This is a continuation of yesterday's post about Canticle of the Turning, the new project I've been canoodling on for the last several months and am finally starting to write. Today's post probably won't make sense if you don't read yesterday's.

The Mothers of the Turning

I kind of imagine the Mothers as somewhere between the Bene Geserit, the Jedi, and the court at Versailles. They are an all-female group whose only job is to steer the caravan through the safe passage as everyone makes the thousand-day¹ long journey around the world. They do this by memorizing the songs in what is eventually revealed to be an old Presbyterian hymnal, using the songs as memory aids to remember what direction to steer.

The Mothers are made up of unwed women; every 1000-day cycle each row of the caravan sends their oldest unwed girl/woman to the front row to be trained up as a mother. This is both practical (every row will have at least one girl that meets this criteria) and very intentional (it creates a significant incentive for women to get married). There is some controversy about this, as in some rows especially more prominent families will "marry" off their daughters almost as soon as they're born to male children of similar ages to avoid them being sent off, but this power imbalance goes unexamined by most and seen as "just the way things are done". This will come into particular focus with our protagonist, who will be around 9 or 10² by our reckoning at the beginning of the story, far too young for the training of the Mothers of the Turning and one of the youngest ever sent.

The training to be a Mother of the Turning is grueling. The first cycle is spent living in tiny rooms for the majority of the day (only being let out for meal breaks), improving memory through extremely diligent memorization and recitation. The punishments by the older Mothers are quite severe if anything is forgotten, and the tracts they memorize at this point are not even related to their true assignment. It's simply the act of "stretching" the memory to be able to learn more. Additionally, these rooms are intentionally inoculated with a black mold that is psychoactive and helps the girls improve their memory vastly at the expense of terrible nightmares and sometimes schizophrenic-type symptoms. After 1000 days of this daily torture, they begin memorizing the actual hymnal. They must be able to recite every word and sing and write every note perfectly before they my be called Mothers themselves. Those who fail to do so within a period of two cycles are ritualistically killed³, their blood used to make the ink used to write new hymnals.

Once they are full mothers, they still aren't done. The ones who are capable of memorizing the hymnal but no more are tasked with writing new copies, and those who show promise to be navigators are apprenticed to read the land. Their job is to sit in the round room at the top of the Mothers' crawler, which is dark and cushioned and one of the nicest single rooms in the entire caravan. They sit alongside a Mother who navigates, singing one slow note at a time alongside their mentor while learning the minute changes in direction ordered by the massive wheel that all the mothers are holding onto during their shifts; they twitch the wheel left and right in unison, each having learned to correlate these tiny movements with the notes of the songs they sing. All the songs are sung as basically funeral dirges; each note lasts a minute or more, and corresponds to one movement. The huge wheel in the center of the room is linked directly to the steer wheels on the crawler. The Linemasters keep the caravan coordinated with the Mothers' crawler, and the whole caravan is navigated safely around the world. After two cycles, these apprentices become navigators, and can begin teaching this delicate operation to the next generation.

The life of a Mother is brutal during training, but becomes about as comfortable as is available in the caravan once she finishes.

The Mothers have a secret mission beyond navigating the entire world, though; they also intend to restart the rotation of the Earth. The way they intend to do this is by building three gigantic nuclear bombs using nuclear material they harvest at defunct nuclear reactors. The intention is to build these three huge bombs, and basically detonate them all simultaneously at an angle into the Earth in an attempt to start the rotation again. The Mothers frequently send out expeditions on electric sleds to go harvest nuclear material and work on the bombs, and these are carried out in secret to avoid detection by everyone else. The Mothers certainly know that if they go through with this plan, nearly everyone in the Caravan will die, but they believe it's worth it so that they can eventually let humanity flourish once more.

Will this work? Almost certainly not, and it'll be implied that a massive Nuclear arms catastrophe caused the Earth's rotation to slow down in the first place. One of our protagonist's conflicts will be to determine whether to go along with this insane plan or not.

Today's picture

I know it's silly, and this isn't an amazing picture, but the dishes are something that truly breaks my mind on a regular basis. I leave them for days because it's so hard for me to engage sometimes.