a brief history of ooranye
19: the foam

[continued from 18: The Last Great Hive]

There was a limit to what the Sunnoad could do to prepare Syoom for the ordeal which lay ahead. Part of his task was to spread the world that the Aoan Hive had merely postponed, not averted, the doom which impended. Ao had given Nennkind a breathing space, a period of grace, but now it was over and there was nothing for it but to endure the coming Foam.

This substance was an inflammation of what is normally weak and faint: the life-force of the gralm.

Gralm is common as Terran beach sand.  It is the loam-like granular material that covers the Uranian plains. Its flicker of life is less than that of the lowliest organic entity; but, because of the vastness of the oceanic world-plain, its total latent “bio-heat” must be colossal. And at the start of Era 57 (the Lanthanum Era, the shortest of the Great Eras, comprising 1,051,880 U-days; 43 U-years; = 3,600 Earth years), gralm bizarrely expanded as though it were popcorn.

Within days the plains around the cities of Syoom had humped and were threatening to bury the cities under a pumice-like covering.

If this had happened on Earth, people would have been driven to insanity or superstition, but on huge and mysterious Ooranye, though the experience was daunting and amazing, it was in the end “just one of those things” – severe in its effects, but no harder to accept than any other disastrous manifestation of the unknown.

What had to be done, was done.  Tunnels, air-holes and vehicle-exits were hurriedly dug in the Foam. The buried cities carried on a much-reduced existence, as they had done during the snow-bound Titanium Era. The era of the Foam was vastly longer than that of the Great Winter, but there was no cold to contend with this time. Cities’ populations plummeted because of food shortages, which drove many people to seek sustenance in the wilderness, sometimes into Fyaym. Most perished but some succeeded in founding new communities far from the Foam, so that the Foam actually caused an expansion of the borders of Syoom, while of course at the same time greatly weakening Syoom at its centre.

Luckily, no great Fyayman hostile power was wielded against Syoom during the Lanthanum Era. This would have been the ideal period for the Quonians to invade, but they did not; perhaps they had troubles of their own; at any rate Syoom survived without being occupied by any mortal enemy.

It did not, however, survive unscathed. The long-term results of the Foam were grave.  They must be examined in the next section of this survey; here we will describe the Foam’s departure.

All bad things come to an end. After over a million days the land’s already brittle covering became still more brittle, dramatically so. This fact was discovered by accident at many locations simultaneously, when travellers poked at the stuff with poles or staffs and saw with amazement and increasing excitement that the material now turned to powder when touched.

A short era followed (Era 58, the Cerium, 123 days and 22 hours) during which the formerly buried cities were enthusiastically dug free, and great stretches of plain around them were cleared for planting, so that the people of Syoom began to recreate a landscape which had not been seen for a hundred generations.

Like a person who has been bed-ridden for a long time, and at last is told that nen is cured, impatiently throws off the bed-clothes and totters to nen’s feet, so the people of Syoom could not wait for a new era. What little energy they had left, they largely dissipated in their frenzied and successful efforts to dig their cities out of the crumbled Foam. While they did so, great surges of expectation washed through their weakened civilization. The greatest efforts of all were made to dig out the Sunward polar city of Skyyon. The tallest city because of its unique, double-tiered, double-disked structure, Skyyon was also the one which had the largest volume of Foam to get rid of, as though its location at the centre of Syoom had attracted the stuff. The day came when the three ayashou around Skyyon’s upper rim – the airstream engines which routinely provide entrance to and egress from a Uranian disk-on-stem city – were freed to operate properly once more. Lines of skimmers could, as of old, queue to float up and down the airstreams. That was the great day when expectations were fulfilled. Inevitably, emotions were stirred; in fact, to such an extent were they stirred that they triggered an eomasp and the start of a new era.

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