Cytheria: Rise of the Concordium...
Johnny1a
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/browse_thread/thread/7dea075d63bc7b7e?hl=en
and
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/browse_thread/thread/bb24099160f09766?hl=en&tvc=2
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The year 4750 B.C., as reckoned in the Gregorian Calendar, was a
momentous year in the long history of the planet Cytheria, a year as
important in its own way as the impact of the Great Dying or the
ancient supernova that had reshaped life on the planet. In the year
4750 B.C., a wave-front of psychic activity swept across the Aphrodite
System, and when it touched Cytheria (Aphrodite IV), it made a
tremendous change. The passing of this waveof psychic activity
‘awakened’ conscious intelligence on Cytheria. [1]
This was a much more complex thing than it might first appear, because
there were many different sorts of potential intelligences on Cytheria
waiting to be ‘awakened’. The reason for this embarrassment of riches
on one world was the fungal superorganism that had dominated the
biosphere for millions of years. In the process of adapting itself
and the biosphere to its needs, there had been side-effects of various
sorts, of awe inspiring degrees of complexity. Several different
species existed within the biosphere, independent of the central
organism, with sufficient neurological and psychic organization to
permit consciousness. The wave front, as it passed across Cytheria in
a few millionths of second, awakened them all, with varying results.
The largest of the organisms to be Awakened was that superorganism
that we have been calling ‘the Thing’ in earlier discussions of
Cytheria. It had long had sufficient, and more than sufficient,
neurological organization to support the _possibility_ of
consciousness, not that possibility had moved to actuality. The
immediate result was chaos, the biosphere was intricately
interconnected with the Thing, and over the course of Terran century
or so, it went mad as the new awareness organized itself and came to
terms with its own consciousness. The civilizations of Man suffered
enormously in this time, there were massive population loses and
civilization would not begin to seriously recover for nearly one
thousand Terran years.
1]
At the same time, along with part the fungal superorganism, the vast
swamps of the continental and coastal lowlands were home to another
species of potential intelligence. This organism was known to the
Homosentient population of Cytheria from long experience as a
potentially dangerous predator, but one which was rarely encountered
away from the deep swamps and bogs that were its natural habitat.
Now, though, this formerly animal-intelligent predator was suddenly
displaying intelligence and awareness to closely match that of Man, as
well as what appeared to be an implacable hostility. The
Homosentients of Cytheria called this creature in their own language
by a word close to a _shryn_. [2]
In those same swamps, there was another species that now Awakened,
amid the chaos of the time, this creature was also well-known to the
Homosentients, not as a predator but as a harmless and retiring plant-
eater that preferred broad, shallow swamps. The creature actually
bore a vague resemblance to a small sauropod, but it was in fact fully
mammalian, though it lacked fur, having instead a thick layer of
hide. This creature too now suddenly changed, its behavior becoming
orders of magnitude more complex, though it was not anything like as
dangerous to Homosentients as the suddenly all-too-intelligent shryn.
The local Homosentient population called the herbivorous (and
frugivorous) creatures by a word we can Anglicize as _tavori_, or ‘a
tavor’ as the singular. [2]
Yet a fourth new form of Awakened intelligence was in its own way as
alien to Homosentients as the great fungal supermind was. There was a
species of ant-like insect, dwelling on one of the swelteringly hot
land masses in the tropical zone of Cytheria, which already led a
unique lifestyle compared to its various kin, and the passage of the
psychic wave-front produced radical changes in this species as well.
The local Homosentients, at that time, had no idea that these
creatures even existed, and so had no specific name for them. This
was due to their location, the tropic zone was a region only visited
by Homosentients at that time, its land masses were not permanently
settled and still far from fully explored in 4750 B.C.
Of all the life-forms Awakened by the shock wave, however, by _far_
the most significant of them was the great, globe-girdling, fungal
superorganism that by this time stretched all through the ocean
floors, under the land masses, through the vast swamps and bogs,
indeed it reached almost from pole to pole. This newly conscious
organism took many Terran years simply to comprehend that it now
comprehended its own existence, and more time was required before it
was able to conceptualize what it meant by the concept of ‘I’, and
still more to fully differentiate itself from other organisms.
This last was made the more complex by the fact that the Thing itself
was a complex and highly variegated assemblage of different kinds of
life, all interconnected by its fungal core. It took time simply for
the new mind to figure out, to determine, what living matter was
definitely part of itself, what was definitely separate, and then to
sort through and conceptualize the special cases that fell into
neither category neatly.
Well over one hundred Terran years after it first Awakened, the fungal
organism created what we would call a name for itself, though it was
more a symbol than a word as such. For convenience, that symbol might
be rendered as a sound that carried part of the meaning, and we would
write it as: ‘Cythorax’. [3]
MORE LATER.
[1] This wave-front was, of course, the psychic shock wave generated
by the Downfall of Atlantis on Earth.
[2] In the case of both species, the precise pronunciation would be
difficult to express using the standard Roman alphabet, the words
given are the closest English equivalent in terms of pronunciation.
[3] The creature’s own symbol for itself shared a sense with its
symbol for the planet on which it lived, and so the word we assign it
shares a sense with the name we use for that planet.
Johnny1a
Cythorax was a unique entity, even on Cytheria, and certainly by
Galactic standards. Nowhere else in the Galaxy did Solarigen life
take a form even slightly similar to this vast, planet-wide fungal/
symbiotic entity. It was, by far, the most massive Solarigen organism
in the Galaxy, even allowing for disputes about the definition of the
word 'organism'. It was probably the oldest multicellular Solarigen
life-form in the Galaxy as well, again allowing for cavils about
definitions.
One of the oddities of this vast life-form was that it was so rarely
visible on the surface of the planet. Even though it stretched
through every ocean, through the vast networks of swamps that covered
so much of the land surface, plunged deep into underground reaches of
the crust, and extended up through underground passages and channels
even into the deep continental interiors, it was almost always covered
by water, mud, swampy bog, or solid soil or rock. Only in widely
scattered places did some tiny, visible portion of the vast creature
emerge into the open air of Cytheria. Even in these places, what was
visible rarely gave any hint of the vast scale of complexity that lay
beneath.
Further, the vast living complex of Cythorax was changing,
reorganizing itself, after its Awakening. New biological structures
were growing on the floor of the oceans and in the depths of the
swamps, structures of greater complexity, greater scale, more
subtlety. What amounted to immense ‘sponge computers’ were growing in
the open oceans, deep beneath the surface, adding more processing
power to the newborn awareness of the Cythorax. New _kinds_ of fungus
were being added to the mix, the creature was uniquely well-equipped
to redesign and upgrade itself, and now it was doing so at a
tremendous rate.
As it did so, Cythorax was also observing the universe around it,
using both a myriad of purely physical senses and its potent newborn
ESP abilities as well. Cythorax found that it was able to observe
almost any point on the surface of the planet in extreme detail, and
even to look beyond the planet using ESP and its visual senses, which
it was rapidly refining and improving as its grasp of the nature of
light improved.
These visual observation points were among the few places where the
creature emerged from the depths, fungal masses that included layers
of optically-transparent tissue not entirely unlike that of the
vertebrate eye, these eye-like organs could be likened to living
telescopes with ‘lenses’ ten meters in diameter, they had both
exquisite sensitivity and tremendous resolution. Their sensitivity
band reached across the entire tight range Homosentients consider
‘visible’, and deep into the ultra-violet and infra-red frequency
bands.
For the most part Cythorax extruded these observation organs far from
other intelligence, but even so they were occasionally observed by the
remaining Homosentient population, giving rise to some odd legends.
The ESP ability of the global supermind was far more extensive than
its ability to perceive light. When it first Awakened and organized
its consciousness sufficiently to make any use of its ESP, it found
that it could reach out to a distance of about ten planetary diameters
fairly easily. Though its range was far greater than comparable ESP
abilities in Homosentient psions, the ‘intensity’ was not to scale
with the greater range, which had a number of secondary implications.
[1]
Cythorax also discovered, as it experimented with itself and its
surroundings, that it had other abilities that Homosentients would
call psychic in nature. About a century after it was Awakened, it
discovered that it had psychokinetic abilities, and that these had in
fact manifested many, many times over the millions of years of the
existence of the Thing, but the now-conscious Cythorax required some
Terran decades to begin to master the skills associated with
intentionally using these abilities. Cythorax found that with its
innate psychokinetic powers, strength rose much more easily than the
skills needed for finely detailed control.
Cythorax also began to manifest telepathic abilities, which like its
esper talent, displayed a range far greater than the other aspects of
the ability would have normally indicated. As with psychokinesis,
however, the necessary _skill_ to use the ability required much time
for Cythorax to master.
The later ability was also difficult to use because of the enormous
‘scale gap’ between Cythorax and the other conscious minds on
Cytheria. It was not so much that Cythorax was more intelligent,
though in some ways it was, than the other minds. It was that
Cythorax was vastly larger, its scale of awareness was larger, it
thought on a longer time scale (and more slowly) than any Tavor,
Shryn, or any of the other intellects now to be found on Cytheria. [2]
The result of this scale gap was that Cythorax could _sense_ the
presence of and some of the thoughts of the other sapients, but
directly conscious communication was quite difficult. It was
difficult for Cythorax to even focus on one single sapient, in
something like the way it would be difficult for a Homosentient to
focus on one single bacterium without instruments. The comparison is
imperfect but accurate within its limits, and worked both ways. Just
as it was difficult for Cythorax to focus on just one conventional
sapient being, it was likewise difficult for any sapient to fully
grasp the scale of the fungal supermind, or to do anything sufficient
to even capture the full attention of such a vast, slow mind.
As time passed, Cythorax found that both its telepathic and ESP
abilities increased, expanding the volume of space-time that it could
‘observe’. Its initial ten-diameter ESP range increased to one
hundred diameters less than a century after Cythorax first learned how
to use its ESP at all. Another century or so gave Cythorax ESP range
that spanned the inner reaches of the Aphrodite System, and by five
centuries after the Awakening, Cythorax was using ESP to probe the
double gas-giant that dominated the outer star system.
In tandem with the increase in spatial range, Cythorax gained the
ability to looked into the future and the past, precognition and
postcognition. [2] These skills are harder by nature, and less
certain, indeed as range increases both abilities reveal not ‘the’
past or future’, but rather ‘potential pasts’ and ‘potential
futures’. The range of Cythorax was sufficient, however, to permit it
to ‘observe’ the crash landing of the Hegemonic starship that had
first brought Homosentients to Cytheria, tens of thousands of years
earlier.
MORE LATER.
[1] In GURPS 3e terms, this means that Cythorax had a lower ESP Power
than the range implied, with an increased range enhancement.
[2] The ‘distributed brain’ that was the basis of Cythorax was spread
all across the planet, it took _time_ for impulses to work their way
through its networks, time for thoughts to percolate. Cythorax was
hugely intelligent, but it thought very _slowly_ compared to
Homosentients, Tavori, and the other sapients that called the planet
home.
[3] In the past I have said that ‘retrogression’ doesn’t exist in my
world, that refers only to the ability to read an ‘object’s’ past or
future.
Johnny1a
strength and the necessary associated skills to be able to 'perceive'
the arrival of Homosentients on Cytheria, which had occurred in the
Gregorian year 31,251 B.C., some twenty-seven thousand Terran years
earlier, a little over fourteen thousand Cytherian years. Only a tiny
speck of time, compared to the length of time that Cythorax had been
in existence, though a long period compared to its brief period of
sapient awareness.
Cythorax had long since deduced by ongoing observation of the
Cytherian biosphere that the Homosentient population was not really
‘at home’ there, that is, they were so poorly adapted to the local
environment that they could not possibly have evolved in place.
Cythorax had memories stretching far back before its time of sapience,
though the pre-sapient memories were less well-organized and less
information-dense than those it had formed since 4750 B.C. Cythorax
thus had a good understanding of the basic elements of evolution,
since it could _remember_ ongoing evolutionary changes in itself and
its surrounding environs.
When it turned its postcognitive awareness back across time to the
period when it vaguely half-remembered the first traces of
Homosentience, it was able to ‘observe’ the crash-landing of the
damaged starship aboard which the various Homosentient species of
Cytheria had arrived. The fungal supermind observed in fascination
across the millennia as the starship came to a semi-controlled
landing, a monument to the skill of its long-dead crew. It watched as
the descendents of the survivors spread out across first that initial
land mass, than the other land masses of the northern temperate zone,
and then the southern temperate zone. Some of this it ‘watched’ via
post-cognition, some it ‘recalled’ by probing through its presapient
memories.
In its own present, Cythorax examined the site of the ancient crash.
By now, that region was largely a wilderness, the centers of
civilization among the Homosentients had moved long since to other
areas, especially some of the vast river valleys, leaving the
highlands of the crash site largely abandoned. The remains of the
former starship now lay buried deep under thick layers of soil and
jungle, the residual radiation from the power cores long since
dissipated, the toxins leached away by near-constant local rainfall.
The site was, to the untrained eye, little different than any other
place in those northern jungles.
The only local Homosentients were a few tribes of stone-age technology
jungle-dwellers, shunning the more sophisticated cultures elsewhere on
continent, and they tended to stay near the local rivers, rather than
in the region of the crash site. After nearly thirty thousand years,
nothing about the site remained significant to the Homosentients of
Cytheria, it was long since lost even to myth.
Cythorax probed the site with ESP, and physical senses, and found that
beneath the surface, there were a number of surviving fragments of the
former starship. Fascinated, Cythorax probed deeper, and the vast
intellect began to grasp some of the concepts embodied in the ruin.
Two hundred years after its study began, the site was criss-crossed by
fungal sensor filaments attuned to detect the tiniest details of
chemistry, structure, and energy. The ESP field of Cythorax was so
concentrated around the site that even the slightest change was sensed
almost instantly.
By 3500 B.C., Cythorax had deciphered enough of the principles behind
the old spacecraft to have at least a theoretical comprehension of
rocketry, some of the basics of metallurgy, and quite a bit of
chemistry. It had also come to the conclusion that to apply what it
was learning, it would need something more precise and versatile than
its psychokinesis. As it studied the matter, it also studied the
other sapients of Cytheria, at first without their knowledge, and then
later with at least some awareness on their parts, as the supermind
developed sufficient telepathic finesse to make successful direct
contacts without driving the other party mad or killing them. The
relationship between Cythorax and the other beings of Cytheria became
complex.
Cythorax concluded that it needed a way to deal more directly, more
easily, with the other sapients, as well as a way to more easily make
direct use of tools and technology. How to actually _do_ this puzzled
Cythorax for roughly a Terran century. The solution it finally
reached involved a massive breeding project.
The end result of this breeding project would eventually be called
Shadowswimmers by Terrans.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1a
NOTE: Information regarding the Shadowswimmers/Shadowhunters can be
found here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/browse_frm/thread/6ac762bfe60ffd58?hl=en#
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With the assistance of the Shadowswimmers, Cythorax was able to put
what it had learned in theory about science and technology to the
test...and it quickly discovered that a huge gap existed between
theory and practice, it was forced to repeatedly return to the
'drawing board' in a metaphorical sense, as experiment showed the
enormous gaps in its understanding. Still, the vast intellect of
Cythorax had both enormous resources and effectively unlimited time,
and now possessed an entire species of intelligent, loyal servants and
assistants. Though at first progress was halting and uncertain, it
began to accelerate as time passed.
As the newly sapient Shadowswimmers began to spread out along the
coasts and vast shallow seas of the southern hemisphere of Cytheria,
their initially crude cities began to grow and become more
sophisticated. Where they expanded, the Homosentient population
tended to retreat over time, both because the Shadowswimmers were
superbly adapted to their preferred habitat, and because the
Shadowswimmers soon were in possession of technology superior to
anything in the hands of the Cytherian Homosentients. The
Homosentients of the southern hemisphere found themselves increasingly
restricted to the relatively small highlands and mountain regions
where the Shadowswimmers were ill-adapted and uninterested.
In terms of the Gregorian Calendar, it would have been approximately
the year 300 B.C. when Cythorax Awakened the first generation of
Shadowswimmers. Within two Terran centuries, the population of
Shadowswimmers had grown to more than a million, spread all over the
southern hemisphere of Cytheria. Their largest city, in the shallow
flooded continental shelves near the islands where they were bred and
‘Awakened’ had a population of 25,000 and was still growing. Their
technology had advanced to the point that the Shadowswimmers were
using gunpowder weaponry and crude steam technology on a routine
basis, while Cythorax and the theoreticians of the Shadowswimmers were
designing much more advanced equipment. The Shadowswimmers were by
far the most advanced sapients on Cytheria. [1]
Cythorax was not fully satisfied with even this level of
accomplishment, however. Along with its steady progress in mastering
‘conventional’ technology, Cythorax had achieved a level of control
over many of the biological processes that sustained it that was
greater than most organisms could ever approach. It had learned how
to ‘grow’ biological structures that could be separated from their
‘parent’ structure (a part of Cythorax itself that it had grown from
its own mass) to exist as independent entities. These beings were
both more intelligent than most Shadowswimmers and more dexterous and
physically capable. They were not trivial to create, requiring
considerable attention and effort from the fungal mind, and often
requiring multiple attempts for each successful new organism, but
these creatures were _very_ useful to Cythorax.
Cythorax created the first such creature somewhere in the general
neighborhood of the Gregorian year B.C. 375, after over one thousand
failed attempts and well over fifty Terran years of effort. The
second such creature required another few decades and still more
hundreds of failed attempts, but Cythorax slowly and steadily refined
the process, until it could at last grow such a being in less than
Cytherian year and with a success rate of over one in four. It would
be centuries before it improved on this, but this was quite sufficient
for Cythorax to ‘grow’ a cadre of some hundreds of such creatures.
These creatures would be referred to by any number of names, by the
native Cytherian Homosentients and by various Terrans when they
eventually came into contact. The name most commonly used by the
Homosentients of Cytheria would Anglicize as something like ‘Rygorth’,
and we shall follow their lead. [2]
The Rygorth came to occupy a position with regard to Cythorax that
might be considered ‘proxies’, or perhaps lieutenants. Within the
ranks of Shadowswimmer society, the Rygorth were revered and held
positions of nearly unquestionable authority, seen as being extensions
of Cythorax itself. This was not _absolutely_ true, but it did come
close to being accurate.
With both the Rygorth and the Shadowswimmers serving it, Cythorax was
able to begin epic-scale projects.
Though Cythorax was almost immeasurably more powerful than any other
sapience of Cytheria, supported by the technologically adept
Shadowswimmers, it had enemies it could not easily eliminate. These
enemies were the Shryn.
LATER.
[1] For a specific comparison, as of ~500 B.C. the Shadowswimmers were
about TL4 (GURPS 3e) and the Tavori and Homosentients were both
roughly TL2 at their highest. (Many of the Homosentients, especially
in the southern hemisphere, were TL0.)
[2] The word Rygorth is both singular and plural.
Johnny1a
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/browse_frm/thread/b0dabeb1106580dd/4c52fe2e1ce01e86?hl=en#4c52fe2e1ce01e86
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LATER.
The Shryn had Awakened at the same time as Cythorax itself, though
what was not immediately known was that this Awakening had been
different than those of the other sapients of Cytheria. Indeed,
Cythorax did not even realize that the Shryn _existed_ as a sapient
species until thousands of years after it and they had Awakened,
because the Shryn were initially few in number, and well-concealed by
their own efforts.
The first full awareness that Cythorax had of the existence of the
Shryn came around what Terrans would call the year 250 B.C., give or
take a few Terran years. Cythorax had long been aware that
_something_ was at work interfering with its own projects and even
attacking those bits of it that were ‘vulnerable’ above the surface of
the land or in the shallows of the oceans. These attacks were never
serious, even collectively they were of no more real significance to
the planet-spanning fungal organism that a single parasitic insect
bite would be to a Homosentient. Indeed, the later comparison
exaggerates the actual damage by a considerable margin. Still, the
attacks were annoying and occasionally rose to the level of a real
nuisance, when the damage was done to some organ or component that was
engaged in a key activity.
More significantly, Cythorax found its _projects_ sabotaged, in ways
that went beyond what could to any reasonable degree be ascribed to
anything but intelligent planning. The sabotage was usually subtle,
and generally effective, though more often than not the damage was
done over time, by the cumulative effect of many _small_ interferences
coming together to produce large problems. Cythorax was by no means
unaware of the possibility of sapient sabotage, it was certainly quite
well aware of the existence of the various Homosentients and the newly
sapient Tavori with which it shared Cytheria.
Unfortunately for Cythorax, it was quite clear that neither of those
known species could be the source of its problems. The Homosentients
lacked the technology to enable them to even attempt such sabotage.
The Tavori, with their potent psionic powers, could have done _some_
of it, but there was no evidence that they were in any way involved,
and even their powers would not have permitted them to do all of what
had been done, especially the sabotage that had been performed at
considerable depths below the ocean surface.
What frustrated Cythorax was that try though it might, it could not
determine what agency was engaging in the sabotage, for all its vast
sensory abilities, both physical and paraphysical, it was never quite
able to pin down the malefactor. Sometimes, very occasionally,
Cythorax would catch a hint of something with its purely physical
senses, a bit of motion, a shadow in the darkness hundreds of meters
below the surface of the sea, but never enough to do anything with and
never _anything_ with its usually more useful psychic perceptions. It
was only after Cythorax Awakened its Shadowswimmer servitors that it
finally managed to discover what sort of creature had been giving it
problems for thousands of Terran years.
Once Cythorax had a force of thousands of loyal Shadowswimmers in
play, matters finally changed. Unlike Cythorax itself, the
Shadowswimmers could readily operate on the same scale as the beings
causing the problem, and though their psychic senses also had some
difficulty in detecting the unknown beings, the difficulty was far
less than that experienced by Cythorax itself.
The actual first ‘contact’ finally came when a force of a dozen
Shadowswimmers called out to Cythorax for attention, drawing the
awareness of the supermind to a point on the night side of Cytheria,
where dawn was still some hours away, underwater above a vast flooded
continental plain. About fifty meters below the surface, in the inky
darkness, the Shadowswimmers had been engaged in routine maintenance
of one of the vast zoological experimentation complexes Cythorax
maintained when they discovered a group of intruders and found
themselves engaged in combat. Caught by surprise, the larger
Shadowswimmer force took the worst of the fight, losing three of their
own in the process as most of the smaller group of unknowns made their
escape. This time, however, the Shadowswimmers did capture a live
prisoner.
This prisoner was, of course, the first Shryn that the Shadowswimmers
and Cythorax had ever knowingly encountered, and many questions would
be answered during the ensuing interrogation.
Most of that interrogation consisted of a fairly intensive but
otherwise straightforward telepathic probe of the mind of the
prisoner. It was none too gentle, and more difficult than Cythorax
and the Shadowswimmers had expected, but they did learn a great deal
before their prisoner suddenly expired in the midst of the process.
This was not intentional on the part of the interrogators, but it
would prove to be a common occurrence when Shryn were mentally
manhandled or probed. [1][2]
Cythorax was fascinated in a scientific and intellectual sense to
discover a new sapient species, but at the same time it was disturbed
at what it had learned. It was worrying that a species of sapients
existed that was so utterly hostile, and possessed of considerable
talent in exerting their hostility. It was disturbing to discover
that these beings existed in numbers and with resources Cythorax could
not define. It was still more disturbing that they seemed to have an
innate ability to elude and evade the psychic senses that made
Cythorax so nearly omnisciently aware of most of what occurred on
Cytheria.
The realization that these odd beings had been free to work against
Cythorax almost entirely unopposed for thousands of Cytherian years,
however, that was almost enough to induce genuine fear in Cythorax.
MORE LATER.
[1] In the Orichalcum Universe, telepathy can’t _compel_ information
from an unwilling, actively resisting mind, but sufficient mental
pressure can be applied to drive the mind to yield. (This is
different than subtle, delicate probing of an unaware mind.)
[2] Shryn have such an intense psychological aversion to non-Shryn
intelligence, _especially_ Cythorax, that they often undergo an
involuntary lethal mental collapse during extended or deep telepathic
contact.
Johnny1a
Cythorax immediately began to take counter-measures, but it was
seriously hampered by the difficulties it experienced with its psionic
senses. Cythorax was accustomed to the use of psi senses, to relying
upon them, and the Shryn displayed an uncanny knack for evading these
senses. This was made the more confusing by the fact that the
Shadowswimmers, with almost incomparably weaker psychic perceptions,
were more able to detect and discern the Shryn than Cythorax itself.
The Shadowswimmers did incur _some_ difficulty in their efforts, but
nothing to compare to the near invisibility the Shryn possessed to the
senses of Cythorax itself. The reason for this dichotomy left
Cythorax utterly without a clue.
The Shadowswimmers were able to perceive the Shryn dimly with their
paraphysical senses, far moreso than their creator could do, and of
course the Shryn were fully perceptible physically. Unfortunately the
deep, dark waters in which most of the struggle occurred were not well
suited to the use of vision. The Shryn engaged in most of their
activities against Cythorax by night, rendering vision even less
useful.
Sound was far more useful, and both the Shryn and the Shadowswimmers
were adept in the use of it. The sense of smell was also useful at
short distances and over short periods of time, though it was more of
a chemosensitivity to the waters than true scent in the Homosentient
sense. Both species had the ability to make artificial light
underwater, but the Shryn were more adept in the darkness from long
practice. Further, the Shryn had by now been waging a slow, quiet,
steady secret war against Cythorax, the Shadowswimmers, and for that
matter the Homosentients and Tavori for centuries. They were much
more practiced in the arts of such conflict than Cythorax and its
Shadowswimmers.
In fact, most of the war experience available to the Shryn in such
matters was based on their war against Cythorax and the
Shadowswimmers. Their hatred certainly extended to the other sapients
of Cytheria, but they interacted with Homosentients for the most part
only as hunter and prey near the coasts, and with the Tavori only in
extremely rare instances. Homosentients made dangerous but ‘tasty’
prey when encountered near the coasts, while the rare encounter with a
Tavor usually ended badly for the Shryn involved. [1]
With time, the Shadowswimmers improved, learning from experience, and
began to discover useful things about their enemies. The Shryn
‘cities’ were vast warrens of hive-like corridors and chambers, grown
out of a local life form somewhat analogous to coral (though a closer
genetic relative of the coelenterates). They tended to be located on
the edge of the deepest parts of the vast flooded continental shelf-
lands that made up so much of Cytheria, near the edge of the true
continental slopes.
Once these ‘cities’ (the term is imperfect for a number of reasons)
proved a further frustration. Cythorax would normally have been able
to simply obliterate them, once it knew their locations. It made the
attempt, only to discover that not only were its psychic _senses_
scrambled by individual Shryn, but they had a means to shield their
‘cities’ as well against its psychokinetic attacks. The psychokinetic
power available to Cythorax could easily have surpassed the
destructive force of a multi-megaton nuclear weapon...save that this
power simply faded away, vanished, when directed against those areas
in which the Shryn lived.
The power could be used _indirectly_, but it was far less effective in
that way. Efforts to use psychokinesis to direct wave and current and
quake against the targets sometimes worked, but were inefficient and
tended to do damage but not to destroy the target. Further, the
psychic interference the Shryn produced was entirely sufficient to
make it close to impossible for Cythorax to accurately target its
powers against them.
Thus the Shadowswimmers were forced to launch direct attacks, sapient-
to-sapient combat, in the depths of the seas. This process was
difficult and bloody, and the outcomes were often frustratingly
indecisive. Sometimes these attacks succeeded in penetrating and
destroying a Shryn ‘city’, sometimes they repelled with no damage,
sometimes the outcome lay between these two extremes. Always the
attacks were expensive in blood and treasure, the Shryn were defending
familiar ‘ground’ and the Shadowswimmers had all the disadvantages of
the attacker working against them. Further, to the dismay of Cythorax
and the Shadowswimmers, it soon became apparent that the Shryn were
technologically skilled and could build and maintain weapons and
defenses almost equal to those available to the Shadowswimmers.
Once they realized that their advantage of secrecy had been removed by
discovery, the Shryn displayed an excellent tactical flexibility and
competence. They immediately stepped up all their activities, going
on the offensive rather than ‘hunkering down’. Cythorax and the
Shadowswimmers found that not only were the Shryn a dangerous enemy,
there were far more of them than they had ever dared suspect, the
Shryn were attacking Cythorax and its projects and facilities all over
Cytheria. The Shadowswimmers could not devote their full efforts to
the attack on the Shryn, over half of their combat-capable numbers
were tied down defending against Shryn attacks.
Over the course of the following Cytherian decades, a slow but brutal
and ruthless war was waged between the Shryn and Cythorax and the
Shadowswimmers. At first the advantage swung wildly between first one
side and then the other, but as time passed a bloody stalemate
emerged. Those ‘cities’ of the Shryn that were most vulnerable had
fallen, the remaining ones were too well-defended to be readily
overcome, the most vulnerable fronts on the side of Cythorax had also
either been destroyed or reinforced sufficiently to make them
relatively secure. Attacks were carried out, not entirely without
effect but never with decisive results. The classic ‘arms race’
inevitably ensued, as both sides poured resources into the task of
protecting themselves against their enemies and seeking a decisive
advantage against those same opponents.
Equally inevitably, the conflict began to affect the existences of the
other sapient intelligences of Cytheria.
LATER.
[1] On land, the vast psionic power of a typical Tavor would almost
automatically overcome a lone Shryn.
Johnny1a
The ongoing war between Cythorax and its Shadowswimmers, and the
Shryn, produced a technological 'arms race', as such things tend to
do. This in turn affected the other sapients of Cythorax, of whom we
have already been introduced to two. One of these familiar breeds was
the psionically-potent Tavori and the other was the various
Homosentients, outsiders to Cytheria, descended from a crashed
Hegemonic spacecraft that had arrived on Cytheria many thousands of
Terran years earlier.
The Homosentients had lost much of their former civilization (or
rather civilizations in the plural) in the wild chaos after Cythorax
Awakened. Now, scattered Homosentient tribes and clans had again
settled in areas far from those claimed by the coastal Shadowswimmers
and dangerous Shryn, and combined those parts of their heritage from
before that they still retained with relearned (yet again!) knowledge
to build a new network of societies across the landmasses of both
hemispheres. The northern and southern groups were only sporadically
in contact with each other, because of the difficulty in crossing the
extremely hot tropic zones with their relatively low technology, but
there was more trade and commerce within the hemispheres. The general
technology level of the Homosentients on Cytheria at this time was
just about comparable to that of the most advanced parts of the Roman
Empire at its height. [1]
The Homosentients had difficulties with ocean travel related to the
fact that most of the best coastal lands were firmly in the possession
of the Shadowswimmers, who while not necessarily _hostile_ toward
Homosentients, were not particularly welcoming, either. Those coastal
regions not directly ruled by the Shadowswimmers were often dangerous
because of the Shryn, or too hot or remote to be useful anyway.
The few coastal areas that were both usefully situated and under
Homosentient control were enormously prized, wars were occasionally
fought over them. This was unusual, however, because the
Homosentients found themselves driven toward unity, at a level of
species and overall genus, but the pressures from the newly emerged
native Cytherian intelligences. Eventually, a particularly vigorous
and well-organized realm in the northern hemisphere succeeded in
uniting all the Homosentients of its land mass, something that had not
happened in centuries, and in the ensuing stable peace, technological
progress began to occur.
It was also during this period that a particularly capable ruler of
this particular empire, by a mixture of his own personal foresight,
good management, and sheer luck, managed to establish a working
alliance with the Tavori of that same land-mass. Up until this time,
there had been only limited contact between the two species. They
were rarely directly hostile, the moreso since they preferred very
different types of terrain and home environment, but they did tend to
rather enthusiastically avoid each other.
The Tavori were divided, at this time, into what might be called
‘tribal’ divisions, though that English word has connotations not
really appropriate to the Tavori. They sometimes fought among
themselves, but less often than Homosentients tended to do, but they
did have intense rivalries, often over valuable territory. The
alliance between this particular ‘tribe’ of Tavori and the
Homosentient state that dominated those parts of the continent
suitable for our breed proved fruitful. The combination of
Homosentient hands and Tavori psionics was extremely effective,
whether turned against rival Homosentients or rival Tavori.
When the long war between Cythorax and the Shryn broke out, the
Homosentients and their Tavori allies were not _immediately_ affected,
since the warfare was mostly in the coastal regions. However, before
long the battles had spread to even those few coastal areas controlled
by the Homosentients, and even with Tavori support the technology gap
was far too great to resist. When the war impinged on the land-
dwelling species, they had little choice but to withdraw or be caught
up in a force too powerful to resist.
Still, the alliance advanced, sometimes by actively spying on the
coastal/aquatic peoples, to the limited and
frustrating degree that circumstances permitted. It was of course
difficult for Homosentients to spy on any activity occurring
underwater, and the Tavori, though psychically powerful, had great
difficulty in penetrating the various psionic defenses around the
warring factions. Still, slowly but steadily, the alliance made
progress, partly from observing Shadowswimmer and Shryn technologies
in action, sometimes from study of the rare bit of captured equipment,
and more than either by their own efforts. The alliance had now begun
systematic study of the universe in a formal, rational manner, i.e.
they had developed science.
This is a much rarer development in Homosentient culture than is often
appreciated. Organized science in the Western sense comes far harder
to most cultures than it did to the West, thousands of years can pass
without any appearance of it. All cultures do study nature, and ask
questions, but the sort of systematic, thorough, _organized_
investigations that now occurred on Cytheria were much rarer. Once
they begin, however, and if they are allowed to flourish, the effects
can be very rapid in historical terms.
Over the course of two centuries, the knowledge of the alliance grew
steadily, and the process accelerated when advancing Homosentient/
Tavori knowledge enabled them to begin to really _comprehend_ what the
Shadowswimmers and Shryn already had.
By about B.C. 150, the Homosentient/Tavori alliance had begun to
experiment seriously with steam power, and had become sufficiently
advanced to be useful as trade partners to the Shadowswimmers. The
Shryn did not engage in trade with the other intelligences of
Cytheria, their only interaction with them was driven primarily by
their instinctive hostility. This trade relationship opened up more
of the coasts to the alliance, and in the ensuing Terran century or
so, the alliance rapidly subdued or overawed the other, far less
advanced Homosentient cultures of both the northern and the southern
hemispheres.
It was during this period that open contact began between Cythorax and
the alliance, mediated by the powerful psionic abilities of the
Tavori. The result was a cautious larger alliance, adding the
resources of the Homosentients and Tavori to the battle against the
Shryn. This proved extremely effective.
MORE LATER.
[1] At times in Cytherian history, the Homosentients had achieved
higher levels, only to lose most of that in the chaos around 4750 B.C.