The Hats of Gorolbrax (part I)

Remember Gorolbrax? Remember fuchsia Gorolbraxians and magenta Gorolbraxians? Did you find yourself wanting to read more? Craving speculative fiction set in the same universe? Well, here you are. A word of caution: like all works of fiction, this is completely unrelated to anything in reality. Please remember: never attempt to learn things from fiction!

If you're anything like me or the French army in 1859, the color fuchsia and the color magenta are hard to tell apart. But that just shows that you aren't a Gorolbraxian. It could be that they sense things in the infrared spectrum, or that magenta and fuchsia are incorrect translations from the Goralbraxian language, which is beyond the capacities of normal human speech.

At any rate, whatever their comparative merits when it comes to 

tarandalating, every society on every continent of planet Goralbrax recognizes that there are magenta Goralbraxians and fuchsia Goralbraxians. As I mentioned before, the breakdown is almost exactly 50-50, and this has held true in every enduring Goralbraxian population during every time we know about. Braxologists (like anthropologists, but for Goralbraxians) have observed some cultural customs around this split that we might think of as odd. Most of these center around hats. On one continent, fuchsias are not allowed to wear hats at all, on another they are required to do so, on a third, both fuchsias and magentas where hats, but the hats are different. On an island off the coast they have the same two styles of hats, but the custom of which hat is worn by magentas and which by fuchsias is reversed from the mainland. 

But the strange thing that braxologists have found is this. Regardless of local custom, over 99% of adult Goralbraxians are able to distinguish magentas from fuchsias with over 99% accuracy, and they agree on the category to which a Goralbraxian belongs. For example, in one experiment a braxologist visited a land where fuchsias are forbidden to wear hats. The braxologists showed them a photo of a fuchsia from another land wearing a hat. Everyone surveyed was able to identify the photo as a fuchsia in a hat. Some of them were shocked -- even offended at the practice. Others were curious, asking, "why is that fuchsia wearing a hat like a magenta?" But strangely enough, none of them mistook the fuchsia for a magenta. The same was true, ceteris paribus, for other versions of this experiment. 

Subsequent study of Goralbraxian life has revealed that this peculiar ability to differentiate might be related to the strange fact of the 50-50 split between the two hues. On some of the smaller islands of Goralbrax, this balance is occasionally upset, and strange things happen to the populations of those islands. When a natural or social event causes a substantial hit to the fuchsia population, the overall population is slow to recover, whereas when an event targets even a comparatively large portion of the magenta population, the island's population recover much faster. But in either case, the recovering population of Goralbraxians spawns at a rate of approximately 50% fuchsia, 50% magenta. Finally, it happens from time to time that a group of exclusively fuchsia or exclusively magenta Goralbraxians will move to a previously uninhabited island. When this happens, the population of the island with only one hue will steadily decrease until there are no more Goralbraxians on the island. No exceptions to these phenomena exist, and no credible account of an exception has ever been recorded.

But back to hats.

In one of the lands where magentas and fuchsias both wore distinctive hats, some of the Goralbraxians became extremely concerned with tarandalation, and formed a group called The Helpful Association for Tarandalation-Egalitarianism (HAT). One day, HAT decided that the cause of inequity among the various tarandaltion training schools was hue prejudice, and the solution was to upset hue norms, most especially the conventions around hats. According to them, if they did away with their traditional hat practices, and initiated universal hat-reform-education among children, the tarandalation hue gap would be solved. We are now anxiously awaiting the results.

Here, the narrative ends. The next page is written in a different ink, the letters shakier, written with less care, as though written in great haste by an older hand. --

Such was the state of affairs when last I left Goralbrax. It has been six years since I have seen or heard news of them, but so much has changed that I suspect that the time dilation effects of relativistic travel means that more time has passed on Goralbrax. Two weeks ago, I made a return visit, and have the following observations to report...