ph_logs | [OPEN] observe the month of spring

[OPEN] observe the month of spring

Who: Zivia (

tehilim127_1) & all comers (with prompt for Degas)
What: Settling in, and scrambling to prepare
When: April, prior to the event (backtagging welcome!)
Where: At home, at work (Town Hall), at the docks, at the Oak & Iron, at wits' end
Warning(s): To be added as relevant

At home
There's a lot of work that goes into making a house one's home, even when one receives it fully furnished. Zivia's resigned herself to doing it in stages, and moreover to those stages happening out of the order she would prefer, since according to the best-approximation calendar she's discussed with Lev-Lyubov and Anzu, Pesach is coming. Which means getting ready for that first.

She's put up a request on the community bulletin board; if it pans out, they'll be able to bake matzah, at least. Cleaning out the house she's been allotted is taking up a good chunk of the rest of her free time, though she might be willing to take a break to talk with a visitor.

At work (Town Hall)
The filing system isn't too hard to learn, it turns out. She takes notes during her brief training, writes up a couple of cheat sheets, and keeps one at her desk and one on her person. The chair and desk aren't particularly ergonomic, but they're sturdy and functional and won't completely ruin her wrists or spine, so she'll call it good.

It's been a while since Zivia's done any purely paper filing, but it's funny how it all comes back to you. Anyone else working there or visiting may overhear her humming to herself as she works.

At the docks (for Degas)
She hasn't forgotten the preacher's offer of help, so he's the one she calls on when she first comes across a task that needs an extra pair of hands. And, she's hoping, a cart or wheelbarrow or something to that effect, to help haul a bunch of items from her house down to the water's edge and back.

At the Oak & Iron
This city isn't the one she's always thought of as hers, but it's hers now, at least for now. She has to remember that. Has to learn that, internalize it until it feels like the truth. And that means, first and foremost, coming to know its people.

So even if she's a little tired most evenings now, Zivia makes a point of coming down to the pub after work at least twice a week, to meet her neighbors. Find her in the common room with a hot tea or a cold beer, looking for familiar faces or new ones.

At wits' end
Wildcard!

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She watches the tea-making with a quiet intensity seemingly unsuited to such an everyday task. It's not very different from coffee-making, Tayrey decides, but she's going to make sure she doesn't miss anything.

Zivia's question gets a nod of recognition in return. 'I don't have a religion myself,' she says, 'but they exist, in my sector. It's usually a private matter, but I know a little. Some of the people I knew shipside were religious, and some of the colonies - I don't expect it will be quite like your own people's observances, but I can grasp the concept well enough.'

"All right," she says, "I'll give you the short short form, and then if you've got any questions ... Do you like honey in your tea? Or anything else?"

Whatever Tayrey asks for, Zivia will bustle about to retrieve from cupboards or icebox as she gives the short short form, while the tea brews.

"So, my people have a religious story about how thousands of years ago, we were made slaves by another people, in their land. And our god took us out, with miracles and wonders, and led us out into the wilderness to make us his people, and gave us laws to live by. And coming up in a few weeks is the holiday that commemorates our being freed from slavery, and one of the things we do on that holiday is we eat unleavened bread. That's what I need the brick oven for, to bake some."

'Yes, I'll have some honey, please,' says Tayrey. She's used to sweetness, syrups in her coffee, so honey in tea seems like a fair equivalent.

Then she listens to the story. The age of it astonishes her. Thousands of years! It would be unthinkable, if she hadn't heard similar pronouncements from Earthers. It still provokes a sense of awe, the same feeling that she gets when she stares into the unexplored deep black beyond the frontier. Time, like space, stretching out far beyond her comprehension.

'It's your Liberation Day,' she says at the end, smiling. 'Of course you should celebrate your freedom.' Then she adds, more soberly, 'I am so sorry that your people were enslaved. It's a horrendous violation of rights. It should never happen. Anywhere.' From Tayrey's depth of feeling, one might think that the enslavement had happened within living memory, not millennia ago - but as she sees it, these enslaved people were Zivia's people. They matter to her, like the dead heroes at Breakaway matter to Tayrey, and she won't take either lightly.

'I have a lot of questions,' she admits. 'If you don't mind. Your people really kept stories for thousands of years - linear, no cryogentics or time dilation? It's incredible.'

Zivia beams at the phrasing of Liberation Day. "That's exactly right. All our major holidays have multiple names, and one of the names for this one is zman herutenu, the time of our liberation."

And she sobers as well, in response to Tayrey's gravity. It's unexpected, but she can't help but appreciate it. And doesn't the text say, in every generation one should regard oneself as having personally come out of Egypt?

"A thing about me," Zivia says in confiding tones, "is that I almost never mind questions. If I can't answer, or if I have to put it off for another time, I'll say so. Anyway, yes -- we had them written down, with very meticulous rules about how the written text could be copied, to minimize transcribing errors. These days we have a lot of more advanced printing techniques, and ways to store information digitally, but we still use the old methods of parchment and ink and quill too, and the parchment copies are considered ... mm, a higher level of sacred. We also had a lot of related stories passed down by oral tradition, and those only got written down when it started to look like we might lose them if we didn't. Which means some of them probably were lost, we don't have any way to know how many."

The time of liberation. Tayrey likes that; it's fitting. She listens closely to Zivia's explanation of her people's record-keeping, glad that the older woman won't mind her questions. It's difficult enough to find the balance between respectful curiosity and being a nuisance even when in her own sector, where cultural norms might diverge, but core values don't stray too far from one another. With people from other universes? Tayrey's never sure how steady the ground under her is, what will surprise and what will offend.

'My people keep most information digitally,' she explains, 'and use slates for anything that is temporary but needs to be physical. It's only important documents that we have printed, onto flexible sheets of plastic.' She thinks for a moment. 'I know that at least one religion in my sector has debates over interpretation, but I think that's more over variant translations than transcription errors.' Not that she knows a great deal about it, only that the problem exists.

'It only seems like such a long time,' she admits, feeling the need to explain her wonder. 'Thousands of years. When my people had our liberation from tyranny, we discarded everything from the old world, and went out to the freedom of the new without the weight of the past to hold us back.' The rhetoric that Tayrey had learned, along with every child of every Company world, all the stationers, and a great many of the independent colonies.

"Oh, we have debates over a lot of things in my religion," she grins. "We're known for it."

The tea's brewed and doctored by now; Zivia tastes hers and adds a smidge more honey. "Discarded everything from the old world," she repeats, consideringly. "No stories about what things were like before? -- How long ago was that?"

Tayrey tries her own tea, and smiles in satisfaction. It might not be Cardalek coffee, but then nothing here comes close, and the tea is pleasant enough.

After that first sip, she answers, 'The war ended just over a century ago, as we count in standard years. The oldest of our colonies is almost twice that age, but they went out in cryosleep and were isolated until faster ships reached them. They kept the isolationist tendencies.' Tayrey has never been to Kishar, but the Kisharin spacers she's met have been idiosyncratic in interesting ways. 'I worked out that the oldest fragments of data we have probably date back three centuries or so. Songs, old objects someone escaping tyranny couldn't bear to leave behind. But all our official records date from the beginning of the war, at the earliest.'

"Huh." More reflective than dismayed, at least outwardly. "Assuming your standard year is anything close to the length of ours, that's not very long at all. And the liberation from tyranny -- do you have any stories about the period you lived under tyranny, or was that left behind too?"

It had never seemed unusual in the slightest to Tayrey, not until she'd met people who could talk with confidence about what had happened on their homeworld thousands of years ago.

She thinks carefully. 'We have stories about what happened just before, to some of our people. The way our inventors and visionaries were persecuted for standing up to a government that wanted to crush them and steal their work.' Another sip of her tea. 'My great-grandmother was just old enough to fight in the last part of the war, but she never talks about anything from before. I don't think many people ever did - and she's very old now.' Past 120. Cardalek can extend healthy human lifespan to some degree, but there are limits.

Zivia nods slowly. "It's very rare, from all I've ever heard of, for a whole society to decide to stop telling stories about what happened before. Your people must have felt they had a very strong reason to make that call, for themselves and their descendants."

(She's trying to keep to herself her own feeling that no reason could possibly be good enough.)

"Do you keep records now, for posterity? For those in the future to know what came before them?"

Tayrey is quick to answer. 'Yes, each colony world keeps its own records. It's ore difficult for spacers, because every ship is independent, but you could certainly find out a lot by reading the mission reports.'

She's still thinking it over, though, and adds, more reflectively. 'I think that after the war people wanted to be more intentional about how they raised children. Trying to do it in a way that would maintain a free society, and help us understand the necessary values to be good citizens, yes? That doesn't look the same on every planet, but everyone's trying.' Company children raised on virtue ethics. Kishar's commitment to equality and direct democracy. Fourth-generation spacers taught to value duty and friendship.

"There's something to that," Zivia agrees. "People have a lot of different ideas on how to raise kids, and how to give them the kind of values you want them to have ... I think we're all probably still gonna be wrestling with that problem for a long time. It'll never be easy and it'll never look the same to everyone, and maybe that's okay so long as everyone keeps trying."

She nods. 'Not that it's a field I have any expertise in,' she admits, 'but I think it's better that way. To have that diversity of thought. Cultures set their priorities differently, right? And that's not wrong, raising one value over another, so long as it's a sound value to begin with. That and people are individuals. Adults and children both. It's why group education is inefficient.'

"Oh, I could talk for hours about education, group and otherwise," says Zivia with a grin, "and I probably will if I'm not careful -- both my parents were educators before they retired, and I picked up a lot. I have, shall we say, Opinions."

Tayrey laughs lightly. 'If you want to share those opinions, I'll listen,' she says. 'My father always had a lot to say about it. As did my tutors, but that's expected. Not that any of them would approve of how I went about things. I was supposed to be a scientist, not a spacer. Guess I preferred the immediately practical approach.'

Not that there's no practicality in science, but studying it hardly compared to her shipside apprenticeship.

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[OPEN] observe the month of spring

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