The House of Tortuga-Clyne
A somewhat gothic Noble House for a somewhat Dune-esque setting
Solomon VK of the blog ‘World Building and Woolgathering’ is working on a ‘Feudal Future’ setting called Faufreluches and asked if I would do a little background thing so here is a Noble House for that setting.
If you want to see the blog post this was eventually used in you can find it here.
The House of Tortuga-Clyne
Heraldry; Tortoise carrying the sun on its back.
The seat of Tortuga-Clynes power is the Audobon system, in particular its single liveable world, Audobon Five, and that worlds largest moon, desolate but for a single house; the Moon Algranesh.
AUDOBON FIVE
Audobon Five itself is a gloomy eclipse-maddened and snotty realm, surrounded by a great variety of moons which mean one or another part of the world is always in a state of eclipse. It is home to curious home to curious transitory fungal ecologies and a spread of mild but persistent ailments which have proved invulnerable to all medical science.
Five has has the structure of an ancient orbital spire, built either by aliens, or a long forgotten human civilisation, perhaps with the help by A.I.s - it is structurally sound but most of its mass is a howling vertical wasteland with only the central core active at any time.
Its not clear why anyone would build such a thing in such a place for Audobon Five is economically lax and culturally vague. It has a handful of small cities, (none above half a million in size), some undersea complexes and a decent maglev system to connect the small metropoles to the spire, but almost the entirety of the planet exists at a low-industrial/agricultural level, and away from the scattered population centres there are a variety of migratory cultures. The world has never developed sub-nations and everyone who goes there gets a cold. Or spots.
The wealth of the world is in its crafts, the chemical products of its unusual and highly complex biosphere, and the ease with which the maglev network and oribital spire connect its economy to the stellar realm. Still, it is almost purely an export economy. Its said the Audobans have little interest in the goods and culture of the greater polity and are happy to remain a backwater.
Imperial Scholars theorise that at some point Audobon Five was host to some form of fierce biological warfare involving gene-phages, engineered viral and bacterial loads and possibly petty nanotechnology. This event, or events, was so long ago that life has regrown and renewed itself, the original phages and other weapons either expiring, being consumed, or adapting to and being adapted to by each other and the general ecology of the world, this explaining why the biosphere, while seeming unexceptional on the surface, is so relentlessly active on the micro scale and produces so many rare and curious drugs, chemicals and other by-products. Also why everyone seems mildly ill much of the time; these 'mild' illnesses being the echoes of ancient bioweapons.
OTHER HOLDINGS
The House keeps its house; that is, a single, unitary physical palace complex, on the Moon; Algranesh, which orbits Audobon Five. (It is always and only phrased so by Tortuga-Clyne, "The Moon; Algranesh" and in no other stye, though no other moon of Audobon Five has the same exalted pattern of naming.)
The 'literal' House of House Tortuga-Clyne is known for its faded grandeur and in particular for being, famously, a House without Servants, or at least visible ones. Tortuga-Clyne say that a core part of their workforce is made up of a generation of analogue robots, created by an auspicious collection of ancestors several centuries ago. They know how to repair them but lack the skills to make more, making them very protective of the robots, always keeping them underground and out of sight. They communicate with the robots by signals and are provided with necessary goods by a series of elevators, from the very large, to the 'dumb waiters' of individual rooms.
No-one is allowed beneath the surface other than core House members and the only large living things on the surface of the Moon; Algranesh, are the House Members themselves. Their complex is often quite dirty for only they are there to clean it, which they do themselves, by drawn straws, in masks, taking on these other identities while the members stay in their rooms and do not communicate with each other, so no-one knows who has had to take on the low-status role on any particular occasion.
The Moon; Algranesh, and all the other moons of Audobon Five, along with several worlds and moons in the Audobon system, are rich in rare metals and curious elements. Small mining operations take place at all locations, and presumably on the Moon; Albraneth as well, performed by the analogue robots beneath the earth.
Tortuga-Clyne has no _major_ holdings outside their core system, but very many petty holdings, often in forgotten quarters of cities, on the borders of deserts, on small islands, little moons or even in highly embellished Oort cloud installations which can take several months of in-system travel to reach.
CURIOUS BIOLOGY
Its known to most that Tortuga-Clyne produces such a bizarre and irregular collection of savants and oddities that they must have been the subject of attempted bioengineering in the past, or perhaps an unusual reaction of such with the bland-seeming but ferocious biosphere of Audobon Five.
The truth is a near open-secret amongst the higher echelons of Imperial Government; Tortuga-Clyne are host to a complex living disease, really almost a symbiotic bacterial strain, which can form an alter-personality within them and which may be able to pass on from host to host, budding new versions of itself within the same family. This they call the 'Family Ague'.
The family ague can bestow unexpected and semi-random savant-like cognitive abilities upon house members, (only reliably effective when it effects the foetus in-vitro within a carriers womb, and becoming less so if the womb, the ancestry or the foetal development are changed). These cognitive 'boons' are never as simple as 'high intelligence' but instead are usually the fragments of intelligence, leaving the whole of the mind otherwise unaffected, or at least seemingly with no great benefit or harm from its curious 'extra' ability. (Though Tortuga-Clyne seems to have the same range of General I.Q. as most Great Houses; presumably a naturally brilliant mind can make best use of its 'extra' savant-like boon, while a mediocrity, (of which Tortuga-Clyne seems to produce a fair few), will experience it as little more than a party trick.)
Example boons might be; perfect lifetime visual recall (but not perfect aural etc, the rest of memory being as it would be otherwise), perfect bodily precision, enhanced sense of smell, perfect whole number calculations to any scale (but not perfect calculus or similar, only basic math, but performed perfectly no matter how large the numbers get), absolute face recognition and recollection regardless of numbers of faces seen, linguistic gifts so they can pick up any language (but may or may not be a mediocrity regarding what they can say), perfect fine motor skills (but no other bodily skills) and so on.
Tortuga-Cline have a tendency towards long skulls and somewhat stooped postures. Women of the house are forced into corsets and heels at an early age to correct this, making them tall, proud and frustrated, next to their stoop-shouldered men. Like the people of Audobon Five they often carry some mild but chronic ailment of one kind or another.
There are rumours of degenerate tendencies but little proof.
ECONOMY
Tortuga-Clyne specialise in Hyperclocks, Bioclocks, boutique luxury goods, anything made with the strange metals of the Moon; Algranesh, and notably; rare and unusual services and singular goods. ("Unusual needs" as the House would put it.)
A ritual for great house contracts or any sufficiently high status exchange is that they are never paid in mere specie or anything standard or common, but only in goods, services or rights as specific and obscure as the thing or service they provide.
So, they might provide a flock of bronze mechanical pseudo-ravens for a house to ensure untraceable and physical communications between its members, along with a contract for renewal or repair, but in return might ask for abyssal-level fishing rights for a lunar ocean during certain seasons. (Being able to perceive and offer the 'right' price for the desired service earns one status with Tortuga-Clyne, failing to perceive correctly loses status. Insisting on 'mediocre' forms of payment will lead to the breaking of the relationship.)
Some think this is a deliberate long-term economic/political tactic to obscure the 'market rate' or their services, to maximise their hidden utility, as part of some 'grand scheme' where at some point, all the economic and political pieces will come together to reveal its majestic and singular genius.
Others say the House has always been a little cracked, or that perhaps there was once such a scheme, created by an unusually capable Family Council, but that it has been forgotten, or corroded or become mere ritual.
And of course the counter counter argument that all the strangeness and queer behaviour is all camouflage and part of the 'Grand Plan'.
The Ague and the possibility of rare or useful collections of Savant ability, combined with or added to perhaps already more-intelligent House members, does create the reasonable possibility that the 'Analogue Robot' thing could be true; Tortuga Clyne does often exhibit unusual, and often temporary, singular and unrepeated prodigies in design, conception, art or theory. Perhaps the 'family circle' at that time had just the right combination of experience, intelligence and distinct and useful (for that task), savant abilities. But should the task change, or even perhaps a single member leave or die, or the organisation of the 'circle' change, that unique combination might be lost forever. All of this, of course, is theory. No-one knows for certain how Tortuga-Clyne does some of the more unusual things they do, or how they make some of the things they make. Whatever they are, they rarely do or make it twice, or twice the same way.
PLACE IN SOCIETY
Tortuga-Clyne has many mediocre or irrelevant members in lower branches of various imperial organisations, usually bought into the position or placed by patronage. They are not especially bad at these jobs, neither are they especially good. Its assumed that the House keeps back its most able members for the Core functions; there have been almost no very high-status Imperial roles held by Tortuga-Clyne over its entire history. Neither have they ever wielded strong direct political power at such levels, or perhaps at any level. There have been *no* major psychic members in its history, a phenomena that grows more curious the longer it goes on. Imperial organisations theorise that the 'Family Ague' cripples or limits such developments.
Generally everyone assumes Tortuga-Clyne are doing crimes, working intelligence for someone, or for everyone, or are somehow up to something secret and suspicious, but no-one has ever been able to pin anything on them. They therefore have a kind of dusty mystique which can sometimes grant them access to the circles, if not the levers, of Imperial power.