Copyright © 1999 by Lenna A. Mahoney

# Capture 2. Earth

Gregarian cognoscenti list this island Earth in the Journal of Blue Worlds, together with all the other mostly habitable planets. However. Almost uniquely among Gregarian planets, nearly all the footnotes to the Earth article are citations of the hardscrabble editions of the Journal of Grey-Green (not precisely habitable) Worlds. This is Not a Pretty Sight, and it's one that must be changed.

With that purpose in mind, we of The New Theleme Club held our local Save-The-Earth contest. This was also (necessarily) a competition to identify the conspiracy that must presently be restraining the Earth from completely Blue status.

First place and maximum kudos went to Maccabee, who till the contest had been a mere lurker.

Maccabee: Enough of the disasters that have ridden the human species since the separation of Pangaea. There is no recourse but to entirely eradicate the continent of Africa from our planet. No lesser cure will work, everything else is only a temporary remedy that does nothing more than prepare the way for a greater catastrophe the next time. Africa's horned skull-like shape is fundamental evidence of its pernicious effect on our world. The first victory of degeneration was there in the evolutionary Garden of Eden. The continent has been filled with corrupt, putrid, and infested calamity ever since. Look at the numerous pestiferous malignancies that have come out of Africa. It is time to get rid of the apocalyptic source of Neanderthals, racial slavery, autoimmune diseases, sickle-cell anemia, vampirism, hurricanes, and famines! Remember the incestuous marriages of Pharaohs and their sisters. Look at the bestial, cannibalistic political slaughters in Africa, the hysterically suicidal self-induced famines, the tortures and oppressions by race against race and tribe against tribe, the widespread genital mutilation, the Biafran genocide, the absence of any native technological or philosophical development. We must remove all life from Africa as a first step and subsequently use image-recognition software to locate other misshapen, cursed regions and erase them as well. The ideologues who prate of the unity of the planet and the idiotically idolized biospherical diversity have merely subscribed to a slavishly oversimplified brainwash. Another step that is essential to saving humanity in the meantime, is the total radical replacement of all the metal bleachers that are laid out in amphitheater arrangement. These are in 93% of the stadiums in the country. These metal surfaces are compound parabolic antenna dishes to receive the lethal energies that Africa beams around the world, bouncing them off the Heaviside layer. The frequent sportsgoers and everyone who resides near the stadiums suffer the effects of conventional science's blindness. This also explains why so many fine athletes are AfroAmericans.
Above all eliminate the mentality of peevish acceptance that the topography of the planet Earth is optimal and harmonious!

Maccabee goosed a discussion that broke out in the predictable sour whines for and against the PC way of life. (Political correctness, that is, personal computers were sacrosanct.) The dissension was brought to an untimely mordant halt:

Sabre: OK, here is a compromise that will make none of you happy. Blacks look and act like gorillas. Whites look and act like baboons.

Second place in the Save-The-Earth competition, and an admiring lift of the eyesbrow, to...

Free Meson: Nazis in Antarctica whose air pollution is causing the hole in the ozone? An epidemic of memonic possession by self-aware parasitic ideas? Enough already with these rationalistic conceits! I can't help feeling you're manifesting an exaggerated lack of perspicacity by refusing to recognize the spiritual conspiracy that is the most dangerous of our time. Am I to conclude that none of you are aware of the Seekers after the Holy Secundines?
These fiends in human form have already seized and destroyed the next to last sample of Christ's cell structure, the Divine Prepuce, in a diabolical theft that took place in the days of the Hapsburgs. (We have been assured by none other than Sister Hildegarde of Bingen that the shred of skin must have been the real circumcised Foreskin of Christ because of Its sweet taste. I'm inclined to think that I wouldn't have accepted any less well attested evidence.)
The only tissue of the Redeemer that still remains in this sinful world is His Holy Placenta. It would be completely irresponsible to fail to locate and preserve the Blessed Organ before the Seekers can destroy it. If they succeed, it will be impossible for genetic engineers to clone the Divine Flesh and Blood and (through the miracle of modern Mass production) provide each and every one of us with her or his own Personal Saviour. Perhaps you see my point now?

Either these bytes of bravura fooled Blue Jay or she was unfairly denied her Emmy for the best virtual performance of 1993. Free Meson (dis)abused her by answering her anxious queries with a retrofit Xmas carol to be sung to "Oh, Holy Night": Oh, holy shit, my gorge is slowly riiiiiising, what do I do with the Lord's afterbirth? Look at it glow, it even has a haaaalo, the angels sing as it falls to the earth! It went on from there, but I'm going to spare you the rest whether you want me to or not.

And honorable mentions went to...

Citizen Paine: Well I'm walkin down the streets of big city hell fnord goin past the banks and the officez of them big fat multinationalz fnord and I see this bum fnord wavin at me. So I look both wayz crossin the street fnord and becauz I'm a real big dude one of them runt Japmobiles fnord dodges me not the other way around. This bum fnord haz big red eyez and bad breath fnord like rotten chicken feet that got pickled in 220 proof and then went bad anywayz, he'z gotta be some kind of alky fnord but I'm bigger than he iz fnord. He sayz "I see you're not one of Them fnord, read this it's the real truth fnord" and he reelz off past the beggarz fnord and the yuppiez fnord and gets away while I'm still tryin to uncrumple the smeary leaflet he stuck in my hand.
What it sayz iz "Get mad now and stay mad! The people who really run the world are the ones who spend the most of their time angry. Everyone is born with this great big safety buffer of curses and rants that don't work, so's everyone has to use up all the duds before getting to the real ones. The people who run the world are the losers always muttering to themselves on street corners and the loudmouths who keep right on complaining and wishing their enemies crash and burn. After years they've reached the point where their temper works for them and all their ill wishes come true, it can work for you too, try it and find out."
Hey suddenly everythin made sense to me and I knew what the fnordz were really for, hey talk about yer self-empowerment. Ever since then I read all the yella journalizm fnord I can find and I write letterz to the editor with exclamation pointz that breed like rabbitz and I do all them kindza frumious thingz cauz I gotta stay mad! The rest of you smileyface happytalk mealymouth wimpz fnord can all go to hell fnord when I get where I'm goin! And I mean it! Fnord!

Sabre: If you want to think conspiracy then think about all those doctors keeping people alive who have nothing to contribute to the world, morons and genetic cripples and seniles and cannibals like the world rulers and the rich class. What the world needs is a good plague with the right sort of infection vectors to take out those losers.
Public-address microphones would be a good start to wipe out the politicians and media and a lot of other people with more influence than merit. The backseats of cars would take care of big families that are too poor to have vans, proving that they are too stupid to hold their families to a size they can afford. As a bonus it would take out the chauffeured richfarts too. Another good pathway would be the packets that get sent to people who answer Get Rich Quick ads. Make it so that it only takes one exposure to a packet to be fatal. TV should be a pathway too that is fatal at more than 3 hours a day or 8 hours a week.
One more thing the plague would need is an immunization pathway. The only one that would save any worthwhile people would be science-fiction and fantasy books as long as they are not based on TV shows or movies.

Beach BEM: I never hear the phrase "saving the world" without wondering about the size of the bank it would take, what the fractional reserve requirements would be, and how the tellers would be required to dress.
You ask about conspiracy? Little does the public know! Advertisements are being used to transmit coded messages precisely because no one ever takes ads seriously. Watch for the seeming typos in the newspapers, the pretended vandalism of billboards, and those off-tempo lip-synchers in the backgrounds of TV ads. Anyone who "warns" us about subliminal seduction is only manipulating us to distract us from the camouflaged secrets of our true Masters.

NeuroGod: That's good and gonzo... try this... anybody who gets vaporized in a nuclear explosion gets transfigured... this is the real "rapture" and nobody can get it any other way... they're literally blown up to Heaven right on the spot... Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the best thing that ever happened to the japs or anybody else and our bosses are doing us a big big favor with all those Bombs... and they know it...

Paisley is my Friend: I guess I've spent too much time lately reading about all your grand world-saving ideas. :-) Last nite I had a silly dream about a bunch of scientists and guys who ran things all sitting and waiting for the end of the world, what with all their plans having failed. One of them was Daffy Duck, and he got all irate at their do-lessness. He charged like some kind of a vaudeville routine across the room, singing a jazzy little song, "Don't nobody tell me how the sky is fallen, 'cause the sky's goin' out with ME!"

Compared to all that, Thalp and Theofe gave a rather pedestrian explanation of Earth. Allow me to summarize numerous Gregarian messages, file uploads, private e-mail to me and Bill Inconnu, and so forth, in this font reserved for bringing up digested data.

The humans on Earth did most of their evolving on Earth, with an interlude on the planet Einva (to which a few had been doppled); apparently no one in Gregaria argues that. The Cats, however, evolved to their present condition entirely on Earth.

The first true humans on Earth seem to have acquired their sapience during a spurt of natural selection that followed their discovery and use of psychoactive foods, and the memons' consequent discovery and intellectual infiltration of the inebriated proto-humans. These anthropoid novelty items were what we later occupants have called Neanderthals. They flourished in Eurasia and Africa by, say, 100,000 years BP (before present). The Nees possessed many traits not exactly in common with us. Their magnetic sense, for example, which led them in populous migrations and pilgrimages. Their acute night vision, and their preference for action by night, sleep by day. Their incredible memories, and other less intellectual incredible features.

Nee women were only capable of sex while they were in heat; that was a periodic orgiastic binge closely synchronized with the full moon; between flare-ups, their vaginas swelled to impassibility. (As for anal sex, our informants sayeth naught.) In the context of female scarcity, freeform male satisfaction was a evolutionary necessity -- if Nee social groups were to hold together and not be randomized by the men's sex brawls. Most of the time the Nee men (a frantically randy lot, by all accounts) pleasured themselves with each other or, by preference, with herms. The more men participated, the more potent their performance.

Ruby Arsenic: Reminiscent of our construction workers, who practice the only socially tolerated form of public mutual masturbation, arousing each other by making downright comments about passing women (and those passing as women).

The Nee women could easily out-enchant (and often out-muscle) their men and herms and therefore didn't suffer from that well-known battered-bride "Caveman Syndrome." Rather the opposite. When a Nee man (however intelligent) was presented with any Nee woman in heat, even a woman he disliked at other times, she'd have no trouble getting however much of whatever she wanted. And then cuffing or cursing him off like an overblown puppy.

The women, smugly superior, became obsessed with breeding men for attraction: sensual aggressiveness, susceptibility to women, and physical strength. Those few women who preferred their men tame and weak were regarded as pussies. The unsatisfactory ill-bred boys were sacrificed and eaten in the usual manner. The Nee hermaphrodites were luckier. The herms had even more magical intuition and grace in gestural gramarye than the women -- a fact passed down in our Gnostic tradition of a two-sexed God -- so they escaped most of the culling and control.

The Nees had the (then inaccurate) belief that celestial motions could modify inherited traits. Nee women compiled and memorized the extensive matrilineal geneologies of which our Biblical "begats" are only a dim mimicry. Those records included masses of astronomical observations that were cast into story or saga form to make them more vividly memorable, crammed with battles and assignations of planetary deities in a kind of memory-palace technique.

The lucky majority of the Nees spent something like the next 60,000 years on Earth, perpetuating their astronomy, celebrating their sacrificial orgies, growing their living temples of trees, holding their red-ochreous funerals, and making their more than lifelong intercontinental spiraling pilgrimages. Which treks served the secondary purpose of allowing exogamous trades of stud muffins and of mythic data compilations. Meanwhile, the unfortunate minority of dopples had been budged here, there, and anywhere, but the ones of interest in Earth history throve on Einva.

The planet Earth's magical identity (or macopave) leaned toward the elements of Fire and Earth, but Einva's toward Metal and Water. Hence the doppled Nees' fiery urgencies and stony memories found little resonant sympathy from Einva. Too, this was a world which had no perceptible magnetic field, and whose nights crept with enormous reptilian predators (in modern times exterminated). The dopples ignored their confused internal compasses and began to live in the comparatively safe coastal ocean shallows. And sacrificed to the macopave for the edited-RNA mutations they needed.

Theofe: DNA works chemically, also as a quantum computer, thanks to all the quantum interactions between the stacked aromatic rings. So the genetic computer, genetic info, can learn from some kinds of experience. The macopave can program it, it can self-program too.

Free Meson: Aha, morphic resonance, the shit heard 'round the world.

The proto-Einvij changed as rapidly as they had to. Consistent with catastrophe theory they fell (or, rather, cascaded) into another format that was an heirsbreadth away from their previous genome. After numerous millennia, the DMs' next pass doppled a few of the pre-Einvij back to Earth (and of course elsewhere).

33,000 BP. The pre-Einvij found themselves off Einva and on Earth, which their shoddy memories (devolved to match Einva's requirements) didn't recognize as their world of origin. The pre-Einvij persisted in their coastal lifestyle, which (inconveniently for modern paleontologists) left their bones and artifacts to be munched by the breakers on shores that were submerged when the last Ice Age ended. In time the Nees and the pre-Einvij began to meet.

What did the Nees see in this new variant? Something cool; something childlike (slim, hairless, obstreperously active by day, and ignorant of the Earth's magecraft); something even more fascinating than it was repellent, the same reaction we have to Mr. Spock. The pre-Einvij were innately monogamous, though their women were always in season. In fact the pre-Einva men and women were, as adults, essentially incapable of orgasm with anyone but their lifemate. Should one mate die, the other (if he or she chose to stay alive) could imprint a new mate after a physiologically sufficient period of celibacy. It was a different inborn balance between sociality and sex impulse, but it worked.

Except from the herms' point of view. The pre-Einvij had no herms, only the occasional atavism. And pre-Einva men felt a strong instinctual sexual aversion to other men, herms, and even burly women. (Understand that pre-Einva women, for all their superior magical skill, were usually some smaller than their men.)

What did the pre-Einvij see in their alien neighbors? Something urgently magic; something friendly with the night sky; something powerful far beyond even the preEinva remarkable talents with word-arts and stone, bone, and wood tools; something even more fascinating than it was repellent...

Dionysus, may I present Apollo? Apollo, meet Dionysus. Charmed, I'm sure.

The "pure" Nees and the pre-Einvij got along like oil and water -- nanometrically close, insolubly separate. (If nothing else, their out-of-phase diurnal cycles demanded social separation.) It was a few generations before the Nees and pre-Einvij began to interbreed. It took that long for the Nee women to be sure they wanted pre-Einva genes to enter their bloodlines. If it had been left to the Nee and pre-Einva men, it would have taken even longer. Nee men saw and smelled pre-Einva women and men as children, sexless and of no sensual interest. Pre-Einva men saw and smelled Nee women as revoltingly masculine. What with the barriers to sensuality, the most workable technique was magically-enhanced artificial insemination of pre-Einva women. Which they did not think well of. However, after mutually sensitive negotiations, miscegenation was accomplished. The hybrids bred true and, thanks to the Nees' sacrifices to the macopave, had genes that dominated over those of both the parent races.

Disaster, fellow hybrids.

What happens when you cross a horse and a deer? It ain't a joke, guys; don't wait for the punchline. The deorse tries to combine the horse's gallop with the deer's sproing -- and so can't run as fast as either of its parents. Bad news, for an animal who lives by speed. Or what happens when you cross two closely related bird species who build different types of nests: the hybrids try to do it both ways and wind up with a nest that provides no parental support at all, at all. Bad news, for an egg.

The Cro-Magnons, the offspring of the Nee and pre-Einvij matings, first puzzled their two societies, later appalled them. As children, the Cros rewarded their makers' ingenuity with astonishing flashes of insight into magic, poetry, and toolmaking. They claimed to have been instructed, schizo style, by godlike voices that no one else heard, apparitions that no one else saw or smelled. Orders, advice, and prophecy, often self-contradictory and vicious, sometimes brilliant, continued to come to the Cros all their lives. In between visions, the Cros observed their surroundings much more attentively than did their pure-blood kin on either side -- though the Cros had less overall aptitude and poorer memories than even the pre-Einvij. The Cros, you see, were afflicted by brain laterality mismatches caused by the cross-breeding. The brain functions related to consciousness and identity had specialized in the Nees and pre-Einvij to somewhat different, incompatible regions of the brain.

Free Meson: I feel I should bring it to your attention that Julian Jaynes' theory of the origin of consciousness in brain camerality changes is not taken seriously by any reputable researchers in the field. I have been so informed by a friend who recently attended a three-day consciousness science seminar at Oxford.

As adults, many of the Cro men made it more than sufficiently evident that they'd picked up the Nee horniness and aggression in place of pre-Einva singlematedness, and also had acquired the pre-Einva aversion to anything like homosex. Neither pre-Einva monandry nor Nee polyandry predominated among Cro women, who were incessantly fertile and often bore litters rather than the typical pre-Einva singlets. In the long run the Cros couldn't cope among Nees because of the Nee shortage of open women, nor could they be tolerated by pre-Einvij because of the Cro libido. Neither could the Cros put up with Nees or pre-Einvij, those villains to whom the Cros' gods refused to appear.

In the inevitable conflict the Cros, with their dissevered commander-obeyer personalities, had the advantage in berserkerhood. (When a godlike figure or voice in a Cro's head told him or her to kill, he or she was generally competent to do so.) After some few generations of the typical expansive litters, the Cros also had the advantage in numbers. Gradually both the Nees and the pre-Einvij were corralled into marginally habitable areas in which, sadly, they failed to thrive. Thus, the Cros didn't wipe out the Nees in quite the way that has been claimed; smooth Jacob didn't seize hairy red Esau's birthright; it was always plain parenticide, never sibling rivalry.

Off Earth, the doppled Nees and pre-Einvij had (and have) whole planets of their own pure strains. If Earth's macopave had gotten its own unstifled way, the Nees might well have retaken our planet too. Why not? They were born for it. However, opposition beyond mere hybrid rigor began to arrive on Earth.

Starting at about 15,000 BP (13,000 BC) in Asia, 9,000 BP (7,000 BC) in Europe, and assorted other times on other continents, several groups of offEarthers set up regional remagic dumps on Earth. Till that event our ancestors could freely use magic, like any other sapients on any untampered planet. But, as the extraterrestrial remagic accumulated, Earthuman magic and the macopave's influence dwindled and became inaccessible to primitive methods. On the other hand, the dumpers presumably found their own use of magic much eased by relocating their remagic pollution to other worlds.

Consider the situation of a typical tribe of Earthumans as they first encounter dumped offworld remagic. They've been following a herd of food animals -- not driving them but migrating with them, always leaving behind the remagic from their own spells. They've been subsisting partly on the herd stragglers, partly on local plants whose growth they've assisted by magic. The tribe also has been using their rudimentary but successful magic to scry for danger, cure many of their diseases and injuries, intimidate (but seldom fight) other tribes, and carry out occasional heavy labor such as mining hematite, salt, or magically potent gemstones. Now the remagic comes down over a broad region, let's say Mesopotamia. No more healing, scrying, cursing, or fertility/infertility magic; those activities are apparently the most akin to the dumpers' own uses for magic, and so are most blocked by the remagic. The tribe can still grow food, the hard way. They can still fight, the hard way. And since they can still move stone and earth by magic, at least in some of the dump regions, they build fortresses to deal with their neighbors. And they build temples to deal with the gods who have shouldered them out of Paradise.

Whether any deals were made, no one knows. But the dumpers -- whose identities are still unknown and very controversial! -- apparently did try to prevent the remagic from overwhelming the existing human civilisations. These appeared sparse but stable, at the time; the dumpers intervened as god-savants to stabilize them further but didn't allow for four subtleties.

First, the casting of spells requires working up one's will and emotional force. The neurochemical feedback leaves a residue of adrenalin, testosterone, and other hormones of passion. The magic-using human civilisations therefore contained a majority of adrenalin addicts. These hotheads had spellcasting as a harmless, even valuable, way to relieve the addiction. But after the dumping got underway addicts had fewer harmless outlets.

Second, magic provided all of the main contraceptive techniques at the time. The dumpers may have known this -- it being true for all the known sapient species -- but expected the Earthumans to find other methods, including abstinence. They didn't realize that, like chimps, Cros would rather fight each other for hetsex than "settle" for masturbation, homosex, et cetera. Even that Cros would more desire to fight as a result of abstaining from sex, and more desire sex after a fight. That fight-fuck link affects Cros much more potently than other humans and sapients.

Third, remagic lessened the magical abilities of children. Human children possess more innate magical will and intuition than human adults, so parents who live in magic need to hold down the number of offspring for everyone's protection. Remagic dumping rendered child-control relatively easy and safe, thereby encouraging rapid breeding.

Ruby Arsenic: Gah. I bet our tots who "identify with" meat-eater dinosaurs, and our big kids who enjoy spray-cans and explosives, would love to learn curses and mind-control spells. Did you ever see that classic tagline, "Where am I going? Why am I in this handbasket?"

Fourth, the new confusion in the rules of magic gave the "inspired" Cros an advantage over their parent variants. The semi-sane Cros' schizogenic gods spoke out answers based on the unconscious synthesis of minute observations of magical nature, data which the pre-Einvij and even the Nees seldom consciously noticed. That made the Cros better at using magic under the insanely, turbulently changing conditions of excess remagic.

Despite all the remagical incentives to lunacy, by 2,700 BP (700 BC) the Cros (and their possessing memons) had lost their old gods and somehow become about as sane as the Nees and pre-Einvij had been. If you define sanity as a standardized, usually dependable lateral allocation of brain functions.

Sanity took the women a bit longer than the men. The delay was not to women's advantage. Neither was the majority male aversion to sex with "mannish" females, meaning muscular, competitive, lusty women. Neither was the unsurprising male distrust of Nee-like female power. Nor was the women's loss of reproductive control spells. In the end, the more (Nee) or less (pre-Einva) matriarchal clans of the parent variants were replaced by predominantly vindictive patriarchal structures over almost all of Earth. The Cro women on Earth began to be bred for little muscle and less sex drive. Female urges were inconvenient, diversionary, and unneeded, since the Cro males had more than enough to ensure continuation of the species.

But the Cro women had nothing to complain about, compared to the herms.

Paisley is my Friend: Which women have less sex drive compared to who, dearie? <grin> Silly Thalp, if you only had a different *sort* of root I'd help you meet some friends who'd give you a better idea of the birds and bees.

In short -- I mean, in nasty, brutish, and short -- the remagic dumping pretty well caused the breed/bleed historical cycle that we Earthuman Cros know so well. The dumpers were the pushers of the Neolithic "Revolution": the hasty invention of organized agriculture to support and produce more people. Though occasionally small groups of dumpers worked to upsize or cushion the Earthuman trap, with little success, much excess.

Beach BEM: It is well nigh impossible to refrain from speculating (together with many science fiction authors past and present) on the effect this type of highly moralized, highly guilty, powerful extra-terrestrial could have had on our human ethos and religion.

In the meantime, Earth had also served as the evolutionary den for another sapient species, the Cats. This variant of Felis catus had evolved, while on Earth, into one of the more magically adept sapiotypes in Gregaria. (They run larger and more plushly furred than our usual household and ASPCAhold cats.) By 5,000 BP (3,000 BC) the Cats had cottoned to the Earth's fate as a remagic dump and had emigrated using Dimensionals.

Theofe: They had to escape. They couldn't remain sapient in a nullmagic environment. Much of a Cat's mind lies outside its head, delocalized into the planetary macopave. So the Cats rely on the macopave for much of their "instinctual", unindividual thinking. Most sapients spread their minds around this way at some point in their evolution. The Cats never stopped.

Thalp: I also mention for commpletion though not "credit" the branching theory about the Cat departure, that they were the fountainhead of the remagic relocation. They much "more" than sapient others require to avoid remagic and have not wholly explained how their unique Dimensionals spells are functioning.

Before the Roman Principate, and just before the Age of Pisces, one last set of offEarthers delivered the coup-de-gramarye. They made the entire planet of Earth almost completely inert to local magic, an enormity that (Gregarians guess) had been previously beyond the dumpers' capabilities.

(Some things even these last and smartest magic-hackers couldn't change. The earlier offEarthers had set up Earth's ley lines in an old, unrefined remagic dumping arrangement. Those leys don't work in harmony with the final schema. Thus, ley lines often intensify magic rather than remagic, depending on the planetary influences at the time.)

To synchronize the remagic with their own needs and prevent it from being delinked from Earth by axial precession, the final dumpers seem to have used the Solar System as a kind of orrery governor or "perpetual clock." (Magic is intrinsically unrelated to distance, duration and other quantified properties. That makes it tricky for dumpers to control the times at which dumping occurs, but they need that level of control all the same.) This timer arrangement affected the ebb and scend of what little magic still influenced Earthlife.

One semi-trivial result of the dumping was the instigation of astrological influence based on the prevailing pattern when the Vernal Equinox occupied the first degree of Aries. The planetary remagic clock has enough of an effect to imprint infant development in the first moments of sapient autonomy. (The very notion of planetary magical influences has so outraged Gregarian mages that they only recently accepted the orrery's role.) Another, more trivial, result was the old truism that (some) iron inhibits magic. Meteorites, the sources of our earliest iron, pass through the Solar System remagic clock and become remagic-laden in so doing.

The final group of remagic dumpers apparently required their own magifacturers to deliver only labeled remagic to Earth. Many Fortean anomalies, falls of rocks, "manna", ice, light and sound shows, crop circles, come from tracer manifestations. Because the remagical chaos on Earth made source-scrying impossible, the dump managers would have needed tracer spells to gauge the success and reliability of the operation. So the archaeomages guess.

Something that's surmised with less need for imagination is that the dump managers had to recruit some Earthuman help to monitor the early stages of dumping. That famous magic square

> > > S | A | T | O | R
> > > A | R | E | P | O
> > > T | E | N | E | T
> > > O | P | E | R | A
> > > R | O | T | A | S

showed up there and then. "Arepo the sower (of remagic) holds back the work and the wheels (restrains magic)." It began as an injoke fad (like the Christian fish) and grew out of proportion among the dumpers' Earthuman recruits after a couple of generations.

Finally some of the recruits formed an org (that is, an organization, an organism made up of people) and named it AREPO. After the dumpers left, the Earthumans remained to keep watch on remagic manifestations and to suppress what few local magicians found ways to accomplish anything. Simon Magus, for example. Incorrectly, and of course in an org-perpetuating fashion, the Arepan founders thought they needed to suppress magicians to simplify the remagic dumping and avoid all backflows.

Theofe: After all, what does a conspiracy need to survive? Two words, secret influence. An org that monopolizes magic, a few GWs, can ensure secrecy. Pick, indoctrinate recruits with certainty of their loyalty. Spy, scry on troublemakers. Apply a unique range of sanctions, rewards. Not many Earthumans could threaten AREPO. Its objectives, methods lie skew to those of earth. Mostly AREPO targets offworlders. In a way, AREPO keeps the earth as their own archeculture, dedicated to the theme of nullmagic.

The 2,000-year-long campaign to suppress magicians had, and has, the expedient side-effect of giving the Arepans a near-monopoly on the very few residual magical advantages. AREPO therefore has a strong interest in, and a considerable capacity for, remaining very secret and preventing any magic use on Earth. But only occasional highly-placed groups, such as the Nazi occultists, require any AREPO interference. Generally AREPO expends little effort on Earthumans partly because Arepans can barely be bothered to take Earthies seriously (by comparison to the infinitely powerful and admirable dumpers), but also because nullmagic science has earned its own self-protective credibility, inertia, wealth, and defenders. Nowadays the sole Arepan cover group is CSICOP -- though its "glamor guys", pop-sci performers like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, James Randi, and Martin Gardner, are not cognizant of their niche.

AREPO also tries to use Earthuman aerospace industries and government agencies to block interplanetary space travel, to prevent humans from somehow tinkering with the rest of the solar system, the vital remagic clock. This too requires little AREPO effort. Factional infighting within large orgs tends to starve new technology, instead directing money, votes, and plausibility to the old "proven" methods. All it takes is for AREPO to sabotage an occasional space mission, reducing the cost-effectiveness of space, and the competition for funding takes care of the rest.

NeuroGod: hey dyde... now I can't even hear Mother Goose without wondering if it started as an AREPO code or maybe learning aid... I luv conspiracy theories but it's all your fault :) ...

Thalp: Conspiracies are the seed of the universe. Memons conspire against sapients. Some planets conspire against sapients. Sapients conspire against each other. Protons and neutrons conspire to exclude electrons from the nucleus. Still I am pleased to tell you almost everyone is on a winning "side" of some conspiracy.

Theofe: As Earthside conspiracies go, AREPO doesn't count for much. They don't care about ruling the planet. Why should they? The remagic dumping has shown them that bigger better things exist. AREPO wants to get in the good graces of the dumpers, not waste their time running Earth.
You want a conspiracy, look at the big one, that keeps changing all the time though it stays about the same. A loose league of worldwide organized crime, a few South American Nazi leftovers, a few elected pols, a lot of First World spooks, national police agents, the privatized prison industry. The people who can't make their living without crime work together even more than they work apart. They don't have a group name, goals, principles, they do all have the same way of life, the same needs. So they don't join a conspiracy, they live conspiracy, the same way white blood cells do.

Most Arepans apparently believe the dumpers still watch and visit Earth, actively using it. (Gregarians know of no such activity.) The most powerful faction in AREPO claims they still have contacts with the dumpers, so they continue to use CSICOP, clippings services, and suchlike to help them track Fortea. In the countries that lack independent media, particularly the XSSR, AREPO monitors government bureaus of psychical research. A splinter faction in AREPO -- of course the stories about this faction may be disinformation -- thinks the dumpers have disappeared and the remagic comes in purely automatically. The splinter Arepans think the purported dumper contacts are pure hoax, and that the dumpers' monitor-golems are leftovers who no longer report to Dump Central.

Cattle mutilations, a few alien contacts, and many UFO sightings result from the activities of the dump-monitors. Being golems, they resemble silicon-based life forms and have purposes and feelings as simple or as complex as bees'. The remagic golems don't use GWs for ships, and they spend most of their time outside the Solar System so that the remagic won't sap their reserves. Mutilations supply the auspices: guts and other alimentary accoutrements to find out the past (or digested) local remagic level, gonads (the organs of the future) to see the local trends, brains to clarify the present. Being designed to function economically, the golems need Earthuman samples only occasionally.

Despite AREPO you'd think we'd have a pile of Gregarians in our face everyday, considering how easy it is for Gregarians to come here. Not so. Major dissuasion begins with the GWemlins, which intermittently trash GWs inside Clarke orbit.

Theofe: My personal casualty list. Two friends whose lift didn't loft, left them sitting in Amazonia for three months. Five whose IVE contact broke down for weeks. One whose shields wouldn't work against local remagic for some days, ruined her antallergy amulets. Three who tried to come in to Earth, got repeatedly veered to other planets instead. One whose banquet table only provided unmodified recycled wastes for a week. Two who have disappeared, nobody knows why. That many incidents out of maybe a hundred successful visits, pretty typical odds.

Also, traders who pirate Earth null-magic tech often harass other Earth visitors as possible competitors, while removing evidence of their own visits to keep Earthumans conveniently off guard. Not that they get a lot of travelers to victimize. In general offEarthers regard Earth as one of the nurdworlds of Gregaria and would rather tour a few select portions by VR than visit in person. (Who was the first on your block to vacation in Burkina Faso? Or Haiti?) Exceptions are the Prankster coterie and a few cachinnodeist missionaries, who don't much mind risk and inconvenience and who rather enjoy Earth. All by itself that Prankster fondness for Earth redirects a lot of plain and simple Gregarian tourists who aren't fond of being made the butts of professional jokes.

Theofe: AREPO's control over Earth works rather well on the large scale, patchily on the small loophole scale. For the sake of absurdity, let's say Ixy, I talked tens of thousands of civsab raumstamm into investing their shit in the fan for the sake of Earth. We could take tens of thousands in Gregarian Wealth from the GWaveyard, bring them in to Earth.
AREPO could stop any attempt on that scale. They don't just stay on Earth, you see, they keep some eyes offEarth. They know much more about scrying, spying through Earth's peculiar macopave than anyone else. Big plans, the Arepans can easily pick up. They'd set plague, bombs, meteor strikes, spells in any areas we might aim for. They'd shrivel the local Earthuman populace, much more likely than hitting us "invaders" safe in our GWs. So? Arepans don't object to holding you nullies hostage at us.

Thalp: AREPO did one of a few helpful things, they prevented that coterie of young Cats from "challenging" Earth all as one. The Cats planned to arrange a huge blinking pattern of GWs in your night sky to read "You lick s**t".

Ruby Arsenic: Hmph. I suppose this'd be a simple statement of fact from one cat to another, and a succulent invitation for a fertilizer-lover like you, but it's something below palatable for us humans who aren't flexible enough to wash with our tongues.

Theofe: I'd call the Catlings case an exception. Little stuff, some GW tourists, some Pranksters, petty recruitment over here, a gravhound over there, AREPO doesn't often do much about those things. Can't afford to police us, probably.
We Gregarian tourists, experimentalists, slavers don't want AREPO plucking at our napes. So we react with great uncertainty to the notion of casting big shadows on Earth. We recall the grim old tales of AREPO's atrocities. So why bother?
I come because I have relatives here. Other Gregarians, I have to wonder why. Maybe a kind of unicorn's lust for innocence.

Why have we seen no interstellar conquerors here? Earth is a less likely target than most, protected by its lack of magic, poorly equipped and therefore of lower value. And harder to conquer, what with remagic.

Why no missionaries here? Gregarian ideologues and concepts seldom have more than local impact. They don't match up with the Earth Weltgeist and its unique absence of consenting sacrifice. Conversion has to pull like gravity, a convincing preacher needs common ground with the congregation; genuine free-floating alienation seldom persuades. Almost all of Earth's most influential creeds started as native products. The most populous exception, Christian Science. The most promising, briefly, Pythagoreanism. (Pythagoras fronted for a mantiaur.)

Gregarians can't actually do much on a world without inviting it to ignore them or, even worse, knocking it to hardscrabble hell. GW Shock has flushed quite a few planetary societies (or weltstamms) down the entropy hole.

The Weltstamm Conservators (who are Nees) spend more effort on Earth than any other Gregarian idealists. It's important to them to take samples of our pedigrees and the matrixes of our unique Earth conceptual strictures before GW Shock sets in or the remagic dumping stops. If you wonder where that hour disappeared to last week at the company picnic, well, you may have been preserved, genetic material, idiosyncratic notions, and all.

However, the WelCon coterists seldom visit Earth themselves. They, like some other experimenters, employ servants. These thrapostulary golems are huge-eyed gray automata who drug, coercively hypnotize, examine, and sample Earthumans who most interest the WelCon collectors. The most time-effective way to preserve genetic material is to mingle it into a golem, which has an extremely long "life"span. Once a golem is made and magically keyed to pseudosapience by contact with a human, it can help with the sampling effort. Hence the tales of Earthumans cruelly abducted and forced to hug larval human-golem "hybrids".

Why no merchants here? Where scarcity absents itself, economic forces abide not. Gregaria doesn't have much in the way of scarcity. There are a few luxury barter goods that GW can't geminate at all or can't copy fast enough to immediately meet the demand: cute knickknacks like the Hope Diamond, the latest data from anywhere, inventions, living tools, luxury slaves, the skilled services (magecraft, courtesanry, healing, improvisational theater). Yes, GWers do eventually transmit, geminate and spread news, bric-a-brac, and knowledge, so scarcities of such items are purely temporary. The trick, gain-wise, is being the first GWer to get these goods. That means knowing the sources better than they know you.

Which brings us back to the topic of Earth. Earth is quite well-known for mass-producing nullmagic technology, a product that has a few specialized users. (Null tech gives explorers an emergency backup for unmapped remagic zones.) OffEarthers get their Earth tech by judicious thefts and borrowings, purchase with pointless Earth currency, or spying through a GW viewall. The slavers can get by even more surreptitiously than that. They don't have to pop up and reveal themselves like so many interstellar flashers.

Theofe: Helpful hint for housewives. GW geminators make great sterilizers, they can't duplicate anything alive. Helpful hint for slavers. Geminate your captive, put the apparently no-cause dead geminate in her, his original's place. It covers your tracks, can save you time, risk.

Some traders have a lasting though furtive impact on Earth. For example, the U.S. and Indian militaries have spent decades secretly studying the propulsion systems of twelve offEarth spacecraft. Not GWs these, but null-magic ships that Ailurosi found on an exhabited world and brought in to Earth. A few Ailurosi traders wanted to lift what tidbits the Earth null-magic techs and mathies might learn about the ships. First, of course, the traders fed the milits all manner of protective entertaining bafflegab about the "aliens" who designed the ships.

And then there are the dopples, tourists, pranksters, loonies, and other close encounters of the fluke kind. Most of these spacers go disguised; they so enjoy slumming. Some achieve quite the tiny success performing Fortean anomalies. Others specialize in mass miracles. Arthur Machen wrote the "Angel of Mons" as fiction soon before it happened, a most Gregarian accomplishment. Some visitors go in for "private acts of art between non-consenting adults", in other words pranks. But Gregarian pranksters refer to us Earthbound proteges as "dew eggs": brittle, naive, too splashy, too easy to break up. The Pranksters prefer to zoom upon other visiting spacers. Usually.

Theofe: Jazbro has secretly surrealized Pope John Paul II for years now. Every time he leaves Rome, the Pope finds the same meal waiting in his visitor's suite. Fresh hot rack of lamb with passion-fruit jelly. A stylish crown-of-thorns garnish. A naked gape-bellied kewpie doll on the side. Served on a place setting of geminated Cellini silver from the Vatican vaults. A napkin geminated from the face of the Shroud of Turin. It could amuse me more if Jazbro hadn't told me what caused John Paul I's heart attack.
I think Jazbro has overdone his Pope surrealization. It should have developed, like the classic growing, then shrinking, turtles prank, not just repeated. Jazbro thinks exact repetition has a delicate beauty. The protege's reaction varies just a little each time. He calls it a "perplexity envelope" around the statistically average reaction. Every cloud has its own silver lining.
Jazbro will move on soon to a different prank. It'll involve Stephen Hawking, the man who impersonates him in "his" public appearances.

As for dopples, they don't often get noticed on Earth in any big way. Don't think of the famed Kaspar Hauser in this connection. He didn't visit Earth the hard way, by the mirror express: he was a native who temporarily escaped from AREPO (one of the control subjects in AREPO's experiments in making Moonchildren). Earth works out about 80% uninhabitable for people who didn't expect to be here, even the human people; and not all nonhumans can survive in our null-magic environment. About a dozen sapient dopples a year have survived Earth long enough to make contact.

If you're much of an SF reader, you can well imagine the narrow inauspicious gamut of Earthuman reactions even to the human offEarth dopples. Non-humans mostly wander the wild till they die or get taken in (in both senses) by magnates' private menageries. Mostly in Kuwait and Oman. As for the Earthumans returning from The DopplExile, they can't very well settle unless perchance they find precisely the right temporal patch of the planet, of which more anon.

Tourists do get themselves noticed on occasion. Consider, if you will, the experience of a certain California couple. On the evening after the 1987 quake, they drove past a boat cruising down a hilly road near Mt. Shasta. Its keel made waves in the pavement, its headlights reflected on the waves, and this bothered the couple.

They followed the boat to an isolated house. They thought they had successfully crept up to eavesdrop. Then they noticed many weirdly dressed folks all around, watching them. Next the couple got the idea the group had mistaken them for friends sneaking in for a surprise party for the boat's owner. In fact the two had clevered themselves into a meet of a Catastrophist coterie, who took them for unfamiliar, uncomfortable new members. Next the party-goers started connoisseuring natural disasters like fine wines, and discussing houses that acted like cars, boats, and planes. The couple figured they'd gotten in among a bunch of the usual Earthuman crackpots and fled by pretending sudden expulsive illness.

But this couple had rare pertinacity. They talked to the press, who sent a worldly-wise 23-year-old reporter out to the house. He knocked. He asked. A pretty pleasant 110-year-old woman said the oddballs had come to be cast in a play. Her "husband" came out in spectacularly zany make-up, volubly gave the reporter handshakes, handbills, and PR, occupying the boy's complete inattention. Later a coterist slept the couple by night and interrogated them GWise. She found they no longer felt any great interest, having passed the problem to a journalistic authority, and she left them certain they'd only been questioned in a dream.

Which may demonstrate how visitors become invisible. Gregarians get lots of diverting practice in viewlessness.

Theofe: Think of the low noticeability of GWers this way. Britain currently records 250,000 missing persons. Each left behind one, more persons grieved, frightened, overjoyed by the loss. Nevertheless, Britain has no official agency to trace missing persons. So the newspapers don't print daily stories about them. By comparison, GW visitors let permanent memories remain in less than 250,000 contacts per decade. We usually cause less disturbance than the loss of a friend, relative. So why should more public fuss arise about GWers than about missing persons?
Another example, maybe a closer analogy. Psychologists, educators, other mind researchers conduct experiments on knowing, unknowing people all the time. So hundreds, thousands of papers get written every year. How many "experimental animals" do you know? How often do research results get published in the news you read? If you read it, how much accuracy did the newsies manage?

Beach BEM: However, none of this quite explains why the Gregarians haven't made radio contact with SETI or any other suitable agency. Despite AREPO they could accomplish that safely and convincingly.

Theofe: Safely for us. Fatally for the Earthbound end. Remember the Tunguska!

Bill Inconnu: If this became widely known on Earth, I think you would see people here reacting much the way our "Third World" (lesser-developed) nations react to the wealth controlled by, and the pollution emitted by, better-off nations. In other words, you interstellar folks enjoy an inconceivably high standard of living, you do not share it with us, and "waste products" which you say you are unable to account for are getting dumped on our territory and are causing us great disbenefit.
In the case of Third World vs Developed World disputes on Earth, these arguments have a bit of truth to them but are largely unjustified. But in the case of Earth vs Gregaria (pardon the "us vs you" terminology, but that is how the politicians and the news media would present it), you have free access to GW technology that just appeared out of nowhere, which (by Earth standards) you could not be said to "own", and which would probably prove extremely valuable to us if we had access to it here. You don't know if this technology produces waste products. And coincidentally, a whole load of waste products are being dumped on Earth.
Our politicians and media would present this as an "unproven but likely" case of cause and effect, and would insist that not only do you have a duty to give us free access to your technology, but you owe us a cleanup of the dumped remagic plus compensation for the thousands of years since the dumping began.

Free Meson: This fiction of yours shows a deplorable lack of respect not only for the intelligence of the Club users but for simple human dignity. How offensive for us to be treated like inadequate experimental animals for pranksters! What would be the point of such puerile behavior? We Terrans are set up as the fall guys again! Haven't we had enough of that from Star Trek?

Thalp: I consider you both are assuming that raumstammm desire to be liked and approved by Earthumans. It happens this may not be the "case". Raumstamm group in coteries, cohered by interior courtesy, not in orgs adhered by dis/approval. If any raumstamm were softened by dis/approval it would program them to stay in the archecultures and thereby in from space and out and away from Earth. To put it further, Earth is an aversion.

One of the more antagonistic Gregarian sects catches followers by claiming to have the power to protect believers from being reincarnated on Earth and Tau Ceti 4. That teaching is frowned upon, though; it's considered an outrageous incitement to prebirth trauma.

Let us briefly (not very) review the nature of Gregarian prejudice against Earthumans. By (Gregarian) definition, any pre-GW world is "immature". A favorite homily is that the development of a sapient weltstamm mimics that of an individual's maturation. Among humans, the lone anarcho-savage hunter-gatherer stage corresponds to a toddler seizing whatever sustenance or information comes to it, with few social loyalties or taboos. Next the superstitious tribal phase in the early school years, with many clannish loyalties and even more taboos. Then comes the god-king stage, late childhood, where the parents seem almost godlike, but it's a big almost. They can be deceived, bullied, or propitiated, but never utterly ignored or escaped. Then feudal rebelliousness and theocratic moralizing in the adolescent period. This is the complexity catastrophe, when the culture tries to bust out of all its leaders' parental expectations and demands, even the rare sensible ones. Finally comes GW, Gregarian Wealth, and full mature unruled autonomy.

Earth's dominant weltstamm isn't just teenage, so they say, but a nurd -- spends all its time locked in its room obsessed with nullmagic tech and inter/dependent on other people. And the nurd way of thinking is a very regrettably insular mixture of quantitatist and personalist ideomania.

Theofe: "Personalism" centers on a Person, Persons. It views life, the world only in terms of the actions of persons. Persuasion of, obedience to Some Person(s) make the center about which daily life turns. Everything bad comes from the fault, judgment of some one. For example, one person's head cold can only come from another's ill will curse, a god's punishment. So every detail of the world comes from a relationship between persons. Therefore it has moral meaning, some kind of personal symbolism. (Ixy reminded me about an example, Earth's passion flower. Every visible part of it stands for a memento of Someone's crucifixion.)
A scarcity (pre-GW) economy can't escape nurd personalism. Everyday everyone depends on other people rather than on inanimate nature. So it becomes natural to think of anything that goes wrong as a person's fault, not the result of some impersonal process. Maybe the nurd personalists blame the sinner persons for drawing down The Big Person's wrath, then burn them. Maybe they blame some person with deep pockets, then file suit against him. Maybe they blame themselves, go buy self-help books, start on some kind of diet, self-empowerment. Personalism drives all of those.
"Quantitatism" means the amount-centered way of seeing life that follows the unmixed use of nullmagic tech. "More is better", "less is more", no "big" difference which you pick. Statistically significant correlations become The Law. If you can measure, quantify, count, poll it, though only under laboratory conditions, nothing else matters. So the quantitative view fosters bureaucratic "bean-counters," with their performance criteria based on accounting.
So nurd quantitatists consider qualitative issues, subjective experience, as irrelevant, delusionary. Their social worries center on whether people get "equality", "inequality", like numbers. Their cost-benefit analyses derive precise prices for lives, health. They ignore all conspiracy theories because the voters outnumber the conspirators, who thus must cause only negligible perturbations. Life, the universe act as logical as numbers. Any disagreement comes from poor observation, wishful thinking, lies.

Along with nurdism, Earth carries the normal Right-Stuff stigma. "It must have been picked as a remagic dump because Earthumans had the least potential for anything better than anthill (or ant-hell) life. Look how no Gregarian mage has ever found a way to trace the dumping. It's nothing short of miraculous." The ability to do miracles is accepted as prima facie evidence of moral authority and supremacy. If the dumpers had that kind of sorcerous ingenuity and power, they probably had what it took to pass an adequately just judgment on Earthumans.

Besides, even if Earthumans weren't inferiors on Day 1 of the remagic dumping, they're bound to have degenerated since then. It's inevitable with the high population Earth has had for so many generations. A crowd is like a liquid near boiling. Its particles bounce off each other too often to gain much from using their foresight; all the most dependable gains come from sudden opportunism during transient interactions. Because Earthumans have dealt more with human vagaries than with lasting abhuman quandaries, they've undergone natural selection for impulse power and short-sightedness.

Thalp: Nonetheless that theory of forward evolution for frivolity is nearly incomplete. A high population density also selects for the ability to manipulate the Inner World, the logic, abstractions, symmbols and et cetera. To survive among many strangers of each other sapients must depend on abstractions, not shared experience as in clans. On Earth this seemingly has gone so far such that "intelligence" is defined only as Inner World dexterity as in the "IQ test", and concrete intuition, imagination, and equilibrated foresight into the Outer World are not included. Therefore the highest IQ ranks go to Earthumans who have longest evolved in high density groupings, these may be the Far Easterners such as Chinese and the Near Easterners such as Semites.

Theofe: The old generation Gregarians say, Earthumans haven't had the generosity, common sense to keep up more than a pretense of regular sacrifice. If they'd sacrificed like other sapients, maybe they'd have intuited a way to get out from inside the dumping.

There's an unsavory substrate to all this pop-goes-the-psychology and normative detritus. Except for a few ardent researchers, most GWers don't quite want to know whether the remagic that's being dumped on Earth (and Tau Ceti 4) is the waste product of their indispensable GWs. One of these days the GWers might be finding out, or so say the dopple-scryers...

...but then dopple-scryers aren't psychic and don't have access to "the truth", only to the opinions and theories that reach the commoner levels of the media of the future. Or perhaps it's just a future, a contingent one that might only have sprung up recently and might evanesce just as abruptly.

Temporal opalescence is the difficulty. The DMs detach dopples from coherent time on their planet of origin. If a dopple gets back to his home planet, he finds it a gerrymandered patchwork of different eras, just as an opal is a patchwork of different colors. One domain of a few "square" miles may lie in 1846 AD, another equally minute and irregular domain next door is in 247 BC, and so on. Waves of time-variance sweep back and forth across some groups of domains, as a wave of color runs across parts of an opal when you turn it.

On Earth, the time domains are separated by some multiple of the invariant quantum of 29.5 years: one revolution of Saturn around the Sun. Other worlds (except for Tau Ceti 4) exhibit numerous domain quanta, not just one. Earth's almost unique temporal behavior is peculiarly consistent with Saturn's traditional connection with Kronos, god of Time, and may derive from the Solar System remagic clock.

To a dopple in high orbit, all of his home planet seems to run in his current time. Only when he enters within synchronous orbit does the opalescence of time become perceptible. Even then, an original can look out the same GW door, or at the same viewall, as his dopple companion and observe nary a trace of any time-domain boundary. Is temporal opalescence only a dopple's perceptual escape from the "illusion of time", then? Leap not to that hypothesis. The dopples who've stepped out of their GWs into a domain outside their own personal time have permanently vanished from the view of their dopple and undopple companions. They reached neither the domain time nor "their own" time.

As seen by a dopple, almost all the natives of a planet disappear when they cross a domain boundary. They must, therefore, be entrenched in their "own" time even while they're outside the time's domain limits in space. Natives don't perceive the boundary, though the dopple's vision is limited by it. A very few apparent natives do not disappear. That must give them a quiltlike limited sort of time travel. For the time being, whoever the Time Being may be, Gregarians can only speculate about what effect the domain travelers have had on history.

You can see how a dopple returning from The DopplExile might have trouble finding a domain in which he can get in touch with his original. Almost all dopples have a horror of stepping outside time, or of being forever trapped in their own past: of catching or spreading history, or some other anachronistic epidemic disease.

Theofe: That doesn't bother Ixy, I, the most. Our bane lies elsewhere. Should we think we know what we've found out by watching the bits of planetary opal in our future? They call it dopple-scrying. We might as well try to understand a Delphic oracle, the I Ching, the Ailurean Tarot, as figure out the future based on the future's pop culture, mass media. I tell you our interpretations. If you don't believe them, I admire you for it.

In Earth's future one Saturn forward (2022 AD), a sort of religious softwar has started over communications standards. The users of the Majornet have begun to decide which data standard to close ranks behind. In the US, the AT&T and MS-DoD "tech transfer" standards rule, with three smaller ones still existing. Each of the standards contractually controls data resources that go beyond incredibly valuable and can't be used competitively by the other standards. The Western world can no longer afford the expenditure it would take to reconcile the standards. And the players don't want any reconciliation that loses them whatever perceived advantage they have.

Over the last five or six years (counting back from Saturn+1) the competitors began to vie more fiercely. They "now" use the media outlets with whose corporate owners they're affiliated to badvertise their opponents. They launch antitrust suits or environmental accusations against each other's client industries, or incite labor troubles. They bribe Third World countries to join their networks, to get prestige or transmission equipment easements. They lobby the First World governments to loan more money to the Third World to buy in with. More and more lobbying groups, industries, and small countries get webbed in all the time.

Idiosyncratically, the Vatican signed on with the LDS data standard -- the largest one that would agree to the Vatican's moral strictures. And the LDS Church holds a manipulable balance of power in the Big Two negotiations. It has a proprietary genealogical data bank, most valuable for tracking inherited diseases and associating them with the human genome.

The first undeniably dangerous incident in the softwar occurred three years "ago", as commercial tactics became well nigh indistinguishable from military. The Ukraine besieged and expropriated the "MS-DoD standard" communications station built to aid the FBI in its Redlands anti-criminal activities. Seemingly unrelated terrorist attacks followed. At first they seemed to have no systematic targets. Then the media was told to notice a pattern. Industrial accidents at AT&T clients. Terrorist groups seizing AT&T broadcast and network stations to disseminate their "political reinformation bulletins".

Next a power failure with inexplicable voltage spikes took out the Central Eastern seaboard for two days. Incidentally, it wiped vital DoD computers. It happened in spring, normally a temperate season, but an unseasonable hot spell drove people out of their costly self-roasting apartments into the cheap open air. The slumbags tried to pillage the richer park-campers. The National Guard drove them back, engendering resonance riots in other major cities.

The pattern of attacks has become more confused since then. A series of "industrial accidents" at Hoechst has been linked back to sabotage by an anti-abortion group. Hoechst makes the biochemical descendants of RU486. Did the anti-abortion Vatican/LDS standard make these attacks? Or did EC-standard supporters like the French government target Hoechst as a holdout?

Was it part of the softwar when India and Pakistan fought a war using biobombs and radiodust? The West and China successfully shut out almost all the IndiPak refugees, tracking and deterring them with metabolically sensitive "sickie sniffer" microflyers. Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Nepal, Bangladesh, and even Korea got badly infected, contaminated, and bankrupted by refugees. US companies have profited hugely from their reconstruction contracts, as they did in Kuwait. Their decontamination spinoff technologies have since been adapted to successfully track non-contaminated refugees and illegal migrants.

Probably not part of the softwar: the slow contagion of human insanity, and the popular "designer phobias", across the burgeoning international trisensory VR NetFun® network. Hypersynesthesia, interchanging the senses of sight, sound, and touch, is especially contagious. A few computer-based viruses infect human minds. Advertisers avoid jingles and hire lobe-hacker convicts to tell them what not to do.

NeuroGod: That is so cool... I want to be the one who invents those viruses... what I really want to invent is some kind of thing for computer telepathy... it would be an expert system that could connect into all the right parts of the brain... anyone who wanted to use it would have to train it to recognize their own way of thinking, I mean like no two people send the same signals for "blue" or any other idea... training would be like showing someone a color to concentrate on, letting the machine learn what mental fingerprint goes with that... do that thing with all kinds of ideas, maybe broken down into different kinds of ideas like a thesaurus... then any two people could link up and let their machines do pronto translating...

Not long from our present, computer networks became "essential to the democratic process", and essential to the AT&T-DoD duopoly. The American government then declared the semiconductor industry and its associates to be strategic industries, protecting them from them thar furrin competitors. Controls were also put on the Majornet to ensure the "efficient, fully mandated use of an invaluable public resource". For example, restrictions on e-cash transactions to prevent subsidizing foreign currencies (called "laundry-bait") and terrorist groups. The Minornet, that slow archaic linkage once called the Internet, has many fewer restrictions. But its participants must have licenses (akin to ham radio licenses) and there are special equalization phone rates for Minornet modem calls, very pricey.

Community policing governs most of the online and offline world. Most crimes are punished not through criminal law but through civil law, on which there are few of those chaotic and arbitrary constitutional restrictions. Civil law, beneficially, requires less evidence to prove guilt -- a "preponderance of evidence", not "proof beyond a reasonable doubt". Meanwhile it considers the defendant "guilty till proven innocent". Generally, a suspect's neighbors and/or coworkers, people who are in a position to be sure of his guilt, file a subclass-action suit against him. They ask for confiscation of his property and other punitive damages for his "wrongful manifestation". The local police agencies join in the suit as part of the plaintiff subclass, recovering the expenses they incur in old-style criminal enforcement. Also in vogue are restraining orders against "proactive manifestation", a tort which covers a bit more ground than stalking, harassment, mental cruelty, loitering, and vagrancy.

Employers have a large part to play in enforcement. Their modern hiring policies, which allocate extra jobs for applicants who engage in community volunteer work, have been praised for reducing the call on taxpayer funding for welfare. In addition, even the smallest government contracts and subcontracts require the contractors to manage their employees in fully standardized ways. In order to maintain "optimal workforce quality, stability, and competitiveness", contractors' employees must undergo regular drug and psychological tests (administered using VeridiScanTM and other truthtek). Career rehabilitation training is mandatory for those who fail. Various types of demeaning conversations and actions are also grounds for dismissal or retraining, as in our present (called the "Gray Nineties"). Employees must be suspended with partial pay for a "cooling-off period" after manifestation actions are filed against them and while they undergo retraining.

Sabre: The "Gray" Nineties is right. Everyone talks about how much trouble young people today are and how selfish they are. No one ever says the trouble is too many old folks who want to get their retirement goodies before they die and are not willing to keep working for them because they think the world owes them a living. They run the young ones into the ground with religious rubbish too because they're so worried about their own afterlives. These are the people who make the country prematurely tired and crotchety.

Beach BEM: You seem to be seeking the word "senescence"; however, I don't agree that it's applicable. This country of ours has the world's most youth-driven culture, and the extent to which the elderly are culturally ineffectual is precisely the extent to which they engage in the distinctively geriatric behavior of which you're complaining.

About half the children in the Western world start working at the age of ten or eleven. This seems to have begun with community service requirements for high school graduation. It has continued into "practicum education", a revival of apprenticeship, which is widely touted as "taking kids off the pedestal" or "disenchanting childhood". Recently a survey appeared in which 73.2% of the interviewed families stated they needed all the income their children bring in. It's barely possible that the Saturn+1 folk find life more expensive than our present generation, but Majornet's consensus spokesEliza calls such topics "concedist and irrelativist" and seldom encourages lengthy discussions of them.

Free Meson: I entirely disbelieve your projection. Pardon my incredulity, but how can a sophisticated information economy possibly profit by employing children?

Children work primarily as household or office servants -- "our nation's social-talents futurists". Sometimes they do the trudge trudge part of craftswork, as in Colonial days. Often they perform VR database validation, using software styled to play like a competitive computer game; humans can still do cheaper, faster, more accurate pattern-matching than any AI.

Even considering everything else on the list, the single ugliest aspect of Saturn+1 is probably disease terrorism. Resistant, infectious strains of TB, typhoid, strep, newpox (it can't be smallpox, that was officially eradicated), and some other diseases have become epidemic in the inner cities. Terrorists (usually the contragenome groups) capture groups of children and elderkin from upper-income areas and hold them long enough to infect them. Sometimes, for a ransom, they free the captives uninfected.

Citizen Paine: Good try gal, but I've got 45-caliber crystal ballz that say different and my futurez bigger and meaner than yerz. See, there'z not gonna be any more lawz enforced against punk criminals but of course there'll still be lawz against companiez makin money too EZ. Murdererz, thievez, con-men, vandalz, arsonists, blackmailerz and them other scumbagz are free to do anything they can. Everybody talx about the country if you can call it that as two classez, Wreckerz and Citizenz.
Guvment will pretty much take care of the Wreckerz of the future. Not by welfare or anything out in the open but by lettin them support themselvez in wayz that usedta be illegal.
The insurance companiez will take care of the Citizenz. They pay back for ripoffs just like accidents or if a Citizen gets offed they shell out to hiz heirz. Of course the govt is subsidizin the insurance companiez who replaced all the welfare and medicare.
The big difference between the Wrecker and the Citizen iz that Citizenz have oldstyle jobz. Their bossez still have this oldfashion insistence on their employeez playing straight and narrow and they pay pretty high for it, I mean before taxez. Natch, a company can't make it if it can't trust the staff. It can't afford gettin equipment stolen and beatingz in the restroomz and all that. The high pay iz so az to lure people away from a life of "crime" becauz crime iz less work like Amway. And besidez someone hasta be able to buy things for the Wreckerz to steal and to buy stuff from the fencez and keep the economy goin.
Of course everybody will have anticrime insurance, the guvment requirez it and most people have moren that much. Even Wreckerz have insurance. After all without any real convictionz how can ya know who iz or izn't a Wrecker. Anyway they're cheaper to insure becauz they know howta fight so they get hurt less. And there are some private detectivez that Citizenz use to find Wreckerz to sue for damagez. That supports the lawyerz so iz still allowed.
In the future the only real crime will be defendin yerself. If a victim fights back any then his compensation will get cut back maybe to nuthin. See, if self-defense wuz allowed more people might get hurt or blown away and the companiez would have to shell out more. Gunz are illegal of course but the rich folks bribe the cops to keep theirz and no one wantz to go into the slumz so there izn't much enforcement except a few block raidz against middle class people. But people who don't have any kinda home or office security system get fined for defraudin the insurance agencies. Real cute.
Hey Free Meson, I didn't fergit ya. Hope ya like livin that way, you and your kidz, cauz that's what you and yer buddiez with the mental blox about gunz are sendin us all to.

The next quantum of futurity, Saturn +2, is (ahem) rather different. At Saturn +2 (2051 AD), the remagic dumping ended almost twenty years past when Mercury mislaid its structural integrity.

Some sources say that a French-African consortium had tried to carry out massive tektitogenic mining on Mercury. They'd meant to blast off a small fraction as cool-orbit asteroids for processing, but instead knocked the planet into a different orbit, blowing off a third of its mass anti-Sunwards. Other sources say a experimental process for converting solar power to antimatter went wrong. Maybe it was all just a ghastly mistake, maybe sabotage in the continuing softwar. Maybe AREPO tried to discourage spaceploitation and it backfired. Maybe the Arepans blasted Mercury themselves to bring on the inevitable while they still had the option of timing the change to their own advantage. In any event, Earth's remagic clock seems to have stopped by Saturn +2.

Earth orgs have undergone a salutary but incomplete setback. Incomplete, in that GWs haven't come on stage. Some dopple-scryers claim to have found references to GWs in the news, but the quotes are out of context and generally indeterminate.

Theofe: Some talkshows have mentioned "the Cornucopia Trains". They say, long strings of boxcars that travel down abandoned highways at midnight, dropping currencies, food onto the pavement. Sounds like urban legend gone dingo. It might have started with Pranksters, though.

After the Mercury spill, the first signs of the remagic dump failure came in the form of major-league Fortea: falls of stones and goo, sightings of chimeric beasts, spontaneous human combustion epidemics, the mass disappearance of 5% of the world population. Possibly those who disappeared were the changelings, "people who should always have been somewhere else." There was a plague of catatonia. Its victims, often gays, grew a second set of genitals and reproductive organs with body-draining rapidity, then awoke. These were the "people who should always have been herms." It took a few weeks for all this to reach serious journalistic attention (if that isn't an oxymoron). Then came prayer meetings against Satanism, TV specials, TV-movies, Sunday telethons to help the afflicted, mockumentaries. Pawky derision from the candidates of that campaign summer.

Shortly before Election Day 2032 came the waves of zauber changes. Another 15% of the population metamorphosed into different zauberstamms of the human species: werebeasts, dryads, fauns, naiads, salamanders, lithotropes, nightrunners, avatars, spellbounds. These preters are the people who would have lived their whole lives in zauberstamm had the remagic not stifled them.

Within a week, depopulation. Many preters, overcome by inexplicable urges, terrified of themselves, committed suicide, often in churches or mosques to save their souls. Others went for the woods, volcanoes, oceans, wherever felt natural or needful. Others barricaded themselves in their neighborhoods or homes, and expelled those suspect of magic. Even their own parents or children. There were surges of massacres in Third-World countries and First World rural communities. The saddest cases were those who had "Frollo's Syndrome": they had become something traditionally considered evil and, considering themselves wholly damned, they behaved damnably.

Most organizations tottered to a dead stop. It wasn't just that many people couldn't do the work they'd done before; besides that, many of the preters had converted to doing something obstructive. Like what the dryads did about logging, and the salamanders about steel-smelting.

For further complications, it wasn't only humans that went zauber. Goat bucks and deer does provided unicorns, dogs joined the Wild Hunt, Komodo dragons finally lived up to their name. Compared to all this, the mere precipitation of stones and organic glorp from the sky didn't affect much. Neither did the continuing spontaneous human combustion of several dozen people a day in Chicago, Tallinn, and Coventry. Demons, angels, and the other avatars of the planetary macopave walked the land. These latter cataclysms, though, occurred as rarely as other natural disasters of the same devastation level.

The legends have turned out not to be accurate about the natures and needs of the preters. Dryads don't die when their tree does, or sicken when they leave it. Salamanders aren't shaped like lizards, but like embryonic humans at the mock-reptilian stage of development. (Young Benvenuto Cellini didn't observe keenly enough.) Lithotropes live in humanoid stone carapaces which they periodically outgrow, discarding their old shells like cicadas. They don't turn others into stone, like Medusa. You might as well say cicadas turn each other into tissue paper.

Nightrunners, the pre-legendary version of vampires, live and wake quite safely in the sunlight. They prefer darkness; their preterhuman abilities work only then. They and what they carry become invisible in shadows. They can run, climb, swim tirelessly all night, in a dreamlike passion of motion. They hunt then too, eating their kills raw while still running. They mate for life, profusely, and only with other nightrunners.

Spellbounds are the most exploitable preters -- they're overcome by fits of magical intuition. They simply suddenly know the qualities of a plant or substance, how to bespell with it. But the intuition can come over them at any time, sending the sorcerer into a driven spell-making fugue that only dubiously allows for reason and conscience. Known spellbounds are treated like holy idiot savants. Their groups forgive their misdeeds; in return the spellbounds turn over all their discoveries to the group. The spellbounds are protected from themselves and carefully watched during fits so that their insights don't get missed or forgotten. They can be allowed little privacy and receive little trust.

Theofe: One more feature, an anomaly barely mentioned on a few pirate radio stations in Saturn +2. Some people have tried to dowse Sapience, found it in only a few individuals of some animal species, including dolphins, cats. Perplexingly, a few humans lack it. Possibly were-humans? Conspiracy theorists claim that the secret were-humans had invented rock music, abstract art to supply the stimuli that all weres need to avoid returning to nonhuman form. Whatever form they might come from.

The overbearing majority of surviving humankind remained trads, "traditionals", "traducers". But they had to form new orgs and find ways to keep getting food, information, fuel. All the nationwide networks (Majornet, transportation, electric power) became local and sporadic because of the lack of reliable, punctual, consistent labor. Even those who were still trad had to spend much of their erstwhile work time protecting themselves in new magical ways against new magical attacks. Some people (possibly AREPOids) already knew enough magic to be dangerous.

"Public emergency." Martial law. Cancelled elections. Curfews. Small towns walled their boundaries where possible. Cities set up Neighborhood Guards and required compulsory social service "for the duration". In a spirit of frantic, unspeakably sincere desire to return to normalcy, most trads went along fervently. "Morale" hadn't been higher or rationing tighter since WW II.

Those controls arrived within the first 2 years after the Change Months. Some pre-existing emergency directives speeded the process. Those years also saw the panicky persecution of misfits, not so much the preters (who had already fled the trad orgs) as the trads who didn't go along politically. Especially hounded were the trads who tried to learn magic. But the fear of (even absent) preters remained clear and present. It led to many local prohibitions on practice of witchcraft, laws which have only begun to be underenforced in the last few years.

The state and Federal governments have had all they can do to keep track of what is going on, maintain a currency and an information service, supply troops for martial law enforcement, seize crucial industries, collect taxes to feed the indigent, and set up make-work programs. With all the internal difficulties, few nations took time for external wars. Law enforcement has had to stay close to home.

To establish a more perfect disunion, governments have lightened their burdens by delegating authority in many areas to "free communities". People in an ethnic or religious group, or in a neighborhood, receive a permit to form a minigov. They need not pay taxes and whathaveyou to the central government; in return they get no services (welfare, policing, et cetera). The centergovs enforce this policy with ID cards, which are (at last!) compulsory, even for freecomm citizens. Various laws of the kind we call criminal still apply to violent interactions between freecommies and other citizens. Freecommies must pay fees for use of roads, utilities, and other services, even in emergencies. This all entails fairly close scrutiny of freecomm actions. The government, still operating in a state of emergency, can offhandedly dissolve any freecomm that "abuses its privileges".

Taking advantage of this sociolytic State, some years back the political rebels and the potential witches began to leave the established centers of population and to form co-operatives, called covunes. They come in all flavors: communist anarchist, individualist anarchist, neuro-thearchies, varying degrees of autocracy. The ones which succeed best are those in which spellbounds are governed least. The covunes mainly survive by producing the magical crafts and services which help fill the gaps between rationing and comfort. Recently a few covunes have even set up trading posts in cities.

The large-scale governments no longer openly persecute the covunes. For one thing, the covunes pay bribes, taxes, fees, or fines, when necessary. For another, they help keep the peace: they decrease unrest by increasing the comforts available to the other citizens.

Besides, covunes can well defend themselves. They have the lead on magical studies because the spellbounds feel safer living in covunes than elsewhere. Curses and 'tacles of safeguarding make potent defenses. Various antagonistic groups discovered that fact within a few years after the covunes began to coalesce from wandering singleton misfits.

In the first few years post-Change, anyone with truly sincere enemies had a large chance of not surviving their numerous curses. The trads still overreact to that memory. Bathrooms have "more privacy and cleanliness than ever", and the new houses have guest and host bathrooms. Guests bring their own cleaning tools and waste containers, and maybe the sheets and bedclothes too. The cry of the vacuum cleaner is heard through the land, to get hair and nail clippings off the floors and away from the filching hoodooing hand. (Filled vacuum cleaner bags are burned for safekeeping.) Few people have those hard-to-clean carpets. Barbers, dentists, manicurists, surgeons, and so on are bonded against misuse of body discards. A patient may contractually require that a corporal watchman be present during any such operations.

Theofe: Talk about panic mode. A few amulets, alrauns would give just as much protection. Defense comes so much easier than attack in magic.

A disproportionate number of covuneers have come from topologists, computer programmers, abstract mathematicians, and other people who deal in number without measure. Boolean algebra comes in useful in examining the combinations of magical qualities in spells. Computers can store the known permutations. Covunes also include phoneticists for sounds having magical qualities, as well as herbalists, botanists, rockhounds...

Some of the trade goods that are made by covunes include "household appliance" magic: rotatory perpetual motion to generate electricity, perpetual heat for heating and cooking. Very few magicians (except feng shui experts) have the skills to provide these spells in cities, in the urban complexity of magical influences; so now there's role reversal, city slickers having fewer modern doodads than the hicks.

Beach BEM: If it is possible to disengage something as powerful as remagic by simply remodeling a minor planet, then there is some plausible hope for the liberation of Earth, and AREPO's opposition to space exploration becomes more comprehensible. I do believe further plot development should revolve around this matter.

Thalp: Why do you think we are now spilling the "beans"?

`Those who cannot remember the future are condemned to repeat it...`

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