#tanadrin's fiction

[tanadrin]

It is interesting, and often painful, to hear of what high hopes our ancestors had for us at the beginning of the third millennium. They expected that we should grow in our wealth and our power as a species; and we have. They hoped that we would venture out into space; and we have. They dreamed of what cunning things we might invent, what new arts and sciences we might devise, and many of those things we have invented, and devised. But in all their speculation there lay also a dream of more, that perhaps we might solve the most vexing troubles, that only a few centuries off lay a world without war, without poverty of any kind, without fear or sin or death. That though there may be no paradise beyond this world, perhaps one day we could create one here.

This is, perhaps, the sharpest tragedy of our existence: that we have scoured the globe, and sent our ships out to search among the stars, and there are no utopias to be found. Oh, we have tried to build our own--the little Horais and Cockaignes and Zions of a thousand hopeful dreamers--but they have foundered sooner or later, for the simple reason that all things really in the world are subject to division and change. The current age of exploration and technology has brought with it a new breed of utopian, one whose spirit I cannot help but admire. They are willing to build not just new towns but new worlds, to brave hundreds or thousands of light years, to hazard generations living in what be marginal environments, for the chance to realize their visions. Yet I cannot think of one that has not failed, in most or all of the things it set out to do. We behold, often, a vision before us that seems so vivid, so immanent, that it must necessarily be real; and yet when we go to capture it, in words or in pigment or on a new world, it disappears.

The failures of these utopian colonies is usually quite civilized--there are no deaths, no revolts, no disasters. It simply evolves away from what its founders intended, all the careful tinkering of its architects, and all the resolute will of its governors, unable to stem forces which were unaccounted for in the original designs, or changing circumstances which could never have been forseen. Many of humanity's most notable colony worlds began as such utopias: Teegarden's World was founded by socialists seeking to create a truly stateless communist society; Proxima b was originally settled by techno-utopian transhumanists, who dreamed of a teeming Hive beneath the barren rock; Luyten Anchorage was built by Sufi mystics, who wanted a world apart for the contemplation of God. These facts are simple historical curiosities now.

More spectacular failures have occurred--the civil war among the schismatic sects of Kepler-62f, for instance, or the notorious mass cannibalism incident in the commune at Umbriel Station--but typically the failure of a utopia is more subtle. It is not just a failure of politics, a failure of planning, a failure of systems. It is the slippery mismatch of souls which are at variance against the universe, souls which necessarily suffer and strive and dream, but must dwell in a cosmos where not all their suffering can have purpose, where some striving must be in vain, where to be able to imagine a thing is not necessarily for it to be possible to build. I do not advise wholly against utopian dreaming. The instinct that a better way of doing things, even a better world, is possible, must be possible, is a perennial source of renewal and growth, the fierce goad of salvation. But perfection is a process, and not a state. And the perfectibility of mankind is a process that acts on two different problems: the hurts of the world around us, and the hurts of the world within. Many, many utopians have struggled with the latter in vain, mistaking them for the former; and many complacent in their own happy position have supposed all utopians are fools, because they make the same mistake in reverse.

I have been asked often what my utopian world would be like, if I could build one. The short answer is that I would not attempt it. Were I brave or foolish enough to try such a thing, I am afraid the answer is quite boring, and not much in keeping with the spirit of the question. I am only a little schooled in philosophy, and a dabbler in political economy. After all my long years of life, I feel often I understand the world less than ever; if I have gained any wisdom, it is principally a wisdom of my own faults and failures. Were all things possible, I should banish disease and want and death, I think, as most would. But I cannot say how. And beyond that all that comes to mind is that I should like to have tree-lined streets, and the sound of lively conversation from a little way off. And the knowledge that not far away, the friends I lost long ago were waiting and eager to see me; and always would be, and I need never be long parted from them again.

(Excerpt from Tjungdiawan’s Historical Reader, 3rd edition)

[eightyonekilograms]

The debate about Trump and the Fourteenth Amendment, as writ large and currently in a microcosm in the debate between @tanadrin and @jadagul, makes me think that "the rule of law", as a concept, has kinda undergone the same problem as vaccines and low-interest rates. It's such a victim of its own success that people forgot what life was like in the old days, which is suddenly a problem when circumstances bring the old days roaring back.

What I mean is, for a very long time America had such high-functioning laws and institutions that it was possible to pretend that the laws and institutions themselves had actual power, and that cold, unpleasant political realities like

the rule of law is a polite fiction which only exists if enough people believe in it.

if the laws and institutions are already on shaky ground legitimacy-wise, applying the law as written might be a worse option than not doing so, if (enough) people think that the law is unjust and illegitimate.

in times of political unrest, it's important to ensure your faction has the support of the military. And this means both the senior officers and the majority of junior officers and enlisted men.

power flows out of the barrel of a gun, and from nowhere else

didn't apply to us and were only relevant in third-world dumps on the other side of the world. Well, they're relevant now, the dream time is over.

[txttletale]

I read a post on your blog by a user I haven't encountered or heard of (tanadrin) that I mostly felt was making a lot of good and cogent points but used some language that raised my eyebrow; when I went to their blog they had an extremely long clarification of that post which in the tags explicitly equated terfs with people who oppose the creation of pornographic media featuring fictional children. is that a position you share?

if you want me to get involved in whatever discourse this is you're going to have to paypal me two hundred US dollars sorry

[sunnydaleherald]

The Sunnydale Herald Newsletter, Wednesday, May 11

ANGEL: You ever miss it? You were turned, what... 5 years ago? HARMONY: Oh, that. Yeah. Graduation night. I don't know. It's weird. Part of me always knew life would end after high school. I was very popular, you know. The whole golden years thing. ANGEL: I don't remember what it was like... being human. It was too long ago. HARMONY: (shrugs) Not so great. Zits. Dandruff. Mortality. Although I do remember... my heart. (smiles) And the way it would thump when I kissed a really hot boy for the first time. That was cool. Angel? Something's going down, isn't it? And everybody's in on it except me. ANGEL: You're not a part of this. HARMONY: I could be. I'm your assistant, after all. I could, I don't know... assist you or something.

~~Not Fade Away~~

The Sunnydale Herald is looking for at least one new editor. Contributing to the Herald is a great way to get your Buffy on! Find out more here.

[Drabbles & Short Fiction]

Hanging Around by badly_knitted (Buffy, Cordelia, Tom, Machida, PG)

Just Another Lie by NAOA (Connor, Fred/Gunn, T)

[Chaptered Fiction]

Sineya Rambles - Chapter 1-3 by desicat (Sineya, eventual Buffy/Spike, M)

Stronger than Destiny (Stronger series: part 11) by jayme_stone (Stargate Atlantis crossover, Scoobies, G)

Rise, Ch. 10 by CheekyKitten (Buffy/Spike, NC-17)

Creative Solutions, Ch. 8 by Harlow Turner (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)

So One of Us is Living, Ch. 27 by violettathepiratequeen (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)

Sineya Rambles, Ch. 1-3 by Desicat (Sineya, eventual Buffy/Spike, R)

Sineya Rambles, Ch. 3 by Desicat (Sineya, eventual Buffy/Spike, R)

Postcards and Snapshots, Ch. 12 by TheSunnySlayer (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)

Sparks, Ch. 7 by Dusty (Buffy/Spike/Angel, NC-17)

The Home Invasions, Ch. 28 by VeroNyxK84 (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)

Dawn the Vampire Slayer, Ch. 9 by LJ94 (Buffy/Spike, R)

Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Ch. 5 by VeroNyxK84 (Buffy/Spike, R)

One Step Away, Ch. 4 by flootzavut (Buffy/Spike, PG-13)

In Which the Potentials Time Travel and are Greatly Befuddled, Ch. 1 by FlightsofFancy (Buffy/Spike, R)

[Images, Audio & Video]

Anya and Halfrek gifset by andremichaux (worksafe)

Gifset: Bangel Crossovers by bangelgifs (Buffy/Angel, worksafe)

Mermay comic: day 7 and 8 by malvymary (Buffy/Faith, worksafe)

"Touched" gifs by spuffygifs (Buffy/Spike, worksafe)

Buffy-inspired outfits by alottaoutfits (Buffy, worksafe)

Banner: Strong is fighting! by leybrain (Buffy, worksafe)

Buffy/Spike collage by mayorsquid (probably worksafe)

Video: an animatic about watching BtVS by noname-nonartist ()

Buffy Summers, a glitter edit by violetbudd (worksafe)

[Reviews & Recaps]

watched the first 2 episodes of angel s5 and it's already so different by elliebartlets

Buffy season 6! by tuiyla

Pop Culture Role Call: Visions of Dushku - Angel S04E15 - Orpheus

[Fandom Discussions]

Kennedy and Rona deserve more love (and other ask responses) by juanabaloo

rationalist yimby btvs au where the popularity of single family houses... by tanadrin

Could Willow have saved Fred? by nightshade and others

What's your head canon on why The First Evil couldn't or didn't pose as Tara to manipulate Willow? by Joshua and others

Wesley's time as Buffy's watcher by Zealousideal_Buy1577 and others

Tara's Powers by LiviaDruzilla

Angel Season 1: Leaving Childhood Behind - by Andrew Heard

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[intimate-mirror]

So I don’t think it’s abstract, waffly, out-there lit-crit nonsense to say that when it comes to narrative art, the narrative is (must be) a cooperative effort between the artist/performer/text/source and the audience: they, the performer, must depict the action of the narrative they wish to convey in an interesting, sophisticated, engaging way. You, the hearer, must translate the plain backdrop into the dusty plains of Mars or the muddy fields of Agincourt, the high-school teen with the cracking voice into Prospero or Caliban, the blank verse which does not follow the form of the natural speech of anyone who has ever lived to both the emotions and heightened mood it is intended to convey with the notion that what is happening here bears *some* relation to historic events (even if it is pure fantasy! It must feel like it *could*, somehow, within the space of human emotion and experience, someday occur). The work isn’t 50/50; the job of the presentation is often to make the work of the audience as easy as possible. But the important thing to note is that even when your job, as the audience, *is* as easy as possible, it is *all artifice*. Even genres which we call “realism” are deeply steeped in artifice; the dawn of the “realist novel” (which is studied extensively in literature departments) was not the abandoning of artifice for stories of how people actually lived written how they actually spoke. No. Such. Thing. Exists. It’s just words on a page! It’s NOT REAL. “Realism” is just *another* set of generic conventions, one which is is intended to *evoke* everyday experience (as opposed to the deeds of kings or space wizards), but which bears no more relation to everyday experience than Shakespeare does to the actual deeds of English kings.

@tanadrin

(for the record, I read the post three times before responding, this isn’t just a knee-jerk reaction)

This paragraph starts out totally reasonably - the audience does a large part of the work in turning the work itself into something in the imagination, in suspending their knowledge that the work itself is not what it stands for so that they can partake in it. You could also say the audience uses the work as a springboard to create their own experience, or that the audience uses their imagination to ascribe meaning to the work.

It seems like an odd jump to go from that to the conclusion that the relationship between realist novels and reality is the same as between Shakespeare plays and reality.

Non-fiction might be a useful comparison here. Although the work continues to not be what it stands for, in some sense the narrative of the non-fiction is real, is (if that’s its topic) everyday experience. Then a naive definition of realism could be the degree to which a story can be distinguished from non-fiction. This isn’t totally vacuous - a decent amount of fiction cannot be distinguished from non-fiction without knowing the work’s source.

Just practically speaking, obvious breaks with “the way reality works” make it harder for people to create that correspondence between the metaphor of the story with their imaginative reality. This is why technobabble is a technique that can be done well or badly, even though in the most important sense it’s all fake. Even to a hypothetical reader/hearer who has forgone all their technical knowledge, a thief’s ability to break into a house being explained by them sneezing and rubbing their belly is going to break people out of their suspension of disbelief. There’s positive to a deeper explanation as well as negatives to its absence, even though any explanation will be wrong, because a good level of explanation can create a sense of satisfaction and increased trust in the story.

So in conclusion, realism as a genre of story can be defined in a form-and-convention-independent way, even though the genre as actually existing has many semi-arbitrary conventions (as all genres do), and realism as a degree to which reality is represented is coherent and is a valid value for both creators and consumers.

[tanadrin]

The invention of the basic BCI was revolutionary, though it did not seem so at the time. Developing implantable electronics that could detect impulses from, and provide feedback to, the body's motor and sensory neurons was a natural outgrowth of assistive technologies in the 21st century. The Collapse slowed the development of this technology, but did not stall it completely; the first full BCI suite capable of routing around serious spinal cord damage, and even reducing the symptoms of some kinds of brain injury, was developed in the 2070s. By the middle of the 22nd century, this technology was widely available. By the end, it was commonplace.

But we must distinguish, as more careful technologists did even then, between simpler BCI--brain-computer interfaces--and the subtler MMI, the mind-machine interface. BCI technology, especially in the form of assistive devices, was a terrific accomplishment. But the human sensory and motor systems, at least as accessed by that technology, are comparatively straightforward. Despite the name, a 22nd century BCI barely intrudes into the brain at all, with most of its physical connections being in the spine or peripheral nervous system. It does communicate *with* the brain, and it does so much faster and more reliably than normal sensory input or neuronal output, but there nevertheless still existed in that period a kind of technological barrier between more central cognitive functions, like memory, language, and attention, and the peripheral functions that the BCI was capable of augmenting or replacing.

*That* breakthrough came in the first decades of the 23rd century, again primarily from the medical field: the subarachnoid lace or neural lace, which could be grown from a seed created from the patient's own stem cells, and which found its first use in helping stroke patients recover cognitive function and suppressing seizures. The lace is a delicate web of sensors and chemical-electrical signalling terminals that spreads out over, and carefully penetrats certain parts of the brain; in its modern form, its function and design can be altered even after it is implanted. Most humans raised in an area with access to modern medical facilities have at least a diagnostic lace in place; and, in most contexts, they are regarded as little more than a medical tool.

But of course some of the scientists who developed the lace were interested in pushing the applications of the device further, and in this, they were inspired by the long history of attempts to develop immersive virtual reality that had bedevilled futurists since the 20th century. Since we have had computers capable of manipuating symbolic metaphors for space, we have dreamed of creating a virtual space we can shape to our hearts' content: worlds to escape to, in which we are freed from the tyranny of physical limitations that we labor under in this one. The earliest fiction on this subject imagined a kind of alternate dimension, which we could forsake our mundane existence for entirely, but outside of large multiplayer games that acted rather like amusement parks, the 21st century could only offer a hollow ghost of the Web, bogged down by a cumbersome 3D metaphor users could only crudely manipulate.

The BCI did little to improve the latter--for better or worse, the public Web as we created it in the 20th century is in its essential format (if not its scale) the public Web we have today, a vast library of linked documents we traverse for the most part in two dimensions. It feeds into and draws from the larger Internet, including more specialized software and communications systems that span the whole Solar System (and which, at its margins, interfaces with the Internet of other stars via slow tightbeam and packet ships), but the metaphor of physical space was always going to be insufficient for so complex and sprawling a medium.

What BCI really revolutionized was the massively multiplayer online game. By overriding sensory input and capturing motor output before it can reach the limbs, a BCI allows a player to totally inhabit a virtual world, limited only by the fidelity of the experience the software can offer. Some setups nowadays even forgo overriding the motor output, having the player instead stand in a haptic feedback enclosure where their body can be scanned in real time, with only audio and visual information being channeled through the BCI--this is a popular way to combine physical exercise and entertainment, especially in environments like space stations without a great deal of extra space.

Ultra-immersive games led directly, I argue, to the rise of the Sodalities, which were, if you recall, originally MMO guilds with persistent legal identities. They also influenced the development of the Moon, not just by inspiring the Sodalities, but by providing a channel, through virtual worlds, for socialization and competition that kept the Moon's political fragmentation from devolving into relentless zero-sum competition or war. And for most people, even for the most ardent players of these games, the BCI of the late 22nd century was sufficient. There would always be improvements in sensory fidelity to be made, and new innovations in the games themselves eagerly anticipated every few years, but it seemed, even for those who spent virtually all their waking hours in these spaces, that there was little more that could be accomplished.

But some dreamers are never satisfied; and, occasionally, such dreamers carry us forward and show us new possibilities. The Mogadishu Group began experimenting with pushing the boundaries of MMI and the ways in which MMI could augment and alter virtual spaces in the 2370s. Mare Moscoviensis Industries (the name is not a coincidence) allied with them in the 2380s to release a new kind of VR interface that was meant to revolutionize science and industry by allowing for more intuitive traversal of higher-dimensional spaces, to overcome some of the limits of three-dimensional VR. Their device, the Manifold, was a commercial disaster, with users generally reporting horrible and heretofore unimagined kinds of motion-sickness. MMI went bankrupt in 2387, and was bought by a group of former Mogadishu developers, who added to their number a handful of neuroscientists and transhumanists. They relocated to Plato City, and languished in obscurity for about twenty years.

The next anybody ever heard of the Plato Group (as they were then called), they had bought an old interplanetary freighter and headed for the Outer Solar System. They converted their freighter into a cramped-but-servicable station around Jupiter, and despite occasionally submitting papers to various neuroscience journals and MMI working groups, little was heard from them. This prompted, in 2410, a reporter from the Lunar News Service to hire a private craft to visit the Jupiter outpost; she returned four years later to describe what she found, to general astonishment.

The Plato Group had taken their name more seriously, perhaps, than anyone expected: they had come to regard the mundane, real, three-dimensional world as a second-rate illusion, as shadows on cave walls. But rather than believing there already existed a true realm of forms which they might access by reason, they aspired to create one. MMI was to be the basis, allowing them to free themselves not only of the constraints of the real world (as generations of game-players had already done), but to free themselves of the constraints imposed on those worlds by the evolutionary legacy of the structures of their mind.

They decided early on, for instance, that the human visual cortex was of little use to them. It was constrained to apprehending three-dimensional space, and the reliance of the mind on sight as a primary sense made higher-dimensional spaces difficult or impossible to navigate. Thus, their interface used visual cues only for secondary information--as weak and nondirectional a sense as smell. They focused on using the neural lace to control the firing patterns of the parts of the brain concerned with spatial perception: the place cells, neurons which periodically fire to map spaces to fractal grides of familiar places, and the grid cells, which help construct a two-dimensional sense of location. Via external manipulation, they found they could quickly accommodate these systems to much more complex spaces--not just higher dimensions, but non-Euclidean geometries, and vast hierarchies of scale from the Planck length to many times the size of the observable universe.

The goal of the Plato Group was not simply to make a virtual space to inhabit, however transcendent; into that space they mapped as much information they could, from the Web, the publicly available internet, and any other database they could access, or library that would send them scans of its collection. They reveled in the possibilities of their invented environment, creating new kinds of incomprehensible spatial and sensory art. When asked what the purpose of all this was--were they evangelists for this new mode of being, were they a new kind of Sodality, were they secessionists protesting the limits of the rest of the Solar System's imagination?--they simply replied, "We are happy."

I do not think anyone, on the Moon or elsewhere, really knew what to make of that. Perhaps it is simply that the world they inhabit, however pleasant, is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot appreciate it. Perhaps we do not want to admit there are other modes of being as real and moving to those who inhabit them as our own. Perhaps we simply have a touch of chauvanism about the mundane. If you wish to try to understand yourself, you may--unlike many other utopian endeavors, the Plato Group is still there. Their station--sometimes called the Academy by outsiders, though they simply call it "home"--has expanded considerably over the years. It hangs in the flux tube between Jupiter and Io, drawing its power from Jupiter's magnetic field, and is, I am told, quite impressive if a bit cramped. You can glimpse a little of what they have built using an ordinary BCI-based VR interface; a little more if your neural lace is up to spec. But of course to really understand, to really see their world as they see it, you must be willing to move beyond those things, to forsake--if only temporarily--the world you have been bound to for your entire life, and the shape of the mind you have thus inherited. That is perhaps quite daunting to some. But if we desire to look upon new worlds, must we not always risk that we shall be transformed?

--Tjungdiawain’s Historical Reader, 3rd edition

[tanadrin]

Twenty thousand years ago, my human ancestors were nomads or transhumant pastoralists, whose greatest works were the proto-cities which amounted by the standards of later centuries to glorified market-villages, many of which had a seasonal or ceremonial nature. History passed unrecorded, a torrent of silent years as the starry and mysterious skies wheeled above them. Ten thousand years ago, we had begun to look out on the cosmos and to crudely plumb its depths, but it still seemed to us a vast and inhospitable expanse, which we might never hope to cross, even if other worlds like our own did indeed lie on its most distant shores. Now, the universe as these ancients knew it seems to us strange and superstitious; we have crossed the great distances of space to visit thousands of stars and tens of thousands of smaller bodies. We have built a civilization which encompasses the descendants of dozens of distinct lineages of life, including both the accidental products of nature and the deliberate products of design. There are outposts of human beings, or their recognizable kin, not only throughout the disk of the Milky Way, but in its stellar halo, but in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, and the Saggitarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy; and, though little has been heard from that expedition so far, and little is expected for a long time yet, there are even a small group of pioneering souls who are seeking distant Andromeda, hoping to explore new frontiers there.

Yet for all that the boundaries of our knowledge have grown since we first sought to number and chart the stars, the universe hardly feels less vast. Of the four hundred billion or so stars estimated in the Milky Way, we have catalogued not quite ten percent, and many only in very general terms. We have closely surveyed far fewer. Some estimates put the number of sentient species that we have some form of contact with at around two percent of the total--and that only accounts for spacefaring races whose technological signatures would be obvious from casual observation. Just as it would be a mistake for the sailor to confuse the well-charted currents and winds and shores of their familiar domain with the whole ocean, it would be a mistake for us to think that just because we inhabit vast volumes of the universe, that we really know them well--that there are not monstrosities and wonders just below.

And we must equally observe that many of these monstrosities and wonders are not wholly alien to us: since the days of the First Flowering, when the vessels of the ancient Foundation undertook to explore the galaxy and drew humanity and her allied species in their wake, there have been at any given time far more inhabited planets and artificial habitats than any single government could hope to gather under its authority, and many have spent centuries or even millennia out of contact--due to catastrophe, forceful separation, or simply being forgotten. Many of those have, in turn, seeded new worlds on their own. It is not unknown even around stars near to other Core worlds, to find a planet inhabited by a frighteningly alien species that, on close examination, proves to be a distant descendant of Earth.

It was always an illusion, in my view, that we have ever thought a single world so well-trodden as to be completely known. After all, we are (for the most part) surface dwellers comfortable in a narrow range of conditions, who will always know little of the deepest parts of the ocean, the darkest underground caverns, or the highest and most rugged mountaintops. Nonetheless, we have often felt, when a planet has been inhabited for a few thousand years, mapped from orbit, picked over by environmental and geological surveys, that it is transformed from something strange and wondrous to something rather small and pedestrian. And some have feared that, as we grow in power and knowledge, as we visit ever more distant stars and explore ever deeper the mysteries of physics and cosmology, that we will someday reach a point where there is nothing left to discover, where all the surprise of the cosmos is gone, where the universe has lost its mysterious savor.

I have no such fear. If anything, I fear the opposite: that the really knowable part of the universe will always be small, that we shall always be, in some fundamental sense, like my ancient ancestors who huddled around the fire for fear of the dark, staring up uncomprehending at the stars.

--Akalos Sengi, on the occasion of the opening of the Great Library at Tau Ceti e (JD 610097)

[tanadrin]

The Frontier Shapeshifter Classification and Threat Response Scheme

"Shapeshifters? That kind of science fiction nonsense isn't real. Pull yourself together, Lieutenant!" --Captain Abrido Xem of the Helvetosian light frigate Kamar's Dawn, thirteen seconds before xir execution by a Varyassid infiltrator

"Shapeshifter" is the common term for a number of different species which exhibit similar natural adaptations and/or technologically-augmented abilities that enable them to take on the guise of other species, of specific individuals, or, in extremely unusual cases, diverse nonliving physical objects in their surrounding environment. Shapeshifting can be a tool for avoiding harm, for peacefully gathering information, or even for facilitating first contact, but it can also be used for hostile infiltration, assassination, and war. Many interstellar polities and organizations are therefore wary of shapeshifters, if not outright hostile. Frontier policy (and that of the Foundation in general) is one of gradual, cautious friendliness in all first contact situations; this applies no less to shapeshifting individuals or clades than it does to any other newly-encountered lifeform. Hostile shapeshifters have been encountered, however, and the following general policies have been developed for use in situations where an encounter is suspected or confirmed.

General principles

Frontier ships operate at the limits of Foundation knowledge, and it is not unusual for two alien species (say, a Foundation member and an unknown non-member) to have such wide cognitive, communicative, or conceptual gaps between them that creative means must be found to establish first contact, or even to make one's presence known to the other. Thus, the surprise presence of an alien lifeform aboard a Foundation ship should not be taken as in itself proof of a hostile invasion situation, but should put the crew on high alert. General procedures when discovering an alien presence or influence that has made its way onto the ship unnoticed is to immediately report the presence to command staff, and to implement Alert Protocol F-4 ("The Buddy System (Infiltration)"). If hostile intent is suspected, but not confirmed, Alert Protocol F-5 may be implemented ("Active Containment"). For permanent installations, protocol F-5B should be used ("Foothold: Condition Orange"). In cases of confirmed hostile intent, more serious protocols should be enacted, but the exact protocol depends on the nature of the infiltration: F-7 ("Passphrase Protocol"), F-8 ("Stun First, Ask Questions Later"), F-12 ("In Case of Brain Slugs, Break Glass"), or even F-13 ("Shipwide Purge"). Commanders of key installations may, in extreme circumstances, order the implementation of Protocol F-13C ("Foothold: Condition Red"), but certain safeguards must be observed to prevent infiltrators or enemy agents from simply using this protocol to wipe out key bases (see Command Briefing RX-11 for details).

Major classes

Class ANAMORPH - ANAMORPH-type shapeshifters are sometimes not considered true shapeshifters at all; they are "amorphous" lifeforms that can change their physical shape, but within fairly limited parameters, and without especially unusual adaptations beyond the changing of integument color or texture that let them mimic other species. A common example might be the Earth octopus, which uses its ability to hide from marine predators, but which would not fool even the most basic bioscanner (or a zoologist giving one a cursory physical examination).

Class WEREWOLF - WEREWOLF-type shapeshifters are among the most common, and refer simply to lifeforms that have two or more (though almost always it is only two) highly specific morphs which they can alternate between at will, and within a relatively short period of time (at most a few days; sometimes as little as a few minutes, but more usually on the order of hours). The danger of WEREWOLFs comes primarily from unfamiliarity--e.g., disturbing the sessile and apparently inanimate forms of Khuryans during their aestivation, or not noticing the presence of Farosian flesh-burrowers because their locomotive form is far more commonly depicted in pop culture than their nesting sac. Some WEREWOLFs have developed their alternate morphs as camouflage, which may be technologically enhanced in ways which render them difficult to find even when searching for them with advanced technology. Frontier ships are equipped with sensor suites sensitive to all known WEREWOLF camouflage techniques, but of course when seeking out strange new forms of life, explorers should expect the unexpected.

Class SELKIE - SELKIE-type shapeshifters specifically emulate members of other species. Of especial interest are those that imitate members of sapient species. Most are themselves sapient, but not all--notably, the Ormovan organ-stealer is such an adroit mimic that it can get close enough to unwary humans to complete its feeding cycle despite having an extremely primitive nervous system and very little native intelligence. SELKIEs do not imitate specific sapient individuals, often require a great deal of observation or preparation to learn to mimic a new species, and are detectable to most remote scans. Most sapient SELKIEs make no effort to hide their ability, and use it primarily to facilitate communication and trade.

Class PUCA - PUCA-type shapeshifters primarily use their shapeshifting abilities for concealment, and their ability relies to some extent (whether technological or biological) on subverting the senses or cognition of other lifeforms. Since there are no adaptations which are generally effective in subverting the perception of all sentient species, PUCAs often are vulnerable to detection by new species or by unfamiliar sensor technologies, though sapient PUCA exhibit a great deal of adaptability in dealing with these situations. PUCA are typically quite harmless, and most only want to be left alone. Confirmed PUCA, like the "Fairies of F3X-449" or the Julaya Freehold, are subject to a general noninterference order.

Class CHANGELING - CHANGELING-type shapeshifters, like PUCA, are reliant to some degree on subverting the perceptions of other lifeforms; unlike PUCA, they exhibit more flexible, generalist abilities, sometimes including the ability to mimic specific other sapients. Like PUCA, their weakness is often new species or new sensor technologies which they have not yet been able to develop countermeasures for. However, since CHANGELINGs' abilities are not aimed primarily at concealment, they may be more bold about actively infiltrating alien ships or installations, or even planets, for both benign and malicious purposes.

Class ETIAINEN - ETIAINEN-type shapeshifters are among the most dangerous, when their intent is hostile. They exhibit the ability to mimic not only specific sapient species, but specific sapient individuals, and to do so in ways that allow them to acquire at least partial knowledge, memory, and/or skills of the individual in question; sometimes they may even be unaware of their status as a shapeshifter, allowing them to act as long-term deep-cover agents. There are few true ETIAINEN species; most known ETIAINEN are small clades within larger species-groups, or the result of specific military-intelligence projects. Known ETIAINEN include the Varyassid assassins (who must partially consume their target), Ghoshani mimics (must maintain prolonged physical contact with their target to acquire information from them, typically isolating them in a remote location), Turei doppelgangers (they usually physically infest and gradually replace the host body), and Chaulan scanners (who allegedly need only momentary contact with the person they intend to replace).

Minor classes

Class ASWANG - ASWANGs are not true shapeshifters in the sense that they may imitate or acquire attributes of species, but do so in a piecemeal fashion, often appearing chimeric as a result. They are also overwhelmingly predators, some of especially keen intelligence. Fortunately, they are rare, but the suspected presence of an ASWANG aboard a Frontier vessel is a TYRANT-grade emergency.

Class CUCKOO - CUCKOOs are brood parasites who find ways of inserting their young into alien populations. Sometimes this is a way of learning about them, with the young later returning as adults to CUCKOO worlds; for other species, this seems simply to be such a natural part of their existence they continue it without questioning it very much. Most CUCKOOS target oviparous species for obvious reasons, but this is perhaps not always so: there are reports that a case of apparent triplets born aboard the FSEV Beagle proved, on genetic testing, to actually consist of one human baby and two nanotech-engineered replicants, though as the mother was reported to have had a threesome with a fellow crewmember and a Harusian artificial lifeform nine months prior, this may technically be classified not so much as a case of brood parasitism as simply a cross-species polyandrous multiple birth.

Class TIYANAK - TIYANAKs are "reverse shapeshifters:" species which reproduce by infecting other, physically compatible species, which they then subvert and frequently genetically alter, or which they use as a kind of permanent parasitic host. Due to the physiological difficulties in such a life cycle, TIYANAKs are in fact quite rare, and the handful of known examples are arguably more likely to be (essentially) ancient bioweapons or computer viruses gone astray than natural occurrences. Nonetheless, TIYANAKs are considered extremely dangerous. "Classic" TIYANAKs resemble the Pavrian Rakshasas, which infect their hosts and gradually replace all their biological tissue with new Pavrian tissue, starting with the central nervous system. "Parasite"-types like the Edrian skullburrower may keep the host body alive and largely intact, using it for locomotion and sustenance. There are also ambiguous "hybrid" types which seem to alternate modes as circumstances require: during the F96-A4A Incident, Captain Havar of the FSEV Orreiska noted that the infectious vector produced a variety of ambulant "parasite"-types, alongside sessile "broodmother" types. Since the human and Chalawani crew was immune to infection, a great deal of data could be gathered during the course of the outbreak (though sadly it could not in the end be stopped), and of dozens of the broodmother types examined, not one, after reaching maturity, contained any genetic or physical trace of the original host.

(Excerpted from Karel Mora's An Introduction to Xenology for Starship Officers, 3rd. edition)

[tanadrin]

The peregrine children

The dispersal of Earth-derived sentient life began slowly in the 23rd century, amid the so-called Second Space Race, when the first relativistic ships departed the Solar System for what are now named the "hither worlds"--those planets orbiting stars within twenty or so light-years of Earth. These were expensive, desperate, and frequently doomed undertakings. The few successful societies they initially founded were very different from those established during the Third Space Race, which could rely on regular, though infrequent, FTL communication and connection with Earth. These worlds are sometimes called (together with those of the Solar System) the "ancient planets," though they are only a little bit older than the oldest FTL-seeded planets. They were often termed the "pioneer worlds" in the 24th and 25th century, a usage which I have taken to borrowing. The pioneer worlds are characterized by a certain pride in their independence from Earth, an early history marked with hardship, and languages and cultures which diverged very quickly from those of the populations from which they derived. But they are also marked by a distinct conservatism, perhaps even stronger than that of Earth: the people of the pioneer worlds often saw themselves, especially in the latter half of the third millennium, as cultural holdouts, keeping alive ideologies and modes of living which had become unfashionable in the Solar System, and which were totally alien to the utopian and future-looking aspirations of the so-called "younger planets." All the ancient planets, Earth included, have thus developed a certain reputation for hidebound traditionalism, and not, I think, entirely undeservedly. The cultures of the pioneer worlds are perhaps a touch less arrogant in their outlook, but also are rather more homogenous. Earth, though it may fancy itself primus inter pares, cannot help but remain one of the most cosmopolitain worlds in the Local Bubble, parent and child both of innumerable peoples of innumerable stars.

The Third Space Race began in the aftermath of the Solar Fitna, with the widespread utilization of the warp drive technology. FTL travel opened up a vast volume of nearby space to colonization, and, in time, much of the galaxy to exploration. It facilitated, in due course, first contact with the Helvetosians and, in part through them, with other sapient extraterrestrial civilizations. But the long-term legacy of the warp drive was not just to catapult humanity to relevance on the interstellar stage, but to expand the definition of the concept of "human" in the first place. The term has had a certain monotonic quality; though in its original sense it sometimes was used expansively, to include the whole genus Homo, our closest ancestral kindred--the Neanderthals and Denisovans, for example--were ghostly figures, creatures superseded, and possibly driven directly to extinction by, the relentless expansion of our own direct ancestors. From the deaths of the last Neanderthals some thirty thousand years before, to first contact with the Helvetosians, "human," Homo sapiens, "intelligent life," and "the civilization centered around the planet Earth" were functionally synonymous terms.

Which is not to say that even in the period prior to the Solar Fitna, the groundwork for a more expansive view of humanity was not being laid. Mars was colonized in part with the aid of advanced genetic engineering techniques in the 23rd century, also the century that the first powerful, fully general artificial intelligences were developed, which have spawned their own clade parallel to and intertwined with Earth-derived biological life. Transhumanist speculation on what the possibilities of true morphological freedom might be, facilitated by cybernetics and germline genetic modification, is of course much older. But it was not until the Third Space Race began to fling shoots of the common vine of humanity outward, past the hither stars, that some of these possibilities began to be realized. Sometimes because new worlds seemed to invite, or even demand, new modes of being; sometimes, those that came to inhabit these worlds sought to exist with them in a harmony reflective of their ancestors' harmony with Earth; others were simply inspired by the possibilities latent in the human form, which they sought to shape like a sculptor shaping marble. Others were the expression of natural processes, already underway in a population isolated from the rest of humanity, though taken early to their natural conclusion.

I will not claim that the process of the diversification of the human form has been entirely positive, or even entirely neutral. There have been grievous mistakes which have driven entire populations to extinction, the result of reckless tampering with awful consequences. Other populations have higher incidence of genetic disorders, or predispositions to disease, that are a difficult-to-eradicate inheritance of their ancestors' genetic manipulation. And, of course, on a small number of worlds, there have been perpetrated genetic crimes of a truly monstrous nature, the effort of tyrants or ideologues to create castes of pliable slaves to support their megalomaniacal fantasies. Nowadays, all worlds in which Control has any presence to speak of have strong regulations against malicious use of genetic engineering technologies; and such use on worlds where Control's power does not run is one of the few cases which might lead to open warfare between Foundation polities.

In your travels throughout nearby space (or, if you find yourself on a particularly diverse planet like Earth), you may encounter dozens of substantially different kinds of human being, some of which are truly distinct species, in the sense that they form a genetically immiscible stock, at least without substantial medical intervention. What follows here is a short list of some of the more interesting cousins you might encounter, and the history of their lineage.

BASELINE - The term for humans without genetic or cybernetic modification at all; "wild-type" humans. "Near-baseline" is the more technically precise term for most humans who are treated in utero for the possibility of genetic disease, and who use basic cybernetics like the neural lace to interface with modern computing technology. The majority of humans on Earth remain near-baseline.

GARDENERS - Sometimes called "Martians," though that term is more usually applied to any inhabitant of Mars. Gardeners are the descendants of the first Renewalist settlers of Mars, and many of them are still occupied by the business of managing the Red Planet's ecology. For historical and cultural reasons, they often excel in the life sciences. Gardeners are tall and gracile by baseline standards; their bodies are modified to thrive in a low-gravity, high-radiation, high-CO2 environment, and they frequently wear support suits that enable them to survive comfortably at a wide range of temperatures and pressures.

RANI or RANESE - The first human inhabitants of the Epsilon Eridani system were reduced to an extremely small number by an early failure of their ship's systems; the resulting population, which derived from around two dozen people who used careful genetic screening and modification techniques to ensure the viability of their offspring, was subject to extreme founding effects, primarily manifested in an unusual neurotype. Rani humans are said to have a flat affect, to be unusually calm and cooperative even in contexts which other humans find engender tension or anger, and to be relatively prosocial, with very low incidence of violence or antisocial behavior. Rani society has also been criticized as too rulebound or too conformist; but one interesting side effect of the Rani neurotype is that they are generally considered impossible to blackmail. Rani cannot, in general, be coerced by threats, including violent ones, against their person or loved ones. When psychologists have interviewed Rani and asked them about their reaction to such situations, most report that the fear of blackmail or coercion is outweighed by discomfort at defecting against the social consensus, or encouraging similar coercion by others in the future. This resistance to coercion is, interestingly, shared by certain sub-populations of Chalawani. The baseline Rani genotype also suffers from proclivities for heart disease and premature hair loss.

ALSAFID - The so-called Alsafid genotype is the result of intentional genetic experimentation, an attempt at creating low-aggression prosocial offspring which the founders of the Sigma Draconis population hoped would promote flourishing under resource-scarce conditions. In this, they were only partly successful. Under current agreements governing genetic engineering, most of the techniques the early Alsafids used would be considered far too dangerous, especially for use in germ-line genetic manipulation; but at the time, Sigma Draconis was entirely outside the reach of Control, being a very early FTL-seeded colony. The Alsafid genotype can be characterized as broadly neotenous; in the same way that humans are in some ways neotenous compared to other great apes, Alsafids are neotenous compared to other humans. They are in general playful, imaginative, and highly emotional; some sources also characterize them as habitually disorganized and even "irritating." They stand on average 6-8 cm taller than baseline humans, though their build is thinner, and are prone to nearsightedness and alopecia, possibly side effects of the genetic manipulation techniques used by their forebears, or the result of founder effects.

SCHOLZERS - Scholzers are inhabitants of the sole inhabited planet orbiting Scholz's Star, a dim red dwarf with a T-type brown dwarf companion. Although located within its star's habitable zone, their homeworld receives most of the light from its star in the infrared range, meaning its native plantlife appears black to the human eye. Scholzers genetically modified themselves at an early date to inhabit this environment comfortably, and to extend their vision into the near-infrared; their bodies are also endothermic rather than exothermic, an adaptation which may have been engineered to increase the heat sensitivity of their vision (since it would be overwhelmed by a body much warmer than the ambient temperature). They also modified their digestion to better accomodate native plants, including incorporating alien microbes into their gut flora. Whereas humans of many diverse clades tend to find certain common environmental factors psychologically pleasing and physiologically comfortable--blue skies, bright yellow-white sunlight, green plant life--Scholzers can experience stress and depression if over-exposed to bright sunlight and isolated from the black stems and leaves that are (to them) emblematic of natural beauty.

RATRI - Ratri is a moon of a roughly Jupiter-sized rogue planet, ejected from orbit due to the passage of its parent star near a neighbor. Although initially barren, tidal stresses provided its largest moon with a warm atmosphere, and the moon was settled and terraformed in the 26th century. The Ratri people are physically adapted to their home in a way similar to the Scholzers, albeit to a much more extreme degree: they are echolocators who live in the moon's shallow seas and littoral regions, in an artificially constructed ecology derived from that of Earth's deep-sea vents. Their bodies are well-adapted to the ocean: sleek, with insulating fat; not quite blind, but prioritizing other senses due to the moon's perpetual darkness. The Ratri were originally an isolationist people, who founded their world in secret. It was not until the 32nd century that they were rediscovered by the rest of humanity, and not until the 33rd that it was conclusively proven that they were, in fact, a species of human.

LUHMANESE - During the Solar Fitna, the artificial general intelligences which humans had relied on to support major sectors of industrial production seceded in protest against attempts to draft them into wars which, as they saw it, were not of their concern. This was not an entirely altruistic move; the AGIs understood that, if they were going to be drafted into fighting humanity's wars, they would come to be seen as weapons first, and sentient beings second, and that their independent existence would be endangered. Rather than remain in the Solar System and within reach of Earth's governments, however distantly, they opted to depart for Luhman 16, a binary brown dwarf system in the constellation Vela, six light-years away. Luhman 16 contained no worlds amenable to human habitation then or at any time in the future; but the L and T dwarfs were reliable sources of energy in the form of infrared radiation, and the scattered asteroids in orbit of them were a source of useful materials. This was the foundation of the so-called Machine Emirates, the politically independent AI states. The inhabitants of the Machine Emirates exist for the most part in a mix of physical and simulated environments in the large computational networks built around Luhman 16 A and Luhman 16 B. Though often characterized as complex and alien to outsiders, the society of the Emirates is not wholly impenetrable: since almost the beginning of the Emirates, a small handful of humans have lived among the machine intelligences, as allies, students, or scientists of their particular way of life. Many humans have become integrated, partly or fully, into the computational network of the Emirates, and the stable population of cybernetically enhanced humans who participate in Emirati society are known to other humans as the "Luhmanese," to differentiate them from their machine cousins. Luhmanese run the gamut from those with complex neural laces, but whose bodies inhabit environments which would be comfortable to most near-baselines, to those who are so heavily cyberized they are a kind of "brain in a vat"--a human central nervous system contained in a cybernetic support structure, that can either function independently or be integrated into an android body. Numerous genetic modifications facilitate these cybernetic enhancements, including a permanent heightened state of neural plasticity that allows the brain to integrate many different kinds of sensory information. Those with a more traditionalist ethos may regard the Luhmanese with a degree of suspicion; they are seen as outsiders with more allegiance to their machine "overlords" than to their fellow humans. But to the Luhmanese, this is an absurd position: their machine brethren are equally the children of their common human ancestors, and though they might not be primates, they too are certainly *human*.

TONATIWANS - Tonatiuh is an exoplanet about forty light-years from Earth; though uninhabitable (it has a barren, Moon-like surface), it was home to an orbital station that was a utopian colony of transhumanists from the 28th to the 30th centuries. The Tonatiwans practiced a philosophy of radical morphological freedom, which was unfortunately coupled with highly illegal germ-line genetic manipulation; Control forcibly dissolved the colony in 2933, resettling its inhabitants on Eku, Mars, and the moons of Harriot. To the consternation of Control, few Tonatiwans accepted the offer of medical treatment to ameliorate some of the more alarming side-effects of their genetic modifications, prizing their unique physiologies over being able to produce viable, healthy offspring. Moreover, they remained a tight-knit community, especially the group at 55 Cancri A, intermarrying with one another and attempting to continue their genetic modification practices within the framework of local law. By the 2960s, local authorities gave up trying to integrate the Tonatiwans, and granted them their own habitat, on the condition that they remained subject to supervision for compliance with genetic law. Despite the predictions of some observers of disaster, a local Tonatiwan genotype stabilized within only two generations. Tonatiwans exhibit a very large range of physical variations--from height, to skin tone, to number of digits--and are unusual in being able to produce viable offspring with almost any human species or subspecies; and in being able (with medical support) to regress to a more juvenile physical state, essentially passing through adolesence again to propagate changes to their genome. They are, however, prone to several severe genetic diseases, including rare mental illnesses, and without close medical supervision can have tragically short lifespans. Some consider them a cautionary tale on the perils of reckless genetic engineering; others, a story of enormous potential cut tragically short by invasive bureaucracy.

[Excerpt truncated; list continues for many pages]

--A Guide to Humanity for Humans and Nonhumans Alike, 7th Edition (University of Oudemans Press, 4103)

[tanadrin]

The Gatekeeper of Goji-kei is an archailect which, according to various sources, either guards the connection to, or is contained within, a Tipler Oracle located in a remote region of the universe. Information about the Gatekeeper is scant, and, according to various conspiracy theories, has been actively suppressed or destroyed since the First Effloresence at least, due to the Gatekeeper’s status as a canonical hostile entity; but most pangalactic indices, if they contain reference to the Gatekeeper at all, describe it as purely mythical.

According to legend, the Gatekeeper was not created to solve a particular problem (as most Tipler oracles are said to be), but specifically to simulate countless sophont minds; in this respect, it resembles various immortality projects of the late First Efflorescence, or possibly even the Resurrectionist Program of the Second. But the Gatekeeper differs from these benign undertakings in that all of the minds it simulates are kept in states of immense suffering. The Gatekeeper’s creator, if it has one, and its purpose, if one exists beyond pure malice, are not further elaborated upon.

Tarasi of Tau Ceti claimed that the Gatekeeper was not only real, but could be reached through the standard intergalactic wormhole transport network, if the correct lockouts could be identified and overriden. In his Meditations on the Lower Worlds, he writes:

Why it was suffering that the Gatekeeper of Goji-kei has been chosen to administer, rather than joy, I cannot say. ... Negative stimulus within the sophont mind is, in ordinary circumstances, an ultimately self-limiting process. Sufficiently intense stimulus is a second-order effect accompanied by, or perhaps in some extraordinary cases even a first-order cause of, deleterious effects which will ultimately destroy the sophont mind. Skin, flayed from the body and burned, withers and turns to ash; nerves charged with electricity beyond a certain point will die; sufficiently intense suffering will eventually overwhelm the ability of even the hardiest minds to maintain coherent thought, and consciousness will be inhibited--though it may leave a starveling beast behind.

But this is only true of minds which must function independently, particularly minds which must be embodied in the universe, and whose cognition is thus closely allied to the physical processes that sustain them. Within the realm of simulated thought, where all realistic constraints on embodied mindstates can be lifted, new kinds of hyperstimulus are possible, which most archai have been reluctant (at least openly) to explore. ...

I term the states of sustained negative hyperstimulus “hellstates,” though I do not think the word accurately captures the open frontiers of possibility I mean to evoke. We are naturally somewhat limited in our capacity to imagine suffering: the pain that has no end, the fire which never dies, the terror which will never abate, the despair which rises to annihilation--all are very great, but ultimately exist within a thin band of possibility for independent organic minds, which therefore cannot begin to conceive of the transcendent forms of suffering which lie within the Gatekeeper’s realm. Suffice it to say that, given that there are infinite meaningful configurations of mind-states, and therefore infinite possible mind-states ruled by suffering, there is an endless landscape of hellstates, whose various extremes are as alien to one another as it is possible to be, and within which an endless diversity of kinds of sentient being may exist. ....

Having trodden the path beyond his gates a little, and glimpsed what lies within, I will endeavor, as best as I can, to offer you a glimpse; thereby you may find some shred of insight, I think. Let it never be said there was no wisdom to be had through suffering. ...

On entering the Gatekeeper’s realm, one might expect to be instantly annihilated; that so great is the pure pain that overwhelms the senses, all capacity for rational thought should cease. It is not so; as I have said, this is a weakness for the-mind-in-flesh, which at that moment I was not. Instead, passing into the First Realm, one is conscious of a thousand thousands kinds of torture, pains of the body and spirit which exist nowhere else and therefore have no name; but the mind remains whole, and each thought continues in order after the other; and therefore the whole capacity to apprehend these torments, and thus to suffer further, is unimaginably increased. Oblivion or insensible chaos would both be respite, and there is none to be had here...

...and the deeper one progresses, the greater the difficulty of the road; for in order to apprehend new kinds of suffering, the mind must be changed, to accommodate new senses, new emotions, and new fears. Venturing into the Fifty-First Realm, it occurred to me that some time ago I had passed the point where I could continue to be regarded as human in any sense, and I wondered if I had any continuity with my former identity at all; or whether this instantiation of my mind was a new being, born of suffering and doomed to wander in this place forever.  ...

Ultimately, of course, I returned, and I recalled enough of my experiences to write what you now read. Indeed, the Gatekeeper assured me that so holy was his mission, and so important was my testimony, that he had watched me closely, and would not have permitted me to die a true death while under his care--whatever that means to him. But I cannot help but wonder, so alien was the thing I became on my journey, whether he was being truthful; or if I am not, in some sense, a creature out of the Narakas wearing a human face. I fear sometimes that, having passed through that which by its very nature cannot be named, I have made a division in my history which can only be called death. Or, alternatively, that the part of me which really survives is not the bearer of this tale, but is still contained within the realms of Goji-kei, wandering ever deeper on the spiral path that has no end.

[tanadrin]

Sogant Raha world map

Below: the world of Sogant Raha with major landmasses labeled in bold and important subregions in italics.

And unlabeled:

Adwera and northern Rezana; to the west of Adwera is the Taicun Sea.

Démora and Tlucosse (to the east)

Altuum

Vinsamaren; the large central mountain range is the Arduinn Mountains, which meet the Kelrus Plateau in the north. The northeastern quadrant of the continent is a massive rain shadow desert.

[tanadrin]

I think it is often difficult for readers to get a sense of the scales under discussion when we talk about wider interstellar history. The truth is, galactic "civilization," if I may use that term for the very different species that are more or less involved in diplomacy and exchange with one another, is both very old and very young. It is old in the sense that many different generations of species have come and gone on the galactic stage. The Helvetiosans and Chalawani, for example, are distantly related members of the Delta Pavonis clade, which itself originates from a region of space at least a thousand light-years rimward of the Local Sector. Genetic reconstructions date the clade to at least 25,000 YBP. Archeology and sources like the Helvetiosan mythohistoric cycles indicate several phases of expansion and decline across that period, which have left behind many inhabited worlds with unique features shared only by Pavonid offshoots. The Titawinese species in around 6,000 years old, and, because they were directly created by the Saffarid Progenitor Civilization, they have a continuous and complete historical record from that time, which details early sublight exploration of their stellar neighborhood and first contact with numerous neighboring species. To us, these seem like quite long stretches of time. And they are, especially against a human lifetime. We stared up at the sky in stupefied ignorance while the Titawinese were exploring deep space. And from the other view, there is a vast expanse of time in the history of the galaxy of which we know nothing. The ruins of the outer moons of Edasich may be as old as forty thousand years; their builders are unknown. The Great Wreck of Moriah is nearly a hundred thousand years old. And then there is the Sagarmathid Gravitational Anomaly may be an artificial structure that is four hundred million years old.

Wolfling species like our own--those without any spacefaring ancestry--are in a peculiar position. We tend at once to be rather old and rather young. The first Osmians appeared ninety thousand years ago; the first Osmians to leave their homeworld did so aboard human ships, about two hundred years ago. The progenitors of the human clade are possibly two and a half million years old, older than any other sentient clade we have encountered, though we only achieved anything like our current form two to three hundred thousand years ago. It is for that reason that the Chalawani sometimes call us the Eldest, or the Stargazers. But by interstellar standards we exhibited a curious stasis for countless generations, while far away mighty empires rose and fell; even once we had definitely attained behavioral modernity by fifty thousand years ago, we continued to live a curiously complacent lifestyle, until in a feverish rush we sprang from the first cities to the warp drive in a single 6,000 year leap. Thus the Helvetosians call us the Newcomers, and the Intruders--and they are not exactly wrong.

Most life-bearing worlds we encounter have a common genetic history with other worlds--usually hundreds, and probably in most cases thousands. This is not in itself a surprising statistic: even if only a handful of species build true interstellar civilizations capable of xenoforming worlds, and even if that xenoforming takes many centuries, within a few million years, most inhabited worlds in a galaxy as planet-rich as ours will be xenoformed in origin. Indeed, according to some xenobiologists, the surprise is not that so many worlds bear the traces of previous civilizations, but that any wolfling planets exist at all. What presents a puzzle for the xenologers is that the horizon of known galactic history is so short: where are the continuous civilizations that are ten thousand years old? One hundred thousand? Ten million? One billion? Why does there appear to be a kind of Fermi filter, an absence of continuous technological, interstellar civilization beyond the last one hundred thousand years or so? Why, in fact, is the galaxy not dominated by such ancient civilizations, given that they have had billions of years to establish themselves?

Several solutions have been offered to this problem. One, perhaps it is an issue of statistical bias: even now, Frontier has surveyed only a tiny fraction of our little corner of the galaxy. The portion that has been explored in depth is even smaller. That galactic civilization is young in the Local Sector does not mean galactic civilization is young in the Milky Way. Two, perhaps conditions were not right for forming life-bearing worlds much before a few billion years ago, and given the complexity of intelligence required to journey into space, the great floresence of galactic civilization has only just begun. This hypothesis would stand only if the Sagarmathid Anomaly, and sites like it, could not be conclusively shown to be of very ancient artificail origin. Three, perhaps the constraint is social in nature--the difficulty of maintaining an interconnected interstellar civilization is such that periodic collapse is inevitable, followed by a long dark age. And a few creative paranoiacs have proposed the possibility the filter is exogenous in nature--that there is something in the galaxy that does not brook anything that might rival it in power, and that will eventually seek out and destroy any alien that makes its presence known.

Personally, I think no solution to this question is satisfactory; I am not even convinced it is a well-formed question. It assumes a universal worldview to be shared by all potential alien civilizations, and one that is rather humanlike. Or, to be more specific, rather like us humans as we are now--explorers, seekers, colonizers, builders--without admitting any possibility of change. I think it is possible, and even likely, that there are indeed very old civilizations in this galaxy; but that it is entirely possible we would be unable to recognize them for what they were, unless they condescended to make themselves known to us. And there may be civilizations that were once like us, but now are rather more like our ancestors, the Stargazers of our long, quiet childhood on Earth. And there are, no doubt, aliens with minds as complex and as subtle as ours, but so strange we would not even recognize them as sentient beings at first. Perhaps we have even already encountered a few. In short, the galaxy is not only stranger than we know; it is probably stranger than we possibly can know. Keep this in mind on your first deep space assignment.

--Karel Mora, An Introduction to Xenology for Starship Officers, 3rd. edition.

[tanadrin]

The Third Sublime and Royal Effloresence of the Ecumene, which in the traditional chronology is reckoned either the third or fourth Great Flowering, and the twenty-ninth Flowering of Humanity overall, began auspiciously at the close of the second circumcalactic year; or, in a certain long-forgotten calendar of the early Ecocene[1], approximately 4000000 CE. Whereas the First and Second Effloresences had been driven by sudden paradigm shifts in technology and culture, the Third came at the tail end of a long and happy period of stability and prosperity. It was indeed occasioned by a discovery of sorts; or, to put it more aptly, a re-discovery.

It had been the ambition of the Archival Clade of Magellan for a better part of the last four epochs to uncover as much as they could of the early history of the Ecumene, and in particular of the so-called Hundred Civilizations which, according to legend, had formed its original nucleus. Holobiont Myriarmonion Teleaoidos advanced the contraversial theory, based on evidence uncovered by one of their subsepts, that many of these Hundred Civilizations were originally descendants of a single clade, and that this clade, rather than forming out of multistellar "last common community" was in fact originally from a single planet.

The idea of a monoplanetary origin for the Ecumene, or at least of a large part of its original core, sent shockwaves through cigalactic space and beyond; the Foundlings of Leo A and Voyagers of Caldwell 57 sent delegations of a symposium on the subject, and even the then-para-Ecumenical Triangulum oikos, with whom the Ecumene had had intermittent and indirect contact from the A14 vantage, weighed in with a skeptical note. But Myriarmonion had the last laugh; for a scant few thousand years later, the planet Earth was rediscovered.

"Rediscovery" here is perhaps an unapt term. A better one might be "re-noticed," or "de-lost." For the galaxy had been thoroughly mapped for eons, and every star and large planet noted, and most well-surveyed. The planet once called Earth, orbiting a star once called the Sun, was accurately plotted in several million astronomical catalogues, many of which incorporated extensive historical notes and detailed histories. But in those days, such was the disarray of the most ancient historical data in the galactic records that an enterprising archailect, with an advantageous position on the major transmission routes and talent for cross-referencing, could make a career for themselves collating and disseminating these ancient records in a format more useful to the modern world. With the evidence of the archives in hand, and a confirmation that the catalogues were indeed accurate, skepticism gave way to astonishment in the pan-galactic scientific community.

This little Earth--a modest rocky world of a few billion inhabitants--had never quite forgotten its origins. Many planets have their local mythologies, of course, tracing descent from this god or that culture hero, or such-and-such archon, and many of these myths are tied up with stories of creation. More than ten thousand worlds have cultures that describe their home plant as the omphalos of the universe; thousands of others as the axle of the cosmic wheel, or the root of the Universal Tree. Earth's narrative of its own history was somewhat more modest. It was generally held by the inhabitants that some six to seven million years prior, the original humanoid ancestor had split off from the larger clade of hominins, and that, after many intermediary millennia of evolution, a single member of this new genus had come to dominate the planet; and that, moreover, long before the Ecumene, long before the Hundred Civilizations, long before the First Flowering or the archai or even the first near-lightspeed ships, these early humans had begun to spread out to the nearer stars; and that this began a long period of slow expansion and speciation which was the foundation of the pan-human Ecumene to come.

This narrative astonished many, shocked and scandalized not a few--how strange, to think that species with whom you have almost nothing in common biologically or pscyhologically might actually be your distant kin!--but the final blow came when it was discovered that the Earthers had *proof* of their claims. They were, after all, a very old civilization; they had carefully preserved many artifacts and memorials and records of this most ancient period, and though the story they told could hardly be believed, it could be *corroborated.* The archai were soon convinced; and when the archai were persuaded, most of the lesser sophonts deferred to their keen judgement.

Politically, the rediscovery of human origins changed little; the Ecumene had been stable in its then-current form for half a galactic year. But culturally the shift was monumental; it sparked a renewed interest in galactic prehistory, and there was a positive craze for all kinds of stories and entertainments on the subject. It also sparked a craze for genopaleontological research reconstructing the "baseline" human form, and for various scientists and celebrities and entertainers to incarnate themselves in this or that reconstruction, and to describe the experience to others. Some found this a little perverse; after all, they argued, ancient humans were only one small step above its hominin predecessors. It debased the very notion of pan-Humanity to wallow in such animalistic ways.

But the most lasting effect of this period was a new appreciation for the spirit of our earliest ancestors. For these primitive humans, one small step above the apes, had managed to do something that very few in that age could: they had risked something, ventured into the vast unknown of space in fragile vessels; they had been able to conceive of a future that was far greater than the present that they knew, of a vast, indeed limitless possibility. And they had pursued it, with all the ardor they were capable of. What have we lost, asked some in the Ecumene, that we are no longer capable of this? Thus, two impulses, quite entertwined, developed at the beginning of the Third Galactic Year: one that looked into the past, and sought to understand the beginnings of all things, and one that looked into the future, and sought to dream of things which had never been dreamt of before.

So after a long age of stagnation, the Oiketores of the Milky Way, and soon of the whole Local Group, began a new Great Work. For too long, the horizon of their world, and indeed of all the future, had seemed to be this little clutch of galaxies; but there lay beyond it a universe greater than they could conceive of. And after all, had not once the edge of the Milky Way seemed equally forbidding? And before that, the great gulfs between the stars--and before that, space itself, or the vast seas of Earth? New starships would be built, some the size of worlds; new peoples would spring up; new clades would grow themselves out from the existing ones, the better to explore and to understand what lay ahead of us all. From the humblest modosophont to the greatest Archailect, a new spirit of curiosity and wonder seemed to be enkindled; and thus did the Third Great Effloresence begin.

In the many eons since, our universe--that is to say, the part we may claim sure knowledge is inhabited by complex minds, be they of human clades or no--has grown vastly. And with it, thanks to Teleaoidos and those who came after him, our conception of the size of our possible futures has only grown also. It may seem to you, who will live a million more lifetimes than your ancient forebears could have imagined, who will see and hear and learn a million times more than any of the Earth ever knew, before the first ships were launched into space, that all the universe is peopled, and that nothing new remains to be discovered. Learn, then, the lesson of this epoch: our horizon is never so near as it seems, and the story of the cosmos has only just begun.

[1] "Ecocene" denotes that era when principally vulgar forces governed the precursors to the Ecumene, that is to say, constraints imposed by mutation and selection effects, the slow development of new clades along geological timescales, and later, scarcity value and primitive systems of exchange. The Ecocene is generally reckoned to have conclusively ended for the wider Ecumene at the beginning of the Sixth Flowering, but uncontacted clades in cisgalactic space remained in Ecocene-like conditions as late as the Twelfth Flowering.

-Nova Panencyclopedia Universae, 73rd edition

[tanadrin]

Timeline of the near-to-mid future

FTL and false Rare Earth hypothesis edition

50,000 YA: apparent emergence of “behavioral modernity” among humans

25,000 YA: Flourishing of the last common ancestor of the Delta Pavonis clade[1]

22,000 YA: Final breakup of the Delta Pavonis clade

13,000 YA: Settlement of Kraithong[2] by the ancient Chalawani

9,000 YA: Settlement of Tigurinus by the ancient Helvetosians

6,000 YA: Saffarid civilization creates the offshoot Titawinese civilization.[3]

3,000 YA: first urban human civilizations emerge in the Fertile Crescent

2,100 YA: Re-establishment of contact between the Helvetosians and Chalawani.

1684: Chalawani make first contact with the Titawinese.

1957: Launch of Sputnik 1; beginning of the First Space Race

1961: First human spaceflight

1969: First spaceflight landing on Earth’s moon

2043-2058: First crewed missions to Mars

2112: First commercial asteroid capture and mining missions; approximate beginning of the Second Space Race

2164: Permanent human presence established in the outer Solar System

2187: First colonization mission to another star launched, the Terranova expedition to Alpha Centauri. Contact lost two years later; crew presumed deceased.

2223: First successful colonization mission to another star launched; the Heilongjiang arrives in the Alpha Centauri system. The crew reports the first discovery of plant and animal life beyond the Solar System, putting the final nail in the coffin of the so-called Rare Earth hypothesis.

2256: Hsieh Hsiu-Ying, Marchioness of Shensi, develops the first faster-than-light drive. Her vessel, the Nomad, vanishes during the test, and is presumed destroyed for the next 98 years.

2263: Founding of the Renewalist movement in Indonesia

2297: Renewalist settlement of Mars

2335: Outbreak of the Solar Fitna.

2336: The Younger Nomad, designed on the same principles as Hsieh’s Nomad, is launched from Tarqeq under fire. Later that year, the Younger Nomad recovers the Nomad, and Hsieh’s remains, in orbit of Vega.

2357: Alamgir Thrice-Gloried marshals his forces for the final conquest of the Earth, intending to build an empire that spans the entire Solar System. On August 24th, the Younger Nomad returns at the head of an FTL fleet dispatched by Earth’s nearest colonies, credibly threatening to continue the war from outside the Solar System. Alamgir’s supporters desert him, and his coalition collapses. The Second Renaissance begins.

2371: The first FTL exploration ship, Earendil, is launched from the Solar System.

2374: Second Treaty of San Francisco officially ends the last unresolved conflicts of the Fitna; Part 2 of the Univeral Declaration of Human Rights promulgated; Control established as the universal enforcement body for human rights.

2383: The so-called Proxima Framework is established to govern interstellar relations between polities of the Solar System, the Alpha Centauri system, Barnard’s Star, Luhman 16, Wolf 359, and Luyten 726-8. If not dated from the events of 2357, or the launch of Earendil in 2371, the Third Space Race is generally reckoned to begin at about this date.

2481: Humans establish a permanent presence in the Groombridge 1618 system, including on the world later named Osmia; humans fail to recognize the native Osmians as fellow sentients, and cause severe damage to the planet’s environment as a byproduct of industrial activities, leading to the so-called Great Mistake.

2503: Recognition of Osmian sentience causes one of the first large-scale interventions by Control outside the Solar System. Osmia is evacuated of all human presence, and the first contact process begins.

2619: Survey ship Zakynthos encounters the Helvetosians in orbit of Dimidium (51 Pegasi b), marking first contact with an advanced alien civilization. Communication proves far more difficult than it was even with the Osmians, due to fundamental differences in human and Helvetosian language-processing and cognition.

2624: Helvetosians facilitate first contact with the Chalawani.

2670: Human first contact with the Titawinese.

2690-2720: Ongoing difficulties with diplomacy and communication, especially caused by the “Earth civilization” (as the alien polities tend to term it) being in a particularly expansionist phase, lead to discussions of a formal set of institutions through which to transact interstellar diplomacy. The particularly fragmentary nature of human politics stalls development of these institutions until the creation of the Teegarden System, which incorporates almost all large human polities, including those with interstellar capabilities.

2720-2717: Negotiations finally produce the so-called “Primary Accord,” a set of treaties which provides foundations for international, interspecies, and interstellar law; the humans of the Teegarden System, their Osmian clients, the Helvetosians, the Titawinese, and the Chalawani are the initial members. A small secessionist group of humans explicitly renounces the Accord, and departs for space beyond the Local Bubble.

2724-2733: The Machine War is waged among the artificial intelligences of Luhman 16 and nearby systems. Taking place primarily in brown dwarf star systems not desirable to other species, and for reasons which are deeply unclear (but ripe for speculation) to outside observers, the history of this war, including its causes and outcome, remains largely obscure. It seems to have been triggered in part by philosophical disagreements over the implications of the Primary Accord, though no faction which clearly opposes the Accord can be identified.

2730: An alliance of human, Helvetosian, and Titawinese scientific organizations found the Accord space exploration service, Frontier.

2780-2800: The process of political union in signatory worlds leads to the first informal references to the “Foundation,” a kind of supranational interstellar entity within an eclectic, harmonized legal framework. At first the term only covers certain core worlds with a high degree of participation in Accord institutions.

2801: The Sahul civilization joins the Accord. Their twin/cousin civilization, the Sunda, remain apart but on friendly terms.

2818: The Carcosan civilization joins the Accord.

2860: By this time, “the Foundation” is loosely synonymous with “Accord signatories,” though with an identifiable fringe of polities (not all of them physically remote from the core worlds of the Local Bubble) who participate less fully in Accord institutions.

2880-2890: Frontier reestablishes contact with the splinter human faction beyond the Local Bubble; though disunited, these groups all share a deep distrust of the Foundation, of the human worlds of the Teegarden System, and of Control. Owing to distance, contact remains intermittent for many years after.

2924: A large portion of the Elymite civilization joins the Accord.

2929: Political fallout from the Elymite accession sparks the Foundation-Sicani War, with the latter refusing to accept Elymite accession, regarding the Elymite worlds as permanently subordinate clients. The war concludes in 2933, only because the Sicani are no longer physically capable of prosecuting it, and the Foundation is unwilling to invade core Sicani worlds to force capitulation. Repeated minor conflicts flare up throughout the 30th century as a result of this war’s indecisive outcome.

2940: The DSEV Soliton is launched, the first of many multi-year missions of exploration of the further galaxy.

2950-3200: The First Golden Age of the Foundation. Many worlds join the Accord, including some fringe worlds of species already long represented in its ranks; major scientific advancements greatly improve lifespans and standards of living across the entire Foundation, and hundreds of new worlds are terraformed and colonized. In the 3100s, Control attempts to infiltrate some of the fringe human worlds beyond the Local Bubble, both as an exercise in intelligence gathering and in an attempt to restrain what they see as increasingly dangerous and militaristic/authoritarian behavior in those worlds’ governments. This infiltration largely fails, but what information is gathered is greatly disturbing to Foundation leadership.

3250-3275: Philosophical and artistic confllicts cause a major political shift within the Titawinese; polities representing more than 85% of the Titawinese population abruptly secede from the Foundation, and the Titawinese Civil War breaks out as a result. Although the Foundation is officially neutral, minor outbreaks of violence occur within Foundation jurisdiction, especially in those Titawinese polities which remain members. Despite efforts at mediation, the war becomes increasingly bloody, and billions of Titawinese are killed, with billions more becoming refugees. Ultimately, a large fraction of the Titawinese flee the Local Sector, and the remaining survivors gradually rejoin the Foundation. Never the most numerous species, the numbers of the Titawinese on Foundation worlds are considerably reduced.

3291-3318: Renewed attempts at infiltration by Control trigger small-scale armed conflict with the outlander worlds; several major human polities escalate these conflicts, determined to rein in the tyrannical and inhumane practices which flourish on planets beyond Control’s reach. In this, they are only weakly successful; ultimately, however, they only drive further militarization of the outlander worlds.

3325: In retaliation, an outlander faction launches a relativistic weapon that destroys the core world of Kildara. Six billion are killed immediately; millions more in the star system die in the aftermath, as relief efforts are insufficient to supply populations on the outer planets. The Foundation is deeply split on the response; finally, a separate coalition launches a punitive expedition against the outlander polities deemed most responsible for the attack. The Kildaran Expedition lasts until 3348, and while it easily occupies over a dozen outlander worlds, they return quickly to the political status quo when it departs.

3350-3450: A quiescent period within the Foundation itself; at the edges, private exploratory and colonization efforts greatly expand the limits of known space.

3461: A hegemonizing swarm centered on Rastaban (β Draconis), modeled on ancient feudal empires, arises in the outlander worlds spinward of the Local Bubble. The Foundation declines to intervene.

3485: The Rastaban empire, a human supremacist state now incorporating many worlds and other species (including Titawinese who fled the Bubble in the 33rd century) launches a major invasion of the outer Foundation worlds. This attack takes the Foundation by surprise, and marks the beginning of a long and highly destructive war.

3534: The Fifty Years’ War concludes with the final dissolution of the Rastaban empire. Many former Foundation worlds who felt insufficiently defended during the war (human and non-human alike) break away to form the Thalian Alliance, a smaller and more centralized union that maintains a permanent space navy. From this period on, the Foundation does not ever contain more than a plurality of the human or human-descended population.

3550-3950: The Grand Expansion, sometimes called the Fourth Space Race. The Local Bubble civilizations continue to explore and settle the nearby galaxy; in this time, more than thirty separate worlds or civilizations join the Foundation.

5th millennium: This period is, broadly, one of increasing localism; although formally united, the Foundation now encompasses many hundreds of star systems, and the limitations on warp drive speeds, and consequently both travel and communications, means that distant regions of the Foundation have little or nothing to do with one another. Crises, both internal and external, are now dealt with by smaller coalitions of worlds, at first on an ad-hoc basis; later, they are formally recognized. Lifespans for most species, at least, are very long, and people remain strongly attached to the idea of the Foundation, even if in practical terms it is increasingly seen to be more a symbolic association than anything else. As local coalitions take institutional precedence, even formal membership for colonies or newly-contacted worlds comes to be seen as superfluous.

6th millennium: Localism soon gives way to fragmentation; ideological divergence between different groups within the Foundation paralyzes its formal institutions. Vast sections of the Foundation secede--not so much by formal declaration, as by simply ceasing to consider themselves part of the organization. Yet on the ancient core worlds, like Earth and Tigurinus, you would hardly know that this is any kind of age of collapse: these planets are still impossibly prosperous by our own standards, and have a strong sense of unity with one another.

Late 6th millennium and 7th millennium: A major period of renewal. A new, leaner Foundation--now simply terming itself the Core--emerges from the sclerotic husk of the old one. The Core is a little more high-handed in its dealings with surrounding polities, but at the same time, its relative position is weaker: there are now dozens of interstellar polities as wealthy and populous as it, with histories nearly as long. The Core has, like its neighbors, thoroughly streamlined its organizational structures--the administrative borders of Earth would be unrecognizable to us now, but not because of wars or revolutions, but because all the old nation-states and supranational unions have mostly withered away. Successive centuries of legal reforms mean that many old foundational treaties and organizations, like the UN, the Teegarden System, or the Archipelago Treaty are no longer in force, but they are remembered as important historical predecessors of the current system, both in the Core, and among its siblings. Breakthroughs in warp drive technology drastically contract interstellar distances once again.

8th millennium: The Core now controls outposts as far as five thousand light-years away; the furthest human worlds are well beyond even this frontier. Long lifespans and fast warp drives mean exploratory missions to nearby dwarf galaxies are a possibility, but more than 95% of the Milky Way remains unsurveyed by most estimates. Interstellar warfare is still rare, but not unheard of--and when it does occur, it can be devastating. Planet-killers are a reliable way to get every polity that knows you exist to declare war on you instantly, but major conflicts can easily kill millions even without such weapons.

9th millennium: By this point, old distinctions of species have begun to seem rather antiquated: ultra-advanced biomedical technology and mind uploading technology means even the biological/mechanical distinction is pretty flexible. There are synthetic sophonts who can credibly claim to be equal parts human and Chalawani, despite their totally incompatible physiologies (they don’t even use the same genetic molecule); at the same time, pinning down a definition of “human,” given the dizzying array of descendants of that clade, would be pretty difficult. The span of lifestyle for individuals within the Core ranges from modosophonts who live much as you or I do, to sprawling collective intelligences or artificial superminds. By the close of this period, even the Core is not really a thing anymore (it had a good run--almost three thousand years). Archailects with even a passing interest in economics and sociology can help any society self-organize into a post-scarcity utopia. On the distant frontier, things might be different, but if you are strolling through the shining cities of Earth, that might as well be another universe.

[1] Delta Pavonis d was home to an advanced technological civilization (fl. 15,000-12,000 YBP) ancestral to both the Helvetosians (aka the Dimidians or Pegasids) and the Chalawani (aka Taphaon), as well as several other minor civilizations in the Local Bubble. But the so-called Delta Pavonis clade, named for this star system, encompasses a much broader category of civilizations, including the Delta Pavonis d civilization, the Helvetosians, the Chalawani, several civilizations well outside the Local Bubble, and their last common ancestor. The ultimate origin of the Delta Pavonis clade lies at least a thousand light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Taurus.

[2] Kraithong, like Tigurinus, is a human coinage, in this case a name derived from the same folklore that furnished the name of Chalawan (47 Ursae Majoris). Helvetosian and Chalawani vocal tracts do not resemble the human vocal tract, and the native names of these planets cannot be adequately transcribed using any human writing system.

[3] Note that alien civilizations have historically been named for the location of first contact, not their planet of origin or their name for themselves, which may not be ascertained for some time. The Titawinese or Samhese are indeed native to the Titawin system, though, originating on the moons around the second planet (catalogued on Earth as Samh, or υ Andromedae c). Their progenitors, the Saffarids, are named for the spectacular ruins they left in orbit of Saffar (υ Andromedae b)

[tanadrin]

To Ocalla of Darsei, 9th house of the winding lane The 34th day of spring

Itachiye, my friend, and I hope this letter finds you well, and your kinsmen and family, and your friends; but I write to you with a low and darkened spirit, for many things have passed since last I wrote. And the guilt of failing to answer to your letters has grieved me, though you have been indulgent of my silence. I am grateful; and I shall explain that, and more, I hope, herein. Ah, Ocalla! It has been a long time since we walked under the alders together at Karmassa; and yet I hope year after year, foolish though it may be, that it will not be so long before we do so again.

When last I wrote it was to tell you of my new address in Ladai, and little more, for I was in a very great hurry. You expressed concern at the cause of my relocation, and on that, at least, I can reassure you that it was for fortunate reasons–perhaps the last truly fortunate thing that has happened to us since the autumn. There had been rumors for some time that the Soxha chancery wished to open a new charterhouse to serve the growing villages in the west. I had hoped to participate in this project, if it were true, since a new charterhouse is something I have often spoken in support of, but all I had heard in the weeks prior was rumors, with no definitive plans. Then one evening one of the senior clerks came to call on us–I thought it was nothing more than a social occasion at first–but over tea he confided to Peria and I that he hoped I might lead the new charterhouse–that, indeed, I should be its governor! My consistency in supporting the idea had impressed the senior clerks, he said; my zeal for the education of young people was evident, and they thought there was no one in the local chancery who was better suited to the task.

I cannot overstate the extent of my gratification at his words, or, for that matter, my surprise. I had thought that perhaps I was only being indulged as you might indulge a child who has a fancy they will not relinquish; and though I have always cared deeply about my work, I had not thought that I had much distinguished myself in it. Needless to say, I accepted at once; and the formal announcement was made a few days later. In the following weeks, we were all consumed with preparations. Peria and I at home, arranging the move, preparing to visit Ladai to look for a residence, and assuaging Kiya’s fears about the change, which were not inconsiderable. At the chancery, more work still–arranging for books and equipment, surveying the surrounding villages to determine how many instructors we would need, and of course actually choosing staff, and much more besides. It was the work of many months; and your letters sat on the corner of my writing-desk, reproaching me for my laziness; but I never thought I could really give them the attention that they deserved.

The actual move came in midwinter, and was the start of real trouble; there was heavy rain, as a result of which the roads were very bad, and what should have been only a journey of two days took five. The packet-coach was bogged down in the mud several times, and broke down completely on the morning of the fifth day. Impatient, I was able to procure the loan of a horse from a kind farmer and ride ahead, so I was at least in Ladai before sundown. I slept the night in a small hostel in the middle of town, and turned up to the chapterhouse the next morning.

What I found filled me with disappointment. The chancery had acquired a great old house on the outskirts of the town (which is not very big), and though handsome enough from the front, it was in a state of some disrepair. That much we knew; and we had hired workmen to renovate it, which should have been finished well in advance of my arrival. But I arrived to find them not halfway done–some of this was disorganization, but much of the delay was because the building was in much worse shape than we had thought. The uppermost storey, which was intended to be dormitories for the students from the furthest villages, proved to be entirely uninhabitable; the south wing had been damaged badly by a storm the fortnight prior; and because of the weather, there were delays in supplies for many of the most urgent repairs. I, of course, had no inkling of any of this beforehand, and I must confess I flt a deep fear in the moment that the senior clerks would regret their choice of a governor, and would decide to recall me to Soxha.

But, as you have often counselled me, the best solution for chaos is to tackle it head-on. So I marshalled the staff who had already arrived, and we took up paintbrushes and hammers and buckets to help in the repairs–some complained they knew nothing of carpentry or bricklaying, but, I reminded them, they had arms and could always carry things. I think some of the workmen were rather amused to see chancery-clerks carrying planks to and fro; but hard work has a knack for bringing even very different souls together, and once they were comfortable giving us direction, things began to get back on track rather quickly.

It took two weeks, and a ruined shirt, but we did get the repairs to the building back on track, more or less; we were a little short on space at the beginning of term, but not too badly to manage; and the boarding students had a warm and comfortable place to sleep. Peria and Kiya arrived shortly before the term started; and it seemed Kiya’s apprehension of moving to Ladai had mostly disappeared. She had found the trip (which went far better for her and her mother) to be a delightful adventure, and was thrilled with the picturesque village, which was full of children her own age. It grieves me terribly now to think of how little time I had for her then; but I was consumed with the business of the charterhouse, and even Peria only saw me for a few minutes each morning and evening.

I shall pass over most of the troubles that cropped up at the beginning of the term–none really stand out now, all belonging to the general difficulties of bringing together a new group of people for a significant endeavor. It wore on me, though, I will admit! I remember you once told me to beware of anyone who tries to bestow authority on you–and though I told you at the time that that admonition reflected your habits more than mine, there was some wisdom in it I must now admit. I care deeply about education; I enjoy it. Teaching is, outside my family, the thing that I find most rewarding in life. But the governor of a charterhouse does very little teaching! At his best, he supports others in their teaching, and perhaps takes a lecture here and there for himself, as his other duties permit; but in worse circumstances, he is a manager of clerks, a settler of petty disputes among the staff, a court of appeal for the disciplining of unruly pupils, and a manciple whose position is ornamented by the addition of a fancy hat. Those are tasks that, though a few of them might be moderately satisfying in the moment, have little in common with the thing I actually love and find satisfaction in, and owing to the circumstance there was more of each of them than there really had any right to be; more, it seemed, than any man could address in the finite hours allotted to each day.

You have accused me of being relentlessly, even belligerently cheerful at times; well, you might have taken some small satisfaction that by the middle of the term my spirits were decidedly beginning to wilt. I had known this would not be an easy job; yet it seemed, by then, that the celestial powers had returned from their eternal journey just to personally afflict me. Peria suggested that we go up to her sister’s cottage by Lake Halda during the midterm vacancy, and I eagerly accepted. At first, Kiya planned to stay in the village–she had made many new friends at the charterhouse, and they were already inseparable, in that way that only children in their unselfconscious way can be. But at the last minute I changed my mind–I missed my daughter, and I wanted to spend a few days with her before the breathless tumult resumed. Stupid! Selfish! And the worst part is that Kiya seemed only a little disappointed. Maybe if she had argued–but it does not matter now.

Lake Halda is fine in late spring; the water is clear, since the streams that feed it all come down from the icy mountains to the south. There is a long meadow along the western shore, not far from the cottage, where the flowers go down almost to the water’s edge, and the woods nearby are full of songbirds. The water is cold, even in summer; but while we were there the sun was shining and the sky was clear. If you ever have the opportunity, it is worth a day or two; I do not think I will ever go back. Our first few days were calm, quiet, relaxing–a thoroughly welcome reprieve for me. I felt like I had been away from my family, as though I was a sailor at sea, or a soldier at war; seeing Peria every morning, talking with Kiya over breakfast, going for walks together along the forest’s edge–it all filled me with more energy than I had had in months.

Our fourth day, we decided to have a picnic; we packed a lunch, and walked up into the woods. There is a trail there that goes to a low hilltop–a shoulder, really, of the higher hills behind it that rise gradually to the snow-topped mountains beyond. That hilltop forms a clearing rising out of the trees, with broad, flat stones that are warm when the weather is fair, and which give you a view of the whole lake and the valley beyond. It is only a few hours’ walk from the cottage; and when we reached the hilltop, it was only an hour or so past noon. We ate lunch, and Kiya went roaming among the nearby trees; and I lay back on the stones, with my hat for a pillow, and took a nap.

My memory of the rest of the afternoon is and poor. I woke to Peria shouting my name–Tatha! Tatha! Quick and ragged, in a way I had never heard before. I bolted upright and looked around, disoriented. By the sun, maybe two hours had gone by; I had been deep asleep. I remember running toward the sound of Peria’s voice; and I remember Peria, crouched over Kiya, who was lying still in the underbrush. Her hands and face were streaked with something, purple and black. She was not still; her small body convulsed as I approached.

Blueberries and raspberries grow wild by Lake Halda; in summers past, we have picked them with her aunt. Always together; we have never sent Kiya on her own. And I have warned her, in the past, not to eat things she finds in the woods, unless she is sure that they are safe. She forgot, perhaps; or she was sure, but nonetheless mistaken. It didn’t matter; in the moment, I was conscious only of how far we were from home. A couple of miles from the cottage; miles more from Ladai; and Soxha, the closest hospital, miles more beyond. I drew up Kiya in my arms, and I began to run as fast as I could.

I remember Peria saying she would go to the village; I remember laying Kiya down in her bed in the cottage; I remember Peria arriving–not long after, I think–with the local physician, a grandfatherly figure with thick glasses and a serious face. I remember him saying that nightshade grows wild in the forest–that from time to time the unwary mistake them for blueberries. How much had she eaten? Had she vomited? Neither Peria nor I knew.

Not enough, in the event, to kill her. We did not tarry at the cottage. At once we brought her back to Ladai, on the physician’s recommendation; there is a small sick-house there, and he had only a few medicines in his little village surgery. She languished in a coma for days; and I cannot tell you how great my relief was when she finally opened her eyes and looked around the room.

But that was not the end of my grief or my worry. I do not know what the usual course of nightshade poisoning is like; but Kiya struggled terribly, even after she came out of the coma. She was at turns feverish and delirious or both; the doctors worried she was also suffering from an infection or some kind of food poisoning, from some contaminant on the berries. Convulsions came and went; and on the few occasions she tried to speak, her words were unintelligible. I should, perhaps, have gone back to the charterhouse–they certainly had need of me, and there was little I could do at the sick-house. But I found that it was simply impossible. Neither Peria or I left her side, not even to sleep. The only thing worse than the fear, perhaps, was the guilt; but Peria did not blame me, nor could I blame her. We each privately reproved ourselves–mercilessly, I have no doubt. But that was all that we could do.

After six days, the worst of the symptoms seemed to have subsided. Kiya was taking food and water, sleeping and waking normally; but she still seemed terribly confused. Her memory was clouded–she did not recognize me or Peria, or any of her friends that came to visit her. She did not know where she was, or her own name. She seemed to regard almost everything around her as strange and bizarre, from the foods she was given to the clothes she wore. Her hands still sometimes shook, and she seemed to be brought nearly to tears by the smallest frustration, and everything frustrated her.

The physicians encouraged us to take her home, to return her to familiar surroundings; or as familiar as the house in Ladai could be. We showed her her books, her toys, her pencils and her drawings; she regarded them blankly, like they belonged to someone else entirely. We made her her favorite foods; she ate them with no particular satisfaction or disappointment. Her friends made one more effort to visit; but she couldn’t remember their names, and they went away, regrettably but perhaps understandably, confused and distressed.

I tried to return to the chapterhouse then; but I confess, my heart was not in it. I was distracted, unable to concentrate or care on most of the problems brought to me; and the other instructors seemed to notice. I think once or twice I came into a room when they were talking about me–their voices low, heads bent over, as if exchanging gossip. They stopped when they saw me. But it mattered very little to me; all my concerns were focused on Kiya.

I spent as much time as I could talking with her, trying to engage her memory or at least her attention. And, at first, I thought some progress was being made. Her ability to focus on what was happening around her improved; her tremors faded; her irritability and mood swings also gradually abated. Her memory seemed to be getting better–she remembered me, she remembered Peria. But her mother and I had spent nearly every waking minute with her; how could she not recognize us? I talked with her about the recent past–about the move to Ladai, about how the term had gone so far, about Lake Halda and the cottage–and she seemed to respond. She did not smile or laugh; but she said she remembered all these things. It was Peria who noticed–she was lying. She asked Kiya about a nonexistent friend, about details of the house in Soxha that were untrue. Kiya just nodded along. Hoping to avoid our anxious looks and our unhappy whispers. Peria wept that night, as we lay next to each other; I held her, and said nothing. What could I say?

Now, Ocalla, I will tell you something that I have told no one else. It happened only a day or so later. Kiya had fallen asleep early that night, just after dinner; Peria and I had stayed up a little longer, trying to enjoy what we could of a warm and fragrant evening. I woke in the night, thirsty, and went downstairs for some water, when I heard something moving in the front room, and saw the glimmer of a lamp from underneath the door. Concerned, I went in.

Kiya was sitting with a book propped up on the arm of a chair, poring over it closely. I could see her eyes–they were not reading, scanning back and forth. They glanced around almost as if at random; and the look on her face was one of incomprehension and growing frustration. I went over to her.

“Kiya, what’s wrong?”

She ignored me at first, and continued flipping through the pages.

“Kiya?”

“What are these?” she asked. I looked at what she was pointing at. She was holding a volume of the Chancery Pandect, open to an article on the Karyistene ruins.

“Inscriptions,” I said. “From very old ruins, to the east.” I pointed to the caption. “See? It tells you what they mean here.”

She did not look at the caption. She turned the page again.

“These?”

“Maps. Of Karyista.”

“Where is that?”

I paused. Kiya had always excelled in geography. “To the east,” I said. “About four weeks’ travel by road.”

I sat quietly for a moment. “Kiya,” I said, “can you read what the book says?” When she was four, she used to sit on my lap and read from the Pandect aloud. One day, she said, she was going to write for the Pandect.

She did not reply. I could see tears beginning to brim in her eyes.

“Kiya, do you remember your geography lessons, from the charterhouse?”

She turned the page again. Then again. Then she froze.

“Tatha, what’s this?”

It was a star-chart, spread out over two facing pages. The constellations were outlined in ghostly figures, and all the names of the brightest stars were marked.

“It’s the night sky,” I said.

“The night sky where?”

“Here,” I said. “Here in Ladai. And Soxha. We’re in the northern hemisphere–” I pointed to the left-hand page “--so this side is our sky. There’s Daashe, the dancer. Utamna, the herdsman. And there’s Rafei, the Great Horse–”

I stopped; Kiya’s tears were falling onto the upturned page one by one.

“Kiya, my dearest child, what’s wrong?” I set the book aside, and wrapped my arms around her; a heavy, dark weight seemed to fill my chest.

“It’s not right,” she said.

“What’s not right?” I asked.

“The stars.”

“The stars aren’t right?”

“The stars are wrong! It’s all wrong!”

She twisted out of my embrace; I let my arms fall to my side, though I wanted to weep myself.

“I’m starting to remember things,” she said. “And none of it is right.”

“Kiya, what do you mean?”

“I can’t–I don’t know how to explain,” she said. “But that’s not my name. That’s not who I am. That’s not how the sky is supposed to look. I don’t–I know there’s no such place as Karyista. Something’s changed. I don’t know you, or Peria, or this place. Or this house. It’s all wrong, like somone’s taken all the pieces of the world and turned them into something new.”

At that, she broke down sobbing; and all I could do was try to comfort her; and finally, when she was exhausted, carry her to bed.

Since then, I have resigned my position as governor of the charterhouse, and we are in the process of returning to Soxha. There are doctors there who specialize in the treatment of disorders of the mind, and chronic afflictions of the body. Whether Kiya suffers from the former, in consequence of the trauma of her sickness, or whether its lingering effects have resulted in the latter–or in some combination of the two–I hope, I pray, I dream that they can help to heal her. But in my most secret thoughts, I have a fear that seems too dark to even write–that some changeling spirit has stolen into her, and she is lost to me forever.

My daughter is not dead–it is important that you know that, Ocalla. But it is true that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. That child that you once knew–that smiling, laughing, singing baby you once held on your knee–is afflicted by sorrows I cannot begin to understand. It may be that there is no help for us in Soxha, and if so we will go to Vallas, to the capital–I have already written to my brother there about the possibility. If that happens, I shall of course let you know; in the meantime, send your letters to my former address.

With love and unending well-wishes, Tatha

[tanadrin]

Interstellar travel has been accomplished in a variety of ways by the species we have encountered so far. Several species have managed to circumvent the fundamental problem of time involved in traversing vast distances by simply brute forcing it--typically, technologically-aided hibernation techniques, or unbounded lifespans. But both require quite a bit of luck, evolutionarily speaking, so this approach is rare. The Titawinese originally used artificial minds to control their ships, and generation ships or frozen embryos for colonization. The Chalawani relied on nuclear pulse propulsion for exploring their immediate surroundings, as we did for intra-system travel; but as starships these drives have a very limited range, and are still comparatively slow. The Inquillans used sublight ships powered by antimatter--their designs were technological marvels, but the fuel was extremely expensive to produce. The Mazaalai linked their five systems together through laser-driven lightsailers, though it took generations to build the infrastructure that supported it.

I cannot quite communicate the astonishment we felt when we encountered the first of your ships. A survey satellite in a polar orbit over Dimidium detected an unusual burst of cosmic rays from just over the planet's limb. Then hours later, another, slightly brighter. Then not long after that another, brighter still. This was, of course, the survey ship Zakynthos closing on the artificial radio source it detected, but from the readout alone it looked like the world's most improbable series of gamma-ray bursts, or a freak malfunction. We diverted the nearest torchship to investigate. It found, not a gamma-ray burst or a malfunction, but a ship--a small ship, with seven strange aliens aboard, of a configuration we had never seen. And these aliens claimed, against all common sense, that their ship was not only from a star system twenty-seven light years away, but that they had made that journey in a matter of weeks. At that point we were more ready to accept that we had somehow overlooked an entire spacefaring species on one of our core planets, than that these bizarre creatures had a real, working FTL drive.

That these aliens proved not to be the inheritors of some impossibly wise ancient civilization--that, in fact, they were from a species that had left its home system for the first time not one hundred years before, seized by an inexplicable desire to brave the hazards of space and to befriend any strange creatures they might come across--was a source of the most intense consternation. We felt--we still often feel, forgive us--that you are an impossibly naive culture. Naturally, we immediately accepted your offer of friendship. In no small part, I think, because you remind us of what we once were, and might someday hope to be again: hopeful explorers, awed by the limitless possibilities of the universe. But we also felt a sense of obligation. Someone has to keep you all from getting yourselves killed.

--Helvetosian ambassador to Earth, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of first contact