Continued from The Hydrogen Era
Tisswa
Ardea decided
to keep the discovery of the mascon a secret from most of humanity,
for the time being. She, and those few in whom she
confided, feared that if the news were released straightaway, it might cause war
between the several urban tyrannies existing at that time, who would probably start
manoeuvring against each other as they vied for the new resource,
and moreover, as they each used the opportunity to try to enforce
internal unity on their contados, civil wars would break out as well,
and the internal and external strife would exacerbate each
other.....
The Dmaran, the Liquid Man who had helped her find the
mascon, offered no comment on her policy of secrecy. In fact, from
now on he fades out of the story. He may have been the last of his
kind; their numbers were dwindling rapidly by this time, leaving the
true humans - the Nenns - to tackle their problems on their own.
Tisswa Ardea and her friends belonged to an international secret
society called the Unity Club. This organization aimed to solve the
main problem of the age - and as we
shall see, it succeeded.
Ooranye
has never been, and probably never will be, "conquered" by
Man in the sense that Earth has been. As has
been noted, the strangeness of the giant
planet was posing a threat to human identity, a threat
which called forth harmful and severe reactions from some human
governments. What was needed was a philosophy, an attitude or mental tool which
would enable mankind to cope with the strangeness of Ooranye, to
adapt to it without either conquering (which was impossible)
or yielding (which was unacceptable).
Terrestrial readers may need to be
reminded that this wasn't simply a matter of needing to find some
"sustainable" or "ecologically sound" way of life. Ooranye isn't
Earth: on Ooranye the pull of the environment is so much
greater, that there's no question of mankind over-exploiting or
polluting it; rather, the influence works the other way. In the
Hydrogen Era, pioneering Man was like a shape dissolving at the edges,
in danger of losing all definition and becoming something
else.
The brilliance of the Unity Club's
insight was in realizing that the key to the problem was the
human
urge to understand
. The Club
succeeded in devising a way to live in the
world without trying to understand it.
The
way to avoid that trap was to chart perils statistically,
solely by their effects, and not to worry about causes
any more. This revelation marked the birth of the unique craft of Uranian
cartography. Maps were henceforth to be given peril-contours, derived from the frequency
of survival among wayfarers travelling in the areas
covered by the maps.
The key contour,
"sfy-50", would be the boundary separating the lands where, never
mind the reason,
one had an over-50% chance of surviving a lone 1000-mile journey,
from the lands where one's chances were under 50%. The former,
relatively civilized lands would be called Syoom; the latter,
most dangerous lands Fyaym.
The Unity Club had
worked all this out, but had not yet publicized the idea. It had
been seeking a way of sparking off a revolution in thought and
practice, to inaugurate Syoom "with a bang". Now, at last, with
Tisswa Ardea's discovery, the Club had the key. A date was
provisionally fixed. Secretly the world went out to armed
supporters to gather at Contahl, for Contahl was a free city, friendly
to the new idea, and with a vested interest in the success of the
enterprise, since it was the nearest of all the cities to the mascon -
which was beginning to be called Idun-Sjalsk, or more
familiarly Jad-Zolm, shortened to Dzolm,
"the Sun-Egg".
Further secret
military preparations were made, Contahl's defences were strengthened and when it
was judged that the moment was right to break
the news to mankind, both of the existence of the Sun-Egg and of the concepts Syoom
and Fyaym, the code-word went out by semaphore:
"Unfurl!"
That utterance marked the end of the
Hydrogen Era.
Sail-waggons bearing the news began
trundling along several routes out from Contahl and from a few other
prepared locations. As they got underway, they were outpaced by
the release of tension which quivered through the
atmosphere, borne by the micro-organisms which sensed it and transmitted
it in the form of a shock to the rhythm of day and night. The
Helium Era had begun.
Unlike the Hydrogen Era, which had
lasted 19,636,085 days, the Helium Era lasted 18 days, 18 hours and 36
minutes. It was occupied by the spread of the concepts "Syoom" and
"Fyaym", and by all that that implied in terms of the re-orientation of
the human mind. Just as the Unity Club had
planned, the great hope held out by the discovery of Dzolm became fused
in the popular mind with the advent of the new cartographical ideas, and
all of a sudden a great weight was lifted off the mind of Uranian
Man.
>> The Lithium Era
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