High Veldt

070 Aquila C8B2418A Fluid Oceans, Non Industrial

High Veldt is a very cold world with a sea of methane and an atmosphere of various volatile hydrocarbons with no oxygen. The only habitation is a domed city at the bottom of the methane sea with a few people living at the starport nearby. It was named by a scout back when it was first discovered, he thought the many windswept plains made of carbon dioxide snow discoloured with brownish oily hydrocarbons looked vaguely like bits of South Africa.

The inhabitants eschewed the temptations of living on one of the many far nicer planets in the sector due to their religion, an exceptionally austere and self-denying variety of Roman Catholicism. The colony is essentially there to service the Monastery of the Mendicant Order of Saint Lazarus, whose monks all have neuro-degenerative disorders (leprosy as such having been defeated by biotechnology decades ago).

There is a hospital here for treating such disorders without resorting to the sinful practices of gene therapy and cybernetic enhancement, but it is little used. Sick men with various conditions come here for one reason only, to join the monks and experience the 'Miracle of St Lazarus' an apparent cure by divine intervention. Women are not admitted to the Order, though an unofficial Sisters of St Lazarus exists for women who make the pilgrimage to this far off place in hopes of a miracle and often stay in the hospital until they are too ill to leave.

The monastery is closed. Once in the order no one leaves the premises. Supplies are put in an airlock, the lock flooded with methane and the stuff is collected by a submarine sent over from the windowless monastery dome. Communication is infrequent and takes place in a small confessional-type cubicle and the monk is present only as a hologram. The only person physically allowed in is the monks confessor, Father Oluwatobi, a severe Jesuit, and they make him come over by foot, wearing a heavily insulated deep sea diving suit.

The population is actually rather fluid, devout families staying for a few years to work, contractors making extensions or changes to the domed town, starport or even the monastery (the monks are never seen though, they seal off the part of their building that needs fixing and flood it with supercooled methane), researchers hoping to find out how the cure has been done and so on. But most leave, especially anybody with any ambition to do anything other than pray, freeze, or work in the sole local industry, crystal farming. Crystal farming involves leaving tanks of various substances out in the freezing seas and allowing them to slowly freeze/crystallise while carefully controlling the chemical conditions. With the right seed crystals you can achieve some pretty remarkable material properties, it's not quite nanotechnology, but close to it. There are other ways of doing this kind of work though, and the High Veldt industry is tiny. The colony is mostly supported by direct grants from the Vatican and Catholic charities.

High Veldt is not quite a theocracy, but no one on the elected council does the remotest thing to annoy the Pope, the Abbot, the Confessor or any of the numerous local priests so it might as well be.

There is some dispute over whether there is actual life on High Veldt. Some of the ice crystals on the highest hills and mountains are very complex mixtures of organic molecules, perhaps too complex to be explained by the environment alone. But if there is metabolism, respiration and reproduction happening here is must be at a literally glacial pace.