> >Book of Taltos pg 313-314 - The emperor sits apart and > watches all that > >goes on to ... fend off the disasters that our world tries > to throw at > >us from time to time--disasters you can hardly conceive of. I assure > >you, for example, that the stories of the ground shaking and fire > >spitting forth from it and winds that carried people off during the > >Interregnum are not myths, but things that would happen were > it not for the Orb. > > I am wondering if the Orb could do much protecting before it > was upgraded? > If it could, why did the Orb not fix the drought that was > taking place in Five Hundred Years After (paperback, Chapter > the First, pg. 15)? Zerika says that the disasters Vlad has heard of occurred during the Interregnum, so my assumption was that the Orb protected against these before it as well. As to your second question, I wonder if a drought is the same kind of natural disaster she is referring to. A drought can be countered by bringing in food from areas not affected, and starving takes some time, so while it might qualify as an economic disaster, it's not really as much of a threat to life and limb as the others, is it? Eruptions, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc, are "instantaneous" phenomena (although to be fair, both eruptions and earthquakes are the result of thousands of years of build-up--I'm not really sure how one would go about preventing them), whereas preventing a drought might require nearly complete and continuous climate control over the whole of the Empire. If the Orb is capable of *that*, I'd think it could do something about the overcast. Speaking of which, has there been much debate on this list as to the *purpose* of the overcast? It just occurred to me that perhaps it serves some useful function. I vaguely recall from playing SimEarth that the composition of the atmosphere controlled how much cosmic radiation gets through to the surface, which in turn affects the rate of genetic mutation (I don't know the veracity of this line of argument, that's just how I remember SimEarth working). Perhaps the overcast helps keep dragaerans from evolving as quickly? Bryan