Two major upheavals, the Kronians were by now fairly sure, had affected the Solar System in comparatively recent times. The earlier, and perhaps more astounding, of these had been inferred from a discovery that occurred only shortly before Earth’s devastation by Athena. For several decades, archeologists had been uncovering evidence of a vanished city-building culture in the region of southwest Arabia and the African Horn. Called the “Joktanian,” it had apparently existed long before what were supposed to have been the earliest civilizations. Then, artifacts of indisputably intelligent origin were found by the Kronians in the ice fields of Rhea. The only way they could have gotten there—short of being carried by an advanced technological culture that there was no reason to believe had existed—was through ejection following an impact or some other comparably violent event that had occurred nearby. But when the artifacts were identified beyond doubt as Joktanian, it seemed to follow that the nearby source from which they had come must have been Earth. The implication was so fantastic that Kronian scientists had been scouring the evidence ever since for another interpretation, but the answer always came out the same: At some distant time, but still within the timescale of human experience, the whole system of Sun and planets had been different. Earth was once a satellite of Saturn.
Theories as to the configuration that had existed at that time differed. Since little remained of any physical signature, the only real guide lay in observations recorded in ancient myths and symbolic accounts, which inevitably drew many alternative interpretations. The proposals being argued ranged from various redistributions of the bodies of the known Solar System—minus Venus—to a capture model in which Earth had formed part of a mini-family accompanying a proto-sun Saturn that encountered and combined with the Sun-Jupiter system. In the latter case, the ensuing turmoil could account for just about any arrangement of orbits found subsequently. But in the less radical models, where Earth and Saturn both formed part of a stable Solar System to begin with, the question then arose of what had caused them to separate. The only plausible mechanism seemed to be either a close encounter with, or impact by, another body—either already-existing, or ejected from one of the gas giants in a process of the kind generally accepted as having originated all the minor planets and other lesser bodies.
These fissions had at first been attributed to the buildup of instabilities in a rapidly rotating gas-giant core sufficient to shed excess mass, which was theoretically possible and thought to have happened with Athena. However, a rival theory now held them to be rebound ejecta from massive impacts—in which case Athena and Jupiter’s “Huge White Blotch,” which now surpassed the Great Red Spot, were results of a freak approach that had occurred on the blind side from Earth. But whatever the detailed cause, the time of Earth’s detachment to become a solar planet was generally put at around 10,000 years Before the Present, with the consequences for Earth that had included climatic and geological upheaval, biological mass-extinctions, and collapse of the earliest human civilization.
Regardless of what the final verdict concerning this earlier period turned out to be, nobody any longer disputed that Venus was not something that had orbited the Sun for over four billion years as once taught, but a young, recently incandescent object ejected from Jupiter some time after the Saturn breakup. The reigning Kronian model of what had taken place traced back to heretical challenges to orthodox astronomy that had first been proposed in the mid-twentieth century and held that after its violent birth, Venus had careened about the Solar System as a loose cannon, disturbing the orbits of both Earth and Mars and eventually circularizing its own orbit to become the planetary body familiar in modern times. Stories handed down since antiquity from the Middle East, India, and China, from Siberia through Europe to the Americas, described it as appearing in the sky as what could be recognized as a giant comet, seen universally as a wrathful goddess approaching at intervals to bring times of chaos and destruction. Newly-born Venus was believed to have been responsible for the calamities recorded at the time of the Hebrew Exodus, roughly 3500 b.p., also described recognizably by other peoples the world over. Initial reactions from Earth’s scientific institutions had been all but universal ridicule at first, then grudging concessions to catastrophic events shaping at least some features of Earth and other bodies—so long as they were confined to happening in the distant past—and eventually full-blooded confrontation with the Kronians. Then Athena repeated the process and settled further dispute.