Continued from The First Sunnoad
Introduction: the glory of
era 15
The
Phosphorus Era is commonly thought of as the greatest era. It may
not be the most spiritual, and other ages may have a subtler
aura of romance, but no other period has quite
the same classical aura of majestic splendour. The reason for this unique prestige is that
the Nenns of the Phosphorus Era had the advantage of surprise in
their enjoyment of the sudden "windfall" of power from
Chelth.
To
put it metaphorically, the non-human forces of the giant planet were "caught napping"
for these nearly fifteen million days (fifty thousand Earth
years). Although humans never can "conquer" Ooranye, in era 15 they came closest
to looking as though they might do so. Some real hope and
expectation existed, that Syoom might extend to cover the
planet.
In truth the population of Syoom did
surge, millions of Syoomeans colonizing borderlands which had never before
been settled, expanding the boundaries of civilization - in
other words, enlarging Syoom itself. But more than this general advance,
the sheer lordliness and might of that era spilled deep into Fyaym by
means of particular incursions which left outposts that in some cases
have survived to this day. And everywhere, from the heartlands to the outposts, the windfall of power
brought forth an epic pride, a confidence and reach of spirit
that dazzled contemporaries and haunted the planet's future
memories.
How best to use the power from
Chelth?
It lay
shimmering in the huge "vats" beneath Skyyon on Day One - the
immense, unrepeatable, ill-gotten gain, grabbed at the expense of another
universe. The deed had been done, and could not be undone; it was now time to
decide how to use it for the best. The people of Syoom, stunned by
recent events, were waiting quietly, but their leaders knew that no false
move would be forgiven at this historic moment. And the
pressure on the decision-makers became all the greater after it was reported, by the
scientists monitoring the "vats", that the contents were evaporating.
The rate of loss was slow - close to the lower limit of
detection - but it was enough to wipe out the possibility of conserving a
share for future eras to deal with. The decision must lie with
the people of the Phosphorus Era.
When the Noads of the twenty-five greatest cities
met in conclave to elect a successor to Sunnoad Hyala Movoun,
two main political factions had already
emerged.
One faction was strongly
in favour of using up the power in the vats fast. These
"hotheads" pointed out that, in view of
its relatively short half-life, all delay must be wasteful. Splurge it
quickly, they advised. Give civilization an explosive boost that must lift the human
story onto a new level, with permanent effect. "Then society shall
never fall back into the grim chaos of the Nitrogen
Era."
The opposing "coolheads" argued as
follows: "This store of energy has been bought with the life and
perhaps the soul of Hyala Movoun
1. We dare not use it in any but the wisest way. We must
make sure we use it in accordance with the best interests not only of our era
but of all Great Cycle time. And since it's not reasonable to expect any
single generation to come up with all the best ideas, we ought to leave
some of it to our successors - diminished though it will be; for evaporation
is not the only form of wastage; premature decision-making
could easily prove worse."
After two days' debate, and in recognition of the
need for speed, a seemingly safe, compromise candidate - one
who apparently belonged to neither faction - was chosen as the Second
Sunnoad.
Lamiroth Eren 2 had been a respected educationalist who
had known and worked with Hyala Movoun 1 during the Oxygen Era, before
her elevation to the sunnoadex. He soon turned out to be a wise
choice. In the next few days he steered the conclave towards a
consensus.
"Our plunder," he said, not mincing words, "according to what
our savants tell me, has a half-life of some hundreds of Uranian
years. This is a small length of time compared with the Great
Cycle, so we cannot afford to be complacent. But neither need we
be precipitate. Using the arguments I have heard from you,
sponndarou, and from our scientists, engineers, economists and military
experts, as Sunnoad I announce the following plan:
"Half of the contents of the power-vats shall be left
untouched for the time being, for future generations to use as they see
fit. The other half shall be used by ourselves to lift our
civilization to a higher level and keep it there.
"Of this half, 80 per cent shall be used to realize
the engineer's dream of indestructible, disc-on-stem city-foundations of
ultimate metal, for the twenty-five greatest centres of Syoom.
Thus these cities will be elevated into a different order of security
and power, with the realistic hope that they will endure for the entire
length of the current Great Cycle.
"Of the remaining 20 per cent, 16 per cent shall be used
in the compression of frozen energy to create 100,000 null-gravity cores
for airships.
"The final 4 per cent shall be used to fabricate tools
and industrial plant of varying quality - I say deliberately varied, so
that they will not all wear out at the same time. There shall be
no repetition of the energy crisis which arose from the depletion of the
Sun-Egg. This time we shall bring a self-sustaining higher economy
into permanent existence."
This complex of decisions is
sometimes referred to by historians as the Choice of the Way - a term
which reflects the immensity of its importance for all future
eras. By and large, it is agreed that the choices made were good;
perhaps the best that could have been made under the
circumstances. We need, however, to note two major unforeseen
consequences.
The first concerns the 4 per cent
used for the variety of small objects and installations - tools,
machines, plant - that was meant to vitalise the economy.
"Vitalise" it did, to an unintended degree. Chelthan energy, to a
degree not understood at the time, was purposive. It had a strong
inherent morphogenetic field that began the long process whereby cities
became holistic collections of machines that functioned somewhat like
giant vegetables in their capacity to put forth growths. What
strikes Terrestrial visitors nowadays about Uranian city economies is
the extent to which the human workers "tend" rather than "administer",
and this theme can be traced back to the Choice of the Way at the
beginning of the Phosphorus Era.
Hence, industrialism has never led
to ugliness on Ooranye. Technology, there, has always been a
branch on the tree of life rather than a contrast to it. It is an
effloresce of self-replicating mechanisms geared to city
maintenance, that needs only pruning and tending by man, for the
prior decision to create the disc-on-stem cities caused all subsequent
uses of Chelthan energy to "fold around" that decision, like climbing
plants trained on a trellis. Thus began the machine evolution that
would, many eras later, culminate in the Ghepions.
The second unforseen consequence concerns the
decision to conserve half the store for future use. It meant that some
Chelthan power was not completely consumed until the end of the era. During
those hundreds of lifetimes, therefore, the stuff was leaking into
the atmosphere around
Skyyon.
As a result, for thousands of miles
around the sunward pole of the planet, a faint nimbus suffused the
air.
It is now obvious - though perhaps unprovable
- that this radiation affected people's minds. Admittedly, the "seepage effect"
is often too glibly invoked by second-rate historians as
an explanation for everything that is special about the events of era
15. We can only guess to what extent the
"seepage" was responsible for the ultimate hubris and the
disaster that overtook mankind at the end of the era.
And to be fair, with equal probability we must also allow it to have contributed
to the greatness that shone before. It elevated people's thoughts, spurring them with extra
ambitions, inciting deeds which burnished the legends of the Phosphorus Era and makes of it
in retrospect a lit stage on which an ancient epic
has been played
out.
The
Disc-on-Stem Cities
By far the largest single portion of the power plundered
from Chelth was used to build the 25 virtually indestructible
disc-on-stem platforms which, piled high with branching
walkways, globular palaces and helical towers, comprise the familiar
Uranian cities of all subsequent eras. Those platforms stand today
as they stood a million Earth-years ago, and as they will stand for the
rest of the Great Cycle of Uranian history. A direct hit by an
atom bomb would not dent the ultimate metal of which they are composed,
though the superstructures would be obliterated.
The construction of these cities
took an amazingly short time - less than a thousand days, and all of
them (except Grard, the last) built at the same time, at the beginning
of the era.
Together with cheaper airships and
the re-equipment of the economy, the new city structures gave the
Uranians unprecedented riches and power. Note however that this
was an enabling boost, an acceleration rather than a deviation
of history. Paradoxially, the alien Chelthan power had allowed
Ooranye to realize itself; had encouraged indigenous trends to develop
more quickly, more fully and more freely.
This can be seen in the case of the city
hive-minds. These instances of occasional group-consciousness were
almost entirely human in composition (with a small contribution from a
few administrative computers) and must not be confused with the much
later sentient cities of era 47 onwards. Group consciousness can
be seen as a natural development of the renl co-ordinating
instinct that evolved during the Lithium Era.
With hindsight, we can see the middle
of era 15 as the "Age of Innocent Hives". That
is to say, in those times, where urban group-minds shimmered on the edge
of existence they did so by and large
without any clash with human freedom. In discussion of era
15 the term "group mind" usually refers only to a
sort of vague Overgovernment existing continuously on a fractional "tax of awareness", levied on a
small fraction of each mind within range. In the very
few cases that went wrong (as in the case of Hoog), events
provided a dramatic and salutary warning for everyone else. Otherwise, peace and goodwill
reigned between city-minds and individual man. In no subsequent age did this smooth
equilibrium return for Syoom as a whole (though the greatest,
happiest and most successful hive-mind, that of the Aoan
Paramountcy, belongs to the
much later Xenon
Era).
This success
story was based, paradoxically, upon ignorance. In the Phosphorus
Era most of the people most of the time were unaware that hive-minds
existed. On the few occasions that they were fully perceived
and admitted, they were regarded with fear and horror; the example of Hoog,
a hive-mind that went wrong, reinforced the prejudice. Like love,
like humour, the era 15 style of group consciousness depended
upon spontaneity and would shrivel and die under logical
dissection.
Politics in the Phosphorus
Era
The sensation of
confidence in the mighty achievements of Syoom meant that long stretches of time
went by without people feeling the need for any Sunnoad.
Even when one was elected, nen's reign was usually very
short - usually lasting only for the length of the crisis which nen had
been called to solve. Meanwhile the Noads of the powerful 25 cities had
greater resources of power at their command than any city governments
have had since. Thus, statistics for the hazard-contours in
this period were compiled the expensive way, more by the use of the
Great Patrols of airships and of the hemispheric force-fields called
dlaxou (which were invented early in the
Phosphorus Era) than from the journeys of individual wayfarers.
This was certainly an extravagant way of doing it. But it had the
good effect, that the mavos, the floating
sky-weeds which had caused such bother in the Lithium Era, were so
reduced in numbers by the dense patrols, that they were
never again a widespread nuisance.
The Bank of
Light
Although power and global ambition were the keynotes of
era 15, other voices were not altogether suppressed.
Counterbalancing the increasing hubris of the leading Noads was the
institution known to its friends and supporters as the Bank of
Light.
Ironically enough it grew out of a failed military
project. Researchers had been trying to collect and "bottle"
mind-power in the form of aggressive emotions which might then be
concentrated and blasted at an enemy as a sort of mind-bomb. The
project was abandoned as unfeasible. However, one of the former
researchers, who happened also to be trained in techniques of
contemplation, did succeed, secretly, in storing a different kind of
force - a kind of awareness-force dependent not upon the will but
upon the passive appreciation of the world. After many obstacles
had been overcome this researcher succeeded in founding the so-called
Bank of Light.
This was the nickname of the tongue-twister
Rgiohafnarn Dzeld or "Voluntary Contemplation Store". Its emblem was an L
shape signifying the belief that what was important was being,
which was in some sense at right angles to the dimension of event
and action, and just as entitled as they to the status of
"achievement".
The Bank of Light opened branches in every
city. Volunteers donated their time and concentration, to project
part of their contemplative force into the great shimmering
receptacles in the vaults of the Bank.
This accumulated force was to play a great part in
salvaging a large part of civilization from the disasters which befell
Syoom at the end of the era.
The Verdict of History
Towards the
end, the civilization of the era began to suffer the strains
of its own arrogance. The powerful Noads and their peoples conceived a hatred and
fear of the community "hive-minds" - sometimes with partial justification,
as the hives themselves grew exaggerated and sinister (the reader
is referred to the example of Hoog, mentioned
above). Meanwhile, the cultures of the great cities showed signs
of eccentricity and instability. Take the case of Vyanth: its
agriculturalists bred a strain of vheic
which glowed continuously,
instead of in the waxing and waning rhythm natural to Ooranye; this doubled the city's economic
resources, but had the unexpected effect, that its people began to stay
awake all the time, so that in a few generations sleep
was forgotten. Such aberrations were fortunately swept away in the disaster
that ended the era.
The
Phosphorus Era culminated in a
hugely ambitious gamble, which in its failure taught humanity a lesson so priceless that
subsequent eras must remember the ill-fated Sunnoad Fiarr Fosn and his
doomed followers with eternal gratitude. For a summary of the events
which brought era 15 to its cataclysmic close, see the next section.
Here, however, we will merely point out that the 723rd Sunnoad
and his captains are still viewed as heroes by the Uranians of our own day. Moreover,
because Nenns commonly live two or three lives, widely separated in time,
and retain memory of their first life during their second, Fiarr
Fosn himself was given the opportunity in a subsequent era to
atone for his mistake.
>> The Great Fleet
[Return to top of this
page]
[Return
to front
page]