The calm which
fell upon Syoom with the end of the Quonian crisis, brought with it
a sense of relief combined with a sudden awareness of how great a
privilege and a delight it was to be alive at this time. Vistas of
glorious well-being suddenly stretched ahead, for, uniquely, the men and
women of the Zinc Era knew the length that their era would
last. It is a strange fact, but true: Era 30 is the only one of
the great eras, the long ones, of which the inhabitants knew at the time
what the duration would be. Here is not the place to list all the
theories which have been thought up as to why this should be so.
Let the fact suffice for now: right from the start, people were aware
that era 30 would total 30,853,745 Uranian days, or 1,257 Uranian
years. (A period equivalent to 105,591 Earth years.) No era
so far, other than the Vanadium,
has surpassed this
length.
The Zinc can be compared with the
Vanadium in that both were to some extent interludes in history, rather
than periods of widespread spiritual quest and striving. But the
Zinc was a much more mature interlude. You couldn't say of the
Zinc, like you could of the Vanadium, that it was primarily a
haven for swashbucklers - though of course adventures and adventurers
abounded in era 30 as in all eras of Uranian history. What made
the Zinc an interlude was not a decline to a more childish level of
consciousness, but a postponement of the search for greater
understanding of the destiny of Man on Ooranye. This relaxedness,
this postponement, gives the Zinc Era its special charm, of contentment
without complacency. You cannot accuse its people of shirking any
ultimate quest, for they knew they were in for a long long era
before the next shaking discovery, and there was nothing they could do
about it.
Another consequence of the
awareness its people had of the length of their era, is that the Zinc is
the period when most of the great monorails of Syoom were built.
The stupendous building project was undertaken with confidence, in the
knowledge that the time and the resources would be available with
which to complete it.
Everyone has nen's own favourite
Golden Age of Syoom. Many would pick the Zinc Era. It lacks
the crudity of the Vanadium, the tension of the Phosphorus; it possesses
some of the serenity and mystery of the Argon and Cobalt Eras. And
it has the special poignancy of the awareness of coming doom, at first
far off, over a thousand lifetimes away, then creeping gradually closer
as the millions of days wore on. Many were glad that they would
never live to see the end; others were impatient and envied their
successors.
>> The Age of Spies
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