Continued from The Lithium Era
The Conference
had cleared the air; at last the people of Syoom knew that they must
come up with something unprecedented,
in order to
survive.
The Noads of the cities stayed in close touch and formed
a standing committee under rotating chairmanship, which grew into a
Syoomean scientific institution known as the Rin-Stazel
("hope-society").
The Rin-Stazel exhuberantly encouraged a great many
research projects and private adventurers, questing for the answer to
the looming energy crisis. This short era, the Beryllium Era (era
4), was a time of somewhat febrile but engaging optimism. It was a
good time for eccentric inventors and explorers; many were subsidised
and given the opportunity to follow their private bent.
One explorer, Dynnt Eshnun, was less welcome than the
others. He had gone into the Mountains of Flame and done the
seemingly impossible - he and his companions had captured an
eopc, one of the rare giant birds, the greatest winged creature
on Ooranye, with a wingspan of nearly 70 yards. Dynnt had stolen
up on the bird while it was "asleep", or whatever the right word is to
describe the state of an eopc when it is absorbing energy from
a transdimensional source. For eopcs do not eat or drink. At
least, they do not eat or drink anything in this world. Dynnt
Eshnun had a hunch that the only chance for mankind lay in the direction
of trying to do what an eopc can do.
Eopcs are noble creatures; they never fight against
weaker beings, and use their formidable natural armament only against
the more powerful insectoid swarms which are enemies of both eopcs and
man. The great birds are thus regarded as benefactors to humanity,
and all of Syoom was shocked when Dynnt Eshnun appeared with his
captive.
He was ordered to release it. He did so, but only
after taking a blood sample from the creature.
He gave a sample of the sample to the Rin-Stazel, which
shamefacedly accepted it and assigned some researchers to the task of
using it to determine how the eopc accessed the "other dimension", the
source of their energy. Dynnt Eshnun then went back to his home in
the city of Skyyon, gave occasional somewhat surly interviews, and
awaited developments.
Dynnt Eshnun was an odd mixture of the unpopular and the
respected. Most people disliked him and yet many of them sensed
that the time might come when they would need him, or at least, need
what he had brought.
The department of the Rin-Stazel assigned to the
examination of the eopc-sample quite soon discovered that the bird's
blood-cells, though unresponsive to analysis, could be grown in
cultures and used. Vats of the stuff were
accumulated, and a way was found to channel the energy they drew upon -
the extra-dimensional energy from the dimension which now began to be
given a name, Chelth, derived from a term used by the primitive
psychic adepts of Era 1.
Chelth was presumably a whole universe, and the little
loss of energy which went to the eopcs of Ooranye was not likely to be
felt. Scientists at the Rin-Stazel however calculated that if
Mankind were to use this energy, to base a whole Syoomean culture upon
it, the effect upon Chelth might be serious - because the energy
transfer was not efficient; the equivalent of several solar systems
might be destroyed to keep one Uranian city going for one Uranian
year. And supposing Chelth were inhabited? Supposing some
Chelthans resented the depredations of Ooranye and
retaliated?
On the other hand something had to be done, and none of
the other lines of research were producing any answers....
After 4385 days (about 15 Earth years) of the Beryllium
era, public opinion in Syoom lurched towards the adoption of Dynnt
Eshnun's advice, and yet another new era began - Era 5, the Boron
Era.
It began with a confession by Dynnt Eshnun,
that the eopc which he had captured was still under his
control. It regarded the blood he had taken from it as a part of
itself, and could not return to its home in the Mountains of Flame
without it. It was still circling Syoom, with great lazy flaps of
its wings, waiting for the return of its blood-sample. Dynnt went
after it in an airship and communicated with it in the rudimentary
mind-speech he had learned in the mountains. He then brought it to
the Rin-Stazel, at Contahl, for the second time, and this time he was
not told to release it. This time Pyoan Tatham, head of the
Rin-Stazel, ordered a giant aviary to be built for the eopc. It
was hoped that further captivity would not inconvenience the thing,
which after all had a life-span thousands of times longer than that of a
human, and which could therefore well afford - so the argument went - to
spend a few thousand days co-operating with Man.
Pyoan Tatham, it turned out, was even more secretive and
unconventional than Dynnt Eshnun. Pyoan Tatham was resolved to
plan a drastic step to save humanity, a step which might be evil; and he
would take all the moral risk upon himself. He would plan in
secret, except for a few trusted confederates. Not even Dynnt
Eshnun was to be told.
Pyoan Tatham did not believe that the vats of blood
cells offered a permanent solution to the energy problem. The
continuous leakage from Chelth would, sooner or later, provoke
retaliation, if that universe contained any powerful inhabitants; and
the likelihood of an entire universe containing no powerful
inhabitants was too slim to rely upon. Yet Chelth must be used; no
alternative existed. The only option, then, was for once single,
brief, once-and-for-all plunder of Chelth; an action which would at a
stroke acquire enough power to meet Syoom's needs for all the rest of
this Great Cycle of history.
The plundering action might ravage huge areas of Chelth,
but Pyoan Tatham could hope that it would merely extinguish some
lifeless suns, or swallow up some unnecessary nebulae. Anyhow, he
rationalised, we need to do it, and we can do it, and why was this
ability put into our hands, if not to be used to save ourselves from the
crisis looming for us? And we will get away with it, for it
will be carried out so quickly that there will be no time for the other
side to get a fix on whence the action came.
Pyoan Tatham therefore began to form a secret
organization-within-an-organization, and to use the authority he had
been entrusted with to prepare some hidden receptacles or reservoirs of
power, which, when the moment came, would receive the loot sucked
from the Other Dimension. Much of the design for this project was
carried out in a state of trance-communication with the wise though
non-intelligent mind of the captive eopc. Hence the engineering
was intuitive, and hard for others to understand; and this helped to
maintain secrecy.
The Boron Era, the era of Pyoan Tatham's leadership and
research and secret project, lasted just 8766 days and 66 minutes -
about 30 Earth years. It lasted no longer because, early on the
8767th day, the eopc escaped.
It did so with the aid of others of its kind, which
swooped suddenly on Contahl. Their approach had not been detected;
they had dived from stratospheric heights - perhaps the security staff
at the Rin-Stazel had forgotten that because the eopcs did not eat,
neither did they breathe.
Pyoan Tatham was killed in the breakout. The
laboratories were partly wrecked. Syoom was thrown into confusion
in the space of a single disastrous day, that became known as the Carbon
Era.
Next day,
another atmospheric oscillation - another eomasp
- proclaimed
yet another shift of eras. The story now gets so complicated that
we can only offer some hints as to the murky Nitrogen
Era. A number of factors conspired to demoralise humanity: the
sudden lack of leadership; the loss of the eopc whom the public had
begun to trust; the clear evidence that the eopc had resented captivity
all the time; above all, the loss of hope in the project which the
Rin-Stazel had been carrying out to solve the energy crisis now close at
hand. Only a couple of U-years, a couple of human lifetimes at
most remained to civilization, before the Dzolm was due to be
exhausted.
To give an idea of the exceptional malaise of this era,
we may point out that during this time the inner Long Clock, which in
almost all periods of history provided every individual with
an instinctive awareness of the fact that there must be 92 eras, went
into abeyance. Some people retained the Clock in their souls, but
most of the population lost it for a while, and believed that human
history might be nearing its end with era 7.
All this was bad
enough, but the weakened body politic also became prey to a particular virus
of evil, which, in the accounts that have come down to us, is referred
to as the Corruption Ray. It is against the background of that scourge, and the extraordinary
deliverance from it, that we will trace the career of the first Sunnoad,
Hyala Movoun 1.
>> The First Sunnoad
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