Excerpt from chapter 4 - concerning the story of the tribe.


IV
Tribe

Dhorma was settled in Earth Common Era year 2446, thereafter known by its people as Dhorma, Year One. It was among the few worlds of Andromeda colonized in the decades after the galactic rift was bridged, before contact with Earth was lost.

These planets were far beyond what had been previously considered ‘remote”’ from the center of Earth's galactic network. Those who chose to settle so far from home invariably did so because they wanted to try their hands at a new way of life altogether. For the groups whose petitions were eventually granted as settlement rights to Dhorma, the life they sought was one where the daily lives and very survival of human beings was entirely independent from modern technology. Their post-tech society, modeled after late 20th century Earth, would no longer be organized around thought-networks and nanotech swarms. Tech would be used to help humans accomplish the work they chose naturally, but never depended upon for that work’s completion. There was increasingly little room to choose this lifestyle within the human cultures of the Milky Way – one could scarcely go to work without interfacing a dozen matrices.

Three separate groups with divergent but compatible philosophies of technology were deposited on the verdant shores along the Ankharra river, with supplies adequate to build a new city. Of these three groups, the tribe led by Deanna McCaden was by far the smallest, and also the least inclined to incorporate any tech whatsoever into the infrastructure of the new city. Deanna and her people held a libertarian and deeply agrarian vision of life on Dhorma – it was not always agreed with by the other settlers, but it was respected, and always considered. Deanna’s tribe did not have a name. “If you need to name it, you don’t know the tribe” was a saying they passed among themselves. Even so, they were a generous and social people who never sought isolation from the other city dwellers, and so they were welcomed wherever they went.

A second, separate colony of anti-tech religious adherents was deposited on an archipelago near the planet’s equator in year five. That settlement was over a thousand miles East, and the soft spoken monks and nuns there sought little contact with the city of Ankharra, which was by that time thriving. A third colony was scheduled to be settled on a continent in the northern hemisphere sometime in Year 17, but that ship never arrived.

It was unknown to the colonies when the scientists and politicians of the Galactic Network first became aware of the existence of the Relics. It was only known to each people when they and their neighbors first became aware that the alien technology was among them. First there were only fantastic rumors, which only the very young could believe. But invariably, the relics would find their way into the cities and towns. In Ankharra, the first recorded object appeared in Dhorma year 11, and many more soon followed. “For a while it seemed like the Andromeda Galaxy had been positively dusted with them,” Deanna McCaden would later recall, “they seemed to turn up with such frequency.”

The objects were a pinnacle of what humans considered engineering. Estimated to be over 5000 years old, they appeared to be indestructible on a molecular level, and somehow interacted with matter and even space-time itself in ways that defied every known model of physics. Whole new fields of science and philosophy were promised.

It was not long after that rumors of fancy became convictions of fear. Too many eyes saw things they could not believe, or worse, things they did not have the words or concepts to describe. Those individuals who tried to study or use the relics would change quickly and dramatically: transmuted personalities, strange new certainties, penchants for thinking in abstractions far beyond the comprehension of their peers. Some literally ‘blew themselves up’, or seemed to, and many others simply disappeared.

The phrase “don’t play with fire” quickly became a somber warning whispered daily across the colonies. When relics were found, they were turned over to the Galactic Network for containment or disposal, immediately.



In Year 14 the most outlandish rumors began to circulate among the Andromeda colonies – that the relics brought back across the galactic divide had created a rift within the inner spheres of the Earth Network- that a civil war had begun that spanned the Milky Way. A war fought by crazed demagogues wielding god-like weapons, proselytizing about the dawn of human evolution. This the elders shook their heads at vehemently – there had been no war among humanity for almost four hundred years. Civil war - and over such trifles! - was inconceivable.

Then all communication from the Milky Way ceased.

Three days later, the local network went dark. The city of Ankharra could make no contact with the Andromeda Armada, nor the other planets of their star system, the science space stations, freight and mining ships, not even the religious colony a thousand miles to the East could be raised. The world around them and the heavens above them grew deathly quiet.

Ankharra was alone. Days turned into weeks, into years. Every day the sun rose over the city, the river ran south, and there was, as ever, work to be done. The panic and despair of the early months of isolation slowly faded, as did the hope that the local network would just as spontaneously come back online, that the Armada would send an envoy, or one of the other colonies a messenger. In time, the people of Ankharra mourned their loss, gave thanks for their continued prosperity, and accepted that they might never know what had become of their brethren in the wide universe beyond.



In Year 24, the Nazul made contact. A predominantly human colony at the edge of the star system, the Nazul had spent the last decade slowly absorbing human settlements and amassing technology, building a new haphazard but effective network as they went. The Armada was gone, they said. It had jumped back across the galactic divide in the hours after the Milky Way went silent, and then it too was beyond their reach. The Network science stations had been evacuated or destroyed.

It was an ironic meeting of worlds, for the Nazul had settled Andromeda for the purpose of using their isolation to foster technological innovation. Philosophically they could not be less compatible with Ankharra. But civility, and joyousness at knowing they were not alone in the universe, made for a rapid allience. The Nazul provided much needed supplies, and tentative trade was established.

By Year 33, the Nazul Network had expanded far beyond the scope of the now decades absent Armada. A formal invitation was made to Ankharra to join the local government and become fully integrated into the Network. The reaction among the Dhorma colony was overwhelming positive

The tribe of Deanna McCaden, long forgotten as being significantly distinct from the other citizens, began gathering to discuss, and then voice, their dissent. While they honored the friendship and good will with the Nazul, the notion of becoming re-integrated into a high-tech society was anathema to them. “Integration means they will bring their tech to us,” Deanna would speak at town hall meetings, “and we will have to accept it in order work and coexist effectively with them. Their economy runs through the medium of technology, and we cannot participate in that economy without participating in the medium. We will be asked to have their software encoded in our brains, so we can interact with their information and security matrices. We will have to start traveling in their flying vehicles, to meet and negotiate and trade with them on their time-tables. We will be asked to place tech on every street-corner for visiting Nazul, as a courtesy to them in navigating our city. Our world will change overnight and our purpose will be lost!”

But it seemed the colonists of Dhorma did not mind a loss of purpose. To live unfettered by technology on the outskirts of a high tech human universe had been a grand experiment – but to live without tech following the collapse of galactic civilization was quite another.

The arguments between the city and the tribe grew in intensity. “If you do this, we will have no choice but the leave our homes,” they said. “If you bring integrative tech into this city, you will be sending us into exile!”

“Exile is too strong a word, “replied the leaders of the tech integration movement. “It is incendiary political rhetoric, meant to make them seem the victims of an oppressive majority, instead of opponents to democratic change.”

“It may be rhetoric,” Deanna replied somberly, “but it is also the truth.”



So in the Year 34, Deanna led her people across the river and into the desert, never to return. She was 107 years old at the time.