The Eosians...

[Johnny1A.2]

OK, the story I've been telling in two previous threads picks up here. The previous threads are:

The Helians

The Solarigens

For a brief background about the 'Eldren' see:

The Orichaclum Universe...Basics

OK, for those still interested, on with the story...
--------------------------

To begin with, let us consider the species Homo eostellaris. This is a
species of sapient near-humans, a sibling species of Homo sapiens.
They are not interfertile with humans (H. sapiens), though certainly similar
enough that members of either species might find a member of the other
sexually attractive and physically/genitally compatible. They are in fact
quite close enough for a member of either species to be mistaken for a
member of the other species if the observer in question did not know the
traits to look for to differentiate the two.

Note that the species name was assigned in violation of the accepted practice
of taxonomical nomenclature, since H. eostellaris is not the ancestral
species of the genus. The name refers to their role in the history of the Homosapients
rather than their genetic role, and was in fact assigned by a layman.

Note that just as the word ‘human’ is (technically improperly) colloquially used to
refer to members of the species H. sapiens, the term ‘Eostellarian’ means the same
thing in regard to a member of the species H. eostellaris.

(These are 22nd century English terms, of course, used for our convenience.)

Homo eostellaris (H. eostellaris)

A typical member of H. eostellaris has ST+2, DX+1, HT-1, and standard IQ.

Average height: Male 6'6" Female 6'1"

A typical H. eostellaris has Alertness 1; Acute Vision 1; and Disease
Resistance. A typical H. eostellaris also has Full Colorblindness; and Night
Blindness.[1]

They have Racial Advantage: Limited Optical UV/Brightness
Resistance: +2 [1]

They have Racial Disadvantage: Limited Fertility -2 [2]

In appearance, Eostellarians look like tall, slender humans, but their
skin tones range from an olive-brown to an intense brown, and their
eyes are universally blue. The females have hair colors ranging from
black to auburn-brown, blondes are unknown among them. The are
stronger on average than they look, with a lean strength, and they
tend to be energetic. Their natural, unaugmented lifespan is comparable
to that of H. sapiens.

[Some additional miscellany is listed under note 3.]

NOTE:

[1] One of the genes for color vision is on the 'X' chromosome in primates,
(which is believed to be the reason why color-blindness is more common
in males). In H. eostellaris, that gene sequence was altered by the
sudden environmental changes the original forced-colonists went
through when the Eldren dropped them on their new homeworld ~70,000
years ago. (Their original ancestors, like all species of Genus Homo,
were Terran). They were already a separate species from H. sapiens
when the Eldren removed them from Earth, and the genetic drift
accelerated in their new environment.

The gene sequence change made their vision more reliable by
compensating for a deficiency in their new diet, but it also wiped out
much of their ability to perceive color. Later, nature compensated by
boosting their overall alertness to sensory data. They're hard to
sneak up on.

Their planet's primary is a hotter star than Sol, with a higher UV
flux. The species compensated by growing darker over the generations,
and developing eyes highly resistant to UV damage and bright light.

Their home world is closer to the center of the Galaxy than Sol, and
has two satellites. Further, much of the 'native' plant-life (also
derived in the ancient past from Earth, but far more distantly) is
bioluminescent. The result of the combination of brighter star,
satellites, and luminous plant-life was that there was little
advantage to developing night-vision, and H. eostellaris as a species
have poor night vision compared to H. sapiens.


[2] Female eostellarians have a fertility cycle much longer than that of
H. sapiens, becoming fertile usually only once a year. The
reproductive cycle will move into alignment with local spring in
whatever environment the female finds herself living in. This caused
them considerable difficulties when they first entered space, since
absent the triggering stimuli of 'spring-like' climate, the fertility
cycle tends to go awry. The fertile period is narrow, and in even at
peak eostellarian females are less fertile than human females.
Gestation requires approximately the same time in eostellarians and
humans.

[3] There were a few other odd mutations that accumulated over the course
of their adaptation to their new home planet, Eosia/Eos IV. The males
lost practically all their body hair to a chance change on the Y
chromosome that produced an enzyme that didn't mix well with hair
follicles. Only one eostellarian male in 100,000 or so possesses any body,
head, or facial hair.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Thousands of light-years from Sol there is to be found a star that Terrans
would come to call, in the fullness of time, Eos. (Along with a formal
catalog number in a star atlas.) This star was so named it was the central
sun of the star system in which would rise the first Homosapient starfaring
civilization, centered on the planet Eos IV. Terran historians would in due
time come to call this world ‘Eosia’.

(The locals certainly had their own languages and names, but for our own
convenience we will use the Terran names...usually.)

SYSTEM INFORMATION FOR EOS:

Star Name: Eos
Star Type: Lower border of spectral class 'F'.
Number of Planets: 12


Eos I: Ultra-hot rockball diameter 4800 miles
Eos II: Hot rockball diameter 4300 miles
Eos III: Desert-hot body with thin atmosphere diameter 6730 miles
Eos IV: EOSIA Earth-like world, diameter 7476 miles
Eos V: Earth-like world, diameter 7383 miles
Eos VI: Small gas giant
Eos VII: Huge gas giant with small gas giant satellite
Eos VIII: Small gas giant
Eos IX: Iceball
Eos X: Small gas giant
Eos XI: Small gas giant
Eos XII: Large gas giant

PLANETARY INFORMATION for EOSIA/EOS IV


Planet Type: Earth-like
Diameter: 7476 miles
Surface Gravity: .97 Terran
Composition: Medium-iron
Axial Tilt: 26 degrees
Seasonal Variation: Earth-like
Length of Day: 25.3 hours
Length of Year: 1.45 Earth-years*
Atmospheric Pressure: .98 Earth
Climate: Warm Earth-like temp-range 70-80-110
Surface Water: 67%
Gems/Crystals: Plentiful
Rare Minerals: Ample
Radioactives: Ample
Heavy Metals: Ample
Industrial Metals: Ample
Light Metals: Ample
Organics: Plentiful
Moons: Avros Diameter 194 miles; Ashtra Diameter 309 miles
Biosphere: Mixed Terran derivation

Eosia was originally a dry-terrestrial world, with no significant
presence of volatiles such as water. About 180 million years ago, the
Eldren terraformed both Eosia and its sister world Eos V, giving both
worlds extensive hydrospheres and breathable atmospheres based on
those of Earth. Then Eosia was 'seeded' with an initial range of
lifeforms from Earth, including many dinosaur species, this being
approximately the Jurassic Period. Plant life included various
carboniferous forms, among others.

Over the course of the following megayears, successive additional
waves of new 'seedling' species were added by the Eldren supervising
their hobby. Cretaceous species from Earth were brought in, and the
original Jurassic species speciated and evolved. Later additions were
sporadic, resulting in a highly mixed ecosystem. Extinction events
occurred in different times and for different reasons on Eosia,
resulting in a different evolutionary history.

The crocodilians transplanted to Eosia did especially well, speciating
into a huge variety of forms, and they remained the top predators for
millions of years, rivalled only by a genus descended from the
carnosaurs, but which had difficulty in adapting to the hotter
planetary climate.

By the time the Eldren noted that intelligent life had evolved on
Earth, and transplanted some to Eosia, the local ecosphere had
stabilized itself and was operating according to its own dynamic. The
species placed on Eosia, Homo eostellaris, grew to civilization
in a world in which they were the only placental mammals, though
marsupial mammals were common, filling many niches that on modern
Earth are filled by placentals. There were marsupial predators and
herbivores, though no marsupial predator was able to dislodge a local
species of uber-crocodile from the top predator position. This did
not occur until H. eostellaris began developing a civilization.

Eosia has four major continents, innumerable islands, and every
variety of terrain found on Earth except ice/tundra. Eosia has not
experienced a glacial period since it was terraformed, and even the
poles are ice-free (for that matter, geological evidence suggests that
Earth was largely ice-free for most of its history).

The warmer climate spawns storms, and coastal regions experience
hurricanes and other tropical weather disturbances averaging more
intense and more common than matching Terran environments. The
current continental configuration produces currents that distribute
heat a bit more evenly than on Earth, resulting in relatively warm
coastal climates even in the high latitudes.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The H. eostellaris 'colony' brought to Eosia by the Eldren was placed
on a large island to the west of a southern continent. It had a
tropical environment, and the Eldren cleared it of major predators to
give the TL0 humans a chance of survival. The entire species-
population of H. eostellaris was transplanted to this island by the
Eldren, a group numbering only a few tens of thousands.

The island, about the size of Great Britain, proved to be a survivable
environment, though their initial losses were horrible. But they did
survive, and over several generations began adapting to their new
home. By 1000 years after their arrival, their numbers were up to a
higher level than when they were brought to Eosia.

Once they learned the ways of the new environment, considerable food
was available by hunter-gatherer means, and thanks to the Eldren,
there were few predators, and for the first time in their history,
they were free of niche-competition from other human species, esp. H.
sapiens. All this helped offset their relatively low fertility,
enabling them to survive, and eventually thrive, in their new home.

Naturally, the freedom from predators couldn't endure forever. The
Eldren had wiped most of the land-predators from the island, and
cleared the seas around it as well, but sea-travelling predators
eventually began to return. A few centuries after their arrival, a
species of ocean-swimming super-croc returned to the island from the
nearby mainland.

It had been some centuries since their ancestors had been
prey-creatures in Africa, and at that time they had a limited ability
to transmit information over time. So it was quite a horrible moment
when the supercrocs began to prey on the relatively slow-moving and
poorly-armored humans. Fortunately, the Eosians were organized enough
to fight back, and they did have spears, knives, etc of stone. The
supercrocs were a menace, but a survivable one.

The continent to their east was separated from the island by about 70
miles of open sea. OTOH, the Eosians had no idea that it even
existed, as far as they knew their island was the universe, except
that they recognized that that supercrocs were coming from
somewhere. Mostly they tended to just accept them as a
supernatural fact of life.

But the Eosians did begin, some thousands of years after their
arrival, to build simple canoe-like boats from the huge trees (very
very distant cousins of maples and oaks and pines) on the island. At
first this was for fishing purposes, but as they got a bit more
daring, they discovered that other, tinier, islands existed to their
east, and hopping from island to island eventually brought the early
Eosians to the continent to the east.

From there, over several thousand years, they spread into their new
lands, encountering other varieties of supercroc, marsupial predators
of remarkable size and ferocity, new diseases, new environments, etc.
They overcame them all, slowly but steadily, much as H. sapiens was
doing on their distant homeworld. By 8000 years after arrival, they
had spread across the continent, and their population had risen to an
impressive 11 million.

The next 15,000 years (more or less) were spent spreading gradually
around the planet, developing languages, cultures, and societies, and
perfecting the technology of TL0. By about 47,000 years BC, the Eosians
were on every continent, and many of the islands, of the planet.

There were literally thousands of languages, thousands of cultures, and
the beginnings of agriculture in scattered places by 41,000 B.C. By
40,000 BC the Eosians had well-established agricultural societies
on the great southern continent and on one of the smaller northern
hemispheric landmasses.

One skill the Eosians were consistently ahead of their Terran cousins
with was sea-travel. At TL0 they were sea travelers to the same
extent Terrans would be at TL1. The Eosians reached TL1 around 39,000
BC. By 37,000 BC they had reached TL2, by 36,000 BC
they were at TL3. At TL3 they were sailing between continents
regularly, with trade and commerce on a nearly world-wide scale, in
spite of the limitations of their technology.

Naturally, being Homosapients, they fought wars of conquest, religion, and
defense. The thousands of cultures were reduced by trade,
assimilation, and conquest to hundreds, then to dozens. By the onset
of TL4 around 35,200 BC, the Eosians were forming the foundations of a
global culture, and by the start of TL5 34,400 BC, they were divided
into four or five world-wide clan-networks, the other cultural forms
have been competed into extinction. World-wide wars raged off and on
between the great clan-alliances, throughout TL5 and TL6. The
development of nuclear weapons around 34,250 BC brought those wars
into a stasis, with the familiar problem of MAD interfering with the
warfare. A cold peace settled over Eosia about that time.

Meanwhile, advancing astronomy had revealed the true nature of the
star system to the Eosians, and the development of spectrography had
produced an exciting result: their neighboring world Eos V, in the
next orbit out, showed oxygen and water lines in its spectrum.
Improving telescopes eventually revealed a blue-green disk for Eos V.
The astronomical community of Eosia began to suspect that their
neighboring world was very like Eosia itself.

MORE LATER.

[Diomedes]

Star Type: Lower border of spectral class 'F'.

Given how detailed the setting is, you should probably just go ahead and call it F9.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Naturally, as technology advanced on Eosia, the possibility of space
flight surfaced. Eosia, still gripped in a cold peace between the
several standing clans, still found sufficient energy to launch
spacecraft to the satellites of Eosia, first to Avros, the smaller
inner satellite, and about fifteen Eosian years later to Ashtra, the
outer body. Neither satellite was anywhere near the size of Luna, one
being 194 miles in diameter, the larger outer satellite being 309
miles in diameter.

The next natural target for interplanetary travel was of course Eos V,
with its tempting similarity to Eosia, and its oxygen-bearing
atmosphere. But the Eos System was larger than the Sol System, with
larger gaps between the worlds than Sol has. It took the Eosians
another 20 Eosian years before they sent unmanned probes to Eosia V.
When those orbiters and landing pods arrived, however, the information
they sent back electrified the Eosia scientific community.

The orbiters sent back pictures of a world with oceans of liquid water
and continents covered with life. Unlike Eosia, Eos V did have polar
ice caps, thin ones, and overall the planet was cooler than Eosia, as
befitted its greater distance from the stellar primary. The landers
confirmed that there was extensive plant-life and animal-life, and
that the air of Eos V was completely breathable to Eosians.

This news accelerated the impetus toward the greater development of
manned spaceflight, but it came even as tensions between the great
clans of Eosia rose toward an apparently confrontation. This slowed
the project, but in time, about another 25 Eosian years, a manned
expedition was launched toward Eos V, aboard a fission-drive propelled
fleet of three ships. [1]

The mission arrived successfully, and reaped a wealth of scientific
data in their stay on Eos V. This was transmitted back to Eosia by
laser and radio link, which was fortunate as the expedition never
returned. During their return, a malfunction in one of the ships led
to a large explosion, just as they were about to undock from each
other to break out of orbit around Eos V. The ships were destroyed
with all hands, including their biological samples.

The lack of the samples added to the confusion on Eosia, because the
information the expedition had discovered about the life-forms of Eos
V was stunning to the biologists of Eosia. They learned that the
life-forms there shared the same cellular base, the same nucleic
mechanisms, indeed, many were clearly related to species on Eosia.
There were even some common genera and species!

But the real shocker was the discovery that a huge variety of mammals
existed on Eos V that were different from any mammal of Eosia save
one. Eos V was dominated in many niches by placental mammals.
On Eosia, the only placental mammal was H. eostellaris. The
discovery was scientifically shocking, religiously disturbing, and simply
unnerving to the Eosians.

MORE LATER.

[1] This 'fission drive' was basically a version of the NERVA engine, using
hydrogen as reaction mass and enriched uranium as fuel.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

To understand why this development was so shocking to the Eosians, you
have to recall the nature of their own origins on Eosia. As of this
time, they had no reason to realize that they were not native to
Eosia. Their recorded history started thousands of years after they
had already spread over an entire continent, leaving a vast blank
before it, with their time on Earth lost in the depths of their Stone
Age.

Likewise, they had no reason to realize that their home planet's
entire biosphere was, at varying degrees of remove in time, either
made up of imported species or species evolved from imported species.
They could perceive the common biochemical/cellular base of their
world's life forms, and they had reached, over the course of time, a
comprehension of evolutionary theory and the basics of genetics and
inheritance.

OTOH, recall that the Eosians were far more 'unique' on Eosia than
Homo sapiens ever was on Earth.

For reaons of the whim of the Eldren, there were no other primates on
Eosia. None. Not even so much as a lemur. There never were any.
Thus the fossil record was blank of any sign of any primate other than
H. eostellaris, there were no such fossils to be found.

To make it worse, not only were there no other primates, all the
other mammals were marsupials. The only placental mammal on Eosia was
Man. Again, the fossil record was empty of any other placental
mammal, since there never were any there.

So Man was unique in many ways, throughout Eosian history. The
various religions, philosophies, and common thoughts of the people of
Eosia incorporated that in countless ways, but it was always a basic
fact, so fundamental as to be unquestioned. Even after scientific
research demonstrated that there was a basic kinship of all life on
Eosia, the huge gap between Man and everything else remained in place.

Only Man (or rather Woman) gave life birth with no pouch. Only Man
walked upright. Only Man was intelligent (the #2 species on Eosia in
IQ terms was nothing to write Earth about.) Only Man used tools.
Etc. While on Earth these sorts of attitudes had countering evidence,
on Eosia they merely described objective reality.

For that matter, paleobiology on Eosia was always limited by the fact
that species, genera, even whole families might 'appear from nowhere'
in the fossil record (imported, but the Eosians had no way to know
that). There were wide gaps between various genera and families on
Eosia, which their evolutionary theory could not quite account for.

Then, suddenly, with the advent of space flight, they received the
shock of discovering placental mammals on an entirely different
planet. To many religions and philosophies, this was profoundly
disturbing, to biologists it was a screaming frustration on a
scientific level. When later expeditions confirmed that they really
were placentals, and that there were thousands of species of them on
Eos V, it overturned countless long-established ideas in a dozen
sciences.

It only got worse with the discovery of primates on Eos V. There were
no great apes, but the Eldren had put monkeys there, and they had
speciated. There were several varieties of primate thriving on Eos V
that Earth never knew. It was frustratingly clear to the biologists
studying Eos V that these primates were relatively near-relatives of
the Eosians themselves.

THE single question of biology in that century on Eosia was invariably
expressed one of two ways, either:

"How the hell did all those placental primates end up on Eos V?" or,
since Man was the odd one out, less Eosian-centric theorists would ask
"How the hell did Man end up on Eosia?"

The Eosians' frustration only grew with the realization that in many
cases, the same species were thriving on both worlds, fully
cross-fertile, and in many more cases first-cousin species existed on
both. Further study showed that like the primates, other
family-groupings of species were split across both worlds as well.
The question would nag at the biosciences for over a Terran century.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Even as interplanetary exploration got started in earnest, especially
on Eos V, and the overall tech level moved up to mid TL8, the
political/social situation on Eosia was deteriorating. A long cold
peace was straining at the edges, lining up over time into a
north/south polarization. With two major continents in each polar
hemisphere, the land areas and resource bases of each side were
comparable. Matters were complicated by the breeding cycle of H.
eostellaris.

The eostellarian species of human had a breeding cycle tied to the
local environment, in such a way that pregnancies would be timed to
reach birth in springtime, whenever local 'springtime' was. If a
woman moved from one seasonal pattern to another, her fertility might
be disrupted for as much as 2 or 3 years while her body adjusted.
Eosia's year, significantly longer than that of Terra, made for a
longer period between breeding chances as well, further limiting the
growth rate. This always made population growth for eostellaris
slower than for sapiens, and it also caused the springtime to take on
enormous cultural and religious significance for the southern culture.
For an enemy to attack during springtime was considered 'cheating', a
bit like stabbing someone in their sleep. The problem arose because
of the north-south polarization.

Naturally, each population's breeding cycle was six months out of
phase with their opponents' cycle, since northern spring occurred at
the same time as southern autumn, and vice versa. When the
northerners finally launched an attack on their southern foes in
southern spring, what would normally have been a minor skirmish
provoked a response out of all proportion. The northern faction that
launched the attack failed to recognize the religious/social
implications of what would otherwise have been routine.

With Eosia already on edge, matters rapidly escalated, into the first
serious nuclear exchange in Eosian history. While neither side used
everything they had, before sanity finally prevailed, serious
megatonnage was unleashed on each side. Orbiting bombs were
deorbited, too fast for defenses to cope with, submarines and bombers
released their loads, and the crude orbiting radiation-laser weapons
opened fire on cities below.

Eosia went from a global population of 4.3 billion to 3.5 billion in
the course of roughly one Terran week. Eight hundred million dead,
with another 700 million wounded, irradiated, or otherwise damaged
non-fatally, it was the greatest disaster in the history of the Eosian
people up until that time.

Enormous stretches of fertile cropland were either melted to glass or
irradiated sufficiently to render them useless for decades. Rivers
were poisoned, artificial diseases ran wild in the suddenly disrupted
societies, basic services were disrupted, and world-wide
communications broken. It would take Eosia 50 Terran years to restore
the infrastructure wrecked by the Brief War, and 250 Terran years to
undo the ecological damage. Their slow population growth made the 800
million dead an even worse disaster to them than it would have been to
H. sapiens.

By the time of the Brief War, there were a few dozen small colonies on
Eos V, with its clement environment, and they were cut off from home.
It would be over 50 years before interplanetary travel was restored,
and by the time it was, Eos V's settlers had merged into a single
society, one that didn't regard themselves as a mere extension of
Eosia. The Brief War resulted in political independence, desired or
not, for the colonists on Eos V.

When Eosia did return to space, it was as a unified planetary culture.
The surviving remnants on each side were rapidly absorbed into a
highly militarized world government, organized on the first principle
that such a thing could never be permitted again. As a general
principle, this government tended to want to draw the Eos V colony
back under its control as well, but it was too far away and too well
entrenched for such action to be practical at mid-TL8.

Exploration of the Eos System resumed, with a certain amount of
rivalrous competition between the two H. eostellaris worlds. As
technology advanced, it became practical to exploit the resources of
the other planets and the asteroids of the Eos System, and both worlds
did so. Various useful resources were discovered, and a profitable
trade existed between the rival worlds. But the biggest and most
important discovery came about almost by accident, in a colony on Eos
I, the ultra-hot rockball that was star system's innermost world.

Both of the inhabited worlds maintained mining colonies there,
including mines tapping into a incredibly large and conveniently
located copper ore mass. Energy was fairly cheap, with the plentiful
solar energy and no atmosphere to absorb it. However, personnel
problems cropped up in both mining colonies in the copper-ore region.

Disturbing dreams began to be reported by the miners, especially those
who had been there for some time. It was commonly rumored among the
miners that long-time vets of the copper mines often dreamed of events
before they happened. While these rumors were not taken seriously
by the government officials that oversaw the mines, more and more
miners began to take them seriously as they seemed to keep affecting
more people.

Then, the some long-time vets who reported such dreams started to
notice that occasionally, they seemed to almost be able to know what
their fellow miners were thinking, especially the other long-contract
miners.

Meanwhile, the other mines spread all over Eos I reported nothing odd.
Only in the Great Copper Mass mines was something peculiar apparently
happening.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

MORE LATER.

The tendency to dismiss all this ended, though, when an Eosian copper
miner on Eos V (apparently) went mad, descended into one of the deeper
mines armed with a heavy mining laser, and forced several miners and
supervisors to leave the passage, saying that it was about to be
collapsed by a meteoric impact.

Since he was armed with the heavy 20-kilowatt laser, and demonstrated
a willingness to make use of it, they did indeed emerge from the
depths of that particular mining area. Shortly therafter, a meteorite
struck Eos I, some miles from the main mining area, but close enough
and large enough to jar the entire region, and to collapse the precise
tunnels the 'madman' had said would collapse, predictions accurate to
within ten meters.

The meteorite had been a chondrite, very dark, in a freakish orbit,
and it had not been detected in time to matter. The miner had been
laying his plans for days, had only a limited amount of experience in
space (as opposed to working on Eos I), and had no realistic way to
know the meteor was coming in anyway. There was no question, however,
that he had saved probably 50 lives. [1]

When asked how he had known, what he said seemed unbelievable. "I
dreamed about it, several times, over the last year or so." would be
the English translation of what he told the flummoxed authorities.

This was the undeniable piece of evidence that the weird occurrances
reported by the miners in the Great Copper Mass were not mere
superstition or hallucination.

The miner's dreams had somehow predicted the arrival of the meteor,
which tunnels would have people in them, and which tunnels would
collapse. To make it all the more undeniable, there had been last
minute shift-changes, so the people were not in the tunnels they were
officially supposed to have been in, and somehow the dreaming miner
had known anyway where they would be.

Attempts to keep the incident secret failed, and researchers began to
pour into the Great Copper Mass area of Eos I. The miners themselves
were likewise examined, their family backgrounds researched, their
habits analyzed, in an attempt to explain what appeared to be a sheer
impossibility, a defiance of the laws of causality.

They did discover a few interesting things in the family backgrounds
of some of the miners, many of them did have family folklore (of
those who would admit it) about people occasionally getting 'hunches',
or the like. Most seemed quite normal, though.

Meanwhile, the investigation of the copper mines themselves discovered
something that stunned the scientific community of Eosia and Eos V.
In the deepest reaches of the mines, miles below the surface, they
discovered that the copper ore also contained something very strange.
They extracted a metal that looked like copper, but which purified had
properties quite unlike any copper any of the metallurgists and
chemists had ever encountered. It had odd conductivity, odd specific
heats, heats of fusion, and heats of vaporization, strange tensile and
compressive strength, it reacted peculiarly to nuclear irradiation,
and the kicker: it massed only about 2/3s what copper should have
massed.

This was simply impossible by the physics the Eosians knew. They
certainly knew of isotopes, but there was no conceivable isotope of
copper that could be a third lighter than common copper! Further,
different isotopes should still have had basically the same electrical
and temperature properties.

There wasn't much of the weird pseudo-copper in the ore of the Great
Copper Mass of Eos I. The ratio of real copper to this stuff was
about 1 million to 1. But it was there, all through the copper mass,
at the lower depths. To make it the more bizarre, the miner who had
dreamed of the meteor impact proved, upon seeing the first samples of
the visually identical purified pseudo-copper, to be able to infallibly tell it
from real copper. He didn't know how he knew, he just knew.

The discovery of this material shook up Eosian physics and chemistry
much as the discovery of the dual biospheres had shaken up Eosian
biology. The central question of much of Eosian physics and chemistry
for a time became, translated into English: "What the blinking hell
IS this stuff?!!"

A popular comic image of the time on Eosia was a chemist and a
physicist, fresh from a frustrating day trying to figure out the
pseudo-copper, entering a bar and demanding the bartender pour them
each a triple. A biologist, sitting at the bar with several empty
glasses and a list of interfertile species found on two different
planets, says, "Welcome to the party!" and passes out.

MORE LATER.

[1] The meteor should have been detected by radar long since.
It would prove in the subsequent investigations that basic safety
precautions had been neglected.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The copper-like 'stuff' in question was, of course, the substance that
the Atlanteans of Earth, thousands of years later, would call
orichalcum.

Like Sol, the Eos System had only a modest amount of orichalcum, most
of it contained unreachably within the stellar mass of the central
star. The small fraction that remained was mostly contained within
the mass of the planetary bodies of the system, usually very deep.

On Eos I, however, like Earth, there was orichalcum reachable from the
surface. On Earth, the geological oddity of Atlantis made the bizarre
material available, on Eos I, an ancient meteoric impact had brought
deep-subsurface material to the relatively near surface (only a few
miles deep). The meteor impact was the origin of the Great Copper
Mass that the Eosians were mining, and in the lower depths of the
upturned mass of rock and metal, small amounts of orichalcum were
present, leading to the peculiar phenomena among the miners.

As with the Atlanteans, the presence of orichalcum interacted with
psionic Power in interesting ways. The Eosians had far less
understanding of psionics than the Atlanteans did, but this was partly
offset by a far greater understanding of 'conventional' science and the
nature of the physical universe than the Atlanteans had ever come
close to achieving (high TL8 vs TL ~5)

The Eosians, in fact, had barely any comprehension of psionics when
they first discovered orichalcum, no more than Terrans had in AD 2010.
There were people who occasionally had uncannily accurate hunches,
the occasional prescient dream, the rare bit of PK (amid many, many
hoaxes).

The discovery of orichalcum, and its ability to amplify (and sometimes
nullify, and sometimes alter, etc) psionic abilities forced the
scientific community of Eosia and Eos V to deal with them as testable
realities. Further, the very oddity of orichalcum as a material
substance opened up whole new questions in nuclear physics and the
study of the structure of matter.

With the advantage of a three TL scientific edge, the Eosians were able
to bring means of study to bear that the Atlanteans could not even
have conceived of. Particle accelerators bombarded samples of
orichalcum with protons, electrons, neutrons, etc. Chemical and
electrical analyses were performed that revealed more about the
properties of orichalcum to the Eosians in 5 years than the Atlanteans
could learn in a thousand years.

The scientific revolution which the discovery of psionics and
orichalcum ushered in took years to take off, and more years to begin
to produce practical applications in the fields such as engineering,
medicine, and agriculture. But the applications did come.

One of the applications with the greatest implications was the
discovery that orichalcum could be used to manipulate gravity,
something else Eosian physics had previously regarded as essentially
impossible (barring superdense mass or the like). This in turn led to
a scientific revolution based on a new understanding of the nature of
spacetime, and to rocket-powered spaceships that took advantage of the
new tech, and eventually, 50 Terran years after the discovery of
orichalcum, to the invention of the simplest form of the 'dimensional
drive'. Though still limited to sublight speeds, this invention
revolutionized space travel, making it orders of magnitude faster and
cheaper. [1]

The study of psionics also revolutionized space exploration, since it
was discovered that a refinement of ESP could be used to scan nearby
stars for large orbiting masses (like planets), simplifying stellar
searches enormously. This was followed up, 20 years or so after the
discovery of the dimensional drive, by the higher-order physics that
enabled the dimensional drives to exceed the speed of light. The age
of interstellar travel now dawned for the Eosians.

MORE LATER.

[1] The term 'dimensional drive' is a Terran colloquialism that does
not really describe what the 'dimensionator drive' actually does.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The first few versions of the high-order dimensional drive weren't
good enough. Though the limiting velocities for a Quantum 2 or
Quantum 3 dimensionator field were 4c and 27c, Eosian technology could
manage only about 1% of those velocities, so even their Q2 drives in
practice could only achieve .27c (though it took only as much kinetic
energy as 1% of c would normally take).

The Q4 dimensionator could use that much drive-power to reach 2.56c,
the Q5 over 31 times c. It was easier and energy-cheaper to try to
construct higher-Q dimensionators than it was to try to build ships
capable of reaching higher physical velocities, but the higher-Q
drives had a limitation: they needed a larger amount of orichalcum
than the lower-Q drives. Since the Eosians couldn't get much better
than 1% of the limiting velocity (and usually less) they needed the
higher-order drivers.

Fortunately for the Eosians, they were closer to the inner edge of the
Milky Way's habitable zone than Sol, and the local stellar
neighborhood was more crowded than it is near Sol. The nearest star
system to Eos was only 2.3 light-years away, and others were not much
further away. Another bit of luck was that several of the nearby
stars were class G and F, with planetary systems.

When Eosian starships, with Q5 dimensional drives, reached the nearby
stars, they discovered that large, complex planetary systems existed.
Three of the stars within 10 light-years had life-bearing worlds. To
the mixed delight, dismay, and surprise of the Eosian/Eos V biological
sciences community, these biospheres proved to be the same sort of
life that was to be found on Eosia and Eos V. Again, not only was it
similar on a cellular and biochemical level, but creatures of familiar
family, genus, and species were present. The Eosians were familiar
from long experience with crocodilians, and now they discovered
cousins of their crocs on two of the three nearby inhabited worlds.

It had been bad enough to have two hyper-similar biospheres on
different worlds of the same star system, but to find similar life on
five worlds spread over four star systems was simply stunning. The
Eosians had a fair comprehension of the basics of evolutional biology,
but they simply couldn't reconcile that with the situation they found
extant over four living worlds.

Naturally, the suggestion that someone had artificially arranged
this situation was made, but nobody could find any coroborating
evidence, no sign of any starships, bases, or any other infrastructure
that could have supported such a seeding program. Only the living
worlds themselves gave mute testimony that something very odd had
happened in the prehistorical past.

While the biosciences tried to figure out the nature of life in the
Galaxy, the engineers and physicists were engaged in a search for more
of the miracle-substance. The only known source of orichalcum was Eos
I, and it was absolutely indispensable to the dimensionators that made
interplanetary and interstellar travel practical. The source of Eos I
was made the property of the government of Eosia, much to the disgust
of the independent colonies on Eos V, who were forced to trade with
the homeworld, on the terms the home government set, for the
orichalcum they had to have.

(A situation that, many thousands of years later, would be quite
familar on Earth in the Atlantean Age, albeit at a far lower TL, and
with less good will on each side.)

The search for more orichalcum spread over several star systems, but
it was difficult because nobody yet knew why orichalcum occurred where
it did, and they did not yet know that even those worlds where it was
to be found usually hid it deep within their planetary masses, often
hundreds of miles or more deep.

The search led to a far faster exploration of the stars of the region
than would otherwise have occurred. As higher-order dimensional
drives were invented, and effective speeds rose, more and more stars
were opened. Still no trace of orichalcum other than that on Eos I
was to be found, even 50 years after the opening of star flight, when
more than 200 stars had been superficially surveyed, and perhaps 30
had been fairly well explored. More living worlds were found, and at
starflight +50 years, 13 worlds of familiar life had been discovered.
Even the most alien of them had the same cellular base as the Eosian
life, being yet more life anciently derived of Terra (not that they
knew that then).

Then, about 60 Terran years after interstellar exploration began, they
discovered something interesting, or rather two things: a second
source of the precious orichalcum, and a sign of truly, genuinely
alien life.

MORE LATER.