After the rest of the D'ni were relocated to Releeshan, a young woman asks to be allowed to use Myst Island, the Damaged Ages attached to them and Atrus' discarded lesson worlds for the purposes of editing out the damage, expanding those ages into actual worlds and future development.
After a long talk with Catherine, Atrus agrees...and adds Riven to the stack of Linking Books he gives to her, knowing Abby is a top ranked World Writer, though he warns her he will be linking into these worlds to keep track of the changes. Abby starts with Myst...and stuns him with the first Change.
Re-Writing the Ages
- Odyssey -
Atrus and Catherine stared in shock, as they waited for the disorientation that Linking always brought to fade. This wasn't an island anymore. or if it was, it was a huge one. Where an endless freshwater, inland sea had been was a wide moat, but beyond that was a grassland savannah as far as the eye could see to the east, densely growing hardwood forests on the west, thickly growing evergreen forests on the north though the lowest branches were still high enough you could walk beneath them and fruit orchards to the south that seemed to continue forever, their branches bowed down with the weight of the fruit they bore. They could see a lot of people there, scattered through the massive grove, picking it.
The few trees that had once adorned Myst Island, were now cottages, the Ship was gone though when he entered the library he found Stoneship Age on the Shelf...along with the others. He opened it past the panel and found it'd just been edited slightly...moved elsewhere. Apparently there was still an ocean, thought it was saltwater now and several days away. The wooden vessal was in a marina there, currently being used to take settlers to various points around the coast, along with supplies.
All that remained of those original puzzles were detailed statues in the moat. The library was serving as a tiny museum, almost a temple, really. The Active, usable Books were in a wooden bookcase with glass doors in the Tower, the burned ones were under glass-topped tables, the story of his sons written as a history that should never forgotten or go unmourned...this new room off the main building held that kind of quiet, sad hush. She had caught them, Old Abby Morris had. She knew the whole story and still mourned with them. Hell, she'd caught Gehn, too...tough, that woman: Past fifty and still going strong.
Instead of the windy silences it had once had, Myst was a throbbing, vibrant world. Now, there were songbirds and various small animals making noises and from a distance...in the direction of the grasslands, they could hear horses, cattle and if he wasn't mistaken, goats. A silvery gray house cat sauntered it's insolent way past them, pausing to look down its nose at Atrus before demanding scritches from Catherine. She chuckled, scooping the female up and complied.
"It's homey. Calm, balanced, dignified and serene in the way only a real planet can be, but it feels good here again."
"I wonder how big the landmass is, pretty sure it's a continent...this is no island, or my feet have lost the ability to sense my Worlds. Knowing her, she just might have expanded it beyond what I thought she could pull off."
He headed toward the sounds of the livestock and found an old fashioned farmhouse and a barn from which Abby was just emerging with a bucket of fresh milk in each hand. He saw her see them and smiled as he took one of the buckets.
"You've been busy, I'm amazed you don't have knotted fingers with all the Writing you've clearly done."
"I'm in a quiet phase, letting various things settle before the next edit. I think that will be a least a year or so...but, I see Agatha has demanded her usual toll from you. I've got dozens, you can have her, if you want. Everyone needs a few pets. She's got a litter though, still nursing."
"You could have knocked me flat with a feather when we got here." He told her mildly. "And only if you have a box for her and any litter she has...we can stand a few cats about. They're neat and clean in their habits, generally. But, I don't need Catherine to get attached and then have them jump loose inside the void."
"I'll give you a soft carrier for them."
"That will do, now, what have you been up to?"
"I fixed Channelwood, did a few old fashioned water tests to see what was going on and it turned out there was harmful bacteria in the water. So, I looked at the Book a little closer, someone used a different kind of ink, so it was written in later." She told him. "I took out it's ability to breed, then wrote in a predator for it and left it alone...it'd been breeding there too long to use a more abrupt method and then, since the trees had all died, I wrote in something with more resistance to disease in general and which had immunity to that one in particular. None of the originals survived, though I did add some of the same kind to Armetia.
"Yes, we're still finding problems of that nature in other books." He sighed.
"Since those freshwater seas are shallow, I planted a path to the distant beach. Thick and wide, that path...and moved the walkways there. Soon enough, some of the same species you once met were drawn to it. It will not only be trees and water but they like it well enough."
"What did you use on Channelwood?" Catherine asked.
"Saplings from that big tree in Edanna crossbred over with Earth Cypress. More suitable for wetland treehouses anyway." They had reached the house and Catherine held open the door for them both.
"Speaking of Edanna...there's a lot more of those trees there now and they're much bigger." Atrus mentioned. "And somehow, those Rivenese that never blended well with the more independent Moiety have moved into some of them."
"Yep. Wider and taller with several solid places inside for cottages at various places. Each is now suitable for housing one large village of a few hundred families." Abby nodded. "And so, they have become a new people, not Rivenese any longer. Like Catherine before them, they've moved on and started new lives in a new place. They are Edannians, now. Not just them, either. No...they are the fishers of the villages, but there were gardeners and husbanders needed too...so I drew from many cultures to fill those cottages. The Edannian People will draw their new ways and traditions from all of them."
"Saavedro linked onto Tomahna, frightened and wanted to know what was going on...Narayan's balance abruptly shifted and reset itself."
"Yeah, about that...one of your lads, I'm guessing Sirrus since the other boy is a bit more straight forward, used a bacteria again...both the world and the life in it was resisting it nicely so things were only a little off. I simply made things...and people...immune." She shook her head as she poured the milk slowly through cheesecloth into a vat with a spigot, to strain it, then got out the shallow, wide, long pans used to set cream. It took a few hours, but with a bit of instruction to her visitors, the three of them got the new cream sets out and skimmed off the cream from the night before.
"Ah, what's that for, anyway?"
She grinned and showed him how to make butter while Catherine was given cheese making lessons with the milk. While they used an aged cheese with breakfast, both the fresh milk and Atrus' batch of new butter was used at table...it answered his questions. Catherine was under strict instructions of how to store her cheese when she got it home and how long to wait before she opened it.
"I think Tomahna needs some pastures." Catherine told him pointedly.
"Myst is now suited to farmers, foresters, orchard keepers, etc. It's my main home, though, as you can see...but it's not an island now...it's been upgraded to a planet since those last much longer than Ages do. This is a big landmass. There was only enough readily available material for one super-continent in one place, so Myst Island isn't an island anymore, now it's a continent. There are several million square miles available here...with every kind of climate and terrain."
"I told Catherine I thought it was a large continent, but did you say...planet?"
"Of course, what did you think I was going to do? Use a few hundred acres and let the rest of the available area rot?" She asked him, noticing his uncomfortable expression. "Oh, Atrus...you didn't ?"
Catherine stared at him. "Tomahna, too?" She studied him, looked at Abby and said, "He did." quite firmly.
"I had to write in a solar system and a primary star, add all the relevant details for those, first. Next, was making sure this world had an active core...so the other side of the planet now has active undersea volcanoes which are clustered and are gradually creating land the old fashioned way...the one that requires thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years of time." She buttered her bread and sopped up some egg yolk...apparently she also had chickens...and pigs, from the look of the ham and bacon on the central 'serve yourself' platter."
Atrus thought about that. Once you wrote that process in, it was in for good, he knew. Once you got it started the only way to stop it was to blow up the Age by Burning the Book. If you started it on a planet...you couldn't even do that much because burning the Book wouldn't stop anything but your own ability to keep an eye on it. He nodded. "It's a big change, but you've made a good start. "
She shrugged. "Myst is available for people to move to and so are Edanna and Channelwood. Stoneship is all solid granite and full quarries for right now, it's fit for workers who need a job but the stone is mostly exported. It's got some offices and the manager lives in the the old space ship...it's grounded and converted into a flightless, odd looking house, but no one else lives there...or will until I get the other side of the planet fit for growing things. Workers would get those cottages up the hill from here, where the pines used to make them used to be. The place where the clock goes is now mostly foundries, steel mills, that sort of thing. There wasn't anything I could ruin there since the boys beat me to it, so it was a good place for factories."
She paused to eat several bites before she continued, her eyes far away and her manner had gone pensive. "Edanna is an ever expanding forest of Jungle trees. I asked for some of my colonists from Narayan of all places. Imagine my shock when I got there and saw that shield? I went to J'nanian of course and removed the line of text since with the boys contained it's just a pain in the butt. That's when I stabilized the ecosystem there, expanding the general size. On average, most planets have room for more than one society, eventually." She eyed him. "Except for those with limited areas in which to expand. No wonder ages don't last, eventually the inbreeding alone will kill their societies."
Catherine gasped in horror, thinking it through...finally.
Atrus looked grave as he nodded, answering, "You do have a very good point."
"Although when you start with a limited population they do take a very long time to develop. I did remove that grafted carnivorous planet Saavedro bred the hard way on Edanna from the jungles and put it in Riven's planet-wide oceans, instead. Those Wharks were eating so much that the oceans are nearly reduced to plankton in some areas...the plants cleaned out the over population of them though the older ones learned pretty fast. Eventually I had to limit the size of the plant to something much smaller and simply remove the wharks from Riven's Book."
"Makes sense. What else?"
"Well, once I got the fish populations replaced and brought up the populations to a healthier level, I needed a replacement animal or three for the wharks...so I used Earth Orcas and bottlenoses, some belugas and narwhals...most of the new fish are Earth Fish, too. Tuna, sailfin, marlin, sardines, that sort of thing. Lots of kreel, shrimp, herring, mackerel and such, too." She buttered and jammed more bread. "Riven's oceans were fine, other than that and the land had only sunk a few dozen feet. So, I wrote in something like what I did with Myst...a super-continent with a few islands of various sizes from useless to colony sized, offshore. Got visitors other than you, too. Moiety showed up...seems they've still got a Book and noticed the alterations. I had to write in a special island so they couldn't interfere, after all, it isn't as if I'm Gehn. I know what I'm doing, for one thing." She scowled. "I don't leave out the detailed details on my hard or soft sciences, to start with."
"Bring me a copy...inactive or active makes no difference, I'll fix it. Oh, by the way Catherine, Riven has a nice shallow water tropical belt now, full of Earth Corals and the thousands of saltwater life found in them and that is the region with most of the large islands scattered around. All the way around Riven's equator are tropical island paradises."
"We brought a copy of the edits we've done to the active Tomahna one to show you." Catherine told her, shifting three-month-old Yeesha to her father's arms and handing Abby the Book.
She gave back the currently active copy of Riven to Catherine for her to examine...and as she and Atrus looked through it, they both discovered several linking pages aside from the one on the front page, where various regions currently considered Works in Progress were.
She left them at the kitchen table and went into her Book Binding Room while half listening to the Oh! That's beautifuls, and will you look at that! The Rivenese will love that!s and carefully unbound it, added about 3000 pages full of Sciences Text, including one line that put all of the seismic activity on the other side of the Age where only oceans were, and five or six hundred more pages in each of several sets that detailed nothing but botany, biology, weather patterns and life from the microscopic to the insectoid. Once these 'set patterns' were in, she added four thousand blank pages and rebound Tomahna."
"Okay...in my Books before I start adding things I make up, have at minimum 12 thousand pages of hard and soft sciences...those pages are written in Locking Ink...that means you can't write in something later that doesn't follow the scientific rules already in there...and that's also why I use Earth Crazy Glue as my favorite ingredient for my binding glue. Can't get the pages out without ripping them into uselessness...which is why there are also four thousands blank pages...this is why all my books are fully qualified as Tomes. These have four thousand blank pages for added Writing in the front under the panel page and three times that many blank but blocked ones in the middle section for the Book's use."
"Locking Ink? No wonder my father could never ruin your worlds."
"Now, if you try to add something that won't work with real science, what happens is that you will get something unexpected and quite possibly dangerous because the locked writing will force your creation into scientific compliance. Since the sciences are already in place ...and I used an Earth Xerox loaded with Locking Ink and Linking Book Paper to make several thousand copies of those basic page sets..." I grinned at the look on Atrus' face.
"Why didn't I think of that?"
"Regular link ink clogs copiers, but locking ink doesn't. That's because Earth isn't a written world, it's a naturally formed one...meaning all the sciences are present and that the Laws of Physics are firmly in control of what can or can't exist on it. Link Ink isn't scientifically sound, Locking Ink is. Anyway, because the sciences are in control, you can add the end results...and let the BOOK add the processes, which is why it has 12 thousand blank but blocked pages for it's edits. So the pages that are still on the table are the ones with all your carefully thought out processes...and here's your active and SOUND Book back. And at any rate, now you know."
"And it took her perhaps an hour to repair it. Amazing." Catherine chuckled.
"That's why Releeshan was so much thicker when you got it back from me last year. I had all the D'ni Writers here visiting and looking around while I fixed their Age...and by the time I was done, it had become a planet, and was no longer just an Age, to me, 'Age' translates to 'Era'. That means the things on the surface can and will evolve, Atrus. Evolution does have it's place." She looked at him with her hands on her hips. "It's not your fault, it's Gehn's. He was a lazy idiot and gave you sloppy habits with underwhelming training by pulling you OUT of formal lessons too early."
She moved to another Book. "This is what happened to Voltaic. It's an industrialized world and already has a self-sufficient good sized population on each of nine large continents, with a decent economy under a single government. They tend to be a little grabby with each other and with visitors...and they expect you to enjoy being tossed to the ground and...well...anyway, unless you're into that sort of thing, leave it on the shelf...it's the last copy. I didn't think that I needed curious D'ni Linking in and getting an unwelcome surprise. And admittedly, once warned, they wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
I was going to destroy it too, but I thought I'd leave that decision to you. The planet is stable and will last for billions of years: It's orbiting a young yellow star, it's in a good M5 class position, has three moons, is four times the size of Earth, has a decent tilt, rotation and orbit: Should be just fine. Far as that goes, I let your dad out of that prison book and dropped him straight in behind his grandson: I dropped Sirrus off in there with no way out. There is nothing to make paper with so they use plastics for that item's uses. As for Sirrus, well, that population can handle him fine and I don't really think Gehn will have much problem with him either. The global population is just too huge for them to be a danger to it, there's several hundreds of thousands of people on each of those continents."
"With an actual planetary government there, presumably they have law enforcement in place." Atrus responded, looking at Catherine who nodded and he tossed it in their hostess' hearthfire. Some places just seemed to attract populations like that...and it was standard D'ni procedure to make sure the Age was stable and cut them off by destroying all the Linking Books: Both parents were still too angry at him to consider letting him run off anywhere scot free.
Abby had provided the pair with a fully populated world that had all sorts of amenities, and was a young, vibrant, fertile, healthy planet, a good solar system and a young star for a sun: Ages lasted thousands of years, planets lasted billions. Removing any accidental contact that might traumatize visitors wouldn't harm the residents who were now free of any obligations to anyone...including their Unfortunate Relatives.
"Yes, well. There's always the chance that sort of mentality will be attracted...and it's by no means the first time." Atrus told Abby sheepishly. "And Gehn is no danger to an ink-locked world with no paper available."
"Saavedro has dropped by a few times...you know, he whines constantly. I told him and Tamra the last time that whining men were just pathetic...and if he kept doing it around me, I'd write him and his entire tree into a Book that you've never heard of...and refuse to tell you where I'd put him."
Atrus snorted. "What did Tamra have to say to that?"
"The conversation went something like, 'Please, do. Women of our people aren't allowed to tell our men something like that unless someone else does first...and Atrus won't. I think Catherine wants to but she's got manners that are too good to let her, so...'
And I answered with, 'So it's gone unsaid until now and that means he hasn't realized until today that he's embarrassing himself and his family with all the whinging?'
To which Tamra replied 'Something like that, yes.'
So I said, 'Fine, I'll just edit Narayan a bit and give your people the option to live successfully on the ground. That way the Tree Elders will have the option to just kick him out. That will give you the option of refusing to join him.'
Nobody has heard another word from him on the subject. He'd been on Myst when it was still an Island so he knows that I can seriously Write. His elders did visit and wanted to know how long the edit would take.
To which I replied, 'As long as it takes me to write an alteration into the trees to allow you to get to the ground...oh, and some of the medium small ones that drift have been stabilized enough to be livable. They tend to seek a coast and root there as they grow...crossbreeding Lattice trees to Jungle trees tends to do that."
By that time, both of her visitors were bent over and leaning on each other, laughing.
"So, that's my current project. I unbound Narayan, put the appropriate pages on top of one of the Locked Ink sets and added in an area that had the trees...but not the processes...and BAM, they had stable surface areas and oceans." Abby shrugged, turning to begin clearing the kitchen table. Atrus and Catherine pitched in and it didn't take long to get the table clean, everything washed and in the drainer or put in the cooler. "The main rule to adding living things with the locked ink sets, is to remember that Form Follows Function. It's the first sentence in the sciences section.
If you write in the function, the Book will add the most efficient and useful form. If you write in the Form, however, you may get an unwelcome function from the Book as a present."
Abby heard a snort from Catherine as she turned to go and finish her chores.
Three weeks later, Abby, Catherine and Atrus were on a healthy Riven...and it was as well they were with her because the Moiety had figured out how to get to her 'office' island. They stopped cold at the sight of the pair.
"Ah, so you now realize I'm not that idiotic father of his, eh? All these new improvements? HELLO, where, exactly did you put your brains?" I snapped in perfectly understandable Rivenese. "If I find even one thing with damage, I'm going to SPANK the lot of you in front of the nearest village, do you hear me?" She scolded in her very best granny-mode, index finger shaken hard and fast under the noses of the nearest. "You idiots shot me with that blasted blowgun when I was out to save your butts! I'm not about to take any sass from you."
They looked at her wide-eyed.
"Yes ma'am." they chorused.
She eyed them for a moment, then turned back to the conversation she'd been having with Catherine and Atrus.
"You can still use that method, but make sure the object is stationary and far enough from anything living to remain harmless...at first...until after you find out what it does." She told them.
"Sounds wise."
She grinned at Atrus. "It will always be something that particular ecosystem needs. So, if you have say...lots of sulfur in the air in an area, chances are if you leave the function to the Book, it will deal with the excess...so at least make it pretty, or a tree of some kind that's got wood that is pulpy and not really useful other than that, in terms of its form so no one uses it instead for a structure intended for anything with a pulse that needs to breathe...so unless you're using a bacteria that eats sulfur...which are usually toxic humans, by the way, animals are not usually a good choice.
Hot springs with a volcanic heat source are an exception...even on some of these worlds I've got those...got samples from the sulfur pools at Yellowstone in Wyoming and added them in by machine...not safe to harvest or touch. They already had a scientifically suitable form and function so the Book added them with only minor adjustments, for such things as local gravity, star signature for the local sun, climate, terrain, soil, humidity and other local ground conditions."
She pointed out several other new things, plants, mostly, as she spoke before indicating the arrival of a pod of bottlenoses at the shoreline. She headed down there with the other two Writers. "Now, if you already have a lifeform that fills a function elsewhere in a different Book, if that Book is Locked and has the sciences in it already, when these Books make alterations, the form might alter somewhat in color or shape, but not the function on any level except increased efficiency. This also works for lifeforms from a natural planet where the developing method is purely evolution...which is always scientifically sound."
"Good point." Catherine nodded, one eye on the little pen where her daughter was and the other on her notebook which was rapidly filling.
"The thing to remember, is that Nature abhors a vacuum, pack a planet as full of life as you can manage. Many lifeforms that eat or need overlapping resources mean many ecological niches. Remember, evolution is active on these worlds now, so you can use a similar lifeform to replace known man-eaters, too. Like...I removed the Wharks and once I had Riven's oceans stabilized, and the fish populations were replaced with Earth Species, I added bottle nosed dolphins and put them in at the top of the oceanic food chain in southern and equatorial waters with Orcas in near polar ones.
I've got Sperm, Pilot, Narwhal and Beluga at the poles or in the open oceans and healthy populations of the greater whales...the plankton eaters...all over the place. Oh, keep in mind, when you add corals, shellfish or other invertebrates, make sure the eggs and larvae forms are placed in areas where the natural currents are steady but not too strong or they'll just be carried off and deposited somewhere it could take you a good long while to find. I put in only the bottom feeding sharks...but not the man-munchers. Great Whites, Mayos, bulls, tigers, blues, etc? I left those on Earth, for instance. I figured they'd been traumatized enough." She motioned with her head toward the small group of Moiety.
"Yes, they have." Catherine nodded as she opened the new copy of the Tomahna Book to link out. He put it into his pack after holding it to let Catherine Link out to first, then put his hand into the pack and left himself. This way, the Tomahna Book would be in the Pack, along with the new copy of the Myst one she'd given them earlier, when he got home instead of dropping to the ground on Riven.
He looked at the Book...four thousands of blank pages just needing to be written in Locking Ink, which he dipped his quill in and began to write. He knew from reading the Locked segments that this world was the third in it's solar system, was a M5 Class planet that orbited a youngish yellow G type star. 68% of it was saltwater ocean that already bore mostly unpurposed plankton.
The section he was writing in was for purposing the rest of that plankton...the ones that already existed took many centuries to develop and grow...and she'd only put just enough of a few varieties to feed any large plankton eaters he might want right away. Brain, Fan and Staghorn type corals littered the stony, sandy floors of the shallow, warm saltwater seas in new, bright rainbow colors.
These fed on the other three forms of plankton and invertebrates his new, barely there world had in abundance...algae and a few hundred species of shrimp and small fish. She had written them in, to the measure of several million tons each without a sample for the Book...then she brought several lidded pails and made him and Catherine carry them down to the ocean, take off the lids and dump them in.
They also spend months releasing insects. Due to the massive numbers of flowers, European honey bees...with a script that prevented them from becoming Africanized in the function code...and the known life-cycle of the Earth bees written in after they were introduced. Other insects like a few non-aggressive species of ants, beetles, and other hard shelled insects, as well as the soft-bodied ones like butterflies, skippers and moths were added the same way.
She had told them that the world needed pollinators on the landward side. Every known tree...most were from Earth because she tended to do that...and blended with trees from other Ages or Worlds, cross-pollinated with them or included a script in the function that allowed them to crossbreed with plants that the Book made. This function had a species limit of 25...it could pile on 25 species near the same niche in any one ecosystem before it had to stop: After that, the function portion was forced to allow the laws of natural selection to take over...and unless all species failed it couldn't add more until the 25 fell below 3. He didn't get that but she just grinned and told him to trust her. He remembered her warnings, too.
"It will always be something that particular ecosystem needs. So, if you have say...lots of sulfur in the air in an area, chances are if you leave the function to the Book, it will deal with the excess...so at least make it pretty, or a tree of some kind that's got wood that is pulpy and not really useful other than that, in terms of its form so no one uses it instead for a structure intended for anything with a pulse that needs to breathe...so unless you're using a bacteria that eats sulfur...which are usually toxic humans, by the way, animals are not usually a good choice.
Hot springs with a volcanic heat source are an exception...even on some of these worlds I've got those...I got samples from the sulfur pools at Yellowstone in Wyoming and added them in by hand. They already had a scientifically suitable form and function so the Book added them with only minor adjustments, for such things as local gravity, signature of the local primary, climate, terrain, soil, humidity and other local ground conditions.
Oh, keep in mind, when you add corals, shellfish or other invertebrates, make sure the eggs and larvae forms are placed in areas where the natural currents are steady but not too strong or they'll just be carried off and deposited somewhere it could take you a good long while to find.
Atrus thought about it for a good while, getting out text books for the oceans of various regions. This was a tropical world except near the poles where the water was icy and the land was warmish temperate and would remain so for a few million years. That sort of change would come, but it was the kind that only time and a great deal of it could change. The cold water was the place that produced nutrients in abundance.
Corals. He rather liked that idea, thinking about it as he added a line of text that would ensure that the locked sciences would make sure nothing was harmful to humans here. There was a lot of scope for corals. He began to write his rules for book added plankton level larvae and eggs for invertebrates, particularly corals...then added the adult forms in the designs, shapes, colors and sizes he wanted he wanted. He also added egg and larvae aged fish and other animals found in the coral reefs of Earth. The tropical oceans of Tomahna began to bloom.
When it was Catherine's turn to write in the Tomahna Book, she read over what he had added and answered with birds to fill the huge expanses of mangrove swamps she'd planted by hand already, with a fifty years of growth in one night, once, line in the text. The shallow waters were then filled with exactly the correct fish for those birds and the first generation were adults with all the knowledge of their kind to ensure survival for their chicks. Other birds were placed in jungles where the could find the fruits and seeds their sort needed and had all the knowledge of their kinds. She expanded on those two places and their birds. This included their food sources first, then the food chain was followed all the way down to the microscopic. When she was finished with that, she added the predators, theirs and those further up the food chain, moving to each species in turn and following the chain down, then up. It took her months to finish the two segments.
When she finally gave the Book back, Atrus went down to an unused area of ocean and placed an 'Abby Adjusted' purebred Edanna Jungle tree in the water...it was only a sapling and the current took it offshore until it lodged against a low atoll. He repeated the process up and down the coast. When he returned home and looked in the Book, the Book had already discovered the trees and had made a few minor adjustments to fit them into this world. It was fascinating to watch the script from the copy of Abby's Edited Edanna Book he had copied over under that section, adjust to the new information and then settle with a few more edits for local conditions.
"Edanna jungle trees?"
"Yes, they're very useful, particularly the ones Abby adjusted for saltwater oceans...though she's got one for freshwater inland seas, too. I've got the text for that one, which includes a huge shallow water inland sea and most of the lifeforms Abby put in it, including the freshwater variation of the Edanna tree. I've asked her to come over so I've got three sets of eyes, your's, mine and her's, to look over the plans to put that freshwater sea right out there." He pointed out at the desert valley. "Frankly, the life here in this section needs the water source."
"Yes. Other than a rather small river, it'd be the only one. You'll have the river emptying into the freshwater sea?"
That was the idea, but I think I might better make it deeper first. I want her to have a look at it since I don't really want to flood us out."
"Good point." Catherine laughed.
They heard her arrive and went out to greet her. She was studying the valley and nodded agreement after he explained. "Where's the Book?" She sighed and dipped into the locking ink. "Seriously, you make this so much more difficult than it has to be. Go back to the section where you eliminated the possibility that any living thing will harm a human and write, 'Under no circumstances will any element, force or event invade or damage the habitation of a human or any structure not naturally occurring in nature.'
She heard Catherine sigh.
"In this way, the Sciences will prevent any damage to a NON-NATURAL FORMATION OF ANY KIND. The Book doesn't know you don't live in a greenhouse, on a sidewalk or dam or on a ladder, but it does know when something isn't natural...and so it makes sure that things like, say...floods or forest-fires, never get close. If putting a given amount of freshwater in front of your house would flood your home, it will either increase the depth or soak up the excess...or both. Since it will have Edanna trees in it that have needs of their own that must be met, it'll will probably deepen it." She flipped forward and wrote in the activation text for that section and went outside to watch.
It didn't take long. The valley had no animals except birds and when the land got wet they flew up to Atrus' home and perched on the roof and in the trees. The valley floor slid away in a series of landslides as the Book dug a massive hole that was so huge you couldn't see the other side of it. Eventually, you couldn't see the bottom, either and that was rapidly filling with fresh, potable water. Or at least, it would be potable once the mud settled to the bottom. From the west they could hear the roar of the river as it began to pour into the freshwater sea...the Book formed it's mouth and freshwater estuary as the shore was formed. On the far side, where the rest of the river had been, a much larger river was...and it continued it's way toward the saltwater ocean in the way of huge lakes everywhere.
This one had many rivers that had been raised and directed at it so that it received water at the same rate it lost it, but since it was still filling it would be a while before any excess was available to spill out on the lower, far side. So, for now, those rivers' water levels were much lower, fed on only streams instead of the main river as well.
Not that anyone here actually had an eye on that, though the Book had it down clearly so that it was a known thing and anyway, the people here knew how that sort of thing worked. Atrus was adding fruit, nut and seed trees and other vegetation as the lake filled, carefully citing how much water each needed and the nutrition each provided and for what kind of animal, including or excluding humans. He included the flavor if it was a human food and if not, only cited it as being possessed of a grand flavor that delighted the creatures who needed it for food. The Book was better suited for filling in the finer details there, he knew.
One minor function had been agreed on fairly early...if a food tasted good to those eating it, it was good for the eater. This was done after Catherine had added a huge forest full of over a hundred species of plants that were good nutritional food for humans and cited that each one was also good for at least five or six other lifeforms...but neglected to mention either which ones or taste...and some had been sour or just plain nasty in flavor as a result. To eliminate confusion, Atrus had specified that every food plant must have a distinct flavor of it's own to it's eaters as well and that all plants or meat animals must have a good, if different flavor when raw than they did when cooked.
For right now, Abby settled in for a visit to help with Writing Hartia as well as Editing both Tomahna and Narayan which Abby had brought along. They sat in a circle around a table and every few hours, when they took a break, Abby made them each sit down at and write in the book to their left...not the one they'd been working on. The creative ideas of three Adept World Writers was being brought to bear on all three Planets.
Hartia was in it's infancy, but all three were well familiar with the other two because Atrus had written both. He set his tea down and sat in front of Narayan, back reading what had been done so he'd know what the changes were. Abby was a seriously, seriously good World Writer.
She'd repaired the Lattice Trees by changing how they rooted and grew. The roots were massive but no longer delicate or easily damaged...not past their fiftieth year...and the trunks of younger trees weren't stable or strong enough to hold a village, being too soft and easily damaged. Until the trees were fifty, they didn't need help with weaving because they drifted on the winds, long and ever thickening roots trailing behind them until they finally could touch the ground...and then they dragged along until they got tangled or lodged in something where they anchored the tree.
If the roots on these new edited versions of Lattice trees lay on the ground for more than a day, they'd already dug into the earth far enough to hold the tree. This made it possible for a becalmed wind to plant whole groves in one spot and a single huge 'city tree' to form. Let the usually blowing wind cease for a day or so and you got a massive, massive lattice jungle...because the new trees were cross bred to Edanna Jungle trees.
The new Narayan Jungle Trees were anything but dependent on humans. They grew as tall as any normal Lattice but they also had the corrosponding bulk of the Edanna...on land or at sea. These trees could grow anywhere and because they were dependent only on the wind when young for placement, grew everywhere.
He read what she'd been working on, the ecosystem inside the jungles. He bent to adding human, bird and small animal food sources, added some creatures suitable as pets and thousands of edible flowers that were also beautiful and which had parts of the plants that were useful as medicines and teas. It was a part of Narayan that had not been changed by Abby, only refined, that was used to alert humans to new foods or other digestible.
The definitions of things like infusion, decoction, syrup, root or other plant part solid, etc, had been given to the Narayan Book a year ago. When a new food was added, a good cross-section of the population got a craving for it...prepared in the same way and they understood from this that it was the gift of another new food, medicine or beverage that had just been written in.
In the case of the medicines, each new plant took care of a different illness and various combinations of teas settled different ones. You simply got a craving for the combination you needed and the Book would either take you right to it or cause it to grow close enough you could reach it if you were too ill to go foraging. A few people found a plant with the right natural chemicals growing right out of the wall near their reading or resting place.
Medicines only worked and tasted good if you needed them though. The rest of the time they tasted like a concentrated form of raw garlic juice and gave you the 12 hour runs...nothing 'cured' those. Atrus read that bit and had to smile. It was a good deterrent since it wouldn't take long for everyone to find that out and it would be known what you'd done to get that problem: Which would humiliate the person in question.
They had a rule, though...no one could ask who added a bit someone liked. You were free to use it in other Books, but you didn't get to ask...or volunteer the information. It kept people from getting a swelled head, if no one else knew. He skipped over that line and continued to write, moving on to adding several species of colorful, sweetly singing pretty birds with neat, clean habits that people would enjoy having around. Some liked the canopy, others denser vegetation and still others liked open areas of the jungles.
He also added butterflies, each to prefer a range of flowering plants that he wrote to outgrow the caterpillars' foraging...but only when the larvae were eating enough to damage the plant. He made them in a bright array of colors, different ones depending on gender. Narayans had never seen butterflies, skippers or moths. He added a few bats for predators and some of those were fruit-eaters. Hawks and Eagles joined them and the birds so predators would be available to cull their numbers, some of which were night hunters.
Catherine was working on Hartia, the new world that Atrus had begun. He had mostly focused on the oceans so she turned her attentions to the interior, adding a massive grassland and on it she first put horses. Common, everyday Earth horses. Morgans because she loved the breed and she added every scrap of knowledge of the breed that she knew, even anatomy. She did have to get Abby to check things over because she was being very, very specific in what she wanted and she needed to be sure the Book didn't change the animal more than was needed to make it fit the new planet. Abby altered the star's signature to match Earth's and then altered a few details of the planet...but it was enough, she told Catherine, to ensure that any animal native to Earth would thrive on Hartia, just fine. She also handed tons of Natural World text books that each held the full botany and biology for ONE type of grassland ecosystem suitable for horses.
"It's like a blanket patch, you specify the maximum area for one...just one, mind you. Select the one you want and put the rest of the books away. Tell me which one you want and I'll add the lines needed to add the text book information to the Book. Then I'll show you how to 'personalize' your work."
Fifteen hundred million square miles of grassland, ranging from arid to tropical, was put in place. Buffalo were added...Catherine had selected the American Great Plains as they had existed before the Europeans discovered the North or South American Continents and since Abby had told her to add one or two other herbivores as well as at least three carnivores from the area of her choice, buffalo, horses and Pronghorn were an obvious selection. She added Western Beaver, Prairie Dogs, Golden Eagles, Coyotes and Wolves, as well. Due to the safety precautions on all Atrus' Books, they were all human friendly. That would not last, in this case, since Abby was an American and she knew of several species of highly venomous snakes and spiders that lived out there. She'd made Catherine put the other great grasslands in too, allowing her to cheat with the rest and just give the Book the style number for the rest, but for her chosen area, she made her do it the hard way.
Atrus and Abby settled into swapping Narayan and Tomahna back and forth for nearly a month...that's how long it took Catherine to copy all the natural history texts just on plants that had existed there, back in the day...though this one was much, much bigger. The added populations of animals each filled the plains to 23% of total territorial capacity. The normal capacity was somewhere along the lines of 65% of the available area so while there were hundreds of thousands of each kind, the grasslands themselves seemed rather empty. And Catherine bordered them with mountains simular in type to the Cascades, the Rockies and the Grand Teton ranges on the west and the Ozarks on the east...adding mule deer, elk and moose along with black and grizzly bears and several species of rabbit, hare and hawk on the west and more rabbits and hares, black bears, more hawks and eagles and both white and black-tailed deer on the east. She filled the eastern mountain forests with mixed trees, hardwoods, fruit-woods and conifers, added in every other native tree known to those areas and songbirds. She also added a few that were found nowhere on Earth, giving the form and the nutritional needs for a variety of plant, fruit and seed eating birds and animals, but no other information to allow the Book to add the Functions. In this case, it frequently also had to suppply the food source because she hadn't.
By the time Abby made her stop and took the Book away, citing that it was Atrus' turn and she needed to work on something else for a while, the interior section had really taken a firm hold. Abby knew that the Book needed someone to go back to working on it's oceans so it could do the adjustments on the hundreds of thousands of new additions. She also knew that after a month without input, Atrus' oceanic additions would have undergone dramatic expansions and Book would have added changes. She handed Hartia to him and took Tomahna back as Catherine drew Narayan to her and began to read. Keep in mind, Hartia comes to me before you get it again, Catherine." She told the woman, got a sigh and a nod in reply and they all settled in to Write.
Atrus had Abby look into one bit and she made one or two minor corrections in the toxicity in meat limitations area of the Book but otherwise left it alone. She just didn't think they needed food animals to be poisonous to the predator species so she corrected that. He raised his eyebrow at the type of correction which had been made and shook his head as she withdrew and went back to working on Tomahna's new river system.
Tomahna had several large inland seas, some fresh and some salt, now and a river system that drained into them. She added Forms for fish that clearly needed water to live in and creatures from shellfish to insects for them to feed on were made available, from some as long as her arm that were edible by humans, right down to the microscopic so that the smaller predators had something to hunt. She added Russian Sturgeon to several headwaters, along with every kind of catfish she knew of that would fit in frying pan or casserole dish, halibut, flounder, blue and rock crabs, Maine and Spiny lobsters, king salmon, Atlantic salmon, various types of bass and trout. She also snuck in herring, sardines, shrimp, krill, sheephead, tarpon, tuna, sailfin, marlin, grouper, basking and whale sharks and floor dwellers like sea urchins, dogfish and various kelp.
She had made half Tomahna's oceans warm, a quarter temperate and the rest polar. She raised a string of tropical islands and put her favorite tropical fruits on them...then started adding her favorite temperate zone fruit and nut trees to the area around Atrus' house. When she had her standard 'supporting' species in, she began to write weather Function Items into Tomahna.
Breathable Air Quality Improvement Item Function:
Weather Event: Begin Planetary Precipitation.
Area of Initial Weather Event for Planet Tomahna? Atrus Residence. This event will be Followed by planet-wide events as needed.
Duration? 2 full days.
Intensity Level: Medium
Atmospheric Electrical Clearing Method: Lightening bolts
Electrical Discharges: Cloud to Cloud Only 8 events out of 10
Cloud to ground or ground to ground Electrical Discharges in Bolt form near residence? Never.
Form of Electrical Discharges near Residential areas? Ball.
Electrical Discharge in Beginning set? Yes.
Engage Set.
Usually she got snow with that in cold areas on a planet but Atrus and Catherine lived in was now part of the tropic belt so Abby looked out the window and watched a storm begin to form.
"Here now, you two. Get a good look at the opening moments of Tomahna's rewritten climate. Oceans and water systems are your weather makers and so you don't get a nasty first one, it's better to set one off yourself to get the planetary weather systems engaged. They will continue on their own on a planetwide scale, once this goes off...like a set of dominoes set up to be tipped."
She stepped out to the covered patio outside Atrus' study and the residence's common room.
End Part One