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A Qubie Featured Book: Cradle
of Saturn, by James P. Hogan
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Cradle of Saturn, by James P. Hogan
© 1999, ISBN: 0671-57813-8, Pub
June 1999
Permission to display sample chapters, by Baen Books, Jan 2007
PROLOGUE
Times had always been plentiful. Since
the beginning of the age when their ancestors first walked in the world, the
People had lived in harmony with the spirits and the elements. Their language
had no words for war or want, famine or drought. The forests were vast, the
plains fertile. Fair winds brought rain from warm oceans. All of life flourished
in abundance.
No memory had been handed down of where
the People came from. Some taught that they were born of Neveya, who ruled the
skies during the times of lesser light when the smaller but brighter Sun was
absent, and at the end of mortal life they would return to her across the Golden
Sea in which the world floated. They learned to farm the lands and tame animals;
to study the ways of wood, and stone, and metals; to admire and create music,
likenesses, and things of beauty. Their sages pondered over the mysteries of
mind and the senses, life and motion, of number and the nature of things.
Communities grew under social imperatives and marketplaces for ideas, and became
centers of government and commerce.
Iryon stood near the mouth of a broad
river, between arms of green hills rising to distant mountains. It was not the
largest of cities, but its buildings had been shaped and ornamented with a care
that made the whole as much an expression of art as the carved gates and gilded
window traceries, or the marble reliefs surrounding the central square. At the
summit of one of the five hills on which Iryon was built stood the Astral
Temple, where priests of Neveya charted the cycles of the heavens.
Each day began with the world looking
out across the immensity of the celestial ocean that extended away to Neveya's
orb, dividing it equally like the plane of a blade halving a water-fruit so that
only the upper hemisphere of Neveya was visible. Then the Ocean would rise,
tilting and narrowing as it did so until it became an edge crossing past the
world to reveal briefly all of Neveya's countenance; from there, now above, it
broadened again to expand its underside, at the same time obscuring Neveya's
upper part to reach its half-day low, after which it would fall and cross back
again. This cycle repeated 5,623 times in the year that the stars took to turn
through their constellations.
The proportions of light and dark
making up the days changed according to whether the Sun was visible as well as
Neveya, and in what situation—which varied with the seasons. The "blue hours"
came when the Sun shone from the far side of Neveya, transforming its normally
orange glow into a black shadow cast across the Golden Ocean. At certain times
in the course of the year, as the Ocean crossed past the world during the blue
hours, the Sun would vanish behind Neveya completely, turning day abruptly into
darkest night. These were the times when the other worlds that moved about
Neveya revealed themselves in their full glories of form and color. They were
known as the days of "Dark Crossings." Multitudes would come from afar to Iryon
to attend the rites and ceremonies that took place on these occasions.
The pyramid was built such that, from the
Eye Stone at the center of the semicircle of astronomers and priests where the
Speaker of Neveya stood, the orb was seen as if supported on its apex like a
cloud grazing a mountain. Since Neveya never changed her position in the sky,
the disk remained balanced in that manner always, varying only from yellow jewel
through shrinking face to waning crescent as the Sun rode its distant course
about both her and the world, and the celestial Ocean rose and dipped through
its daily cycle. As the moment of the Dark Crossing approached, she glowered at
the world with full face, black and featureless, fading into the glare as the
Sun touched her shoulder.
The crowds assembled on the slopes were
hushed as the Speaker intoned the Verses of Passage. Around the temple and
across the city below, torches had been lit in readiness for the Darkness. At
the top of the pyramid, Neveya reappeared suddenly out of the glare as a black
arc sliding across the Sun, her shadow lying now like a black ray cut out of the
Ocean, moment by moment advancing closer. When it fell across the world,
connecting it to Neveya like a bridge spanning the Ocean, then, it was taught,
the souls whose time had come to return would depart on their
journey.
A murmuring of awe and wonder, more a wind
than a sound, stirred through the crowd as the sky darkened. The astronomers
readied their instruments and recording tablets, while the Speaker turned,
opening his robed arms wide to greet the spectacle. For an instant Neveya's
outline flared into a thin curve of light as if the extinguishing Sun were
trying to claw its way back around the edge.
And then all the light went from the sky,
and the stars appeared. Above and to one side of Neveya, the pink globe of Jenas
became visible, while beyond it Sephelgo's white-veined features shone as
crescents of crystal. Lower was Aniar, graying and mottled, swimming to the side
of Neveya, transfixed by the spear of the celestial sea seen edgewise, with the
white speck of Delem farther out still along the same line. As the astronomers
peered and recited their measures, scribes marked the stone that would later be
cut for incorporation into the records.
The picture showed a disk pierced by a shallowly
sloping line, standing on an arrowhead. Smaller circles showed the other visible
worlds and their dispositions, with major stars represented by their symbols. A
table incised beneath the design gave precise directions and elevations.
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