In the hope that habitable worlds might be discovered within this critical eighty light-year limit, huge Colony ships (C-ships) were designed, construction began and the whole planet waited for news of success.
For the first time in centuries, the intrinsic greed and self-interest that drove the Corporations found itself in accord with the pressing needs of the overcrowded planet. The search for other habitable – and exploitable – worlds had begun.
It was a slow and, at times, frustrating process.
Worlds rich in resources were discovered within the limited range of such ships, but none were habitable, and mining the vast mineral deposits necessary to supply the demands of a resource-starved Earth required a resident population. With terra-forming technology still in its infancy, that meant finding a world with a breathable atmosphere and a survivable climate.
And such worlds are a rare and wonderful occurrence among the stars of the knowable universe.
Experimental dome-communities were established on a number of inhospitable planets, with some minor successes and some notable – and catastrophic – failures, but interstellar colonisation remained a dangerous and prohibitively expensive undertaking.
Finally, in the year 2075AD the planet that would become known as Deucalion was discovered. At thirty-four light-years’ distance, well within the limit of cryo-sleep survival, the sole planet in the Aeolian system possessed a breathable atmosphere, a somewhat Earth-like ecosystem, and vast, accessible mineral deposits which made the cost and effort of colonising the planet more than worthwhile.
Following the formation and market capitalisation of the Deucalion Mining Corporation (DMC) to finance the vast project, in 2097AD just twenty-two Earth-years after the original discovery, the first C-ship was launched from lunar orbit, headed for Deucalion, and the era of mass off-planet migration began.
Life on the New World was far from easy, but a century of immigration and development saw the population of Deucalion grow rapidly, with the arrival each year of thousands of new settlers – indentured workers, drawn mainly from the unemployed masses that peopled the teeming cities of the mother-planet.
Following the promise of land and freedom, they signed on, bade farewell to a world that neither wanted nor missed them, and slipped silently into the living death of the freeze-sleep, dreaming of a golden future.
It was a dream that for many of the would-be settlers quickly became a waking nightmare. After working their contracted years for the Deucalion Mining Corporation, they left to claim their allotments and begin the new life they had been promised – only to find that the promise was an illusion; that the ‘land and freedom’ they had uprooted their lives to possess lay out in the desolation of the Fringes; the barren, windswept band of infertile land that lay between the Central Desert and the Coastal Ranges.
City-dwellers for the most part, they stood little chance of survival in such an inhospitable environment, and within months – sometimes weeks – they found themselves back in the cities, begging for lowly paid jobs in the mines they had left with such hope.
The few hard men and women who braved the winds and the droughts and survived, did so by banding together into tightly knit communities, making their living by growing the hardy cash-crops, Capyjou and Ocra for export, or mining the valuable seams of iron and manganese, which lay close to the surface in places, then trading the ore with the DMC for food, water and other essentials. It was a hard life, but they owed allegiance to no one but themselves – and for such rugged and independent people, that was enough.
For the first hundred years, little changed. The ore was mined and shipped, and the settlers came.
But change was in the air.
The shareholders of the DMC cared little for the worn-out bodies and broken lives upon which their fortunes were built, and the masses of Earth thought nothing of the sacrifices that enabled their resource-bankrupt planet to enter a new age of prosperity, so on Deucalion, the anger and frustration grew.
The Phony Election of 101 was an attempt by those who had the most to lose to maintain control of the planet, while appearing to appease the demands for democracy. The revelation of the extent of the deception and cold duplicity of which their former masters were capable, led in 102 to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (commonly known as the Silent Revolution) and the establishment of the Republic of Deucalion – breaking forever the power of the Great Corporations over the citizens of the new state.
The Revolution also led to the freeing of – and the granting of a permanent homeland to – the other victims of the planet’s annexation: the native Elokoi.
For a century, the Elokoi had suffered the fate of invaded cultures throughout history.
A gentle race, peaceful and sharing in a way that humans could barely understand, Deucalion’s original inhabitants were powerless to stop the invasion of their lands.
From the early days of the settlement, they were hunted and driven from their homes, to make way for the mines. Their culture decimated, their Tellers slaughtered and their ancient history walls torn from the living rock and shipped to Earth to feed the trade in exotica, they were feared – hated even – for a talent that humans for centuries had speculated on, without ever really believing in.
The Elokoi were telepathic. To this day, they are the only native race on any known planet with the ability to communicate thought to thought, mind to mind – sometimes across significant distances.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this unique ability scared the rough and uneducated settlers, placing the Elokoi in grave danger.
‘Ferret hunts’ became a common and brutal pastime in those early years.
Finally, in an attempt to stop the genocide, the Governing Council confined the remaining Elokoi Tribes to ‘Reserves’ – tracts of land with no commercial value, usually in dry, inhospitable environments, which no self-respecting human would ever covet.
Contact between the Elokoi and their human oppressors was restricted – except on the Fringes and in the plantations, where their resistance to the oppressive heat and their knowledge of the Capyjou and Ocra made them extremely valuable as plantation workers.
The establishment of the Elokoi state of Vaana in 112 – following the ‘Great Trek’ of the entire Elokoi population from the eastern coast, back to the shores of the inland sea – marked the end of a cycle hundreds of years in the Telling.
But the story of the Elokoi was more intimately connected with that of the planet’s human inhabitants than most Deucalians could possibly imagine at the time – and it took many years and a disaster of global proportions for the truth to finally reveal itself.
The story began at the very beginning of the settlement, and hinged on the Elokoi’s unique Gift.
While the Elokoi telepathy scared the rough miners and would-be farmers on an isolated frontier planet, on Earth, Researchers and scientists saw the existence of such a talent as something akin to the Holy Grail and though it broke the rules laid down by every ethics committee for over two hundred years, it is hardly surprising that, as soon as they isolated the alien genome, and extracted the structures responsible for the Elokoi’s unique Gift, they would be unable to resist the temptation to create the first telepathic human children.
The Icarus Project was begun secretly in 2195AD using gene-replication technology to create an unknown number of ‘hybrid specimens’ – who were brought to term by paid surrogates; couples recruited from the destitute urban masses, who could be trusted to maintain their silence in return for what must have seemed, to them, like a fortune. The intention was to study the ‘telepathic tendencies’ of the Icaran children (as they came to be known amongst the renegade Researchers) to see what it might mean to possess such a stunning gift.
The results were a spectacular success, with the children possessing, not only a powerful telepathic ability, but what turned out to be a super-dominant gene for
telepathy – a gene which would be passed on to every one of their offspring, no matter who the other parent might be.
Of course, such a radical experiment could not remain secret for long. Politicians and members of the Fifty Families who controlled the dominant Corporations knew all too well what could happen if their secrets were accessed by such ‘prying minds’ and revealed to their enemies – or worse still, to an otherwise gullible public.
In 2199AD (44AS), when the Icarus Project was uncovered, orders went out. The Grants Council terminated the Funding of the Researchers in question, destroying forever their careers in Research – and it was rumoured in whispers that, within weeks, most of the key personnel had met with ‘untimely accidents’.
As illegal experimental material, the Children of Icarus were ordered terminated, and the role of overseeing their disposal was assigned to Stanley Hendriks, a trusted career scientist, with an impeccable record of service. It was a choice which changed the direction of Deucalian history – though it would be over a century before the world-changing significance of Hendriks’s actions would be revealed.
Despite his years of unstinting service to the Corporation, Stanley Hendriks was a man of principle. Faced with the task of finding and destroying the Icaran children, something in him rebelled. A diary trace found in the Carmody archives a hundred years or so after his death, summed up his dilemma:
Life . . . or death? he wrote. When did we usurp the right to decide? Have we come so far that we reserve for ourselves the prerogatives of gods? What child, no matter how different, deserves to die for the sins of his father?
Though it was impossible to save them all, Hendriks and a few trusted colleagues managed to spirit away well over a hundred of the children, securing passage for them and their surrogate families on the C-ships that were heading for the New World.
When they were safely in stasis, on their way to their new life, he applied for a transfer to the Research facility in New Geneva, and turning his back on the ‘stagnant morality’ of Old Earth, he stepped aboard the next C-ship, and into history.
He spent the rest of his life watching over the development of his charges, providing for their needs, and setting up the school on Carmody Island, so that they could learn to control the power they had been gifted.
Eleanora De Buiss, the legendary eighth-century historian, summed up what it meant to grow up Icaran during those early years.
It seems unthinkable today, she wrote in 785, but telepathy was once a feared and dangerous ability for anyone to possess on Deucalion.
For well over a century after the first Icaran children arrived on the planet, saved from summary termination on Earth by the efforts of Dr Stanley Hendriks and his team, their very existence, and the existence of their descendents, was a closely guarded secret.
As survivors, they were well aware of the likely reaction from many of their fellow citizens during those intolerant times.
With the overwhelming majority of Deucalion’s human inhabitants incapable of sharing even the most rudimentary of telepathic communications, and remembering the treatment meted out to the Elokoi during the early history of the settlement, it is not surprising that those of Icaran blood were reluctant to reveal themselves.
They lived their unremarkable lives within the ‘normal’ society. They held good jobs and shared in everyday community pursuits.
Of course, the fact that some families chose to send their children far away to school at an early age, was remarked upon occasionally, but only as a minor excess. Few saw anything sinister in it. After all, didn’t those children come back highly motivated and almost inevitably successful?
The pivotal role of Carmody Island during the period of the Crystal Death, is a well-documented historical fact, but what was barely guessed at outside the secret Icaran community, was the significance of the island in training the Icaran young in the mastery of their special talent.
For over a century, Carmody had been the key source of their special education – both in the ways of the Gift and in the culture of the Elokoi, from whom they had indirectly inherited it.
It was not until years later, when the young Julius Hyams – the first and greatest of the early Icaran Tellers – began his ministry, that the existence of homo icarans was finally revealed. After his first Shared Telling in 213, the news of his special talent spread across Deucalion like a brush-fire. Hyams’s history was researched by the networks, and the connection with Carmody – his birthplace – was established. From there, it was inevitable that the existence of others like him would be revealed.
But now the time was right. Something had changed on Deucalion during the Time of Crystal . . .
Natasha Eiken, in her famous account of the period, Standing on Ararat, wrote:
That is the view from Ararat. Past and future, viewed through the eyes of the survivor . . .
And every Deucalian was a survivor.
The Crystal Death was a horror epidemic unprecedented in the settlement’s – or even Old Earth’s – history. It was a plague of Biblical proportions that had threatened to extinguish all human life on the planet.
But, despite the destruction and the loss of life, and despite the near-breakdown of civilised society, historians agree that those few terrible weeks changed forever the direction we were to follow as a race.
Across Deucalion, the human survivors embraced a new vision: the dream of a fresh and tolerant society; the obligation to break with the mistakes and tragedies of the past.
And into that new vision, the Children of Icarus stepped, fully formed – a reflection of the dream; a living symbol of the future.
If tolerance meant understanding, then Sharing, mind to mind, soul to soul, as the Elokoi had always done, was a path that demanded serious exploration.
Within a few years, what once had seemed an abomination was embraced as the salvation of humanity – the ‘new beginning’ that the early settlers had dreamt of when they named their planet.
During the decades of enforced quarantine and isolation, brought on by the existence of the deadly Crystal in their midst, the humans on Deucalion came to understand what it meant to finally break with the ways of their ancestors.
In the manipulation of one tiny fragment of their complex genetic code, lay the birth of tolerance and justice – the creation, for the first time in human history, of true equality.
In the Shared Thoughtsongs of the alien Elokoi, lay the deeper understanding of what it could mean – should mean – to be human.
Almost as one, they stepped onto the path, their eyes fixed on the future – their children’s future – as they watched over the birth of a new race.
Some, of course, resisted, fearing change, clinging to the mantra of ‘purity and sanctity’, but it was a short-lived resistance. None of the doomsayers’ prophecies came true, and the arguments of the ‘true humans’ – as the traditionalists styled themselves – came to sound more and more hollow. Especially as they were never subjected to the kind of prejudice and discrimination that was the common experience of all other historical minorities.
A few generations of inter-marriage and the super-dominance of the Icaran gene in any offspring led to ever-dwindling pockets of resistance.
By 235AS (2436AD, Earth Standard), the Crystal-decontamination techniques had been perfected and communications with Earth were resumed in full, but given its long history of conflict and entrenched vested interests, acceptance of the ‘Icaran option’ and universal genetic manipulation on the mother-planet was unlikely ever to be easily achieved.
Then, in 251AS (2457AD, Earth Standard), the warp-shuttles from Earth simply stopped arriving. Forty years later, the last of the sub-light-speed C-ships arrived in orbit around Deucalion, then . . . nothing.
The Separation had become a fact.
Background Notes: Factors Leading Up to the Separation:
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p; (Edited crossload [c.9/2/989] from educational thought-sphere 978.234.197.Ea – The Build-Up to the Separation: a Socio-Historical Overview. Author(s) unknown.)
During the decades immediately preceding 2456AD, Earth Standard, the worldwide social upheaval and the internecine warfare between the Great Corporations, saw a breakdown of order across every continent on Earth, with revolutionary movements and civil disobedience reaching epidemic proportions among the semi-starving masses.
In the wake of the Crystal Death on Deucalion, during the years of Crystal-enforced quarantine, the trade moratorium between the two planets had devastating results for the fragile economy of Old Earth. There was increasing competition among the major multinational conglomerates – both for scarce resources and for the dwindling markets. This competition, once hailed as the driving force behind economic and technological progress, erupted regularly into bloodshed and produced acts of cold-blooded corporate assassination and industrial sabotage on a global scale.
So although, in the end, the catastrophe of the Separation came suddenly and unexpectedly, the seeds for its eventual occurrence had been sown many years earlier. Even at the time of the settlement on Deucalion – probably the single greatest triumph of human ingenuity – civilisation on Earth was already in danger of falling into serious decline.
Of course, such trends are easier to see with the benefit of hindsight. However, historians generally agree that the decades around the turn of the twenty-first century AD, Earth Standard (c.150-100BS), formed the crucial period, leading to the inevitable social disintegration that occurred over the succeeding centuries. The events of the twenty-fifth, they argue, were inevitable, given the grave mistakes made in the preceding centuries.
As with the Fall of Rome – one of Earth’s great proto- civilisations – two thousand years earlier, the decline began gradually and gathered momentum over decades and centuries, until nothing could be done to arrest the slide. Certainly not by those in the positions of power among the Great Corporations, who effectively ruled the world from the mid-twenty-first century on.
Dreams of the Chosen Page 31