[Dragaera] The Jenoine and humans elsewhere

[Scott Schultz]

> 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...