The Traveller's Handbook

Nearly everything you do in Xalaria raises one of your two Levels, your Technology Level or your Culture Level. Doing raises your Technology Level, by exploring, mining, salvage, finding new life and fighting. Understanding raises your Culture Level, by a concert followed, a museum understood, a festival kept or a gift well chosen. Technology builds and fights. Culture opens cities, councils and rites. Between them, they decide how every planetary culture and every alliance regards you, and that regard, in the end, decides how you come home.

This book follows the same path outward, from you and your craft to the stars and the planetary cultures that live among them, the alliances those cultures stand with, what you fight and what you build, the travellers you meet, and at last the homecoming, which is always to your home star.

1. IOf the Travellerthe keys, the voice in your craft, two levels, colour
2. IIOf Stars and Worldsstar classes, the superdrive, skies, life, mines, charts, ruins
3. IIIOf Planetary Culturesmusic, art and dance, antiques, gifts, rites, regard
4. IVOf Alliancesfour banners, standing, councils, forgiveness
5. VOf Combathitting, striking true, what a city fires, a fall
6. VIOf Building and Keepingrobots, stations, farms, halls, while you were away
7. VIIOf Companymeetings, space station notices, deals
8. VIIIOf Homecomingby victory, by peace, or by a third way
9. §Appendicesevery craft, every weapon and tool

Xalaria is played in words. Every key stands for one, and the letter is always shown beside its word, so a command reads as a sentence. Press n and you are navigating; press w after it and you are on your way to the wormhole. Press c and choose a vessel, and you are speaking to it. Press f and choose a target, and you are firing on it. There is nothing to memorise, because whenever you are asked to choose, the choices are shown as words.

Anything you type that is not one of the choices is taken as speech. Type the name of a star and your computer tells you where it lies. Type a few words while a vessel is waiting on your answer, and the vessel hears them.

Many things take time, as they would. A landing takes time, a concert lasts as long as its music, and leaving a fight means putting all your power into acceleration for ten seconds or so, with no shield and no weapon while you do. Whatever is firing on you keeps firing.

The first voice you hear is your craft's computer, and it is the one you will hear most. Its character, one of five, is fixed by the name you choose for yourself. It may be wry, tender, sceptical, poetic or steadfast. It speaks in short lines made from where you are, from the star's light, the world below, what lives there and how the city speaks, so no two travellers hear the same voyage.

It thinks before it speaks. A remark about a place is dropped once you have left it. Nothing is said while you are answering a question or watching a landing, and never straight after you press a key, because you are reading. A warning comes first, then news, then a question, then a remark, one at a time. It teaches you the commands one idea at a time, only while you seem to be waiting, and never one you have already used.

It never tells you the universe's hidden laws. What it knows is what it perceives, and what it perceives is true.

Every traveller has two levels, each from 1 to 13. Technology Level rises with experience of doing, from exploring, prospecting and salvage to finding new life and fighting. Culture Level rises with experience of understanding. Each step up either ladder asks for more experience than the last, until Level 13 asks for 50,000 points and is particularly difficult to reach.

Stars, cities and stations have a measure of their own, their advancement, from 1 to 22, which is how far the civilisation there has come. It sets what their music asks of you, what their seats cost and how hard they fight, and a station wears it as its colour.

Every Technology Level and every Culture Level carries a title, and you are known by the title of whichever of the two is higher. A Programmer of Technology Level 6 who reaches Culture Level 7 is known from then on as a Musician.

Culture Level cannot be bought. A seat at a concert can, but a traveller without the Culture Level to follow the music leaves the hall exactly as they came.

It opens what technology cannot. A city's Exchange asks less of someone who knows its ways. Its council will hear them. Its rite is offered to them. Its citizens will work their farm, and sing their anthem as they do it.

Vessels are known by sight before they are known by name, as the grey Hobby Explorer or the crimson Vimba. A vessel's colour is the colour of its home station, and a station's colour is its advancement, so a colour says something.

A station receives a vessel of its own colour as one of its own. Its administrator welcomes you, and once a day there is a gift, and a tenth off in its assortment shop. Raiders read colour too, and to a raider a rich colour means a rich hold. Glass is where their interest begins.

With a can of paint, docked at a station, you can give your vessel a new face. Those who knew you only by sight lose track of you; those who know who you are still do. A full can covers it. Half a can leaves it patchy and fools fewer. Paint has a second use. Words painted on a station's wall are read by whoever looks about there, and what the station's security makes of them depends on its alliance. Praise of its own cause is left to stand, and liked. An insult, or praise of its enemy's cause, earns a fine.

Each of the 7,804 stars, and the 48,688 worlds around them, is fixed, the same for every traveller on every day. Its class is rolled first, and the rest follows, as it does in the real sky, its colour and its heat, its size, and the habitable zone around it, where life can begin.

There is one quirk of Xalaria's sky. It has no blue-white B stars at all, only the rare blue O stars above them and everything below.

Life can begin only within a star's habitable zone, and even there it is a roll. A moon must be more than 400 km in radius to qualify, and a gas world that rolls life keeps it only on a d20 roll of 1. On any other roll, it is lifeless.

Between the stars, the wormholes do the travelling. Between the worlds of one star, your own superdrive carries you, and fuel is what it burns. How hard it drives is yours to choose, under v, and the choice stands for every journey until you change it.

The bargain is exact. Halve the setting and the journey takes twice as long and burns half the fuel. Double it and you arrive in half the time, having burned twice as much. Fifty percent is where most travellers keep it. A traveller running low turns it down to creep home on what is left, and a traveller in a hurry turns it up and pays.

What you carry costs fuel too, though never time. The superdrive holds its pace whatever the load, and simply burns more to keep it, so a full hold of ore makes every journey dearer. Distance matters less than you might expect. Four times as far takes only about twice as long.

Before you set off, your computer tells you how far it is, how long it will take and how much fuel it will burn. If the fuel left would get you there but not back, it says so and asks whether to go on. Fuel is sold by every station's technology assistants, and a vessel you meet may share a little of its own.

Clouds follow temperature, as they do in our own solar system. Below 95 kelvin a solid world wears Titan's orange haze. A little warmer brings Neptune's methane ice, then Jupiter's ammonia, then white water cloud like Earth's, then the sulphuric acid of Venus. Hotter still come clouds of salt and of molten rock. Only solid worlds of 5,000 km radius or more hold air enough for weather.

Near the most radiant fifth of stars, or at the hottest tenth of worlds, radio suffers. Every voice that reaches you arrives with a warning and with words missing, a tenth of them where it is weakest and up to seven tenths where it is most extreme. Your own computer and your own words come through whole.

Great radiation interrupts the signal.

Every world has a description of its own, drawn from what the world is, and some describe life. On a world with none of its own, a careful search of the surface may still turn something up. You might have discovered life! You collect a sample for scientific review. The more cultured the eye, the likelier the find. A world that many have searched before you gives up less.

Whether the sample is truly new is decided at the moment you find it, by how well you can see. Science in Xalaria needs culture. A traveller of Culture Level 1 brings in a real discovery one time in thirteen; by Culture Level 13, every time. Take it to a station's administrator. A true one is met with a grant and a line in the Chronicle's legends, brought proof of new life. Anything else is politely declined.

Upon inspection, indeed it appears novel at first sight, however it is not of great interest to our scientists.

About one star in twenty holds an animal, intelligent enough to be worth watching but with no cities and no words, and a few shops sell one in a travelling cage. It is restless, and never wrong. It knows things about a place before you do, and it shows what it knows in the way its own world made it, by its feelers or its eyes, its claws or its wings. Learn to read it. A kind that sleeps for weeks tells you nothing while it sleeps, and its world's description says so, for those who read that too.

Rocky worlds and moons hold deposits of metal, and gas giants a fifth as often. Most are common metals of ordinary quality. A world with a shiny or metallic surface gives finer metals. On a stony world about one deposit in four is a quarry instead, of marble or granite, the two stones a hall or a gallery is built from.

A deposit gives easily at first and grudgingly at the end. Strike it with a mining tool and a unit comes free on a roll against what is left. A deposit of ten units, full, never refuses. With one unit left, it gives one time in ten. Fail, and experience gives a second chance. Fire on a deposit with an ordinary weapon and it may still yield, as debris flies about, but crudely, and the deposit loses a second unit for every one you take.

What you mine on a world with a city may be taxed by it, and refusing a city's tax is a wrong it remembers. When a deposit is worked out, another forms, unknown to anyone until it is found, somewhere suitable in the whole universe. The universe's wealth is never used up, but the more a region is worked, the further out its wealth must be sought.

The first traveller to reach a star through a wormhole charts it, and their name stays with that star for as long as the universe lasts. Beginning at a star is not charting it. Only arriving does.

Now and then a city's antique dealer holds, instead of an antique, a chart, hand-drawn long ago, of the stars about that city. It marks one thing truly there within three stars that you have not found yet, such as life no one has catalogued, or a quarry of marble or granite. Or so it seems. Like the dealer's antiques, half the charts are forgeries, and a forged chart marks a real world where the thing is not.

Read, a chart sets your search. Each search of the marked world's surface finds what a true chart marks about one time in two, and never what a forgery marks. Nothing ever tells you which you hold. In the end, you decide for yourself.

A city or a station destroyed is destroyed for good, and its ruin keeps the story of the battle, who fired, with what, and which vessels fell beside it.

Explore the wilderness of a world with a ruined city, or the orbit of a ruined station, and you may come upon it, once. What you see there is what happened there. Its own structures lie broken after their material, crystal shattered or growth torn. The burn lines are lasers and the craters blasts. The wrecks of those who fell still bear the markings of their alliance. How long ago it was shows in what covers it, smoke, then ash, then dust, then the world's own life creeping back over it.

Every mark in a ruin was made by someone, and some of those marks may be yours.

The hall is full and the doors have closed. Your seat cost 1,856 gc, about what a hall asks at a star of advancement 5. The music begins, goes on, and ends, and you are given one line:

Their music stays utterly strange to you. The 1,856 gc bought you nothing more.

Nothing was left to chance. Each city's music, art and dance asks a certain Culture Level, and you either reach it or you don't. Paying for a second seat changes nothing; coming back with a Culture Level one higher may open the same concert at once. Fall short of what it asks by two Culture Levels or less and you are told so, in words, never in numbers: For a moment their music almost made sense to you.

The most advanced cities ask more than Culture Level 13 can give. There are three ways round this. A culture may love one of its ways above the others, as its world's own description shows, whether a love of song, of decoration or of great gatherings. In the way it loves, a stranger's Culture Level counts ten levels higher, so the hardest cultures in the universe are entered by the one art they love. A true antique of theirs, brought home, opens its way outright. And a People's Hall founded by another traveller can lower the bar for everyone after them.

A museum is the same, for art, and has its own Art Director to tell you about it. A festival is the same, for dance, except that knowing their music is enough to join in: You celebrate with them, singing with them now that you understand their music.

Every city has a museum, and every museum keeps its own hours, open for an hour and closed for an hour, so you will often arrive at a shut door and an Art Director telling you, through it, when to come back. Inside, the tour takes three minutes. Like a concert it asks a Culture Level of you, in art rather than music, and below it the rooms are only rooms.

Understood, a tour ends among the things that culture treasures most. Remember what you saw there. Every planetary culture decorates what it loves in one way of its own, with spirals or runes, with dancing creatures or with stars in their places, and its museum is the one place that shows you which.

Stay and talk to the Art Director. Ask about any piece and you hear when it was likely made and where, sometimes with certainty and sometimes only a guess, and now and then the name of a world near here whose culture would treasure one like it. Art Directors also know a true antique from a false one, and will tell you, for a fee.

Half of what we know about these, we pieced together from their decoration alone.

An Art Director

The pieces stand on open stands, and nothing stops you lifting one. Set it back, and the Art Director lets out a breath.

Antiques turn up as you travel, and some of them are true, such as a culture's own musical manuscript, an ancestor's figurine or a festival mask. Taken home to the culture that made them, a true one opens that culture's music, art or festival to you at once.

After a few bars they are singing it with you, and then without you, as a song come home.

They take it in both hands, very still, and then they show it to the others, one of their ancestors' own, come home.

A manuscript, and a figurine, returned

A true mask, worn among its culture, lets you keep their festival as one of their own, and counts in their rite of the body. Wear a false one and someone laughs, and then they are all laughing, not kindly. Their celebrations are closed to you for a day.

Every planetary culture adores one kind of decoration and is offended by another. Nothing tells you which. An orb of magnesium decorated with spirals within spirals is a curiosity to one culture and a treasure to the next, and to a third it is an insult.

Offer a leader something bearing what their culture adores, and you are a hero of that city, and your culture experience grows by five times the city's advancement. Offer something plain to them and they thank you kindly, and mean it. Offer what offends them, and they say so.

You bring this here? To us? Take it away.

A leader, offered the wrong gift

Merchants make wares in their own culture's taste, from what their world offers. A ware is cheap where it is made and dear to a culture that shares the taste. Carried to the leader of a kindred culture, it opens doors, though leaders give nothing back for mere wares, as they do for antiques. Carried to the wrong culture, it is a wrong, and moves you a rung down in their regard.

Leaders receive gifts. Merchants deal in goods and coin, at a city's Exchange. Every city's Exchange is its own, shaped by its culture, and far less dependable than a station's trade bureau.

The market is a quiet clue to the city's alliance. The Freedom Fighters always sell arms. The Traders keep the widest range, rare metals too. Nature sells only what the world can spare. The Rebels sell contraband, to those they trust. Independents barter, and sell knowledge.

Its manner of trade is found out, never explained. Some cities haggle. Some barter goods for goods and refuse coin. Some will not trade with a stranger at all until the stranger knows one of their ways. On a festival day, wares are cheaper.

For a tip, a merchant will pass on gossip, and gossip in Xalaria is always true, things overheard or told.

Every culture decides somehow who continues. Some choose by music, some by judging new works, some by tests of the mind, some by trials of the body, and some by mating or by chance. Those in the first four groups offer their test to an honoured guest, which in Xalaria means anyone who has learned at least one of their ways. The rite is held two hours in every eight, on the city's own calendar; explore the city while it is held and you come upon it on a d20 roll of 1–7.

The rite of music asks you to join in, and everything you have heard elsewhere counts. Every anthem you know from other worlds is worth a point and a half; theirs is worth four more; a true instrument of theirs, more still. The rite of the mind asks a question only a real traveller can answer, such as which of these worlds holds a city you have found, or which of these stars you have seen, and the answer comes from your own record, never invented.

You take up their anthem, and they take it from you and carry it higher. When it ends, they turn to you as one.

The rite of music, passed

Pass and you are a hero of the city, the Chronicle tells it, and the city gives you a name in its own tongue. Fail, and the music falters around you, and stops, and their celebrations and rites are closed to you for three days. Fail the ordeal of the body and it takes a quarter of your shields with it.

A city keeps a simple memory of you, four rungs long. A wrong you do it moves you one rung down; a kindness it values moves you one rung up. Firing on a city skips the ladder entirely. That is war at once.

A city also gives names, in its own sounds and with a meaning in ours. Honour one with its rite or its festival and you may be known there as the one who carries our song, whose eyes found our beauty, or who did not break.

Four great alliances hold most of the stars, the Freedom Fighters, Trade and Manufacturing, Nature Preservation and the Rebel Coalition. Independents answer to no one and trust no banner. Allegiance in Xalaria is guarded. An ordinary vessel never names its own, and its alliance shows only in what it values, fears and takes for granted, for you to read.

Tell a vessel who you are and its answer gives it away. Nature Preservation talks of worlds and life left unspoiled. Trade and Manufacturing talk of custom, credit and trust. The Rebel Coalition speak of discretion and a world's right to itself, and ask where you have been and what you saw. The Freedom Fighters speak of freedom, theirs to give, and of the better system they wish everyone shared. An unaligned craft talks of art and curiosity.

Each alliance keeps some things close. Ask a vessel where the mines are, or where to buy heavy weapons, or where rare life is, and whether it tells you depends on what you are to it, and on what its alliance guards.

Under g, goodwill, you may choose to stand with any alliance that thinks well enough of you, or with none. Or you may found an alliance of your own, name it, and from then on every traveller sees it listed beside the four, in the same words.

Every alliance keeps a measure of goodwill for every traveller, earned and lost by deeds, and it fades without them. The steps are the same for every alliance, the four and the founded alike.

Stars are held as well. Look about in a star's orbit and your computer reads the stations you know of there. If most stand with one alliance, that alliance holds the star; if two or more share them, it is contested. Territory cuts both ways. Over a star your own alliance holds, its vessels escort you more readily. Over one held by its enemy, every vessel is watching.

An honorary member is shown things members are not. The four keep stations that are not on any list, and share them only with those they trust that far.

Stand with one of the four great alliances, go to a city's leader, and ask its council, in your own words, to change sides.

The council listens for three things. The first is the creed of your alliance, which is liberty and rights for the Freedom Fighters, markets and fair prices for Trade, rivers and forests and harmony for Nature, and sovereignty and courage for the Rebels. The second is what this culture values, which is song to one that chooses by music and endurance to one that chooses by strength. The third is whether you said enough. It also hears the insults. Call them primitive and it costs you more than any fine phrase earns.

Fine words. What do they have to do with us?

You understand something of us. Not enough, not yet.

We have talked long of it, and you have persuaded us.

Three councils answer

Win, and from that day the city stands with your alliance, for every traveller who comes after you, for good. Lose, and it will not hear you on it again for three days. If you insulted it, on a d10 roll of 1–6 it also thinks less of you.

If you stand with one of the four great alliances, its vessels may fight for you. Fired upon, every vessel of your alliance nearby weighs whether to join in, a member's sometimes, an honorary member's often and a Fellow's most of the time. Up to two can come at once. Ask for help in plain words, such as cover me or help!, and the odds rise. Ask a vessel to escort you and it stays twenty minutes, more readily over a star your alliance holds.

A hostile city can be bought off, all but the Rebels', who mend a wrong by deeds, not coin. The price is never told. Make your offer to its leader and its council takes fifteen seconds to weigh it, while its defences keep firing. A large offer ends it sooner and wastes money. Small steps come closer to the price, under more fire. It costs half as much again each time you buy the same city off, because it has learned that you pay. Even once paid, the city is only wary of you, not welcoming.

Every hostile city but one kind can be bought off. The Rebel Coalition is not for sale. A wrong done to a Rebel city is mended in one of its own ways, all of them honest.

A Rebel city never refuses to talk, even while it is hostile. Speak to its leader and the city holds its fire while you are heard. The leader says plainly what you did, and what would set it right. If another Rebel city counts you its hero, or you are a Fellow of the Rebels, that is enough, and you are forgiven at the hearing.

Otherwise, amends are made in kind, as the wrong was, and the leader will tell you what kind. There is one more way, which suits a culture that is endlessly curious. Bring them something true that they did not know. Be very sure that it is true.

Forgiven, a Rebel city keeps its word. It is fully welcoming again. A city that was paid is only wary.

Combat happens in real time. Each port of your craft holds one thing, whether a laser, a blast, a glow shield or a mining tool. Every shot draws on your energy. A fight is about which port you fire and when, and whether you will have the energy to raise a shield when you need it, as much as about the weapons themselves. When the first shot lands, your computer gives its view:

We're being shot at! Use f to fight back, or n to get away. I recommend away, but I'm biased: I'm the hull.

Light craft are small and hard to hit; heavy ones are not. At Technology Level 1, a pilot hits another beginner's Medaka on a d60 roll under 36, three times in five. From Technology Level 5 up, a pilot never misses a Delta Destroyer flown by a pilot of the same Technology Level, since at weight 50 it is too large to miss. Blasts strike every craft in range and never miss, which makes them strongest early in a career. Later, aimed weapons hit more often and strike true, and a blast never strikes true.

The strategic hit is rolled on a d169, and 169 is thirteen squared, so at Technology Level 13, the top of the ladder, every hit that is not critical is strategic.

A city is built of what its culture's nature allows, and it defends itself with what it is made of. A planetary culture of stone or metal builds, and fires from its watchtowers and gate towers. A silicon or crystalline culture grows spires and lenses that focus light into a beam, as the crystal in a laser does. A culture of plants raises thorn towers and spore pods. An armoured, shelled culture builds carapace turrets and shell domes. On a gas world a culture of light fires from drifting lanterns and hovering veils of charged light.

A city has four weapon ports, and each fires from a structure of its own, chosen once for that city, so the same weapon always comes from the same tower. Aimed weapons come from the towers, spires, lenses and turrets. Blasts, which fill the space about the city, come from its domes, veils and bulwarks. The most advanced cities raise greater structures besides, a crown of prisms, a great dome, a storm veil. When you are told what fired, it is the tower that is named, never the city.

Remember me?

You thought you were safe here?

A pursuer, finding you again

Vessels remember too. Every vessel near you when you do something notable, a vessel destroyed, a gift given, cargo demanded, a wreck salvaged, keeps it in mind for a while, and it colours how they speak to you. A vessel that attacked you and is still hostile says so when it finds you again.

Xalaria never pauses, and it needs no saving. Close the page and your craft stays where it is, in the universe, while you are away, for hours or for days. Things happen to it. Vessels come alongside, hail it, demand its cargo or fire on it, and the craft keeps a log. When you come back, your computer sums it up in a few sentences, the most serious first. Docked at a station, a craft is safe. In orbit, or on a world's surface, it is not.

When shields fail, a stone is carved. It says who you were, what you flew and how much you had learned, and then exactly how you fell, in plain words, with what you were doing at that moment and, where it bears on the death, a phrase from the world's own description. Nothing is embellished. The stone stands in the public Graveyard with every other.

…whilst taking off from the moon Lispra to escape

…whilst collecting 12 units of ore in the orbit of Wriquoe

From other stones

To quit is to be laid to rest yourself, for good. Most travellers simply close the page.

A station's assortment shop sells robots, and its keeper will try hard to sell you one, because the shop takes a tenth of everything a robot it sold ever earns. There are four kinds. A Pilot Robot flies a craft of yours and follows you about a star, docking when you dock and landing when you land. A Mechanic Robot mends what is damaged. A Cleaner Robot clears an infestation from your hold. A Nurse Robot cures a disease.

Any robot can fly a craft, after its fashion. A pilot flies well and a mechanic passably. A cleaner or a nurse flies late, flustered and slow to fire, which is the fun of it.

Each robot has a mind, and the shopkeeper speaks of the makers of minds as one speaks of breeds. A Corvane mind is usually brave, and a brave robot turns on anyone who attacks you at once. A Brightwater mind is usually fearful, and a fearful robot will not fight at all. Orrery minds are curious, Quillon minds headstrong. Every robot has a quirk of its own besides. One dreads wormholes, one adores music, one collects shiny things, one is afraid of the dark.

A disease is caught exploring cities, and an infestation comes aboard with cargo. Both grow worse the more advanced the star where you met them, and only a robot of a high enough model can cure them. A prototype cures nothing at all.

In orbit, with construction nanomites in the hold and most of your energy to spend, you can seed the frame of a space station. How advanced it will be is up to you. Aim at your own Technology Level and the frame holds only on a d4 roll of 1. Aim one Technology Level lower and it holds on 1–3 of a d6; three Technology Levels lower, on 1–9 of a d10. If it buckles, half the nanomites and all the energy are gone.

A frame that holds still has to be fed metal (aluminium, iron, titanium, nickel or chromium) by you or by anyone else who flies by. Leave it unfed for a week and it falls apart.

Finished, it is yours for good, and every traveller sees it. It takes your alliance, pays you an income every day (more if you are cultured), and charges a berthing fee to every vessel that docks, into a till that waits for you to come and collect it. A full till tempts raiders, so it pays to visit.

A farm planted under a city's protection is worked by that city's citizens. They sing its anthem in the fields, grow what its citizens prize and harvest for its festivals, and how well they work depends on how well you know them. A farm with no protector is tended by machines, and any day a rival may land and burn it.

A station you built can hold a gallery, from five units of construction nanomites and forty of marble, or a concert hall, from the same and forty of granite. Both stones are quarried on stony worlds. Travellers who dock may donate antiques and wares to the gallery, and its curator judges each piece aloud, the way a leader judges a gift: A copy, I'm afraid. A good one. Keep it. Every ticket sold earns the owner a twentieth of its price in culture, even while they are far away. In the hall, a concert ends this way:

The last note fades into the hum of the station. It stays with you.

A People's Hall is built in a city, not a station. A traveller who understands all three of a city's ways and is its hero may found a People's Hall there, with that culture's own music or art explained in words a stranger can follow. Tend it and its renown grows. At a quarter of its renown, every stranger needs a Culture Level two lower to understand that culture, in every one of its cities.

Close the page and your craft stays where you left it, docked or in orbit, for as long as you are gone, which is often days. The universe does not wait for you. Vessels come alongside and leave, hail your craft, demand its cargo, fire on it, and now and then send it a gift. Your craft keeps a log of everything it saw and heard.

If nothing of note happened, nothing is said when you return, and you are simply where you were. If something did, your computer gives you one short report, the most serious first, a few sentences however long you were away, and the whole log stays in your journal until you next leave. It holds only what your own craft saw, named as you would have seen it, never news from elsewhere. If your craft did not survive, one line before the gravestone says where and when it was lost, and what broke through its shields.

Your stations and farms are another matter. No one tells you what happened to them while you were gone. You find out by going back, to a till far smaller than it should be, or to a station or farm that is no longer there, and your computer is as surprised as you are. Or you hear it from the vessels at that world. For about three weeks they gossip about a raid, each in its own alliance's manner, and they name who did it, by planetary culture, alliance and vessel. Speak to the raider itself and it may boast of it, once.

Your journal also keeps the voyage itself, every star reached, world orbited, landing, city and station, in order. Ask it to trace your journey and the voyage plays as a film. The view flies the route you really took, star by star and world by world, past the landscapes and cities where you landed, with a caption beneath each place in the voice of the ship's log, and each city's concert music as you pass it. You can watch all of it, only your last voyage, or everything since a star you choose.

Travellers are rarely in Xalaria at the same moment, so Xalaria makes them present to one another even when apart. Docked at a station, ask your computer to invite someone to meet you there. Add a few words of your own, and a welcome gift if you like, and it gives you a link to send.

A newcomer who opens the link begins docked at that station, not at Earth. Their computer already knows why they are there, and the gift waits in the station's keeping. A newcomer far from Earth is vulnerable, so for their first hours the station's own people treat any attack on them as an attack on the station. You are told when they arrive, wherever you are, or when you next return.

Two travellers at the same concert, festival or museum tour remember one another, each named as the other saw them. A vessel that never gave its identity stays the crimson Vimba. Side by side, travellers may form a company. The journal then shows where each member is, and when a member's shields fall below a tenth, every other member hears it at once, wherever they are.

A distress call from Ana5, in the orbit of Zhiogs, at Oylanhai. Their shields are almost gone.

Every space station keeps its notices, read and written through its administrator. Leave a note for a named traveller or for anyone. Notes stay, even after their writer has died. Arrive at a station where a note waits for you and the administrator hands it over at once, in whatever manner your standing with them deserves.

Words can be carried, too. Tell a robot of yours to take a message to a traveller at a world of this star, and it flies there itself. It waits a moment in orbit, where it can be met or fired upon like any vessel, docks, and hands your words over in person, or leaves them among the station's notices. Then it comes back and tells you how it went.

A member of an alliance may post a charter among one of its stations' notices. Bring twenty units of granite here, for 900 gc. The station holds the reward, and the charter is seen among that alliance's station notices for a few stars around, which is a reason to travel. Anyone carrying the goods is paid at once. Unfulfilled for a week, it comes down and the reward goes home.

Any traveller may also give a quest, left with a station's administrator, who holds the reward and offers it to everyone who docks. The first to come back with it done is paid. Anyone after is told someone was quicker.

Ask a vessel what it carries, in your own words, and it answers truly, or not at all. Never if it is hostile to you, or if you have ever demanded its cargo. Never while anything near is hostile to it, since talk is an open channel and a hunter could be listening. Otherwise, it depends on its alliance. A trader always tells, because it is business, and says roughly what the hold is worth. A Rebel tells once you have answered its own question first, where you have come from, and it knows whether you have truly been there.

Instead of demanding cargo, offer coin. How a vessel answers a generous gift depends on its alliance, and the answers say more about each alliance than anything it tells you about itself. Watch what each one does with your coin, and what it says as it does it.

Every vessel you speak to is in some state of mind, and it shows in how it talks. With its shields low it is shaken, with its fuel low worried, with danger in view tense and short with you. Alone somewhere quiet, it is glad of the company. With a full hold, it is keen to sell. Busy or tense, it says less.

Ask a vessel where to find something, and it can only tell you of places it has been. What it noticed there depends on its mind, and what it is willing to say depends on you. Each alliance keeps its own things close. Traders guard what is worth money, Nature what lives and what is dug, the Freedom Fighters and the Rebels the weapons. A kind word, a gift, a deal or your name freely given can change its mind. Insults and gunfire close it. When it will not tell, the way it refuses says something about who it is.

Or make a deal, some of your cargo at your own price. Another traveller is asked there and then, and the offer stands for two minutes. A robot answers as a trader would, from what anyone could see, and buys only below what the goods fetch at this star's stations. Nothing changes hands unless, at that moment, both of you are still together, the goods are still held and the coin is there.

Every traveller sets out with the same charge. For centuries an empire has held the civilisations of your home star in its grip, so long that freedom is barely remembered there. Your colleagues laughed when you said you would end it. A strange force has you looking towards the abyss all the same.

There are three ways to set them free. Break the empire's power, city by city and station by station, and come home a Lord. Win its world instead, until every one of its cities and stations counts you its hero, and come home a Noble. Or find the third way, which this book leaves for you to discover, and come home a Sage.

Whichever you choose, the journey closes where it began. Dock at your home station and the news is already there before you. It has passed throughout the stars.

It was so many ages ago that we last had freedom, but now it has returned, and you will be celebrated for eternity.

Your home station, as you dock

Your name goes into the Chronicle's legends, and a stone is raised in the Graveyard that tells, for every traveller after you, how you did it.

That is why nothing in Xalaria is there for decoration. The anthem you learned at a concert on one world carries you through a rite on another. The spirals at the end of one museum's tour tell you what to bring its leader, and what a dealer three stars away is selling too cheaply. The figurine a dealer swore was genuine is someone's ancestor, or a mockery of one. The field recorder lying in your hold can make you a hero to a culture you have never met. The farm a city's citizens tend for you pays for the seat that opens the next culture; that culture's ways give you standing before its council; and the council turns a city to your alliance. Every law in this book leans on the others, and all of them lead home.