It's finished! The reason it took so long is that I was writing a story about it. There was much to explain!
I very much hope you like my work (I hope it's legible in this wide forum format too!). Don't hesitate to let me know how it makes you feel; I'm hungry for feedback after spending over 30h on this!
Many thanks to Alyss for proofreading the English text. You can read the original French version here. Also, you may find the SVG version on the DeviantArt page for the map.
The Conspiracy
They were promised unexplored lands. Throw those two words into a hungry country, add promises of subsidies, and your audience is primed. Then sell the dream, and voilà: you have just sold a planet to the poorest part of your nation.
Gandobhar was indeed the most promising world, but not for the reasons it was portrayed. Suddenly popping up on the radar, it soon proved to be habitable and potentially rich in natural resources. Much closer in proximity to Earth than the other candidates, it was the missing piece of the space exploration puzzle, and the intergovernmental community had rushed at the opportunity to promote it.
The social, moral and scientific conundrum had only really begun twenty-four years earlier, when nuclear fusion applications in space exploration had finally been mastered. While it was being perfected, the technological singularity was making its way into popular morality, giving rise to debates of which no one had yet thought; among them: Minority Representation. Who were the settlers to be?
It was decided that the dominant groups would keep Earth for themselves, which was theirs and whose responsibility it was to keep it in good condition. As for the minority groups, they "won" the right to inhabit the new world, thereby saving their heritage otherwise doomed to disappear. None of this was easy to achieve, but it would have been tedious to review the three wars and endless international consultations that took place to determine who would be considered part of the marginalised groups. Or to go over the consultations that decided the name of the planet.
For more than a decade, it differed from country to country and even from region to region. Lucy, Prospect, Athena, Eve, Kahen (for Kuiper-Newton), Genesis and dozens of other names reached various degrees of popularity. It was the Irish word for hope – Muinín –, with its universally-soothing sounds, that would eventually baptise it. Its two syllables became the symbols of a long-held social creed that had finally found a way to become real: to salvage the remnants of the old days that unstoppable capitalism would otherwise have eradicated.
Science fiction and tradition walked hand in hand; at least, in the media. It is not certain that we can speak with peace of mind about an era that revived a wave of discrimination not seen since the middle of the 21st century. Fascism rose again as a logical consequence of the manipulation of the masses that became necessary to maintain political power. Corruption seeped into every stratum of society. Ultimately, the very cultural hegemony that was to be broken with Minority Representation emerged victorious.
By leaving this world full of tensions maintained solely by the “hope” hanging from the sky, the designated settlers believed they were getting the better half of the deal. For if propaganda and repression were necessary to stifle scepticism, those who were lucid enough to perceive their oppressive undertones could only rejoice in escaping from them by relocating to those virgin lands - the ones that had been promised to them.
The Landscape
Officially, it was reported that the probe had failed; however, how this official version of events had gone from a deafening advertising campaign promoting the launch of hundreds of probes to Muinín to a modest press release that reduced their number to just one, no one knew, and the scandal was as brief as it was intense. A few so-called experts suggested that it was to be a single, indispensable probe, though the controversy surrounding this statement was lost as quickly as had been the scandal in the dense fog of information about Muinín that mystified the population. Despite this, there remained some clear facts: for example, the surface of Muinín was certainly virgin, unexplored, habitable, exploitable, and offered everything necessary for the establishment of a rapidly developing, autonomous colony. Yet, once on the other side of the abyssal sky, the settlers discovered for themselves that it was also hostile.
At sea level, it was possible to breathe normally with standard equipment; however, as altitude increased, so did the concentration of toxic gases and corrosive particles in the atmosphere, rendering heavy equipment necessary for any successful ascent. It was therefore understood that the mountains, which made up a significant proportion of the planet’s landscape, would remain inaccessible to settlers for several decades. This estimate proved conservative once Muinin's new inhabitants experienced the second of its plagues: the climate.
The temperature never fell below 35°C. During the day, it could rise to 70°C if the wind came from the south. Since Muinín did not have any seasons, the weather was constant: for the equivalent of a few earthly months, the drought cracked the ground, and the greenish glow of the sky glistening softly above the 880,000 men and women lacking both preparation and equipment for water treatment or storage. Then an immense storm would come, advancing straight yet sluggishly, bringing with it purplish lightning and hot rain.
The huge, unharnessable raindrops that battered the earth for half a month would become characteristic of the hurricanes that settlers would come to refer to as “spring”. These storms would replenish the rivers and cover the landscape with a microorganism called Lichen, one of the few living indigenous species of Muinín. It thrived with the rain like plants had on the mother planet during Spring time, tinting the planet a soft green, as if giving hope for the future. This said, water sometimes did not have any easier time than humans did crossing the horizon.
The rivers of Muinín were generally endorheic: like the Tarim or the Okavango on Earth, they had no mouth, evaporating before they could fill the sea. Preliminary studies interpreted this as a result of the planet gradually drying out, as several basins bore the traits of ancient seas that had disappeared. Huge rivers were discovered, as if taken directly from dreams on ancient Mars, which gradually became narrower and narrower until they vanished into the barren canyons they had made long before. Every landscape bore the scars of an age when water reigned, though now they cried out in agony over their lost kingdom.
It didn't take long for doubts to fade away from the colonists’ mind: they were the victims of one of the most significant crimes against humanity since the last wars. An offering made to Muinín to prepare it for the next waves of immigration, the settlers’ survival had never been pledged, and their displacement, disguised by the Minority Representation, hid a mass deportation. These migrants had been duped, and they and those arriving in subsequent waves of immigration were doomed to become sacrificial lambs in the name of earthly hegemonic governance.
In light of this betrayal, the settlers gave their world their own name: Gandobhar, “Without Water”. The survivors became silent separatists, as nothing they sent to Earth through the interstellar communication systems ever made it through the filter of propaganda.
What the government did not foresee was that the Gandobharians, taken over by the few soldiers and scientists sent for good measure at the launch of the expedition, did more than simply survive: they exceeded expectations, achieving more than simply laying the foundation for a new society.
Ourrhaia
The Gandobharians settled in a city called Wholehue. The ships would continue to house them all on the ground until a self-sufficient city was built. Despite having chosen a humid region rich in raw materials in which to erect their settlement, however, half of the settlers succumbed to the first drought.
While Earth was still called upon to help with the most difficult decisions, dissension towards the mother planet’s will was growing. Already it was suspected that the mother planet was not so concerned about what happened on Gandobhar. When an information leak exposed the fact that Wholehue was actually the second ideal settlement site, some settlers organised an exodus for independence. The better site would be reserved for the settlers who followed them.
Their decision to leave Wholehue for the new capital of Firstport meant the loss of thousands, but sealed the survival of the others. Further, as the northern route did not offer enough opportunities for supplies, the road along the Allmouthe, the wide mouth where many rivers flowed into the North Sea, had to be found to bypass the Oxnose Mountains. The journey of almost 510km took 37 days.
A little more than one hundred thousand settlers saw the end of the road. The population would drop to 68,000 before stabilising as Firstport was made and already self-sufficient. These 68,000 people were the first to truly live on Gandobhar and to claim it for themselves. They were the first Gandobharians – the first humans to believe in themselves, without propaganda, in decades.
Unable to act on Earth, where people continued to be enthusiastic about joining the first settlers – whom the media reported as healthy, enthusiastic and heroic in their task of building the necessary conditions for mass emigration – on Muinín, the Gandobharians gave up their expectations and cut themselves off entirely from Earth.
They began by extending a primitive road network around the Allmouthe and exploring the hospitable lowlands as best they could with the few vehicles at their disposal. The region was relatively hospitable and, soon, four more towns (Soothflow, Northundeep, Endmouthe and Bond Lower) were established, their populations rising incrementally over the months following settlement.
Proper names flourished everywhere. New names, never inspired by people, and rarely by places on earth. Names of peace, full of new ideas, which sometimes came from old stories where people dreamt of a new beginning. Names that celebrated the lives lost so that others could replace them and live on. They were often English, but that hardly bothered anyone anymore. Regions were designated to represent certain languages in a kind of rudimentary continuation of Minority Representation, though the concerns of Gandobharians lay often elsewhere.
In order to preserve their work without having to hand it over to the Earth, Gandobharians had to be able to defend themselves. In the midst of their struggle for survival, they had to invest energy into militarisation. Luckily, this turned out to be easier than expected: the immigration ships were not designed for combat and it would be easy to disable them if they ever approached the planet. The promise of self-defence proved to be effective: the intergovernment became keenly aware that Muinin could be truly lost to them.
This closely-guarded secret was not kept from the Gandobhar-idealising Earthlings for long. The veneer of propaganda had been cracked. Worse, hope of recovering the planet was guillotined by a revolution led by billions of people who could not fathom that not only was the greatest promise made to them destroyed, but that it was false. Earth ultimately paid the price for its lies and murders. Over the following four years, the Gandobharian population rose above the 100,000 mark, while a thousand times as many Earthlings fell victim to revolt or repression.
Thirteen more years and the revolution on mother Earth was finally coming to an end. It left her bloodless, amputated of nearly two centuries of technological progress from which she would not recover until at least a millennium had passed. Muinín became a painful memory; a wound that would never heal. In the meanwhile, Gandobhar had converted its meagre and ephemeral military resources into new tools for colonisation.
We were getting to know the planet through our own senses and intuitions without relying on old records. Even the altitudinal frontier was overcome: two cities were built between the two great Allroof massifs, linking the two coasts of the wider arm of land. Only the ancient, toxic lava outflows remained inaccessible. How long would the secret of this settlement be peacefully kept? The Gandobharians liked to think "forever" because there was still so much to discover and share. Perhaps they were right.
The focus was on the maintenance of the known territories, but the expansion continued. With it, the explored areas were cut into farthings. It became Gandobhar's first - and, to this day, only - country: Ourrhaia.
We are now long after the time of the first Gandobharians. So long, in fact, that we have lost the habit of measuring time in Earth years and have even discovered unexpected applications of the Lichen which may pave the way to resolving the greatest of agricultural and even technological dilemmas.
Today, the population, made up entirely of New World natives, is 1,265,000. While what used to be earthly civilisation slowly turns to waste, eaten away by the lasting ravages of its past pride and unable to engage in warfare (or to continue emigration, if it were allowed), the seed it sowed flourishes under unforgiving skies. Yet, it is full of hope. After all, it had been promised unexplored lands.
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