Sol on 8 February 2309 and was published the same day. Its images of the forest's dusk, the deer that could be eaten and the orchard stumps in the alloy terraces were on 14 billion screens by the 9th. The Office of Settlement's register for Daranma, which the Office had not yet opened, received 40 million applications in its first month. The Chamber released the Fund's second decade in June 2309, and applications to the Office's registers doubled that year and did not fall. The Office claimed Daranma in 2313.

The world's meaning was argued in every member's press and university from 2309. The inheritance reading held that the Mardak Vol had left their garden to whoever came next and that humanity, arriving with their chart, was the heir. The warning reading held that the federation was building colonies on the grave of a civilisation whose cause of death it did not know. Neither side doubted that the world should be settled.

Founding, 2318 to 2323

The Office designated the founding region in 2318, in the era's most argued choice: the Central African Confederation. Its delegation had held the Pledge's swing votes since 2292 and had never been given a world, and its President had asked in the Chamber in 2317 whether the garden was for everyone or for the members that had ships. The UNS Legacy, the fifth ship of the Recalada class, landed 100,000 colonists from Lagos, Kinshasa and Kigali at the Harbour on 4 January 2323. They named their capital Nkrumah.

Growth, 2323 to 2441

The colony grew faster than any of the era's settlements, because nothing on the world needed to be domed, cleared or fought. It held 2 million people in 2340 and 30 million in 2380. Its settlers kept to the grasslands and the coasts under the Office's charter, which forbade building within the ruin fields and the Great Forest. The universities of Nkrumah became the home of the inheritance reading, and in the 2350s the Inari Ascension Movement began there, arguing that humanity as the Mardak Vol's heir owed a duty to the Inari of Binami. By 2441 Mardak Vol held 120 million people.

The war, 2441 to 2449

The Red Khanate's fleet took the core worlds of Landfall, Circumstance and Dauntless between 2441 and 2444, and in 2445 the Fevarian Acolytes named Mardak Vol, which they read as a garden the Golden Khan had kept, as the Return's last world after Earth. The Khan's fleet never crossed the Sun to reach it. Between 2441 and 2446 Mardak Vol took in 500 million refugees from Landfall, the Sectors, Circumstance and the Sun, and housed, fed and schooled them from its own revenue, without a credit from the Chamber. It sent 2 million of its people into the Navy and the Corps.

Reconstruction and the Apportionists, 2460 to 2510

Of the 500 million refugees, 450 million stayed when the war ended, because the worlds they had come from were ash. Mardak Vol held 600 million people in 2460, and its assembly was the Republic's richest after Earth's by 2465. It funded the Nkrumah yards, a tenth of the Repatriation Authority's ships and, in 2500, the Mardak Cluster expedition. The Chamber of 2460 sat on the census of 2420, which gave Mardak Vol 8 seats. The Reconstruction Levy was assessed on its 600 million.

The Apportionist party was formed on 14 March 2466 under the member for Nkrumah, Adaeze Okonkwo-Lindahl, a Landfall refugee of 2441. Its platform was the census the Constitution promised and the seats it required. Kwame Adeyinka-Rousseau of Mardak Vol, the son of Landfall refugees who had stayed at Nkrumah, was elected President in November 2493, the first President from beyond the core worlds' founding five. The Capital Motion of 2 October 2497, to move the Chamber from New Luxor to Nkrumah, failed on 4 October by 396 votes to 404. Mardak Vol's assembly withheld the Reconstruction Levy from 1 January 2499, by 120 votes to 30, and Serenity's assembly and six of the northern worlds' followed. The Senate moved to Nkrumah on 1 January 2505. The census of persons was taken from 2502 and published on 1 January 2510. On its figures Mardak Vol held 46 of the Chamber's 800 seats.

Government

Mardak Vol was settled under the Office of Settlement's charter as a world of the United Nations of Earth and became a member of the Unified Solar Republic. It is governed by its own assembly at Nkrumah. The assembly has 150 members, elected by districts that the assembly redraws at every census of its own, which it has taken every ten years since 2350, including through the fifty years in which the Republic took none.

Society and culture

The founders brought Yoruba, Lingala, Kinyarwanda, French and English, and English became the world's common tongue by the second generation. The refugees of 2441 to 2446 brought Cantonese from Landfall, Kreyòl from Bounty and the languages of every Sector world, and Mardak Vol's assembly has published its acts in six languages since 2462.

The world's founders built in brick and timber at the coasts and kept away from the alloy ruins, and their children's generation made the ruins the centre of the world's sense of itself. Every Mardakene child walks a stage of the Long Road with their school, and the First Garden's orchard is harvested each year by the assembly's members. The Day of the Landing, 4 January, is the world's chief holiday.

The inheritance reading is Mardak Vol's own. The world's universities kept it, and its politicians invoked it. Its assembly paid for the expedition of 2502 that found what had happened to the people whose garden the world had been.

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.2 "On the Solar Wind: The Four Explorers"
2. Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.3 "In the Shadow of Ancients: Mardak Vol Monuments"
3. Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.5 "Discovery of Eden: Mardak Vol"
4. Solar Eternal, Part X, §10.7 "The Inari Ascension Movement"
5. Solar Eternal, Part XIII, §13.1 "The Darkest Hour"
6. Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.6 "The Constitution of 2460 and the Presidents of Reconstruction", §15.9 "The Hulk, the Fifth Drive and the Mardak Cluster" and §15.11 "Earth - Mardak Vol Tensions"