#semphorean concerns

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Another maybe-interesting thought I’ve been having about the Basilean medical infrastructure is that there’s an interesting divide--beginning to be gradually blurred with advancing technology but certainly not gone--between health things that are handled by doctors and health things that are handled by Semphorean temples.

If you remember from my earlier posts, Semphora is the goddess of children, midwives, colony harmony, and family life. She’s one of the oldest and most widespread “minor” goddesses, and most Basilean colonies either have their own maintained shrine for her with a number of working devotees, or share one with another colony that’s geographically local. 

Semphoreans have a long-standing role of being like...space Planned Parenthood. For as long as they work at the shrine (which, because of the kind of person that chooses to do this, many of them leave to get married and have kids of their own but just as many make a lifelong career of it) they take an oath to protect the wills and interests of mothers (as in, the 1-in-100-or-so reproductively capable astraeas) and children. Depending on how big of a place it is, they’ll manufacture birth control meds; take in children and elderly folks with nowhere to go as well as anyone else in the colony who’s having trouble taking care of themselves but isn’t in the care of a medical doctor (more on this in a bit); perform the regular well checkups for babies and young children; and generally work on advancing prenatal and pediatric medicine. Their main function is facilitating the passing down of information from senior to apprentice midwives (a colony matriarch’s attending retinue is usually made up of local semphoreans and relatives who are particularly close with her who trained with local semphoreans), so basically any medical stuff that’s specific to mothers or babies falls under “semphorean concerns”, not “medicine,” although it’s not like there’s no acknowledgement of the crossover. Still, a doctor or pharmacist called in to assist with a complicated hibernation, genvia, or chrysalis development will usually defer to the midwives. 

Another branch of medicine that Basilean astraeas consider “Semphorean concerns” is psychiatry. It’s well known that things like neurochemical imbalances, post-traumatic symptoms, etc exist, but they’re mostly conceptualized as potential threats to colony cohesion, which as one might predict is Not Great for compassion toward mentally ill people. The absence of misogyny and the sorta...nearness to the pro-social foundations of things prevent the ableism from being AS horrific as the equivalent time period’s on earth--standard procedure if you’re scaring the neurotypicals is to just send you to live at the shrine and be a relatively chill monastic for a while, which can actually be good for people, it’s structure and calm and predictability--but it’s stigmatized and whispered about and not Good. I think there are definitely a few folks, some of them vestals, who are vocally pushing to end mental illness stigma in the Rings and I’d really like to write about them sometimes because on the one hand it’s a very familiar social fight but at the same time the specific flavor of the stigma is very different. Basilean society has fallen into this doublethink with the parallel worlds of colony-based traditionalism and modern industrial capitalism where individual achievement matters, but individual pain is just trouble for your sisters, and that’s something I try to touch on with my Basillan and Sitherian characters because it does cause conflict in their lives despite their social privilege relative to my main cast

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“500 Babies is A Lot Of Babies,” or, a post about astraea Mothers and genviae

I’ve not gotten too deeply into this because it’s not something that many of my characters are directly touched by (after all, most of them are lux, made in factories and necessarily motherless) and also because I recognize that it is Weird, but Mothers and the specific conditions they need to have children are a pretty major factor in why astraea society has developed along the lines that it has, and it’s hinted at through things people say, so I think it’s important that these questions have canon answers even if I never Get Into All This in the books beyond the extent that’s needed to understand the clone-class situation. I feel like someone was going to ask eventually so, yknow, it’s out there

Fidelity Fortefemen Vega-Revoni half-reclines, in respectable fashion, on a sofa in the fonsilia collonade; solelas stuck flush against her cheeks; shoulders veiled in her long, dark curls; curls veiled in the mantillas of Ouria’s sacred moon. It’s mid-summer, and her body glows softly through the loose weave of her dress; soon she will sleep for the second time. The grey-haired colony midwives attend her constantly, hovering at her extremities with vapor-pipes and paper fans [....]  the basic dynamics of the Vega sisters survived the marriage intact until the delivery of Fidelity’s first genvia. At that instant--when Chivalry was seven and a half quinturns old--the sister she and Dignity had known suddenly became honora pecara, the future hope of the family name and the nucleus around which life at Fortune Flats revolved.

The above (from the vol. 3 draft) is a glimpse of the figure around which, by the conservative/traditionalist ideal, all astraea life is meant to revolve--the titled, landholding colony Mother, who is seen as a giver and sustainer of life on both the biological and social level.

Mothers are born with some characteristics specific to their reproductive capability--they tend to be bigger and may have specific markings or other bits, depending on species (for a bunch of species, including Basillans and Caesurans, mothers are born with spots on their faces that fade away as they get older; a few cultures, like the Zasci on Caesura, tattoo these into place so they don’t).

From birth they carry a mini-nebula in an abdominal pocket--it’s the same spot where a human might have a womb, but a bit of a different structure. What happens inside an astraea Mother before she “gives birth” (to chrysalises, not live babies) is basically akin to the start of the stellar life cycle. Her nebular material begins to form protostars, which start to produce light as they develop the potential to form a baby once in a chrysalis.

Mothers usually get glowy every few planetary cycles, often in accordance with shifts in atmospheric pressure (which may have some role in how they take in nutrients from the air). It’s quite easy to halt the process here, if 500-800 new children and a nearly two-(earth) year-long gestation process wouldn’t be convenient for the Mother or the colony, with various medications. 

If the process isn’t halted, the Mother will eventually need to go into a hibernation-like state to take in and consolidate trace solids from the atmosphere with which to spin chrysalises. The hibernation prevents too many of these solids from being burned up in her light, which can be deadly. Before astraea species developed their current understanding of this state, it was common for Mothers to simply be out of commission for months with no resulting children--if a certain amount of solid matter isn’t breathed in and stored in specific organ systems (the same ones they use to regrow limbs and stuff) the protostars will simply disperse inside her body and the process starts over from scratch.

But with the proper atmospheric composition--nowadays often delivered by a pneumatic pump fastened directly to one of her spiracles, just to take all the variables out of the equation--the Mother will eventually rouse and start to produce silk from spinnerets on her inner thighs. The bit that follows looks a lot like human childbirth with two key differences: first, the “baby” is just a little glowing blip that’s born into a kind of bag made outside the body, and second, any astraea who has ever been involved in the process will tell you that the hibernation period is the part that, you know, sucks. That’s their equivalent to human labor. The actual birth event--which is called a genvia, as is the particular “batch” of children born in said event--is usually very peaceful and repetitive, with drama occurring only if the Mother runs out of natural silk before she runs out of nebular globes (for which there are fairly easy-to-operate artificial-cocoon incubators--this tech was actually part of what got the cloning industry started). 

Chrysalises are mostly air, with superstrong carbon-based tissue (?) woven around. The Mother usually just detaches them from her body and lays them out somewhere comfortable where they can be easily checked on and where the babies will be safe once they start to hatch, which uhhhh they do by chewing their way out. There is no way to make that not sound like a creepy sci fi monster of the week thing but it’s just normal to them and in some smaller/more isolated colonies the sisters even come visit before the kids are properly “born” and just sit and tell them hello, it’s all in how you frame it. 

There are usually a few older daughters who stay around where their Mother lives and become “midwives” (obviously it’s my translation of their word but it is analogous) and are stereotypically very present and very fussy, especially when the colony’s Mother is young. They are basically a necessity though, both because in the hibernation phase and the weeks leading up to it the Mother’s health is really vulnerable and it’s hard for her to muster the energy to take care of herself when her body’s forcing her to stay at a super-low baseline, and because 500 Babies Is A Lot Of Babies even if they’re still developing. Once they start to hatch more sisters will show up and help and begin divvying them up to adopt into the various individual households of the colony but also just kind of keep them corralled because they can toddle as soon as they hatch.

New Mothers aren’t generally born until their own Mother is older. As she ages her chemistry will change just slightly, making the subtle “genetic” adjustments needed to create a Mother more likely. Because of this it’s very rare for a new Mother to be born in her Mother’s first genvia, leading to the tradition of Mothers being raised by First Daughters. 

A lot of astraeas have strong psychological drives to care for and protect Mothers at all stages of their lives--similar to the drive to nurture children, it’s tied up in the perpetuation of their species. The hierarchies of Basilean society, however, heavily exploit this reasonable tendency. In noble colonies, where the Mother is titled, the peasantry will still be made up of her biological daughters, who idealize her archetype and may feel strong loyalty to her even though she’s given them the short end of the stick. The powers that be of Basilean capitalism, meanwhile, dangle the opportunity to secure comfort for one’s colony’s Mother and future sisters and daughters in front of the lower classes to rope them into various forms of wage slavery. 

ON THE OTHER HAND, Mothers who are...good mothers and really care about their daughters as people (rather than out of noblesse oblige or w/e) are a really powerful force for social change, because they tend to be highly influential within their colonies and more or less have the ear of a few thousand people by default, and can say to those people “let’s all act in our best interests together” and be listened to, at least to a certain degree.

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Couple & family norms - lower classes

I’m finally finishing this trilogy of posts (first parts here and here) that I started ages and ages ago

Although they obviously have the same range of experience surrounding love and romance as everyone else, low-class Basilean citizens generally aren’t expected to marry--it’s considered more respectable for them to be attached to some upper luminus by military, feudal, servile, or monastic devotion.

Aristocratic Basileans are aware of the romantic lives of their subordinates; they just tend to think and talk about them the way we’d talk about crushes and dating about children--”the centuriae and their little girlfriends”; “her assistants are so adorable together, they have some feelings for each other you know.” It’s all based in the idea that love, even fully mature and committed love, does not automatically lend seriousness to a relationship which is not a High Fidelity. 

The trouble is, of course, that the same colonies that produce these supposed devotion-bound innocents also can and do produce children, and a lot of couples do want to raise children (from one or the other of their Mothers) together, which can become complex if they’re not able to cohabitate or submit any morally (or in some cases legally) admissable request to their respective ladies for support in providing for them. 

Many lower-class children are still cared for communally and not officially “adopted” by anyone--which was at one time, to be fair, the norm (official adoptions just ensure that nobody gets neglected basically, the majority of astraeas in the Seven Suns still grow up surrounded by hundreds of sisters). The demand for Fidelity in exchange for shelter and basic nourishment in the Rings, particularly--where there is no atmosphere but the artificial atmosphere that is a finite commodity--often results in severe shortages of adult supervision. Many public spaces in the Rings absolutely swarm with street children, who drift from place to place avoiding the city guard patrols as best they can.

Members of the lower classes still court and marry informally, and because they’re so much more dependent on and immersed in their colonies they tend to be good at organizing recreational things--like dances and holiday celebrations--that give folks an opportunity to meet people from other colonies and let the sparks fly. They still use the initia/mutati courtship model, although traditions like letter-writing and engagement ribbons are in sparse practice among couples where one or both parties are likely uneducated and/or illiterate, and where one or both parties may be barred (because of the obligations of Fidelity) from “official” romance. 

Note that even this level of permissiveness is generally reserved for Basilean CITIZENS in the lower lumini--non-citizens, including conscripts from occupied worlds and lux units, are generally looked down on for any “wavering in their devotion” at all, whether it’s from romantic or any other perceived passion.