by Diane Duane
Aztecs begin the Recolonization of Europe in 1703. Industrialization follows fairly rapidly, with first steam engine in 1750, first assembly line in 1782, electricity in 1810. This rapid movement, coupled with Aztec/Inca fascination with astronomy, leads to an unusually early space program (crude at first, and with much loss of life, though rapidly improving) with the first successful manned flight in 1914. However, despite rapid advancement made in atomic and high-energy physics, no progress is made toward worldgating technology until Temec’s abrupt pioneering work in 1948. A combination of xenophobia and war (the Aztecs and Inca finally fight it out for possession of Western Europe) delays the opening of exocontinual relations and the advent of commercial gating until 1966 and the decade that follows. Huictilopochtli signs the Agreement and trades ambassadors with Earth, Tierra, Xaihon and Alfheim in 1968.
(4) XAIHON
Positioning against other universes in sheaf:
Face-on: Alfheim
Side-on: Earth, Midgarth, Huictilopochtli. Terra
Cultural flavor: “Eastern hemisphere”-“Old World” dominant
Sovereignties: National (Chinese/Japanese tr. of “United Nations”): Chinese-Japanese flavor
DEITY/DEITIES: Assorted — historical/non-otiose: occasional intervention
LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: Xainese
VETO POWERS: China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Xhi Mei (Australia)
BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: The major branching in this world happens a long way back, circa 40,000-30,000 BC — prehistoric migrations out of Africa went mostly eastward rather than to the west. A much larger population than in otherworlds where migrations distributed themselves more randomly ended up in the Hwang Ho basin by 2000 BC — thereby speeding up trade, war, exploration, and all the other things that make life worth living. Unification of the warring feudal states came later than the Chou Dynasty in this universe, not being achieved until well into the Han (around 50 BC). Many of the warlords, preferring the expediency of exile to honorable execution, fled into surrounding territories with their armies, conquering the indigenes and setting up Xainese-type “independencies” — the most powerful of these in Japan (Nihon), Tibet (Xizang), Manchuria (Manzhu), India (Ninjai), and the Aral Sea-Caspian Sea area occupied by Russian cultures in other universes (Wei Zhinjiang).
A second wave of colonization began in the late Han (circa 200 AD) with the Xainese Great Age of Sail. Indonesia, Ei Fuzhou (New Zealand) and Xhi Mei (Australia) were settled in this period — largely, in Xhi Mei’s case, by criminals and “disgraced” (read “out-of-favor”) nobles; while exploration took the Xainese as far east as the Persian Gulf and Africa, and as far west as South America. That continent was nearly empty; the Aleutian migrations had not yet worked their way any further down the West Coast than northern California and had never crossed the Rockies. The Xainese killed or enslaved most of the Amerind population and began using the West Coasts of the Americas as silk plantations around 800 AD. Meanwhile, industrialization was already proceeding rapidly, with the invention of paper (100 AD), movable type (around 300 AD), simplification of Xainese orthography (Nihon-inspired, around 250 AD), firearms (also about 300 AD), steam power (independently invented in Nihon, Xizang, and Xhi Mei, all in the 400’s AD), and electricity (another case of multiple development, in Seixan Hui/North America and Nihon, around AD 1000.)
Extreme astronomical interest similar to that in Huictilopochtli caused an early (1200) and aggressive space program, with the first landing on the Moon achieved in AD 1230, on Mars in 1252, and the first interstellar flight (Alphacent-beta Ceti-Xaihon) in 1296. The invention of the Zhei-Nu Pi-meson False Equilibration Drive in Shaanxi, fifty-two years later, greatly reduced the cost and time spent on interstellar travel, to the point that it became not only scientifically interesting but a major engine of the planetary economy.
By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Xainese and Nihonnsu (running separate space programs) had mapped or explored every star within 30 lightyears, had survived a first-contact war with the Procyines (when their standoff situation became apparent, both sides surrendered gracefully to one another and immediately signed a trade agreement) and had opened diplomatic relations with seven other nonhuman species. World government set in in 1680, it being considered a more efficient way to deal with the dominant species of other planets (three out of five of which were found to have global governments; the fourth out of five had usually blown itself up, and the fifth was usually atechnological). Interstellar exploration continued at a leisurely pace through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the theoretical and high-energy arms of physics suffered somewhat from neglect until the early 1930’s. Around that time the Xainese government started to get interested in particle-beam weapons (having just seen the Shaula conduct a war with them, and feeling slightly nervous about relations with the Nihonnsu colony on Luna), and funded the first mEv-level accelerator, with multi-gEv and multi-tEv rings following through the ‘40’s and ‘50’s.
Worldgating breakthrough was finally achieved — quite by accident — by Hu Sahuen at the Dzamiin Uude Great Accelerator (the Seven Worlds’ biggest, three hundred miles in circumference) in 1953. Since the process had taken place at a Xainese government installation, the Xainese claimed it as property, and also tried to claim the equivalent property in the otherworld (Earth, as it happened) as also subject to Xainese sovereignty. A brief but spirited war with (Earth) China ensued, rapidly settled by the First Sino-Xaihonnsu Concord, and later confirmed by the Three-Geneva Agreement of 1956. Xaihon still holds its monopoly on interstellar travel, refusing to divulge construction details of the False Equilibration Drive. However, intracontinual travel in both directions is now unregulated, and Xaihon enjoys a unique position as Gateway to the Twenty-Three Planets, acting as clearing-house and mediator for trade and industrial agreements among the Seven Worlds and the Near and Far Stars.
(A general note: Worldgating only develops in worlds where high-energy physics research has built multi-tEv accelerators for itself. This is because one of the things wrong with the GUTS is that when you split quarks and such tiny particles in the highest-energy accelerators, the “missing” pieces are forced/squeezed into the nearest neighboring universe. If you succeed in tracking the particles, you will also discover [eventually] how to access that universe.)
(5) MIDGARTH
Positioning against other universes in sheaf:
Face-on: Alfheim
Side-on: Terra, Tierra, Xaihon, Earth
Cultural flavor: “Western Hemisphere”-“Old World” dominant
Sovereignties: National (cyclically in exile due to the Fimbulwinter): Northern European flavor
DEITY/DEITIES: Historical/active intervention: emphatically and actively non-otiose
LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: Icelandic/Norse
VETO POWERS: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Russia (Imperial/Tsarist)
BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: One of the oddest of the Seven Worlds. Mankind did not evolve in Africa, but (as far as evolutionary evidence suggests) in France and Germany, over a very short period of time as such things go (about 6000 years from Pithecanthropus to Homo neanderthalensis). Migrations went northward thereafter; encouraged, as far as can be told from cave paintings and the remnants of prehistoric legends, by the Gods.
These entities are apparently what Their name implies — supranormal, immortal beings of great strength, controlling several brands of magic (seithr, runr, laengr) with some similarities to the sorts practiced in Earth, Xaihon, Tierra and Huictilopochtli, but also many major dissimilarities. During active periods They are easily documented (by normal means such as photography) and interviewed (though the only language They consent to speak is a fossilized, extremely pure Norse of the sort spoken by Icelandic peoples in most of the Seven Worlds). The Gods, with a few exceptions, correspond to the standard Norse pantheon extant (though passively) in Terra and Earth.
This identity creates s
omething of a problem for the mortal inhabitants of Midgarth, since the interactions of the Gods, with minor variations, follow the broad course of Norse mythology — the creation of “the World” and of mankind, the loosing of Evil in the form of Loki and the Wolf’s various children, and eventually — once every two thousand fifteen years of Midgarth time — the Twilight of the Gods, with its subsequent battle to the death between Good and Evil, and the destruction of the world in fire and storm. Since the strictly temporal quality of the “entropy constant” is set higher in the Midgarth universe than elsewhere in the Seven Worlds, time runs faster there; two thousand fifteen years passes in what (in the other Six Worlds) comes out to approximately six years and four months.
Despite this horrible and repeated destruction, Midgarthian history managed to follow a course rather like that of Earth’s and Terra’s North European areas (except for details such as the Roman Empire, exploration of the Far East, etc. — no area of Midgarth was colonized except for a circle with the North Pole at its center and France at its circumference) — with long interruptions, but roughly parallel nevertheless. There were no Dark Ages, but neither was there a Renaissance as such; scientific and cultural advancement came very slowly, each millenium becoming painfully aware that it must store as much as possible of its knowledge for its descendants. The building of disaster-proof libraries became an art. Repeated appeals to the Gods to do something proved futile; the Gods believed themselves bound by Fate to repeat the cycle until some higher Force should relieve them of the necessity.
This cycle had been repeated many, many times — some 1.5 million times, if theory is correct and the whole sheaf of Worlds came into being at the same time — when Kainnson of Denmark implemented his theoretical conclusions with the financial support of the Crown of Denmark and made worldgating breakthrough at the Nibe-Hobro accelerator in (Earth)1969. There was considerably more urgency attending the discovery than there had been in most other of the Seven Worlds; Kenzisson was hoping to find the people of Midgarth a way out of their homeworld before the first indication of the Twilight, the seven-year-long Fimbulwinter, then twelve (Midgarth) years away.
In this he was successful, for as soon as preliminary contacts were made and embassies began to be exchanged, all the worlds signatory to the Three-Geneva Agreement offered either logistical or concrete aid in evacuating the population of Midgarth for the duration of future Twilights. Massive high-power gatings are performed (powered out of Kattegat Intercontinual) to Xaihon and Tierra, so that the entire population of Midgarth (1980 census: 8.4 million) “winters” for several seasons in either Xaihon/Seixan Hui or Tierra/Ultima Tule. Winterers trade off work, either professional or manual, to the host nation/world in return for wages, food and shelter — in the most successful and certainly the largest “welfare” program in the history of any world. In return, Midgarth makes available to scientists from the other Seven Worlds some of the finest high-energy facilities anywhere, as well as general research facilities for those interested in studying the nature of time, the entropy constant in Euclidean universes, and other such anomalies that come with the atypical Midgarthi physical laws. Midgarth is also something of a haven for comparative religionists, and is especially esteemed, after the Regeneration following each Twilight, as a vacation spot of great beauty.
(6) TERRA
Positioning against other universes in sheaf:
Face-on: Alfheim
Side-on: Midgarth, Xaihon, Huictilopochtli, Tierra
Sovereignties: National (U.N., non-binding on members!)
Cultural flavor: Mixed
DEITY/DEITIES: Assorted: historical/passive-indeterminate: otiose
LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: French
VETO POWERS: USA, Great Britain, France, Russian Federation, China
BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: Our world. Not discovered until 2001 due to cyclically poor positioning in Pattern (caused, as far as is known, by the Riemannian structure of our universe, unique among the Worlds, which are all either classic Einsteinian in curve [Tierra, Earth, Xaihon, Huictilopochtli] or Euclidean variants [Alfheim, Midgarth]). Not yet added to the Three-Geneva Agreement due to lack of independent discovery of worldgating: though reconnaissance survey tours have been going on for some time. There is also interest in Terra’s legends of “natural” worldgates, a phenomenon occurring only very sporadically in the Otherworlds except for Alfheim, and not even slightly understood. Breakthrough anticipated for early 2000’s with completion of multi-tEv accelerators —always supposing that a “MacKenzie” turns up. Three McIlwains presently in advanced physics courses — impossible to tell yet which one will be the catalyst.
(7) ALFHEIM
Positioning against other universes in sheaf:
Face-on: Earth, Terra, Tierra, Huictilopochtli, Midgarth, Xaihon
Side-on: None
Core-to-core: immediate affinity with 11 other cores in neighboring tesseracts
Sovereignty: World [Alfen rai’Miraha, “Council of Lords], under the Elf-King (‘rai-Lauvrin)
Cultural flavor: Modified “Western Hemisphere “-“New World” dominant
DEITY/DEITIES: Assorted — historical/documented manifestations: passive
LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY: N/A
VETO POWERS: N/A (no separate nations)
BROAD-BRUSH HISTORY: Core world of the Seven, Alfheim stands in a peculiar and unique relationship to all of them. Things that happen in the Otherworlds are mirrored, to some extent, in Alfheim; and vice versa. But its history is among the quietest of any of the Worlds’ — though not the most uneventful.
The coreworld of any tesseract (as we now know) is the world the “rotation” or movement of which through the “fourth-dimensional angle” produces the other ten worlds associated with it. (The actual epoch at which this rotation took place is subject to only the most roundabout estimates; “background” radiation studies in Alfheim now suggest that it took place some two hundred billion years ago, but this datum is subject to experimental error of +/- twenty billion years.) A coreworld’s multidimensional “affinity” with both other cores and its own product-worlds causes its space to acquire unusual characteristics, the most noticeable of these (in Alfheim’s case at least) being a far greater malleability to the actions of living agencies. In such universes, both physical and mental actions are both more easily effected, and more effective. Various attempts have been made to understand or explain this phenomenon; but as the Elves have recently pointed out, explanations can wait while the fact itself is being dealt with.
Alfheim’s version of the third planet from Sol remains, even in its “twentieth century”, a remarkably pastoral and unspoiled place: low of population, high of technology, in many ways surpassing the best that its associated worlds in the sheaf have to offer. No one knows whether humans evolved independently on Alfheim, or, if they wandered in from one of the otherworlds, at just what point they did so; but Alfen archaeology makes it plain that they were there from at least 40,000 BC onward. (However, fossil remains of at least one sort have been found to be misleading; for Tyrannosaurus australensis draco and his brothers still roam the Alfen Outback and veldt, alternately annoying and delighting paleozoologists, and convincing folklorists of one reason why dragon myths are so widely spread through the otherworlds.) The migrations of the Alfen followed a path similar to those of Earth and Terra, though the numbers of people making them were at first much smaller. Even at that early date, it is plain from cave paintings and other such sources that death, except by violent accident, was unknown — all burials show some sort of trauma in the remains.
Migrations progressed at a leisurely pace, their numbers slowly growing — apparently the difference in physical laws in Alfheim also affected reproduction to some extent, so that births were (and still are) relatively few. Their tribal structure persisted, largely unchanged, through the Alfen’s settlement in cities (about as far as the Catal Huyuk period). It then shifted, without too much fuss, to the sort of royal state common in
the early-historic Mediterranean cultures of Earth and Tierra; kings were chosen, the purpose of their rule being to cause the fertility of the land — and their success at that determining whether they lived or died. In the other worlds, such selection had various kinds of effects — but in Alfheim, due to the malleability of the universe, it caused those kings who were effective at altering the universe around them to survive and breed more kings equally effective. Eventually — over many centuries — the combination of the universe’s malleability and the royal prerogatives caused the Elf-Kings to become the most powerful magicians known in any of the universes where magic worked.
The power of the Kings grew even greater as more migrations occurred and a given King or Queen became responsible for control of more and more land and weather. Consolidation of tribes became commonplace during the secondary migrations: whichever petty-king proved most adept at controlling weather and the other details of tribal life by his magic came to rule the other neighboring tribes as well…sometimes by violence, but usually by default. Tribes and cities and eventually nations came to swallow one another in this manner, flexibly, from the earliest times; and the tradition continued until all the populated areas of Alfheim, in its early “fifteenth” century, were in contact with one another, and the greatest of the Alfen “continental groups” gathered together at Aien Mhariseth (“Elder Mariseth/Latemar”, Alfheim/Bolzano) to decide the rulership of a world.