The Sung

by Randy McDonald

Notes on the Sung-Xiang Encounter (DM+4 123)

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This document goes into more detail on the Sung than Canon provides. Taken from a now-abandoned variant setting, I've decided to share this element of the setting since it's one attempt at explaining in detail how and why the Sung got to Home of the Mother in the first place, how they incorporated the Xiang, and how the Slaver War started. In addition to the information in the books, I drew upon Deb Ziegler's articles on the Sung and Xiang, Bryn Monnery's article on the Sung's Cho-at-Soon class starship, Rob Myers' article on the Sung language, Peter Skanes and Dan Hebditch's Etranger article "Canadian Land Forces", Timothy B. Brown's article on the North American Research League, and Dan Schirren's maps of Home of the Mother and the DM +4 123 system.

Speaking notes of Adrian Landry, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Sapientological Studies of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Presented to students of Sung Civilization Pre-Stutterwarp (SAP-203) as lecture 10 (“The Sung-Xiang Encounter”) on 10 November 2299.

In order to understand the causes of the Slaver War (2252-2255), one must understand the hierarchical nature of the Sung. Contrary to the rhetoric of uninformed human observers, the fact that the Sung have a hierarchical international system (Soon-Atkacharr, literally translated, "Flight of Superiority") does not differentiate them from humans. Let's leave aside those zoological studies which demonstrate that all Earthly animals–including humans–possess strong hierarchical instincts. Even now on an Earth shortly entering the 24th century, observers distinguish between first-tier nation-states–those countries possessing stutterwarp interstellar technology and perhaps also colonies–and the remainder of the world. In the past, human governments on Earth have regularly waged wars against competing states which showed signs of destabilizing existing geopolitical hierarchies. The efforts of Germans to consolidate their own nation-state in a central Europe delineated by debatable frontiers played a critical role in triggering the three world wars of the 20th century, while Manchurian efforts to dominate the Central Asian Republic ignited the Central Asian War in the 2280s. Indeed, the colonial empires created by the first-tier states of Earth serve to magnify their Earthly power by creating offshoot societies on other worlds which further expand their power–a France without Nouvelle-Provence and its French Arm colonies, without French Africa and the Beanstalk, would never have reached its mid-23rd century apogee of power.

Where the Sung differ from humans in terms of hierarchical political organization is in the consistent way in which all nation-states– currently hegemonic or not, rising or falling–faithfully adhere to the principles of Soon-Atkacharr. The idea that one Sung nation-state which believes itself to be more capable in a complex network of cultural and technological elements has the right to challenge another Sung nation-state to the Charr-to-sah (a series of mutually agreed-upon tests or competitions designed to determine which nation-state is superior) has been accepted by the Sung in something close to its modern form since at least the 14th century. The precise ranking of Sung nation-states, inferiors being identified as Taka-soon ("lesser flight") and superiors as Kacharr-soon ("greater flight"), is also without precedent in human history. Sung and humans are enmeshed in hierarchies, but the Sung are consistently much better at accepting and following explicit hierarchical principles than humans. This may, as some sapientologists have suggested, be due to the three-dimensional spatial orientation of the Sung, who, as individuals capable of flight, must think in multiple directions. Whatever the reason, this fidelity to principles of hierarchy has marked the Sung civilization indelibly.

This has had positive effects for the Sung. Among human states, for instance, disputes over the relative positions of nation-states and blocs within the international system has regularly led to unregulated conflicts, and to devastating wars. Modern Sung has never known anything remotely similar to the world wars of the 20th century. International disputes over geographical frontiers are handled by Stark's World Council; disputes over relative ranks are handled by time-honoured codes that few states have ever sought to challenge. As well, the Soon-Atkacharr system contains within itself the seeds of equality between states. Taka-soon are obliged to obey the Kacharr-soon; the Kacharr-soon, though, are obliged to help their inferiors reach their levels through investment, and must allow those of their inferior states which have reached positions of parity to attain Tassacharr-soon (literally, "equal") status and thus independence. This effectively sets a time limit to the dominance embodied in the Soon-Atkacharr system, and allows for a relatively mobile geopolitical system in a way that traditional human systems of colonialism have not. Sung civilization on Stark is relatively uniform, with a homogeneous planetary culture and language, similar levels of economic output and technological development across the Sung homeworld; again, this has no parallels on Earth. From the Sung perspective, the main failure of the Soon-Atkacharr system is its requirement for expensive long-term investments in ensuring the homogeneity of Stark civilization at all levels, explaining the species' relatively slow technological progress over time, but Sung observers have traditionally seen this as a minor fault.

The Soon-Atkacharr system worked well for the Sung on Stark; had the Sung developed stutterwarp stardrive when Earth was a prestarfaring society and expanded into an empty Chinese Arm, it would have worked well for a Sung interstellar civilization. Where it failed, however, was when it came into contact with non-Sung. The DM+4 123 planetary system is unusual in having two garden worlds, one a planet and one a gas-giant moon; only Zeta Tucanae comes close, with its garden planet of Syuhlahm and the barren gas-giant moon of Syun. Whereas neither Zeta Tucanae world developed intelligent life, though, both DM+4 123 worlds did. DM+4 123 III–Stark–was homeworld to the Sung. DM+4 123 V a– Home of the Mother–was homeworld to the Xiang.

Sung astronomers appear to have known of the existence of Home of the Mother, as a large moon orbiting the DM+4 123 system's largest gas giant of High Wind, since time immemorial. It was not until the 15th century, however, when Sung astronomers conducted the first spectroscopic examinations of Home of the Mother, that Stark learned that Home of the Mother had a breathable atmosphere with a nitrogen-oxygen mix quite similar to that on Stark, and that temperatures on Home of the Mother, while cool, were tolerable in the moon's equatorial region. The effect of this discovery on the Sung cannot be underestimated, for it gave industrial Sung civilization a new goal to strive for, namely, that of traveling in space to visit Home of the Mother (or as the Sung still know it, Neehaatch, literally translated, "Respite from Wind"). Although we are far from having a complete survey of Sung literature in the period, much of it did focus upon the mysterious distant globe, recounting the adventures of Sung on a world depicted either as a world populated by mysterious superior beings or a globe entirely free of intelligence and open to exciting colonial adventures.

The first Sung space effort, mounted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a great effort coordinated by the dominant Sung nation-state of Sokeeha, using the equivalent of late 20th century Earth manned space flight technology. It is difficult to underestimate the magnitude of Sokeeha's achievement. The first human expeditions to Earth's neighbouring world of Mars were made with moderately advanced reaction propulsion and electronics systems not radically different from those used now. The Sokeeha interplanetary space vehicles used much more primitive technologies, barely more advanced than those used by American astronauts to reach Earth's Moon. American lunar missions took up one week between launch and return, though; Sokeeha missions took several years just to reach High Wind and its major satellite, engaging in orbital surveys of the two major worlds and High Wind's other moons, sending landers to the surface of "Respite from Wind," and returning to Stark with biological and minerological samples along with raw data. Bold as they were, these missions regularly encountered mishaps owing to technological failures. In transit to or from their destination, these mishaps tended to be fatal. In orbit of Home of the Mother, though, Sung astronauts stranded far from home had an option: They could descend to the surface of the world known to them as Respite from Wind and make their home there.

Sokeeha interplanetary vessels were primitive, but they did have large stores of material which could be used in a pinch for colonization purposes. Roughly 200 Sung astronauts settled on Home of the Mother following shipboard accidents in five decades of Sokeeha astronautics; another 250 Sung were sent to Home of the Mother as colonists equipped with what Sokeeha specialists believed would be useful goods for a colonial enterprise. By the standards of Stark and other garden worlds, Home of the Mother is cold thanks to its distance from its sun; most of the heat received by the world's surface is radiated from High Wind, and even then unglaciated areas are limited to equatorial areas on the tide-locked side. The Sung on Home of the Mother tended to concentrate on the island of Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha, located off of the eastern coast of the world's primary continent. The Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha colony had difficulty adapting to the new world, but after much suffering it began to slowly grow. For Sokeeha, the relative success of Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha was trumpeted as a sign of its general superiority over the rest of Sung civilization.

Ironically, it's at this point that Sokeeha reduced its material support for the Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha colony; regular commerce with Home of the Mother was too expensive for the Sung of the 20th century, and Sokeeha was becoming increasingly concerned by the challenges posed by the Taka-soon in computer and biomedical technologies. Sokeeha ships once regularly arrived at Home of the Mother every three years, but the frequency of their visits was reduced. At roughly the same time that Earth was savaged by the Twilight War, Sokeeha interplanetary ships simply stopped arriving at Home of the Mother, leaving the two thousand Sung of Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha utterly isolated from Sung civilization.

Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha was barely a viable settlement–the genetic diversity of the colonists was low, the lack of the necessary machinery forced Sung agriculture to revert to pre-industrial modes of production, and the colony was incapable of maintaining its roughly late 20th century level of technology without aid from Stark. Over the 21st century, the colony slowly degenerated into a pre-industrial society, with the colonial government controlling a half-dozen agricultural villages on Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha's east coast while Sung adventurers ventured deeper into Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha, even as far as Home of the Mother's main continent. It is at this time that the Sung learned of the intelligence of the Xiang. Some of the 20th century expeditions had seen individual Xiang before, of course, but few Sung explorers suspected that they were intelligent. In the mid-21st century, just before the colony's last radio transmitter failed, the news of Xiang intelligence was transmitted back to Stark. The news did surprise many Sung, but Sung attention on the homeworld had been captured by the challenges posted to Sokeeha's hegemony and Sokeeha's space technology had been drastically scaled back to focus on exploration of the inner DM+4 123 system. The Sung of Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha were left to deal with the Xiang by themselves.

The Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha Sung were of course aware of the principles of Soon-Atkacharr, but they lacked both the population base and the technological advantages needed to rule a Stone Age population of millions of Xiang dispersed across an entire planet. Although the Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha government did claim to exercise sovereign authority over the entire planet, in actual fact the only influence of Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha Sung over the Xiang was the creation of a Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha-centered trading network, exchanging edible plants from Stark and Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha-manufactured crafts (particularly ones made out of metal) for information about Home of the Mother's landmasses. Sung and Xiang psychologies were too divergent for there to be more in-depth cultural exchanges, and contemporary records seem to suggest that the two species felt uncomfortable around one another. (That one of the Xiang's major sources of food were creatures which looked uncannily like half-meter miniature versions of the Sung did nothing to make the latter feel comfortable.) Traders and explorers aside, the Sung remained concentrated in their eastern Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha colony, leaving the rest of the world to the Xiang.

By the beginning of the 22nd century, physical contact between Stark and Home of the Mother was resumed. After a tumultuous technological revolution that brought Stark up to the technological level of mid-21st century Earth, Sokeeha experienced a resurgence and resumed its position as the dominant Sung nation-state. For the first time in a century, a relatively expansive space policy had become a relatively inexpensive possibility. Sung space technologies had advanced considerably, as Sokeeha interplanetary ships moved away from bulky hydrogen-oxygen and nuclear fission rockets towards more efficient ion-drive and solar sail designs. Further, economic growth on Stark made financing an ambitious interplanetary program of exploration, colonization, and trade affordable. The second Sung interplanetary age can be said to have begun in the last decade of the 21st century with the establishment of permanent Sokeeha research outposts on the neighbouring planets of Enchantment and Vivid and with the beginning of prospecting operations in the DM+4 123 system's asteroid belt. To romantics, though, the second Sung interplanetary age really began when a Sokeeha courier arrived in orbit above Home of the Mother in 2108 and dispatched a lander to Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha to formally recontact the lost Sung.

Over the 22nd century, Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha and Home of the Mother were gradually incorporated into Sung interplanetary civilization. Neither the colony nor the world received a particularly high priority, owing to Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha's small size and Home of the Mother's lack of obvious resources. The research outposts on the worlds of the inner DM+4 123 system had a higher priority for the Sung, while the mining outposts established in the asteroid belt were more profitable. Slowly but surely, though, the nation-state of Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha was drawn back into the Soon-Atkacharr system, the speed of its reintegration limited only by the expense of the courier vessels which brought high technology to Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha and took away Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha Sung to be educated on Stark and Xiang artworks to be treasured by Stark collectors. The Xiang were neglected by the Sokeeha hegemony, mainly because they were seen as incomprehensible and vaguely repellent.

This changed as the Sung nation-state of Akcheektoon became an increasingly credible challenger. Sokeeha pioneered the technologies of the second Sung interplanetary age at great cost; Akcheektoon was able to implement these technologies cheaply. For instance, although Sokeeha researchers developed the theory behind solar power satellites and deployed prototypes, it was Akcheektoon corporations which built them on a large scale, capturing control of Stark's global energy market. Similarly, it was Akcheektoon corporations interested in establishing a foothold in the outer system of DM+4 123 which were responsible for dispatching a survey vessel to Home of the Mother, to deploy teams of planetologists in concert with modern Sung orbiter survey satellites in an effort to discover usable natural resources.

The Akcheektoon surveyors found, in the 2160s, large amounts of mineral resources on Home of the Mother–including some of the largest deposits of titanium and iron ore found on any world. Flush with their success, their employing corporations, with the full support of the Akcheektoon government, produced plans to use these mineral resources and the biological resources of Home of the Mother to build a local network of orbital outposts and colonies similar to Earth’s L-5 and the Sung’s own developments in their homeworld. These colonies could support further development in the outer DM +4 123 system, By the mid-22nd century, Sung interplanetary civilization had entered an expansionistic colonial phase similar to that of 21st century human interplanetary civilization, with two critical exceptions: Firstly, the Sung were far from developing stutterwarp drive; and, secondly, whereas 21st century humans had no particularly desirable targets for colonization and exploitation, the Sung had Home of the Mother. Full-scale colonization of that world was unlikely, given the relatively un-Starklike conditions on that gas giant moon; exploitation, though, was quite probable, and indeed rapidly began, using Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha Sung workers and Akcheektoon Sung managers. The Xiang remained neglected, however, simply because the rising Akcheektoon and broader Sung civilization had not yet how to integrate the Xiang into Sung civilization.

Sokeeha lost its position of dominance in 2189; the following year, the Stark World Council ratified Akcheektoon’s ascension to top position. Under Akcheektoon, the exploitation of the DM +4 123 planetary system accelerated markedly as orbital habitats were pieced together in orbits around High Wind and Home of the Mother using the abundant resources of the Xiang homeworld. In the 2210s, the Sung began to use lasers, based in orbits around their sun, to drive solar-sail craft on long-range missions including the first Sung interstellar missions, sublight unmanned probes dispatched to DM+1 4774 and Van Maanen’s Star. Under the “Akcheektoon Peace,” Sung civilization reached its apex of independent development.

It is at this high point that the Xiang were first enslaved. The Sung did not–and do not–think of this as enslavement, mind. They saw it as incorporating the Xiang within their system of Soon-Atkacharr. Continuing to exclude them from Soon-Atkacharr, the Sung came to believe, would imply that they believed the Xiang were incapable of existing in Sung civilization, that they believed that the Xiang were animals. It was thus necessary to incorporate the Xiang into Sung civilization, if even at the lowest levels. The Xiang, the Akcheektoon decided, would be miners, contributing vital resources to promote the furtherance of Sung civilization. The Sung were quite aware that Xiang biology, and Xiang psychology, was quite different from their own. How could they fail to be, when the two species evolved on different worlds and were profoundly different at the basic chromosomal level? If a human had come up to a Sung, though, and asked whether or not these fundamental differences meant that the Xiang could never be assimilated into Sung civilization, never brought up to Tassacharr-soon status, the Sung would have been distressed. Again, material on this is limited so we cannot make any definitive statements, but the Sung simply do not appear to have made this connection. If they did, though, they would have realized that by incorporating the Xiang–then as now a Stone Age species–into their civilization at the lowest levels, without any prospects of upward mobility, they would have created a hereditary class of slaves.

Regardless of these moral considerations, slowly through promises of payment in exotic foodstuffs and crafts as well as through various forms of coercion, the scattered Xiang populations were concentrated around the mining districts on their homeworld. Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha Sung, mostly brought up to speed with the mainstream of Sung civilization, were no longer willing to be miners; instead, they preferred to emigrate away from their backwater world, to the High Wind habitats and Stark. Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha remained a sovereign Sung nation-state, but it was a declining one; inexpensive Xiang labour discouraged the growth of expensive and demanding Sung populations so far from Stark. The racially stratified social system on Home of the Mother was unjust, and did make the Xiang unhappy; it could have endured, however, for so long as Sung civilization remained unchallenged.

This would not happen, since the humans were steadily approaching the DM+4 123 system with their superluminal stutterwarp. The Manchurians took the leading, founding one outpost at Van Maanen’s Star in 2245 and soon afterwards another at DM+1 4774, just 6.6 light years away from the Sung home system. Long-range astrometric studies of the DM+4 123 system conducted from Sol system led the Manchurians to expect the existence of the gas giants of High Wind and Danger Wind, and suspect the possible existence of a garden world in DM+4 123's life zone. What the crew of Manchurian survey vessel Zhongwei did not expect to find, however, upon their arrival in the DM+4 123 system on 2 December 2248 arrival, was a highly advanced spacefaring alien civilization. (The Sung, for their part, knew of the existence of Jupiter and Saturn in Sol system thanks to their own astrometric studies, but they had no knowledge of Earth and Tirane, much less human civilization.)

The Manchurians saw in the Sung an excellent business opportunity, and were quick to begin trading them outdate human technologies unrelated to stutterwarp. The Canadians, searching for colony worlds in this region of the Chinese Arm, were quick to follow suit. Aware that the Sung were quite advanced in the biological sciences, Captain Émile Laforest of the Canadian Emilion Gheni-class survey ship Cartier approached the Akcheektoon and was directed to go to High Wind, where the more advanced Sung life-support systems could be purchased. On arrival, as a matter of course the Cartier examined the unique world of Home of the Mother, and discovered the existence of the Xiang.

The consequent Slaver War, beginning in 2252 and ending in 2255, was not quite as one-sided as self-congratulatory human historians would like to believe. To be certain, the overwhelming human advantage of the stutterwarp drive gave human space vehicles an unmatched advantage over the Sung. Akcheektoon military spacecraft were armed, but the “Akcheektoon Peace” meant that they were untested against even other Sung ion-drive or light-sail craft. Against human stutterwarp craft, with stutterwarp velocities far in excess of what Sung reaction drives could achieve, they were helpless. (The rumour that all Sung interplanetary craft, Akcheektoon or otherwise, either returned to base or disarmed in flight after the first dozen one-sided battles is true.) Ground fighting on Home of the Mother, as Manchurian and Canadian ground units destroyed Sung bases and forced labour camps, was more two-sided, not least because the Sung could attack in three dimensions, from above. Still, the overwhelming technological superiority of Manchurian and Canadian forces told in the end.

In the meantime, the intrusion of clearly superior human forces into the DM+4 123 system almost entirely unopposed, and their subsequent victories in space and on the ground against the Akcheektoon, destabilized the entire Soon-Atkacharr system. If, as many Sung observers pointed out with mixed horror and glee, human forces operating almost 72 light years from their homeworld could handily defeat the most advanced Sung nation-state in the Sung’s own planetary system, the Akcheektoon claim of general superiority was rather spectacularly disproved. Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha was the first Sung nation-state to defect to the humans, soon followed by the dependent habitats elsewhere in orbit around High Wind. The construction of a broader anti-Akcheektoon alliance, with the help of Sung in the High Wind system, took somewhat longer, but by 2255 the Akcheektoon were forced to petition for peace. It is interesting to note that Sung historians have generally called what humans call the “Slaver War” the “War Against the Akcheektoon,” with some justice since the provisions that eliminated the Akcheektoon presence on Home of the Mother were but one component of many which were aimed at redistributing the balance of astropolitical power in Sung civilization, with the Manchurian and Canadian humans now on top.

In the half-century since the Slaver War, interactions between the Sung and the Xiang have dropped off considerably. Some of the mines opened by the Akcheektoon on Home of the Mother remain intact and worked by Xiang; these Xiang, however, are free workers who are paid substantial wages, while as part of their reparations to the Xiang Akcheektoon has promised to repair the ecological damage caused by the mines.Koorreeh-Seetcha-Akha remains a Sung nation-state, but it continues to decline as its Sung population emigrates offworld, to the High Wind habitats and elsewhere in the DM+4 123 system. The North American Research League has recently argued that some Xiang remain slaves, taken away from their homeworld by the Akcheektoon before the Slaver War and since made to labour in Akcheektoon asteroid-belt mines, but these rumours are as yet unconfirmed. The intentions of the Sung towards the Xiang, and Home of the Mother, remain open; so long as Soon-Atkacharr survives, any Sung nation-state is unlikely to challenge the protectorate over the Xiang on their homeworld. When considering the vast transformations of the Sung-Xiang relationship over the past three centuries, however, one must always remember that this history is full of sudden reversals.