"The frontier is closing. No fleet will come by Myrum until it opens. Look to your own."Message of the Maweer to the Unified Solar Republic, delivered at Nomotar, 2416
The Maweer are a spacefaring species whose worlds lie north and west of the Voor Confederacy, beyond Faenov. The Voor call them the Caretakers, and say they tend worlds as a gardener tends beds. They are the oldest and largest civilisation known to the Unified Solar Republic, with about forty systems on the Republic's estimate of 2413, and the most closed. For a century and a half after first contact they received no embassies, admitted no foreign ships and gave no other species a name, a population figure or a view of their worlds.
The Maweer trade. Their fleets reached the human system of Nomotar through Voor space on 20 June 2321, and from then on they sold minerals, consumer goods and, from 2324, the field technology that let human warships survive a first exchange with the Voor. Their frontier fleets sat opposite the Legion's twenty frontier hearths through the Voor War and never crossed. In 2413 the Red Khanate invaded their southern marches. They lost eleven systems in four years and sealed their frontier in 2417. They reopened it in 2447 to fight the Khanate, fought beside the Republic's fleet from 2455, and hosted the peace conference at Fejantris that ended the war in 2460.
The Maweer opened further in the Reconstruction than in the three centuries before it. They admitted the Institute of Xenology's xenologists to one of their worlds in 2482, and the Institute's report of 2484 was the first account of Maweer society by any other species. The Maweer asked that it not be published, and it was held back until they withdrew the request in 2505. Most of what this article says of Maweer biology and society comes from that report.
Name
The name Maweer came to humanity from the Voor at Hiverion in 2318. The Institute's report of 2484 gives it as the Voor rendering of the species' own word for itself, which the report translates as "those who keep". The Maweer word is not a sound alone. It is spoken and shown together, in a pattern of the skin, and no other species can say it in full. The Voor name, the Caretakers, describes what the Voor saw of them: worlds kept as gardens.
The Maweer gave no personal name to any other species until 2470, when they sent a trade-master to Nomotar under a name given in their notation. The report explains why. A Maweer name is a pattern shown on the skin as much as a word, and the Maweer did not give names until another species had a way to write the pattern down. The notation the Institute and the trade-masters built for the purpose between 2468 and 2470 records a name as a sequence of colour, pattern and tone.
Biology
Anatomy
The Maweer are amphibious. They evolved in the warm shallow seas of their home world, Saelith, and breathe water through gills along the neck and air through lungs. They stand about 1.8 metres when upright on land, and move on land slowly and with care. In water they are fast. The body is long and smooth, with a broad chest, two legs that end in webbed, paddle-like feet and two arms that end in webbed hands of four long digits, one of them opposed. A low fin runs along the spine from the back of the head.
The skin is the Maweer's most remarkable feature. It is smooth and soft, and it carries cells that change its colour and its pattern within a second, over the whole body or in part. A Maweer at rest is a dark blue-green. The large eyes, set wide on the head, see further into the blue than a human's and see well in dim water. The Maweer hear well in water and less well in air.
Language
Maweer speech has two channels. Sound carries the words, in a low, unhurried voice that humans can hear and in part reproduce. The skin carries the rest: emphasis, tense, courtesy, doubt and the speaker's standing toward the listener. A Maweer sentence spoken in the dark, or written in sound alone, is incomplete. The shared notation the trade-masters used with the Voor and with humans from 2321 was, the report concludes, a Maweer courtesy: a language with one channel, made for peoples who had only one.
Life cycle
The Maweer live for about 400 Earth years, on the report's figures. They lay eggs in tended nursery waters, sheltered shallows that every Maweer settlement keeps, and the young are raised by the community of the nursery and not by their parents alone. Young Maweer of one nursery and one season count each other as kin for life, and a Maweer's first loyalty is to that cohort. A Maweer does not reach adulthood until about forty years. The report records that the Maweer regard a century as a short time, and plan in terms of the lifetimes of forests.
Diet
The Maweer eat what they farm in their seas and shallows: tended shoals, shellfish, sea-grasses and the floating crops of their warm coasts. Their ocean farming is the oldest of their arts. The Maweer ocean stock that Bounty's aquaculture was built on from the 2320s, and that the Maweer licensed to Bounty again in 2465, came from it.
The tending
The Voor's phrase for the Maweer, that they tend worlds as a gardener tends beds, is literal. The report calls the practice the tending. Every world the Maweer hold was made or remade by them. A world is begun from its seas: the Maweer seed an ocean, then its shores, then its land, and keep it for centuries until it can keep itself. The oldest of their worlds have been tended for longer than human civilisation has existed. Each world is kept by a body of keepers, Maweer who give their lives to its seas, soils, weather and life.
The tending explains the Maweer's closed frontier. A tended world is fragile for its first thousand years, and a ship from another world carries life that has not been tended. The Maweer admit no foreign ship to their worlds because a foreign ship could undo, in a season, work of centuries. The report records that the xenologists of 2482 spent forty days in quarantine in orbit before they were allowed to land, and wore sealed suits throughout their year on the surface.
The tending also explains what the Maweer sell. Their minerals come from worlds stripped to begin the tending of others. Their fabrics, instruments and foods come from worlds that have been kept for a long time. The Institute's analysts described the Maweer's goods in the 2320s as made to be beautiful by a people who have had ten thousand years to decide what that means.
Society
Worlds and keepers
The Maweer have no single government that the report could describe. Each world is governed by its keepers, who settle what the world needs and who may live on it. The worlds coordinate their fleets, their frontier and their trade through a council of the keepers of every world that meets, on the report's account, about once a century, and through standing bodies that act between its meetings. The report did not learn where the council meets.
Trade-masters
The trade-masters are the only Maweer office other species knew before 2468. They led the trading fleets, dealt with the Voor court through envoys the Voor did not discuss, offered the field licence of 2324, and spoke for the Maweer at Fejantris in 2459. The report describes them as a standing body of the council, the Maweer who deal with what is not tended. A trade-master is chosen late in life, after centuries as a keeper, and serves until death. The Maweer sent their messages to other species by a single ship, delivered at Nomotar, and the ship left without trading.
Belief
The Maweer have no gods that the report could find. Their ethic is the tending itself: a world is held in trust for those who will live on it after the keepers, and the measure of a life is what it leaves kept. The report records that the Maweer regard war as the opposite of tending, and fight only to keep what they hold.
Technology
The Maweer's technology is older than the Voor's. Their field generators were the best any species had sold, and the Maweer-pattern field, licensed to the federation on 18 August 2324, was fitted to human ships from 2326. It covered a hull of 500 metres at a cost a cruiser could bear and a hull of 1,000 at a cost a battleship could bear, and no more. Their fields held the Fevarian monoliths' ancient weapons longer than any Voor field held anything. Their ships were faster than the Khan's raiders and jumped further than the Republic's. In 2474 the Maweer sold the Republic their drive, which jumped twenty light years, under a licence whose terms the Institute's negotiators spent two years on and which the Maweer honoured in full. The Magellan Consortium built the Republic's fifth-generation drive in 2499 from that drive and the geometry read from a Fevarian monolith.
History
Before contact
The report dates the Maweer's first tended world beyond Saelith to about nine thousand years before 2484, and their first jump-capable ships to about six thousand. For centuries before the Red Khanate the Maweer's frontiers were raided by Fevarian clans, one clan at a time, and their doctrine was built against such raids: hold each system, fall back to the next, and never go beyond what is held. They made contact with the Voor about three centuries before 2318, and the Voor frontier became their other border. The Voor did not ask the Maweer for anything. The Council's highest welcome, a rank of 10,000 Legionaries, was given twice to Maweer envoys before 2318. The Maweer kept envoys at the Voor court, and their frontier with the Voor was, the Confederacy's civil leaders implied in 2318, the reason the Legion had kept building after the Fevarian wars.
The trade with humanity, 2321 to 2328
The Maweer watched the Voor-human trade at Cirban for two years through their envoys at the Voor court. On 20 June 2321 a fleet of eleven Maweer ships arrived at Nomotar's edge from Myrum, having crossed Voor space under a transit licence the High Council had granted and the High Command had opposed. It traded for three weeks with the federation's Exchange officers and left. It came back in 2322, 2323 and every year after with more ships. Human envoys who asked to travel with the fleets were refused with courtesy.
The Maweer sold three things. Minerals, of kinds the federation's chemists had not catalogued, made the Anibesa yards' hull composites and the Fortaleza yard's driver rails. Consumer goods, fabrics, instruments and foods, found a human market at once. From 2324 they sold field technology. In March 2324 the fleet's trade-master offered a licence to build the Maweer field, for a price in food, human manufactures and a share of the Gulf's concession revenue. President Okafor signed it on 18 August 2324 over the Voor's protest. The High Command won the argument that followed in the Council, and the ban of 1 January 2328 on human goods in Voor space cut the Maweer trade off.
The Voor War, 2333 to 2341
On 19 July 2333 a Maweer fleet of nine freighters and two escorts arrived at Myrum bound for Nomotar under no Voor licence. A Legion patrol stopped it, and the fleet charged its coils for four days under the patrol's guns and jumped for Nomotar on 24 July. The patrol followed, and the fight with the federation's Battle Squadron Papa at Nomotar on 28 July led to the Voor declaration of war. The Maweer's view, which their trade-master gave the Nomotar station afterwards, was that the transit right of 2321 had been granted to the Maweer and not to the federation, that the ban of 2328 covered human goods and not Maweer ships, and that the Caretakers went where they liked. The fleet traded at Nomotar for two weeks and left.
Through the war Maweer fleets sat on the Maweer frontier opposite the Legion's twenty best hearths, for six years, without crossing and without a word. The federation learned of it in 2341 and has never known whether the Maweer meant to pin the Legion or had come to watch. The Treaty of Ximpok of 2341 guaranteed the Maweer's transit through Myrum to Nomotar, at the Maweer's own proposal made through the Voor court. Their fleets used the route again from March 2341 and every year for seventy years, and said nothing about the war or the frontier.
The Red Khanate, 2410 to 2417
The Maweer paid for the Ka-Dur league's fleet when the Red Khan attacked it, and the Ka-Dur held from 2410 to 2413. In the spring of 2413 the Khan struck the Maweer's southern frontier through the Ka-Dur systems, with 120 monoliths and the tributary fleets of the Dwaii and the Ka-Dur. The Maweer's frontier fleets fought well. They held each system until it could not be held and fell back to the next, and they did not counter-attack. Their doctrine had no answer to two hundred clans that stood and fought when struck. The campaign cost the Khan twenty monoliths and a third of his tributary fleets, on the Voor's estimate, and it was the only campaign of the crisis in which he lost ships in numbers.
The frontier marches fell over four years. The Maweer lost eleven systems, their southern fleets and a population they would not give. In 2416 a Maweer world beyond the marches refused submission, and the Khan burned it, the first world he burned. The same year a single Maweer ship delivered at Nomotar the only message the Maweer sent the Republic during the campaign: the frontier was closing, the Myrum route would carry no Maweer fleet until it reopened, and the Republic should look to its own. In 2417 the Maweer sealed their frontier, withdrew their fleets to their core and stopped their trade with every other species.
The return, 2447 to 2460
The Maweer reopened their frontier in 2447 to fight the Khanate, after the Khan's defeat at Sol. Their fleets retook the eleven marches between 2447 and 2449 and held the Veil's northern approaches from then on. In March 2455 the Maweer's trade-masters and the Republic's foreign affairs committee signed an agreement at Nomotar, the first the two had ever signed. It gave the Republic's fleet passage through the marches and the Maweer's charts, gave the Maweer the Republic's fields and the Retribution class's projector pattern, and bound each to fight under its own command and share the other's targets.
The Maweer's fleets met the Retribution Fleet at Fejantris on 2 June 2455 and hunted the monoliths of the marches with it for nine months. Maweer pickets, which read the dust better than the Republic's, found the monoliths and Maweer fleets fixed them in their wells, and the Retributions broke them. The last fell at the march the Republic's histories render as Kaldreth on 9 March 2456. The peoples of the marches were the Maweer's own to free, and the Republic's fleet did not land on a Maweer world. The Maweer fought beside the Republic on to the Dwaii and the Ka-Dur. The Republic's histories record that the Maweer's fleets were the war's best-handled, that they fought more cautiously than the Republic's, and that no Maweer officer was named to a Republic officer in three years.
On 20 February 2459 the Maweer proposed the peace conference, by the single ship they sent for everything. It would be held at Fejantris, in Maweer space, because the Maweer would not sit on a Republic world, the Republic would not sit on a Voor one, and no one would sit in the Veil. The Maweer had never hosted anyone. They built a station for the conference at Fejantris's Pillai radius in four months, and the Conference of Great Promise sat there for 111 days, from 12 September 2459 to 1 January 2460. Three trade-masters spoke for the Maweer. In the occupation zones of 2460 the Maweer held the marches, with a number of Fevarians in their custody that they did not give.
The Maweer opening, 2460 to 2510
The Maweer attended the Fevarian Accords of 2466 and did not sign them. The Accords named them an associate, whose transit, charts and warning the parties would receive and whose fleets the parties would not command. Through the Reconstruction they opened step by step, and the Republic's histories call the period the Maweer opening.
- 2465: the Maweer licensed their ocean stock to Bounty again.
- 2468: they accepted a Republic trade mission at Fejantris, the first non-Maweer delegation to reside in Maweer space.
- 2470: they sent a trade mission to Nomotar under a trade-master whose name they gave in their notation, the first Maweer name the Republic had been given.
- 2474: they sold the Republic their twenty-light-year drive.
- 2482: they admitted the Institute's xenologists to one Maweer world for a year.
- 2488: they named an officer to the Accords' Joint Command at Haedius as the Accords' associate, the first Maweer officer any party had been given a name for.
They did not join the direction of the Repatriation Authority, give their population, or allow a Republic warship into a Maweer system except by the marches' road. The Maweer, on the Institute's one account, call the period nothing.
Relations with other species
The Voor
The Voor met the Maweer three centuries before humanity and treated them with a reserve the human mission of 2318 noticed at once. The Voor would not discuss the Maweer frontier in detail, and their manner made Rahal's party understand that the Maweer were not a people the Voor asked things of. The two peoples' frontier fleets watched each other for centuries without a recorded war. The report records the Maweer view of the Voor as respectful and wary: a people who had made themselves into a weapon against the Fevarians and had not found a way to stop.
Humanity
The Maweer sold humanity the field that made its war with the Voor possible, guaranteed their own transit through the war's settlement and left humanity to its own defence in 2416. They fought beside the Republic from 2455, hosted its peace and opened to it, slowly, over the following fifty years. The Maweer are the only species that has fought beside the Republic without signing an alliance with it.
The Fevarians
The Maweer fought Fevarian raiders for centuries before the Red Khanate, and the Khanate's war cost them eleven systems and a burned world. They took part in the hunt of 2455 to 2456 and in the peace of Fejantris, which excluded the Acolytes, and they hold the Veil's northern approaches under the Accords.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.2 "The Birth of Interstellar Trade", §8.3 "The Binami and Saolea Sectors" and §8.7 "The Ciriban Incident"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.4 "Interstellar Blitzkrieg" and §9.7 "Solar Ascendant: The Voor Surrender"
- Solar Eternal, Part XI, §11.2 "The Maweer Campaign"
- Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.5 "The Hunt: The Marches, the Dwaii and the Ka-Dur", §14.6 "Broken Giant" and §14.7 "Conference of Great Promise: The Fejantris Peace"
- Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.3 "The Fevarian Accords", §15.7 "The Confederacy, the Maweer and the Veil's Edge" and §15.9 "The Hulk, the Fifth Drive and the Mardak Cluster"