Despite their experience, the surviving Lunarians remained hostile and immiscible. The Lambians went back with the Ganymeans and were installed on a world called Jevlen, eventually to become a fully integrated, human component of the Thurien civilization. The Cerians were returned, at their own request, to the world of their origins:
Earth, where they were almost overwhelmed shortly afterward by climatic and tidal upheavals caused by the arrival of Minerva’s moon. For thousands of years they reverted to barbarism, struggling on the edge of extinction, and the knowledge of their origins was lost. Only in modern times, when they at last climbed outward once more toward the stars and found the traces of what had gone before, were they able to piece the story together.
The Jevlenese never ceased regarding the people of Earth as Ceri— ans. As part of a plan for one day settling the score with their ancient rivals, they inaugurated a campaign to retard Earth’s progress toward rediscovery of the sciences and advanced civilization, while they themselves absorbed Thurien technology and gained autonomy over their own affairs. From its beginnings, they altered the course of Earth’s history by infiltrating agents, fully human in form, to spread beliefs in magic and superstition, and to found irrational mass movements that would keep Earth impotent by diverting its energies away from the path by which real knowledge is acquired.
As the confidence and arrogance of the Jevlenese leaders grew, so did their resentment of the restraint to their ambitions posed by the Ganymeans, whose nonviolent ways merely aroused their contempt.
Taking advantage of the innate Ganymean inability to suspect motives, the Jevienese gained control of the surveillance operation set up to keep a watch over Earth’s development; while preserving outward appearances of being model protégés of the Ganymeans, they fed the Ganymeans falsified accounts of a militarized Earth about to burst out from the Solar System, and used this as a pretext for inducing the Ganymeans to prepare countermeasures. What the Jevlenese planned to do was seize control of the countermeasures themselves, eliminate their Terran rivals and repossess the Solar System, and then sweep outward in a wave of acquisition and conquest across the galaxy, unchecked and unopposed.
But the reappearance of a lost starship from the ancient Ganymean civilization on Minerva changed everything.
The Ganymean scientific mission ship Shapieron, returning after a twenty-five-million-year time dilation compounded by a fault in the vessel’s space-time—distorting drive method, came back to the Solar System to find Minerva gone and a new, terrestrial race spacefaring among the planets. The “Giants” remained on Earth for six months and mingled harmoniously. But the most significant outcome of the pooling of the Terran proclivity for intrigue with alien technical ability was the establishing of the first direct contact between Earth and Thurien, bypassing the Jevlenese and the millennia-old surveillance system. The affiance led to a confrontation in which the deceit and scheming of the Jevlenese was exposed, revealing the network of infiltrators by which they had endeavored to subvert modern-day Earth after the attempts to block its technological advancement failed.
The encounter that followed came to be known as the Pseudowar. In it, the supercomputing entity JEVEX, which managed all of the communications, information handling, and other vital functions of the Jevlenese worlds, was penetrated and defeated by a fictional interstellar attack force consisting entirely of computer—generated imagination. The just-proclaimed “Federation,” by which the Jevlenese proposed bringing their plans to fruition, collapsed, JEVEX was shut down, and Jevlen put on a period of probation. The Ganymeans of the Shapieron, displaced from their own home and time and needing an interval of respite to adapt to their new circumstances, were installed on Jevlen to take charge of the rehabilitation. Earth, rid of the corrupt element responsible for practically all of the more sordid side of its turbulent history, looked forward to assuming its rightful place in the interstellar community.
So, once again, after a few more old beliefs had been toppled, what remained was surely fact, resting on solid foundations. The future could be faced with assurance.
Nothing more could go wrong, now .
CHAPTER ONE
Nieru, the god of darkness, was descending in the west after his nightly domination of the sky, his cloak wrapped about him in a glowing purple spiral. Overhead, Cassona, the goddess who created weather, had become the dawn star. The three lesser stars of her daughters, the Cassoneids, which oscillated about her—Peria, Isthucis, and Dometer, the spirits of wind, rain, and cloud—were very close, almost in alignment, which meant that it was early summer. Compared to the splendor that the night sky had once been, the stars were few and feeble.