I love the Salmaxians. Unironically.
They're one of the ones that came from the Overlords, right?
Yes, and they are easily the most tolerable. They're pretty nice, honestly. I don't know what the hell happened. The Koraxians are bloodthirsty tyrants, the Pa'rians are simply deranged, but the Salmaxians turned all of the prowess toward just doing good business.
They aren't scammers, mind you. They participate in gray and black markets as much as anyone else, but the overwhelming majority of their commerce is above board. They actually open their books to the entire galaxy, which is kind of silly as a concept, but that's how seriously they take such accountability.
Do they care about anything other than business?
As far as I can tell... no. They don't like to party. They have art, but it's all about their commerce-oriented culture, and of course it's all made with the intention of being sold. I'm not sure what it is, but a common thread of the Overlords' descendants is that they tend to be very single-minded. They are capable of anything, but each one of them has oriented their society around one particular way of life from which they don't really deviate.
How do they enforce something like that? I just wonder.
I think it's some kind of subtle telepathy or chemical signaling, because they seem to be able to thwart deviance pretty quickly. I don't know how it works. There's probably some research from a couple centuries in the future that would tell me, but I never found out.
You said you loved them. I don't see what's very lovable about a bunch of suits.
Calling them "suits" is doing them a disservice. They're very polite, but they also cut to the chase. If the first words out of them when you meet are, "Greetings, we hope this occasion finds you well," then their next sentence is, "Perhaps we could interest you in some trade today." They consider it a good day when they got to trade something. There's no galactic currency, obviously. Some things function like it, though, like liquid hydrogen. Everyone can use liquid hydrogen for something, so I guess it's an informal currency. You can also infer its level of preference because the Salmaxians invested a ton of R&D in making the most robust hydrogen extraction operations in the galaxy. Hydrogen is everywhere, obviously, but capturing it isn't the most straightforward task since it's so light and is quite sparse in the interstellar medium. They basically run huge "hydrogen nets" through all their solar systems, capturing huge amounts of the stuff, and then they have orbital facilities which, to coin a metaphor, wring out the nets to squeeze all the hydrogen out of them, at which point it's then compressed into liquid form and put into standardized storage vessels. A neat trick of the vessels is that they don't require any power. Structurally, they can hold the liquid hydrogen for centuries without worrying about a rupture. In addition to the usefulness of the hydrogen itself, a lot of people stage the vessels so that spaceship cooling systems run past them. You know what happens when you release a compressed gas, right?
It's like compressed air cans, right? It gets really cold when you use it.
Exactly. Imagine you run some pipes of very hot coolant past these vessels at the same time a trickle of hydrogen is being extracted. You get fuel and cooling, in a single package. If I had to guess, I would say the Salmaxians have the most successful vertical in that area out of anyone in the galaxy.
None of this is telling me what you love about them!
Oh, yeah. They're just so no-nonsense. I don't ever have to guess what they want. Everyone else has some agenda they're hiding up a sleeve. With the Salmaxians, you know what they want. They want to make a trade. You got something cool? They got something to trade you for it. Now, here's the fun part: they inexplicably love alien artifacts. They don't know what to do with them, but if they run into an artifact that they haven't seen before, they will trade an unusually high price for it. From what I hear, Salmaxian households treat these artifacts like trophies. The more you have, the more successful you are. I'm not sure I'd call it a religion. Maybe just a cultural tradition. I've seen pictures from the inside of Salmaxian houses where the central ammonia-hearth is just surrounded by weird alien knickknacks, and they're incredibly happy to have it that way.
OK, that's really cute.
Right?? It's such a charming trait. Thinking about it a little more, I wonder if it's their substitute for conquest, basically. When you run an empire, you have to collect territory, right? If you aren't expanding, you're dying. The Salmaxians don't run that kind of empire anymore, but they have to put the impetus somewhere. So I guess they just put it on collecting alien wares. From what I know of their history, nobody had to pacify them into doing this, either. They didn't lose some war and got disarmed and turned to commerce. They made this choice voluntarily at some point, over several generations, just drifting away from warlike behavior.
You know, that makes a lot of sense.
Does it?
Do you know what "schismogenesis" is?
I'm sure you're about to tell me.
The short explanation is that it's how cultures define themselves in opposition to each other. A lot of cultural choices are due to practice concerns, but a lot of choices are also made simply to distinguish you from your neighbors.
So it's cultural spite, basically.
Sometimes, but it doesn't have to be. But I think you know where I'm going with it.
Yeah. The Pa'rians and Koraxians are nothing if not warlike. With the Salmaxians sandwiched between, I can see why they'd go another way.
Did the others every try to conquer them?
Oh, yeah. More than once. They're on roughly amicable terms nowadays, but millennia past they were at each other's throats. I think the Salmaxians got through it by choking their enemies' supply lines. They have respectable military hardware but it's nothing that would stand up to frontal assaults by the Koraxians. So they took advantage of what they knew best: logistics. Cripple enemy logistics, you weaken them, now it's easier to push them back.
That's smart.
They're smart folks!
So, if you ever find yourself cruising the stars and a Salmaxian ship stops by, just remember to have something to trade them. If it's a random Earth object, all the better. Hand them a baseball or a curling iron. They don't care. They love it. Cute little guys.