a brief history of ooranye
2: syoom and fyaym

Tisswa Ardea decided to keep the discovery of the mascon a secret from most of humanity, for the time being. She, and those few in whom she confided, feared that if the news were released straightaway it might cause war between the several current urban tyrannies, as they vied for the new resource. Furthermore, as each power used the opportunity to try to enforce internal cohesion, civil wars would also break out, as the internal and external strife exacerbated each other…

The Dmaran Advisor, the Liquid Man who had helped her find the mascon, offered no further counsel. In fact, from now on he fades out of the story. He may have been the last of his kind. Their numbers were dwindling rapidly by this time, leaving the true humans – the Nenns – to tackle their problems on their own.

Tisswa Ardea and her friends could call upon some ready-prepared political support. Like many voyagers and prospectors they were members of an international secret society called, simply, the Unity Club. This organization had grandiose aims.

Ooranye has never been, and probably never will be, “conquered” by Man in the sense that Earth has been. As has been noted, the vast range of the giant planet was posing a threat to human identity, a threat which called forth harmful and severe reactions from some human governments. What was needed was a philosophy, an attitude or mental tool which would enable mankind to cope with the multiplicity and strangeness of Ooranye, to adapt to it without either conquering (which was impossible) or yielding (which was unacceptable).

So – adapt yet remain staunchly oneself! That was the challenge, the main problem of the age.

Terran readers may need to be reminded that this was not simply a matter of needing to find some “sustainable” or “ecologically sound” way of life. Ooranye isn’t Earth: on Ooranye the pull of the environment is so much greater, there is no question of mankind over-exploiting or polluting it; the influence works the other way. In the Hydrogen Era, pioneering Man was like a shape dissolving at the edges, in danger of losing all definition and becoming something else.

The first brilliant move of the Unity Club was to pin-point what was unfortunate about the human urge to understand. They were then able to realize that the key to the problem was to devise a way in which one might live in the world without trying to understand it. Ooranye would always be incomprehensible: to hope otherwise was to languish forever in a futile and hopeless trap. “Forget, therefore, your attempts to understand. Don’t solve – be.”

Then came the second insight: namely, that the trap could be avoided if one charted perils statistically. “Class them solely by their effects, and don’t worry about causes any more.” This revelation marked the proper birth of Uranian cartography as a unique craft. Maps were henceforth given peril-contours, derived from data of the frequency of wayfarers’ survival.

The key contour, “sfy-50”, became the agreed boundary separating the comparatively “safe” lands – where, never mind the reason, one had an over-50% chance of surviving a lone 1000-mile journey – from the lands where one’s chances were under 50%.

The former, relatively civilized region would be called Syoom; the latter, the impractically dangerous one, Fyaym.

The Unity Club had worked all this out but had not yet publicized the idea. It had been seeking a way of sparking off a revolution in thought and practice, to inaugurate Syoom “with a bang”. Now, at last – with Tisswa Ardea’s discovery of the great power source of the mound of gvo – the Club possessed the key. A date was fixed. Secretly the word went out to armed supporters to gather at Contahl.

Contahl was a free city, friendly to the new idea, and with a vested interest in the success of the enterprise, since it was the city closest to the mascon – which was beginning to be called Idun-Sjalsk, or more familiarly Jad-Zolm, shortered to Dzolm, “the Sun-Egg”.

Military preparations were made, city authorities in unlikely liaison with Unity Club revolutionaries. Contahl’s defences were strengthened. When it was judged that the moment was right to break the news to mankind, both of the existence of the Sun-Egg and of the concepts Syoom and Fyaym, the code-word went out by semaphore: “Unfurl!”

That utterance sparked the end of the Hydrogen Era. For as sail-waggons bearing the news began trundling along several routes out from Contahl and from a few other prepared locations, they were outpaced by the release of tension which quivered through the atmosphere, borne by the micro-organisms which sensed it and transmitted it in the form of a shock to the rhythm of day and night. With this first recorded eomasp the Helium Era had begun.

Unlike the First Era, which had lasted 19,636,085 days, the Second lasted a mere 18 days, 18 hours and 36 minutes. It was taken up with the spread of the concepts “Syoom” and “Fyaym”, and their re-orientation of the human mind. Exactly as the Unity Club had planned, the great hope held out by the discovery of the Sun-Egg became fused in the popular mind with the advent of new cartographical ideas. A great weight was lifted off the mind of Uranian Man.

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