The Age of Steam

The Age of Steam is the period in which the Atevi began, before the Foreign Star appeared in the heavens, to build a transregional political order around their own industrial development. Its defining achievement was not simply the railroad, but the associations and institutions formed to build it: cooperation across clans and regions offered an alternative to alliances that had repeatedly broken down in conflict.

Steam and the railroad project

Before the Foreign Star appeared, the Atevi had reached the age of steam on their own and had begun philosophically and politically to transcend the clan structure that had fueled ruinous wars. Eleven regional associations agreed to build a railroad west from Shejidan without going to war over it. The scale of that agreement mattered: clans had long created temporary regional alliances for trade or convenience, but such arrangements could dissolve bitterly when their interests diverged.

The project continued amid anxiety about the Foreign Star. Number-counters treated it as an omen of change in the heavens, and most considered the omen unfavorable. Some tried to connect it, for good or ill, to the railroad; the question occupied lords and clans for a year but produced no result. The line from Shejidan to the coast went on. The Star harmed nothing, the railroad succeeded, and some came to regard the omen as favorable after all.

New forms of authority

The railroad required coordination that the older political order did not readily provide. Aijiin, once warleaders elected for a particular purpose, were elected to manage the project. Their authority now concerned not armies but the arrangements among guilds, clans, and sub-clans needed to carry the line through different districts and uphold the promises sealed by individual clan lords.

A small group that was itself beginning to cross clan and regional boundaries empowered these project leaders. This was the beginning of the Assassins’ Guild, whose assigned task was to protect the aiji against attacks by assassins serving individual lords. In this early institutional arrangement, the Guild’s role was tied to enforcing a political project whose success depended on keeping agreements as well as building infrastructure.

Success brought further projects and larger associations, overlapping in the way clans and kinships did. When a dispute threatened to dissolve the new associations, the Assassins’ Guild backed the aiji against three powerful clan lords who wanted to revise the agreement and divide the railroad into administrative districts. The aiji held them to their commitments. Even the three clans that collected no tolls benefited through the trade the line enabled.

The railroad’s institutional legacy

The historical account presents the railroad as a change in the basis of relative peace. Boundaries and regions had not themselves reconciled the Atevi; associations formed around common purposes, and their expansion created connections through which distant interests could be brought together. The railway thus joined material circulation to political obligation: agreements made for its construction could be defended, and its benefits reached beyond the parties collecting tolls.

The institutional pattern continued after the War. Because guilds had worked across regional lines, the aiji proposed that membership and assignments in the expanded aishidi’tat should likewise disregard clan origin. Guilds such as the Rail Transportation Guild and the Builders’ Guild were to assign posts according to qualification, placing control of membership in the hands of guild masters. The rule became established through internal guild regulations rather than statute. The account notes that some regional associations remained apart from this system, but those seeking guild services had little leverage to overturn its terms.

The Assassins’ Guild accepted an additional restriction: none of its members could seek or hold political office or a lordship. In return, it received statutory immunities from political pressure. Lords could not summon its records, Guild members would testify only before their own council, and investigations into a member’s disappearance or death belonged to the Guild itself. The arrangement shows how institutions formed amid the railroad’s earlier need for cross-regional cooperation later became part of a broader settlement over authority and independence.

Rail and communication in later crises

The railroad remains politically consequential in the later action. Aboard the Red Train, Tano communicates with the engineer over the train’s internal system while Jago reports that the switches are set. The route depends on two critical junctions: one shifts the train from the Bujavid track to the eastern track, and another directs it toward an old freight-yard line and the city’s older center. The train’s progress, and the possibility that a switch might fail to send it onto the intended spur, make the infrastructure a live operational risk rather than a neutral backdrop.

The planned detour has an ordinary explanation ready for the Rail Transportation Guild. Tatiseigi’s men and the dowager’s have entered its Bujavid office with an order to send the Red Train to the old mid-city spur to collect artwork for Lord Tatiseigi’s special exhibit in the Bujavid Museum during the Festivity. Large crates from his estate are genuinely awaiting freight pickup after midnight; their actual contents are spare wardrobe left behind at Tirnamardi. The plausible cargo story lets the operation use routine freight movements as cover.

The city rail system can also be made to stop. Its usual interruptions are brief and practical, including stalled vehicles, pedestrian traffic, and unscheduled mail pickups. In this crisis, however, traffic is to come to a cold, prolonged halt. The situation is to be reported in the name of safety, while the dowager’s men ensure that the Transportation office does not send crews to the affected train and does stop other rail traffic. The episode makes visible the tension between a network built to move people and goods and the power to obstruct that movement.

Communication infrastructure presents a parallel problem during the restoration of the Guild. When its new leadership takes control of communications, the Guild Council must choose between retaining a compromised system, shutting it down, redefining its signals, or making technical changes that exclude everyone except approved users. It chooses the last option. The four speakers, the dowager’s units, units assigned to the Aiji and Lord Tatiseigi, and Guild Headquarters are to be cleared initially; other units, including Cajeiri’s bodyguard, remain under review. The railway’s switches and the Guild’s access controls both determine who can move or coordinate, and under what authority.

From mainland infrastructure to space

The period’s political and technological setting also clarifies the stakes of later expansion beyond the mainland. The urgent construction of a shuttle fleet brings wealth to places that had previously been poor, while change makes society increasingly unstable. Yet allowing decisions in the heavens to be made without Atevi participation is presented as unacceptable. In response to what the ship-folk have confessed, Tabini suspects that neither Atevi nor Mospheirans have been told the truth and sends Bren and the aiji-dowager to investigate the situation in space. He also sends his son to learn, understand humans, and study with the woman who taught Tabini.

That decision is described as a desperate gamble, made without knowledge of the scale of the universe, the ship’s inability to communicate across the distance, or the danger of the undertaking. Set beside the history of a railroad built through negotiated regional cooperation, the expedition marks a new scale of political challenge: the question is no longer only how to connect districts and keep local agreements, but how to ensure Atevi have a voice in decisions made beyond their world.