[Dragaera] The Jenoine and humans elsewhere

[Maximilian Wilson]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt at kithrup.com> wrote:
>
> I'm reading these messages with "mail" on a BSD UNIX account that
> reads ASCII only.
>
>
> Dorothy J. Heydt
> Vallejo, California
> djheydt at kithrup.com

I apologize. I think, in trying to turn that message into plain-text,
I actually turned it into HTML. Here's the real plain-text.



On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 8:29 AM, Scott Schultz <scott at cjhunter.com> wrote:
>> If we are to assume that the Easterners/humans came to Dragaera before
>> the Jenoine — or at least without the aid of the J — then what of
>> Earth/the place they came from? Have the J quarantined Dragaera — are
>> they aware of the origins of the Easterners and are they are threat to
>> those at that origin? Or may they be the cause (or one of the causes)
>> why humans came to Dragaera once (or more than once) but came no more?
>>
>> Margaret
>
> The only answer to any of these questions is speculation. Given that we know
> that, I assume what you're asking for is the sorts of things that other
> readers have speculated. ;-)
>
> Whatever Earth was like when the original colonists left it, that Earth is
> now long gone or at least long since changed. Easterners predate the Empire
> and the Empire just concluded its first Great Cycle. Pulling a number
> arbitrarily out of a hat, let's say that every turn of the cycle takes 1500
> years. (It doesn't. They vary, sometimes wildly.)  That works out to, um,
> *calculates* -  433,500 years. Give or take a few millenia. That's close to
> half-a-billion years. By contrast, all of written human history is something
> on the order of 10,000 years, I believe. Most of our
> technological/scientific advancement has occurred within the last thousand
> years. The Terra that sent out the original colonists quite literally does
> not exist any more.
>
> We don't know how long the colonists had been on Dragaera before the arrival
> of the Jenoine. It may have been awhile. The Serioli that Vlad and Morollan
> interview refers to Easterners as The Old People. That may simply be a
> reference to the fact that Terrans pre-date Dragaerans, or it might also
> indicate something about their relative "ages" as well. That is, if the
> Terrans arrived one day and the Jenoine arrived a year later, the Serioli
> (presumably the native species, or one of them) would think of both Terrans
> and Dragaerans as "new".
>
> Conversely, it might also indicate that the Serioli imagine themselves to be
> "young" in relation to the Terrans, which would be an interesting thing to
> ponder.
>
> Given what we know about the Jenoine, I would guess that they don't give a
> Chreotha's damn about Terra. They just happened to need a testing lab with a
> breeding group of lab rats already thriving and they happened to find
> Dragaera which just happened to have what they wanted. I don't think they
> care where the Terran colonists came from and I'd guess that those colonists
> were part of a far-flung program of colonization; not part of a
> star-spanning empire that would expect to be engaging in commerce with all
> of their colonies. As extra-dimensional beings, the Jenoine go where they
> wish, when they wish, and the fact that there are other worlds in this
> particular dimension means little or nothing to them.
>
> If anyone has quarantined the world, it's the Lords of Judgement. That, in
> fact, is their mission - to keep the world under quarantine forever in order
> to prevent the Jenoine from obtaining mastery over amorphia and enslaving
> them all again.
>
> The fact that this also means keeping the Easterners in a kind of perpetual
> cultural stasis may be a side-effect or it may be part of the overall plan.
> We don't know. We don't really know much at all about the East outside of
> Fenario, except that Vlad jokingly refers to setting himself up as a Sultan
> with a harem at one point.
>
> There's a whole _Lord of Light_ thing going on here when you talk about the
> East, which isn't surprising given that Steve is a huge Zelazny fan and they
> seem to have had a passing friendship or at least acquaintanceship - I
> wouldn't deign to guess. At any rate, the situation of the Easterners
> vis-a-vis the Gods is quite similar to that of the colonists vis-a-vis the
> "Gods" in _Lord of Light_, even to the point of Bolk, a possible rogue God
> or God-like being, taking on the role of Mahasamatman (er, Sam) as the
> Light-Bringer who, whatever his reasons, is attempting to free at least some
> of the Easterners from the yoke of the Gods.
>
> It might be interesting to see where Fenario is in 1000 years.
>
> If Vlad ever figures out that his Goddess is responsible for "managing" his
> people so that they never can better themselves or advance beyond a certain
> point, technologically and sociologically speaking, I suspect that he will
> suddenly become a very dangerous threat to her...
>
>
>
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-- 
"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a
man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and
desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although
he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F.
Smith (manual, p. 69)

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me."