A lot of people didn’t trust the Peloran when they showed up. Still don’t actually. Many groups tried to reverse engineer their treatments in fact. The results weren’t amazing. The Russian and Chinese Treatments for example have some kinda crazy side effects. Very rare of course or they wouldn’t still use them. But dwarfism, giantism, and a lot of other ’isms like that show up with them. One side effect they don’t get is the Ageless. We’ve got no clue why.
The Great Wall of Xin Shi isn’t actually a wall of course. It does ring the planet, where day and night meet, but it isn’t a single building by any means. It’s broken up by lakes and small oceans, and even on land it is more a collection of buildings crammed together. Those buildings on the line itself are the largest and richest of course, towering over their lesser cousins. The buildings on the edge of the habitable zone are the slums of Xin Shi.
Most of the Normans ruled England from Normandy. My little branch of the family actually did move to England, but many of us stayed. We continued to speak our own little version of French, and to rule the island as we thought best. The irony is that the greatest of Norman kings, forever known as Richard the Lionheart, never did learn to speak English. You see, England was a secondary holding at the time, truly only important in that it gave us a claim to kingship.
There’s an old saying, from back before Contact. You can be full of wisdom or full of youth. You can’t have both. That’s still true of the lower classes in places like China and India, where population and cultural pressures keep the treatments more rare. But in most of the Western Alliance, and even in Russian and non-aligned territories, most people can learn wisdom through experience, and still be healthy enough to take advantage of it. That’s changed everything.
The Chinese colonized Xin Shi in 2115. It is the closest planet to Alpha Centauri B, tide-locked with one side perpetually facing her sun. That side is far too hot for us to live normally, and even Africans prefer to avoid it. The far (dark) side of the planet is too cold for anyone but a Tibetan. Most people live within one hundred kilometers of the edge of the world, the ring where sunlight and starlight meet. They call it the Great Wall of Xin Shi.
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