Outward Borne Read Free Page B

past
of ObLa and the ObLaDas went on to develop an extremely stable and
ancient culture. The pace of ObLaDa social and scientific
advancement was decidedly slow, but progress was not set back by
wars and overpopulation that many other advanced societies have
repeatedly faced. Much of the credit for this is due to the
biofeedback that is linked to their somewhat ambivalent gender
situation. It all seems to have worked rather well as the ObLaDas
have one of the most enduring technologically advanced societies
existing within our galaxy and one uniquely suited for interstellar
space travel.
    For the moment, however, the
ObLaDas had no idea that the universe existed, or that anything
existed beyond the perpetual cloud cover that hung over their
shapeless heads. That, however, was about to change and that change
would lead, in the fullness of time, to the people of the planet
ObLa becoming the first civilization within the galaxy to lead a
voyage through interstellar space.

 
     
     
    Chapter 3 Tidal Tales
     
    There was not much interest in the
day-to-day weather on ObLa for the weather hardly varied, besides,
the ObLaDas did not wear clothes and did not care if it rained or
was clear. Clear being a dim damp, foggy oily mist for there had
never been a sunny day. The ObLaDas did not even know they had a
sun, and so they did not miss it, but they did want to know if
there was to be a storm. On ObLa, a storm meant wind and they did
have winds, especially in the northern and southern regions that
were both dangerous and destructive.
    Even so, the Center for ObLa
Weather was far from the forefront of ObLa life, unless you
happened to work there. The COW had a long history of tracking
weather patterns, issuing boring weather forecasts, and maintaining
centuries-old weather records, but there were enough storms that
caused enough damage to make it politically prudent to improve said
projections. RaLak LemTer, the Senior Scientist at the Atmospheric
Research Office of the Center for ObLa Weather led a large team to
revise the Atmospheric Disturbance Projection Program. No easy
task.
    Forecasting of day-to-day weather
was quite accurate, for one day was like another, but predicting
the rather rare storms was difficult and frustrating, and it was
the only prediction that anyone cared about. Problem storms were
caused by a coalescence of large upper atmospheric fronts and high
velocity wind streams that stirred up enough turbulence to
influence the surface air flow patterns. There was no way to know
what was going on in the upper atmosphere; so the windstorms
appeared to reach down from above in a random touch of
havoc.
    For all their efforts and
upgrades, the new Atmospheric Disturbance Projection Program
achieved no more than a modest improvement in prediction accuracy,
which RaLak LemTer found to be a frustrating and intrinsically
unsatisfying result. His next project, he vowed, would be simpler,
one that depended on manageable data that would lead to a
straightforward conclusion. Little did he know!
    The Fickle Flow of Filim was a
well-known natural phenomenon on ObLa, or what passed for a natural
phenomenon on ObLa. There was not much else in the small catalog of
natural wonders on this gray, flat, featureless, fogbound, smelly
planet. The Fickle Flow was an occasional change in the direction
of flow between Foot Lake and the neighboring Head Lake. A narrow,
deep channel connected Head and Foot, and that was where the change
in flow occurred. Since there were two good-sized streams entering
Head and one fairly small river leaving Foot, the flow of water
through the connecting channel, named after the local village of
Filim, was from Head to Foot, except when it wasn't.
    The Filim Flow was rather erratic,
sometimes being quite rapid, sometimes static and, on occasion, it
went the wrong way. There were no rapids or anything spectacular
about the channel even at its most extreme. In fact, you rather
needed to sit and stare at it for a