a brief history of ooranye
13: the quonians

[continued from 12: The Cobalt Era]

Anachronism

Artists have portrayed the scene many times: the misty plain, the grid marked out to plan the excavation, the shapes of buildings emerging from the strata… and the faces of astonished men and women, examining artefacts of impossible age. Things dug out from ground which, a short while ago, was known from soundings to have contained nothing but featureless ice and gralm.

The possibility of it all being a hoax was soon dismissed. To have fabricated such a site, burying fake artefacts on this scale, seemed impossible – how could one afterwards de-disturb the ground? Besides, the business would have been pointless and impractical to an insane degree. But then – what was the alternative? The Sunnoad, when he got to hear of the issue, instructed his agents to follow all clues. One of these agents, who doubled as an archaeologist, rummaging in the ruins of a similar anachronistic site, accidentally put his hand through an activation beam and unleashed the broadcast which brought on Era 28.

The Nickel Era

The telepathic warning lasted 57 minutes. During those minutes every man, woman and child on the planet heard the recorded message in nen’s mind, and the truth dawned on the people of Syoom, that they shared their world with a race which could manipulate time.

That was one fact which could be gleaned straightaway. Further details would follow as millions of hearers sorted out their memories and began to understand more of what their minds had received. It had been an almost wordless message, uttered so long ago, by a creature so ancient, that nen’s extinct language was unrelated to any living tongue. Being wordless, it relied on the direct communication of ideas, and that was not easy, for the sender’s mind had plainly not been human. Nevertheless, nen had been Uranian, evolved on the same world as the modern Nenns. The ideas, images, expressions were not wholly unfamiliar. And one part of the message was verbal: a name: THE QUONIANS.

These – the message warned – were a race of humanoids similar to the Nenns of Syoom in appearance but very different culturally. They were an immensely ancient race, surviving relatively unmodified through several Great Cycles. They posed a threat to other cultures because –

And here came a specially sharp, clear part of the message, the main point of the warning. The only trouble was, the idea it contained was so new, it could hardly be taken in at one mental gulp.

The Coppper Era

Their heads ringing from the warning, the people of Syoom tried to pick up their normal lives again. Gradually, as the days passed, a sense of normality did return. But the extraordinary experience of the 57-minute Nickel Era remained the chief topic of conversation, debate and investigation. Moreover the issue was kept alive in any case by the arrival in Syoom of the Quonians themselves.

The first Quonian scouts were humble and apologetic regarding their presence on Syoomean soil. They came on their gleaming white skimmers, their white eyes peering around at whatever they saw, fascinatedly, as though they saw more than anyone else. They asked diffidently whether the Kalishan Voice had been heard. Kalishan Voice? The broadcast warning, they explained. The Voice of the Kalishan, a malicious mind – so the newcomers alleged – a mind hostile to the peaceable Quonians. Long, long ago the evil Voice had been encased in a cubical probe which was programmed to follow Quonian civilization on its journey through history and to spread slanders about Quonia. “All we want,” said the newcomers, “is to be allowed to settle and mingle with the Nenns of Syoom. Surely there is room for a few hundred thousand refugees, in the four hundred million square mile vastness of Syoom.” “Refugees? How come?” demanded the Syoomeans, and obtained the reply that Quonia itself was going through an over-rigid phase and had expelled those of its people who were possessed of an adventurous spirit. Surely, the culture of Syoom must sympathize with such a spirit as that?

When asked where Quonia was, the visitors became cagey. They vaguely admitted that the place was “somewhere in Fyaym”. (Of course, by strict definition a civilization cannot be “in Fyaym”, for civilization is Syoomean by definition, but in loose everyday language a hitherto unsuspected area of Syoom surrounded by Fyaym can be “somewhere in Fyaym”.)

All this time, people went on thinking about their memories of the 57-minute Voice of Kalishan. In fact the entire Copper Era (2,961 Uranian days; a little over ten Earth years) was a kind of race between the warning Voice and the persuasiveness of the Quonians.

During the last third of the era, the Voice began to win out.

Triumph of the Voice

It began to be noticed that more and more people were not only “seeing things from the Quonians’ point of view” in the sense of sympathizing with their social and political situation, but were literally seeing their environment as if it were Quonia: a land of different geography and traditions. To bolster this illusion, physical objects continued to be found which should not have been in Syoom at all, and yet which could be proved to have been there for aeons. These objects consisted of Quonian-style buildings, coins, works of art… as if they had been smuggled across Time, to give a false pedigree to the current Quonian presence.

The terrible thought occurred to the Sunnoad and his advisers, as well as to many other high-placed Syoomeans: what if the Quonians were able to re-write human history in their favour? What if that was what they were preparing to do?

On the other hand, if they could do this, why had they not already done it?

Or had they?

Quonians were pulled in for questioning under hypnosis. It was found that they did not, after all, possess true time-travel, but were able to take advantage of certain “cul-de-sacs” in Time – areas which were out of touch with the lines of causation. These special areas could be altered without paradox. Quonian artefacts had been sent to such areas, in a fantastically expensive operation for which the revenues of Quonia had been mortgaged to the hilt for tens of thousands of days ahead. Indeed, to finance the great deception, the Quonian homeland had almost beggared itself – but the newcomers to Syoom were not “refugees”, they were agents, whose “cover” had been dearly bought. They, and those who sent them, had hoped that, as a side-effect of their tampering with time, the Quonian world-view might seep into the minds of the people of Syoom, negating the effect of the Kalishan Voice.

As soon as the plot was uncovered, it lost all its force. Little further action was necessary. The truth was broadcast, and the discomfited Quonian invaders were allowed to leave (mostly unharmed) for their own country, their business unfinished.

(The memory of Quonia was long; many eras later, they were heard from again.)

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