Inside Scoop page 1

WHY FISH DON'T SPEAK

by Jezz

As some of you may remember, a few months ago I had an unfortunate accident. I was a financier and was putting the finishing touches on my planet ready for linking when it happened. Now I'm not going to go into all the embarrassing details but suffice to say that I was suddenly a groundhog again. I distinctly remember Freya telling me to use the extra time I had to make my planet files perfect. That was stellar advice of course, but my immediate thoughts were of getting out of Sol and on with the business of promoting. As the weeks went by I contented myself with thinking all was well with my planet files and that I really had very little left to do.

Then quite suddenly I was almost at the rank of Financier again and I knew I really had to make those final finishing touches to the plans so that my little world could become a reality. I diligently cleared my desk and opened up the blue prints. I have to say I was quite taken aback by what I found!

You see... Ideas have a way of mutating over time. They grow and meander and take routes that we never would have thought of at first inception. So it was with my planet. I tried to imagine myself standing on the shuttle pad of the planet I had written about, but it didn't seem right anymore. The more locations I looked at the worse it got. My fine red pencil slowly became a small worn stub and I realized to my dismay that my lovely blue prints were all but worthless. My vision had changed while they gathered dust on the shelf.

Now if I hadn't promised a particularly evil Financier that I would link my planet by a certain deadline so that he would sell me my shares back, everything would have been fine. Unfortunately, said Financier had also promised to take a dividend in body parts if I reneged on the deal. I needed advice and fast! So cap in hand I booked a trip to Magrathea, hoping to get some pointers from the Great Slarti himself. Slarti was too busy with a project to see me and I was at my wits end when I stumbled across one of his assistants, Rafe.

Rafe proved to be a help in so many ways that I thought I would share a little of the conversation with other budding planet builders. It went something like this:

Rafe: ...body parts, you say? Well.. can't have that now can we? Look I'll clue you in. Just don't mention any of this to Slarti if you do run into him, Ok?

Jezz: It's a deal.. now please would you tell me how I design a planet from scratch in a week?

Rafe: Easy! You leave it blank.

(strained silence followed by laughter from Rafe)

Rafe: ok look... I graduated from Planetary Design with higher marks than old Slarti himself! And the first big project we're on together I get my choice of what I want to design. So I said "give me the biggest bit." and they did. I got Oceans. Slarti got Fjords. I worked my posterior off designing the most fabulous coral reefs and Slarti gets an award because some spider crawled through his ink pot and all over his map, or was that the day he had the shakes from all the caffeine... anyway... the point is, there are things that you can spend forever designing and nobody is going to look at them.

Jezz: But how do you know nobody will look?

Rafe: Ppht. Newbods! Ok... if you don't give people a way to chop down a tree you can leave the inside of the trees blank. There's no need to put in all those nice rings and wood grain till someone can see it.

Jezz: I think I follow, but there's a lot more than... um... tree rings involved here. I mean folks are going to start wandering all over the place and finding my blanks. There's no way to stop them.

Rafe: Well sure there is! Why do you think we make mountains? How is someone going to know there's literally nothing on the other side of a mountain range if they can't get over it, eh? You've got all that extra time to figure out what to put there while the inhabitants are making book on whether it's climbable or not.

Jezz: Oh! So did you also discourage exploration by planting the idea that the Earth was flat?

Rafe: It was flat.

Jezz: Um... I've seen it from space. It's a sphere.

Rafe: Well yeah... it is now! But that's only because we couldn't figure out what to do with all the stuff that kept falling off the edge. So we changed it and tucked in the ends to make a sphere after a few billion years.

Jezz: Riiiight... and nobody noticed the difference...

Rafe: Don't be daft! Of course they noticed, or... discovered it was round. All that happened was the ones that found out we'd changed it told the others it had always been that way. See?

Jezz: Ah... so if I make it so people can't get to the blank spots I can extend my time table for completion pretty much indefinitely and the inhabitants will just think it was always that way when they do notice?

Rafe: Now you're catching on... and put in lots of oceans.

Jezz: Now I'm lost again. You said you worked really hard on the oceans.

Rafe: Sure I did. Right up to the point that Slarti got the award for squiggles and I got nothing for my reefs. Oceans can be big... really big! What do you think I put on the bottom of all that water?

Jezz: um... nothing?

Rafe: Yep, nothing. It's mostly just construct graph down there - who's to know?

Jezz: Well, er... the fish would know.

(Rafe smiles slyly)

Rafe: Shame about how that whole fish language thing didn't work out, ain't it? I accidentally lost the whole shipment of fish tongues and was forced to change the design. Pity... but there you go.

So... there you have it. Armed with the knowledge that the world was once flat and that a planet designer can change anything they want at a later date because the inhabitants will simply think their ancestors were idiots, I set off to re-write my planet. There's still a lot of blank construct material on it but hopefully by the time anyone works out how to get to those parts I'll have built something to cover up the little squares... besides oceans... lots and lots of oceans.

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