"A proud, structured, ancient civilisation, whose every institution has been built to survive a war."Halima Rahal, final dispatch from Hiverion, read to both houses on 3 July 2318
The Voor are a spacefaring species native to Hiverion, a cold steppe world of 1.3 gravities in the Exedor system. They are the people of the Voor Confederacy, a union of fourteen worlds in 2318, and the first spacefaring species humanity met, when the survey cruiser Lorni Indur met the survey ship Grissom at Cirban on 21 September 2317.
The Voor stand two metres and more, are half again as heavy as a human, and carry a plating of dark exoskeleton along the spine and the outer arms. They count in base eight and live for 120 of Hiverion's years. Every Voor serves in the Voor Legion, which is at once the Confederacy's military, a caste, a school and a church. The Voor's own word for the Legion is the word they use for peace, which human linguists render "the order".
Voor society was shaped by the Fevarian wars of about 1,100 years before contact, in which Fevarian raiding clans burned two Voor worlds and the survivors founded the Legion. The Voor fought humanity in the Voor War of 2333 to 2341, were made tributary by the Red Khanate from 2427, and restored their Confederacy in 2452.
Name
The Lorni Indur gave its people's name in the shared notation on 12 October 2317 as Voor, and the human record has used it since. In the Voor language the word means the gathered people, all the clans together, and it is used only in the plural. A single Voor is named by clan and by rank, never as "a Voor", and the Institute of Xenology's linguists note that the singular in human usage struck the High Council's envoys in 2318 as faintly ridiculous.
Biology
Anatomy
The Voor stand two metres and more and are heavier than a human by half again. Along the spine and the outer arms they carry a plating of dark exoskeleton, which the physician of the 2318 mission to Hiverion, after a week's study, called neither armour nor bone but a third thing that grew as both. A Voor hand has four fingers and a thumb. The plating grows through life in overlapping ridges, darkens with age, and is thickest across the shoulders. It is shed and regrown in patches after injury, and an old Voor's back carries the record of every wound in the pattern of its ridges. The plating is grown, not worn, and the Voor do not decorate it; seals and rank are worn on cloth and metal over it.
The Voor skeleton is built for Hiverion's 1.3 gravities, with heavy limbs, a broad chest and a short neck. The Voor are slower than humans over a short distance and much stronger, and in human gravity they move with an ease the Institute's physicians at first mistook for languor.
Senses and voice
The Voor see in the same band of light as humans and breathe an atmosphere a human can breathe with effort. They speak in a register a human can hear but cannot reproduce. Their hearing reaches far below a human's, and Voor speech carries meaning in low tones that human ears catch as a hum under the words. The pidgin the Institute's linguists built with the Voor in 2318 lifted those tones into ranges both species could hear and say.
Lifespan and life stages
The Voor live, on the High Council's own figures, for 120 of Hiverion's years. A Hiverion year is 1.1 Earth years, so a Voor lifespan is about 132 Earth years. A Voor's life is divided by the Legion. The first thirty years are childhood and schooling. Service begins at the end of the thirtieth year and runs for twenty years for the ordinary Voor, and for eighty for the hereditary formations whose families live aboard the hearths. A Voor who has served is, for the rest of life, a Legionary, addressed by rank and expected to answer a summons.
Reproduction and family
The Voor have two sexes and bear live young after a pregnancy of about fourteen months. A Voor rarely has more than two children, and a child is raised in its clan's household rather than by its parents alone. Both sexes serve in the Legion and hold every rank. A Voor household is large: three or four generations of a clan's line under one roof, governed by its eldest Legionary.
Diet
The Voor are omnivores. Their staple diet is the meat and milk of the grazing herds of Hiverion's steppe and the hardy grains of its river valleys, and the colonies have raised the same herds and grains on every world the Voor settled. Voor cooking is plain, and fresh food is a mark of standing.
History
The steppe clans
The Voor emerged on Hiverion's steppe as herders, moving with their animals between summer and winter grazing in clans of a few thousand. Each clan was known by its seal, a mark cut into stone, wood and later metal that stood for the clan's name, its herds and its dead. Clans met in great assemblies to settle grazing, marriages and feuds, and the assembly's decision bound every clan that sat in it.
The Voor settled late. Their first cities grew around the assembly grounds, where clans built in stone to hold their seals and their dead, and the cities rose upward because the land around them was pasture that no clan would give up. The towers of two kilometres that rise from Hiverion's plains are the descendants of those first stone halls.
The six worlds
Before the Fevarian wars the Voor held six worlds, each with its own government and its own navy, with no common cause between them. The Voor's early settlement of other worlds followed the clans: a clan or a group of clans took a world, carried its seals there and governed it by its own assembly. The six worlds traded, quarrelled and on two occasions fought, but they had no common law and no common fleet.
The Fevarian wars
The Voor Legion was formed, on the Confederacy's own calendar, about 1,100 years before contact, when the clans of the Fevarians came out of the region the Voor call the Veil. The Fevarians were a nomadic species, clans of a few million each living in fleets between stars, raiding worlds for what they could not make and moving on. They burned two of the six Voor worlds, the first colony at Ladiom and a world in the Gulf whose name the Voor no longer use. The four that survived pooled their fleets under a single command and called it the Legion.
The Legion's first century was the Fevarian wars. The Voor fought the clans between stars, which meant building ships that could live between stars as the clans did. The first hearth was grown at Hiverion 900 years before contact: a ship that carried a Legion formation and its families and could hunt for a decade. Over a century of campaigns the Legion drove the clans out of the Gulf and beyond the Veil. Every Voor institution dates from that war.
The Confederacy
The four surviving worlds became the Voor Confederacy when the war ended. They secured the Gulf, settled it, and expanded into every system they could reach that did not belong to the Maweer. The Voor called the expansion civilising, the bringing of order to a disorderly galaxy. Each new colony was founded by a hearth that arrived, landed its 20,000 and stayed in orbit for a generation. By 2318 the Confederacy held fourteen worlds and 30 billion Voor. The Maweer, whom the Voor call the Caretakers, made contact three centuries before humanity and became the Confederacy's other frontier.
Contact with humanity
The survey cruiser Lorni Indur met the Grissom at Cirban on 21 September 2317. The Voor opened with the prime numbers and led the exchange through a procedure they had used with other species before. A human mission under Halima Rahal reached Hiverion on 30 April 2318, was received by a rank of 10,000 Legionaries on the Legion's field, and signed the Cirban Protocol on 11 June 2318.
The Voor War
Relations broke down over the 2320s, and the Confederacy declared war on the United Nations of Earth on 7 August 2333. The Legion's Haedus group was destroyed at the Battle of the Mog in 2334, Hiverion was besieged from 2338, and the High Council surrendered in the Krakre on Hiverion on 21 December 2340. The Legion lost 25 of its 52 hearths. The Treaty of Ximpok capped the Legion's hearths, barred it from rebuilding for fifty years and set an inspectorate over it, and the Haedus system became a territory of the Republic in 2343.
The Red Khanate
The Red Khanate of the Fevarian Khan Thurva attacked the Confederacy in the 2420s. Vur Duri at Aethos fell on 14 June 2422, with 700 million Voor dead and 300 million enslaved, and Hiverion fell on 16 August 2427. The Confederacy's worlds were tributary for twenty-five years, their 26 billion people put to the Khanate's yards, its swarms and its slave levies, and the Khan held court in the Kindling at Hiverion. Indata Mog's Voor held the planet's ancient tunnels against the Khanate from 2428 until the Republic's fleet came in 2451.
When the Republic's fleet reached the Voor worlds between 2451 and 2453, the Voor of every world rose against their garrisons. On Hiverion 800 million Voor rose on the day of the landing, 2 October 2451. The Institute estimates that the Voor killed 30 million Fevarians on the tributary worlds' surfaces and orbitals between 2451 and 2453. The Voor lost 10 billion people to the Khanate.
Restoration
The Confederacy was restored at Hiverion on 1 January 2453, with eight worlds and 17 billion people, no High Command and a refounded Legion, under a presiding member from the Haedus Territory who had held Indata Mog's tunnels for twenty-three years. The Republic released it from the Treaty of Ximpok's military terms on 1 February 2452.
Society
Clans and households
The clan remains the unit of Voor life. Every Voor belongs to a clan by birth, carries its seal and is buried under it. A clan holds land, herds, ships and seats in its world's assembly, and its household halls are the oldest buildings in any Voor city. Clans rank by age and by the Legion service of their members, and the precedence of clans at an assembly is fixed by a roll kept at Hiverion since the Fevarian wars.
Service and citizenship
Every Voor serves. A Voor who has not served cannot hold civil office, own a ship or sit in the Council. The Legion's academies at Hiverion educate the Confederacy's engineers, administrators and physicians as well as its officers. Schooling begins in the clan household and passes at the age of twelve to the Legion's schools, where children of every clan are taught together, drilled together and judged by the same examinations. A Voor's place in adult life follows the record the schools and the Legion keep, and the record is read at every appointment the Voor ever seeks.
A Voor enters service with the year's cohort and keeps its name for life. Service is hard by design. The Legion's training years are spent on the steppe, in the cold, on short rations, and the Voor regard a Legionary's endurance as the measure of the clan that raised them.
The hearths
The hereditary formations of the Legion live aboard the hearths with their families. A hearth of five kilometres carries about 120,000 Voor: the ship's own crew, a Legion formation of 20,000 with its landers and armour, the crews of forty embarked escorts, and the families of all of them. The Voor do not separate the Legion from the people it is drawn from. A hearth is built as a household. Its decks are laid out in rings around a central hall where its commanders sit and where its fire burns, and its families live in the inner decks under the heaviest part of the hull. Each hearth carries its own seal and its own dead, and Voor of a hearth's line count their descent from the ship as a clan does from its founder.
Government
The High Council of the fourteen worlds' delegations sits at Hiverion and governs trade, settlement, law and its own budget. The High Command sits in the Council, holds a veto on any matter that touches the Confederacy's safety, and defines what touches it. On the Institute's count of the Voor court's record from 2320 to 2328, the High Command used the veto eleven times. The Council descends from the assemblies of the steppe clans, and it still decides by the old rule that a decision taken in assembly binds every delegation that sat in it. Only served Voor may sit, and a delegation's precedence follows the seniority of its world.
Court and ceremony
Voor public life is conducted through ceremony. The High Council's hall at Hiverion keeps a fixed order of precedence for every clan, world, rank and office, and every audience, petition and reception follows a set form. Titles are long and exact. A General of the High Command is named by clan, by rank, by command and by the hearth that founded the General's line, and the human habit of shortening Voor names to two words, as in the Navy's Volar Vex, was regarded in the Council as a mark of human haste.
The reception given to the human mission on 2 May 2318, a rank of 10,000 Legionaries on the Legion's field between the landing site and the Council's hall, was the Council's highest form of welcome for an envoy of a foreign power. The Institute later recorded that it had been given only twice before, both times to the Maweer.
Religion
The Legion's rites, which the Institute's observers were allowed to see once, mark the Voor year. Voor belief centres on two things: the sky and the dead. The Voor word for the sky is also their word for what endures, and the steppe clans held that the sky watched over the herds and the clans beneath it and judged them. The dead of a clan are kept with the living. Their names are cut into the clan's seal-stones, and every household and every hearth keeps a fire for them.
The Legion joins the two. Its dead are honoured above all others, and the Legion's rites at the turn of the Voor year read the names of every Legionary who died in service since the last. The order the Legion keeps is understood as the right relation between the sky, the dead and the living: when the Confederacy is safe the dead are honoured, the clans are fed and the sky has nothing to judge. The Voor have no gods and no priests apart from the Legion. A hearth's fire is a household fire, and its name, The Hearth That Keeps the Order at the Threshold and the like, is a statement of what its crew and families owe their dead.
Language and writing
The Voor count in base eight. At first contact the Lorni Indur transmitted the prime numbers and the Grissom's crew answered in kind. By the end of the first week the two ships shared a notation for physical constants. From the third week of the 2318 talks the two sides spoke a pidgin the Institute's linguists and the Voor's built between them.
Written Voor descends from the clan seals. Its oldest signs are seals that came to stand for words, and the formal script still writes the names of clans, worlds and hearths as seals. Ordinary writing uses groups of dots in base eight for numbers and a cursive developed from the seals for everything else. Coins and banners carry a band of script around their rims.
Names
A Voor personal name is given by the household and is followed by the clan's name. Navy records use these two, as in Volar Vex and Ahnar Varn, though in Voor use they are followed by rank, command and line. Hearths and other great ships are named with long epithets, which the Institute renders literally: The Hearth That Keeps the Order at the Threshold, The Hearth of the Long Watch Over Green Fields. The Navy gave hearths short reporting names for use in signals.
Culture
Architecture
Voor cities rise from the plains in towers of two kilometres, because the Voor build up and not out. From orbit, Hiverion's surface is dominated by the Legion's grounds: fortresses, yards and drill fields on a scale that made the human mission's Navy observer, Captain Rawiri Smith, write that the whole Unified Solar Marine Corps could have paraded on the field outside the capital and been lost in a corner of it. The Voor grow their hearths rather than build them. A Voor city is laid out as a camp: the towers of the clans around an assembly ground, the Legion's grounds on the side that faces the frontier, and open pasture beyond.
Banners and seals
Voor banners are round. The Confederacy's banner, The Hearth, shows a bone-coloured world split by the Legion's violet spine, burning at both ends, inside a double ring, on Legion purple under a rim of gold with a band of script. The Legion carries the same banner with bone in place of gold, and every hearth flies its own, rimmed in lilac. Clans, worlds and hearths each have a seal, and the seals of the fourteen worlds are cut around the Council's own in the High Council's hall.
Food and trade
The Cirban Protocol's trading station was built so that the Confederacy's civil factions could sell engineering and buy what they wanted most, which was food. The demand came from the civil factions' households, not from want: human fruit, spices, coffee and sugar were new to Voor tables and became a fashion in Hiverion's great clan halls within a decade. By the late 2320s a gift of human food was a mark of standing in the Council, and Bounty's aquaculture, farmed with Voor-licensed ocean techniques, sold its rarest crops to the Voor at the Cirban Exchange. The trade ban of 2328 cut the fashion off and left the civil factions, who had argued for trade with humanity, with nothing to show for it.
Relations with other species
The Voor had met other minds before humanity and had a method for it, which they followed at Cirban in 2317. They had fought the Fevarians. They described a species of the Gulf's inner systems that had been the Fevarians' prey before the Voor and that no longer existed. They knew the ruins of the Mardak Vol and called their builders the Wayfinders. They described the Maweer as the Caretakers, an empire older and larger than the Confederacy that tended worlds as a gardener tends beds, and did not ask the Maweer for anything. Their view of other species, which Rahal reported in 2318, was shaped by the Fevarian wars: other peoples were to be ordered, or they would order the Voor.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.7 "The Voor Dreadnought"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.3 "The Binami and Saolea Sectors"
- Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.3 "The Voor Worlds"