"Wise Apnarg call hisself...." I overheard one of my two indistinguishable strawberry blond five year-old grandsons ask their governess, referring to me in reverse just as they called everyone backwards.
"Same as this cake?" The other finished their sentence in the manner they had and I think will always speak. Lilianna spluttered into delighted mirth. Hidden away above their nursery, on the flying balcony that is an extension of my library, I had to hurriedly exit stage left lest they hear my laughter too and stopped in embarrassment that I had overheard.
"Well, you are a wizened, sun-dried old fruit!' Their, twin-speak, 'armeh' Merka admonished me when I told them that same evening over high tea. 'You've just called me Sutsainnah." Softening the criticism with an endearing chuckle, while my wickedly irreverent but seriously holy son-in-law smacked his hands on the table hooting like an orangu-tan. Thereafter I changed my call-sign name on all communiques from Prenter Challis, Hisself the Current; (I will only become Hisself the XXXIV on my death) to Prenter Challis the CurrAnt. The A is deliberately capitalised. For good reason I never used my call-sign name for offical letters to my publishers as I will explain.
The balcony extension to my library is where I keep all those books that, for one reason or another, never really held my attention long enough to travel beyond the opening chapter. A great many of them are academic tomes good only for keeping doors open or when piled up as a step ladder for my declining stature. The top shelf is now beyond my reach. Typically when the time came to find Mei Tan's book, it was, according to my index card system, on the top bloody shelf.
My editor, Eta Martineau, at the publishing house of 5M (Martineau, Martineau et Martineau fils et filles) had intended to cut out all the words that she thought would shock the readers. What, I had wondered, would she do when she finally worked out that her budding novice author and eccentric sender of written communiques, P. T. Hecurrant, was the wealthy customer who used a privately owned Tandreš system to call the eldest daughter at least once a day because she was so much fun to talk to? What didn't she do!! The bloody woman asked me a question on 29.02.3904 to which I could not, without due thought, care and attention, respond negatively when she didn't hang up at my silence. "Actually dearest' she reminds me frequently, 'neither silence nor a negative were options available to me." She has never explained this cryptic comment.
Still who am I to complain? These three women have refused to let this book be defeated by writer's block; my son-in-law continues to try and convert me with the subtlety of a blacksmith opening an oyster with a jack-hammer and the twins who set the snow-ball rolling and I suspect will have a major role in its completion.
This is meant to be the foreword, Eta has reminded me, not the whole of the b*****y first chapter.
Cats. There have never been cats on Jonti. Leastwise during the presence of my family. There aren't any of those other animals and insects which are normally associated with cats .. on Jonti. There aren't any birds to stalk, there aren't any pestilential rodents to ambush, there aren't any butterflies to chase.
"What', my ancestor Prenter Challis, Hisself the I, the founder of the fortunes of Jonti and the family dynasty, asked 'is a cat to do on Jonti?" Which was a kind way of avoiding speaking aloud the obvious, that the original settlers could not afford to have pets. When the time came that pets were affordable, after the first shipments of Izezentil were transported to The Lama's Joke in 2345 and CCC settled their account, any form of pet would have been an unnecessary distraction.
I, like most of the younger children of the eldest children of the dynasty, did not stay on Jonti once I had fulfilled certain dynastic obligations. Lack of opportunity or lack of means to stay has never been an excuse any of us could use. The most populated extended family in TO history - all born on Jonti since the C25 are genetically related to the dynastic core - and the wealthiest - Jonti supplies 99% of TO Izezentil requirements and has sufficient reserves for another five thousand years at current rates of supply. Hisself the I laid down the 'beneficent feudal' rules of Jonti society. Younger sons of the dynasty have, as a result, no choice once they have produced a brood of children but to travel, explore, expand our networks and business interests and to be Officers of the Challis Guard. There are oodles of drawbacks to the nomadic lifestyle of the wey-wah travellers. The pertinence here being that I hadn't had an opportunity to meet a cat, to touch a cat, to stroke a cat, to hear a cat purr. Neither had I had a chance to discover that arch independence that cats have; to learn that cats are actually the ONES-in-CHARGE!
Recruits to the Home Guards Regiments on Jonti spend a three month acclimatisation period on the family Estate before joining the Training School at the top of the cliffs. Madrileno was from Segudo where the big wild cats from Old Earth are bred to preserve their genes. He joined me on the seaward terrace, politely asking my permission to ask a question which earned him a nod, and asked where he could find the Jonti cats. At my look of bewilderment, Madrileno promptly related an odd conversation that he had just had with the twins. They had asked him if he knew anything about cats. They had apparently listened with rapt attention till he had dared to suggest that the mountains leopards on Segudo were without doubt the largest and most graceful of the cat family anywhere. Madrileno sticks in my memory because he was a wonderful mimic:
"Then you haven't seen......."
"Apnarg's bliddy cats......."
"They're humongous and....."
"they're black......"
"but one is brown.........."
"and upside down......"
"we can see one now....."
"Can you?"
He couldn't and I had to confess to him that I had no idea what the twins were talking about. I sent him on his way with the assurance that I would tell him when I found out. I suspect the young Seguddan found out before I did, but was too polite to say so. Naturally I related the incidence to the family for the sheer enjoyment of their speech pattern.
"A right pair of poets!" their father muttered darkly. Poetry sits ill with his religion yet it was Plight who spotted the wax drawings on the walls of their nursery and took me to show them because they explained their conversation with the Seguddan recruit.
For those of you have never been to, or seen pictures of, Jonti's space-port on the beach at the base of the caldera's cliffs, all you need to know is this: at the eastern-most end of the forty-two kilometre long east-to-west crescent of dark gray volcanic sand, the mother-lode of Izezentil falls away from the cliffs forming a three hundred metre high ridge that juts five kilometres into the sea. The ridge has never been mined for two reasons: the mining of Izezentil is b*****y dangerous and because atop the ridge across the 150 metre wide saddle sits the most perfectly preserved, untouched and unvisited, Maze City that anyone has ever seen. Lilianna takes the children for beach picnics in the lea of the ridge almost daily at their request. We have a wonderfully eccentric wire-guided sail-balloon courtesy of Hisself the XIV. One of the loops goes out to the Maze. Since the winds along the beach blow in a regular pattern - eastwards by day and westwards by night - it is very easy to plan a return trip. The day after Plight's momentous discovery of the wax drawings, the two of us, as excited as young boys on their birthday morning took out the sail-balloon for a look. We were returning full of disappointment when light grabbed my arm and make me look back from we had come. There, with the setting sun providing back-light, was the outline of a huge cat squatting on the ridge, hind-quarters raised and tail arched gracefully. That it was just one cat did not diminish my delight. We remained rooted to the floor of the basket, Plight and I, as the sun slowly set. Thank the Lord we did. As the sun winked out behind the Maze city there was an odd refraction of moonlight off the rogue Izezentil crystals in the cliffs. We were presented, as the twins had seen, with a mirror image of the cat in the sea. Only this time, instead of the blackness of shadow, the image was the greyish-yellow typical of moonlit Izezentil.
You will discover in the introductory chapter to Mei Tan's book about Kari Bruther, which is included in its entirety, that the memory of a man in his dotage is appalling. All the months that Plight was furtively sifting through his SFC contacts and settling on Tosh Brinath to supply the measurements for the known Maze cities, there was a tickle at the back of my mind that some-one else had researched and written about the presence of cats as indigenous species on the known worlds. Plight's need for secrecy stems from still having an entry on IEI's 'most wanted list' as MPDAWxC (missing presumed dead approach with extreme caution) because they suspect his involvement in the 2121(707) Conspiracy in 3906. In an attempt to jog my defunct memory into action, I called the Old Man at 5M to ask him to supply me, PT Hecurrant, with a list of books about cats - ordinary and extraordinary. He said 'maietal givyew unarnser'. Thankfully the Old Man had managed to give his offspring the education that his family had failed to provide for him. 'Is it the books or the cats that are ordinary and extraordinary?' was her initial question and promptly sent me a database that covered all the variables. She had, bless her cotton-sox! listed those which in her view were the rarest, the most popular, the most academic and the oddest because there were more than twelve thousand entries. Eta's choices for the last two categories were the same book - Mei Tan's review of and additions to Kari Bruther's Theory of Commonalities and H. Selissi's P-S-B Theorem.
My memory was duly jogged. I had that book! Sutsainnah, my dear, departed wife and mother of Merka and her five brothers, had gifted the book to me as a departure present. The book never left Jonti. I duly found it, on the top shelf in the library extension on the hanging balcony, courtesy of eight volumes of the Encyclopedia of the Diaspora.
There were three TOs interested in the shared characteristics - commonalities - of the arvra races. They were Kari Bruther (2145-2216); H. Selissi (2498-2572) and Meii Tan (2953-3663). Their chronology is interesting:
2171-2191 - Kari Bruther (2145-2216) leads the official UN CoM team that sets out to decipher and translate the FW archives in their entirety.
2193-2199 - Kari Bruther is Senior Researcher aboard the Exploration Platform 'Scott-Amundsen'. He record the six year expedition in detail.
2200-2206 - Kari Bruther 'writes up' his reports and begins to formulate the Theory of Commonalities.
2207-2211 - Kari Bruther takes up the Chair of Philosophy at Aberac in what is now known as the Llas.
2211-2214 - Kari Bruther publishes the startling Theory of Commonalities.
2215-2216 - Kari Bruther leads the Reasearch Team on the 'Stanley-Livingstone' exploration platform. 'S-L' is a permanent, visible and poignant memorial to the need to avoid de-acceleration when entering a tear too quickly under 'sphere factor paramaters'. 'S-L' is trapped like a fly in amber in the middle of the 'tear sphere' located in Reinart's Belt of asteroids.
2299 FIRST CONTACT
2444 SECOND CONTACT
2539-2560 - H. Selissi works as Specialist (Exo-skeletal Anthropology) Assistant to D-G of Archeological Research (Apostles)
2560-2571 - H. Selissi Director-General of Archeological Research (Bliss)
2571-2572 - H. Selissi gather's material to support her findings. Phrenon-Skoy-Bliss Theorem announced but never published due to Selissi's death from natural causes.
3553 - Mei Tan's theories on Commonalities and P-S-B is published.
The following four excerpts are taken from the reproduction of Meii Tan's book:
The mindset of our Terran ancestors as they spread out into space was we have discovered little different to any other race that has made the same journey. Terrans expected only to encounter space-faring races that were biologically contrasting to ourselves and did but that with the exception of the su'do' they were all extinct. Our Terran ancestors expected conflict. They expected to dominate. They expected to conquer ever new and expanding horizons. They certainly did not expect to find any oxygen breathing, bipedal space-faring races similar to themselves and so far advanced in all departments that they were so far over those horizons that the Terrans would never catch up. As far as our ancestors of the Diaspora were concerned the Terrans were The Human Race. That mind-set only truly changed at Second Contact. Up till then, throughout the Period of Inspection, The Human Race had been treating First Contact as either an anomalous incident or simply a bad dream.
Introduction, page 1.
Kari’s voyage of discovery was the making of his fame. He is credited with the discovery of the ‘commonality’ of the arvra although at the time TO society was unaware of the existence of the known others: the Arvrasindahl, the Akkaidiiz and the Dzunoeskei. Bruther based his argument on archeological finds made on the frenetic exploration of the 'Scott-Amundesen', during which he collected clear evidence of at least two, if not, three other humanoid races. Bruther's hypothesis was that whatever number of humanoid races were discovered, they would share 'commonalities':
Commonality 1. Upright bipeds with physiological features differing only in the shape and versatility of sensing organs, the number of digits and epidermal tones all largely dependent upon the different variable factors of their home-worlds.
Commonality 2. Myths / legends that tell of visitations from space.
Commonality 3. Icons or symbols (the four are now known as Kari's Icons) the four symbols which are to be found on anthropo-archaeological as well as life supporting habitats which he describes succintly as the silhouttes formed by:
- an inverted v with a tail;
- a three-branch candle-holder;
- the digits 69 in the horizontal position;
- an open wrist amulet with turned ends underlined.
Commonality 4. A small quadruped of feline appearance.
The public (SFC's) and the private reaction to The Theory of Commonality was a pre-cursor of the The Human Race's reaction to First Contact. But the academic community, no matter how deeply divided they were over the issue, concurred wholeheartedly that if other humanoid races were proven to exist they would need to comply with all four commonalities.
Chapter 5, pp1-2.
Selissi had the distinct advantage over Bruther of knowing that the four arvra races existed. She applied Bruther’s commonalties to the Arvrasindahl and the Dzunoeskei and was able to confirm that both races had 'characteristics of commonality'. That was the easy part. The inimicable character and enmity of the
Akk(aidiiz) would have been a deterrent for most researchers in any field of research. Numerous confrontations between SFC military units and the Akk since Second Contact had furnished visual, if not forensic proof, that the Akk complied with Commonality 1. The other three would prove more difficult to assess. There was however, the tantalising lure of a wrecked and broken Akk vessel which attracted all of Selissi's famed attention because like the Exploration Platform Stanley-Livingstone, it was in the middle of a 'tear sphere'. The Akk vessel was in The Veil's 'tear sphere'. But unlike the TO vessel the Akk had broken up. The debris makes even the passage of an automated probe through the 'tear sphere' very difficult and dangerous.
Force of personal character and determination saw Selissi win CCC funding to send a series of probes into the 'sphere' to acquire close-up images of the debris. The images permitted Selissi to state that the Akk had complied with Commonalities 2 and 3. Commonality 4 would, she realised, mean a visit to an Akk colony, permission for which would never be given in her lifetime. She continued her hobby research but turned her considerable abilities back to her speciality of 'exo-skeletal anthro-archeology'.
Twenty-four hours after announcing, in 2572, that she would within a year publish the Phrenon-Skoy-Bliss Theorem of Commonalities, Selissi succumbed to a stroke.
Selissi's research notes are as extensive and detailed as her private diaries are not. As a result the anthropo-archeological community could not discern what she had been proposing to reveal.
Chapter 6, pp1-2.
Meii Tan (Tan disliked the use of the first person singular - PTH) had a considerable advantage over both her predecessors in that as an Officer in SFC's Strategic Command she was required to travel both regularly and frequently on the wey-wah. She was therefore able to plan and command any field trips within her remit, unlike Bruther who went where the Platform Commanders' orders required and unlike Selissi who had to argue, cajole and threaten to get funding for field research. Tan's interest in the P-S-B Theorem stemmed from the fact that both Selissi and she were Marchmontese.
In order to gain an understanding of what drove the Akk expansion policy, and not trusting the veracity of the information being sent to Strategic Command, Tan began to visit those planets that the Akk had abandoned in the course of the conflict between the Alliance and themselves. Tan needed thirteen exhaustively detailed inspections before she made the first of her reknowned (in military circles only - PTH) 'Predicted Movements in Akk Expansion for the Coming Decade'in 2988 (which permitted Hisself the XII to gain CCC permission to transform the Challis Guards from a local Reactive Anti-Theft Unit to a wey-wah Proactive Anti-Invasive Force and expand it from a force of 10,000 Jontis to an internationally recruited force of 100,000 - PTH). SFC High Command was so impressed by the 80% accuracy of the report that Tan recieved Federation Flag Officer status and the orders 'to act at will in pursuit of objectives' (High Commands' version of total freedom of movement with an unlimited budget - PTH). A second Predicted Movements report followed in 2998 that ultimately led to the stalemate between the Akk expansion policy and the Allliance's defensive stance (She continued to make reports until her last, 3448, in which she predicted a change in Akk strategy; from the seeking of raw materials to the seeking of causing unsustainable losses on the Alliance. Sadly the Alliance High Command had grown idle and complacent in the five hundred years since the stalemate took effect and reacted too slowly when the conflict again flared up. Colonel-Commander Meii Tan, born on Marchmont in 2953, the oldest living wey-wah Flag Officer, died at the physiological age of ninety-seven on Plutarch in 3663 in the first year of that appalling war in which I lost all seven of my elder brothers - PTH).
Tan admitted that the visit to the highest peak on the first planet she visited where she found a 100 metre flag-pole embedded into the summit, and the decision to conduct a low-level aerial survey which led to the finding of the cavern were both unplanned and 'on-the-spur-of-the-moment' decisions. She found the short-term, degradable, highly visible flag pole and the long-term, durable, secret engraving caverns on all thirteen of the planets she visited on that occasion. They were, Tan concluded, possession markers. She devised a 3-point set of rules for finding such markers on planets and sent out four teams to report back their findings, with the military data taking priority. All four teams had a selection of planets known to have been Akk and those for which there was no data. The analysis of the data streams, 100% of known Akk planets possessed the remnants of the flag-pole as well as the cavern in its entirety while only 23% of the unknowns had the same results. This enabled Tan to predict where the Akk would not strike in the coming decade and therefore by default where they were most likely to strike, which formed the basis of the 2998 report.
The success of this report had a direct impact on Tan's freedom of movement. High Command now considered her as irreplaceable and placed her under a limited travel ban. Deprived of the abilty to travel to Bliss to test the theory she was developing, Tan relied on her survey teams and Selissi's research notes on her unpublished P-S-B Theorem. Tan quickly realised that although they were both thinking along the same lines, the stroke which killed Selissi had paradoxically saved her reputation. Selissi had been about to make an appalling error of judgement which would have caused the validity of all her previous publications to have been called into question (if that isn't a knife in the bloddy back, what is? There was no need to make that inference - PTH).
Selissi had discovered in the sediment levels of three dessicated river deltas, identical city-based civilisations spaced at intervals of 250-350 millennia over the period of 6-18 million CE. Within the context of Selissi's search for 'commonalities' she had proof-positive evidence of compliance with all four commonalities of the inhabitants of these cities. Selissi also had the upper levels of three new Maze cities which were to her mind extraneous to her theory.
Selissi had made a number of conclusions based on the pictograms used in the cities' religious sites, that matched Tan's conclusions from different sources.
i) This race was certainly older than the Dzunoeskei. Their use of all four of Kari's Icons made them the pre-cursors if not the source of the Icons.
ii) The use of the Icons indicated a four clan social system.
iii) This race possessed a small feline quadruped.
iv) They had developed a complex mythology.
v) They were bipedal and distinctly humanoid.
Selissi's overriding problem was the Akk. Her conclusions were meaningless unless she could prove they had never visited Bliss or the two satellites. The earliest known reference to the Akk is in the FW archives. The date is known because following the two races' First Contact the FW archives included an extra dating system. The new one was the FW equivalent of First Contact + n years. That date of First Contact is the equivalent of 800,000 CE. The earliest of Selissi's Bliss civilisation layers is 12 million CE. Selissi either had to fill the intervening gap of 11.2 million years to prove that the Akk were the race on Bliss or she had to prove that they had never been there.
Tan was able to add the following key data:
vi) The rock geologies on all three bodies of P-S-B are not conducive to caverns - natural or constructed.
vii) Selissi on her own initiative conducted ground and aerial surveys of the highland areas on P-S-B and found no traces of skeletal or exo-skeletal activity.
viii) Teams following Tan's instructions did not find either the visible or the secret possession markers on P-S-B.
Tan then brought the Maze cities into the theory.
ix) No two Maze cities are constructed to the same design, but all, with two exceptions, have four or more equilateral sides of level height.
x) The Mazes embedded in the upper levels of all the Maze cities, with two exceptions, are one of six designs.
xi) The designs of the engravings - the durable possession markers of the Akk - have the same six designs of x).
xii) The two exceptions to ix) are Bliss - ellipsoid for no discernable reason and Jonti - elongated diamond to fit on the ridge.
xiii) The two exceptions to x) are Bliss and Jonti.
Tan drew four further conclusions to add to Selissi's original five:
a) The Akk had never been to P-S-B or Jonti.
b) The race that had built the city civilisations on Bliss are probably the builders of the Maze cities.
c) The builders of the Maze cities were probably pushed to the edge of extinction by the FW builders.
d) The remnants of the Maze builders probably became the Akk.
Then the Maze city on Jonti threw a spanner in the works. A non-military Research Instrument Test Team included Jonti among the 'tested planets' because Izezentil is notoriously impervious to sub-surface scanning. A scheduled three day test developed into a three month test due to the need to recalibrate their equipment on a daily basis becasue the results were so startling.
Jontis know the ridge, on which the Maze city is located, possesses an overhang, which makes any non piton-assisted climb impossible and is formed from Izezentil (88% purity) which does react well, at any of the purity ranges, to the proximity of other metals, such as hammers and pitons. So no Jonti has ever climbed the ridge and discovered the city's construction material is Izezentil (96% purity). The Izezentil could not have been sourced from Jonti. It had to have been imported. But that is not the spanner that Jonti's Maze city threw into Selissi and Tan's conclusions. Sub-surface luminescence analysis permits the dating of constructions, like the historical layers of ancient cities, layer by layer with an accuracy of 99.8% probability.
Jonti's ridge was known before the test to be approximately 6 million years old which was in accordance with the test.
But the city was built in the Common Era between 1500 and 2000 CE. This is almost within living memory.
Where are they now?
Chapter 7, pp1-6.
I just knew I should have read Tan's book when I was given it all those years ago. The 'spanner' is typical Jonti bloody-mindedness!
All three scientists, Bruther, Selissi and Tan, were regarded as the supreme scientific researchers of their generations by those that mattered, their peers, and are still regarded likewise by many of their descendants.
Nevertheless, the 'unofficial' official SFC view is to shy away from their conclusions. Here I will end with the thought that it is far better to face up to the possibility that there's an incredibly powerful but gentle (you try building a tool-precision house out of Izezentil, with or without the tools, without blowing up the neighbourhood); shy or secretive (why leave or never return to Bliss?) and durable (they have outlived the incredibly long-lived exoskeletals)'skeletal' space faring race somewhere out there. An arvra race that none of the others have records of. Sure .. it's a terrifying and scary thought.
But Jontis cats would go and investigate.
Yes, we had two cats brought in from outside. Strange looking breeds. One is black, flat faced and long tailed. The other is the same but smaller and brown. The twins, for reasons known only to themselves, named them Hisself the Waidaaš and Hisself the Bazz. The four of them are inseperable and the cats are most definitely the ONES-in-CHARGE.
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