Near East had dried up with the retreat of the glaciers, the game had gone away, and agriculture had required widespread well-organized irrigation. Then the discovery that the Teloi had genetically engineered Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago in the southwest Asian/northeast African region as a slave race, which had subsequently rebelled and been taught the arts of civilization by the crew of a crashed warship of the Teloi’s Nagommo enemies in the Persian Gulf, had forced a rethinking. Perhaps such a background had preconditioned humans to civilization. (Of course, this merely begged the question of why the Teloi and the Nagommo had risen to civilization on their own.) And afterwards, humans seemed to have avoided the various ways civilizations had of dying from their own toxic sociological by-products. As the former slaves had spread outward from the core area, escaping slavery and differentiating into the racial varieties of modern humanity, a variety of civilizations had grown up . . . and many had almost succumbed to the common fate, as though civilization was, as the twentieth-century cynic Mencken had called it, “a self-limiting disease.” But the diversity of civilized societies had been the saving grace; one, the Western society, had by various fortunate happenstances escaped all the pitfalls and set in motion the dynamics of continued advancement.
One of those happenstances, it was generally agreed, was that gunpowder weapons had appeared in the West amid a chaos of competing sovereignties, and therefore set off an ongoing, self-regenerating “arms race” that drove technological innovation. Introduced into a society’s universal empire, such weapons merely froze that society into a stasis by making the empire invincible. Earth had seen the beginnings of this often enough—in China and India and others—before the arrival of the Western ferment.
And this, it appeared, had happened on Zirankhu, HC-4 9701 III. Thousands of years before, the Manziru Empire had established unchallengeable hegemony over the entire planet, aided by its geography. (This was a less massive planet than Earth, with extensive but landlocked seas rather than island-continents in a world-ocean.) The other cultures of the Zirankh’shi had continued to exist, but forced into unnatural Manziru patterns—a “pseudomorphosis,” as a human historian named Spengler had once called it. And the empire had settled into the normal state of unchallenged empires: an extravagant, degenerate imperial court; a fossilized bureaucracy whose corruption was no longer even perceived as corruption; an intellectual establishment mired in pedantic worship of an approved version of the past; and all the rest.
Then the humans had arrived. And the resulting social dissolution had been as Karl Marx, in the mid-nineteenth century, had once described the opening of China to the West: a long-buried mummy in a hermetically sealed tomb suddenly exposed to the open air.
They landed at the spaceport that the imperial court had grudgingly allowed by treaty on the outskirts of the city of Khankhazh, about a thousand miles south of the capital city of Shandu.
“We’re still negotiating to get a permanent embassy established at Shandu,” said Evan Orsini, the young staffer who had come from the Earth legation to meet them, as he led them across the tarmac to his glide car. “But they’re resisting it every step of the way, by every tactic of diplomatic delay and obstruction they can think of, because the whole idea of recognizing another sovereignty is repugnant to them. As far as they’re concerned, there’s the Manziru Empire and there are savages—period.”
“But,” ventured Chantal, “can’t they see that we’re civilized, and far more powerful than themselves? Surely our technological superiority speaks for itself.”
“If only in the form of our advanced weapons,” added Mondrago. “Which they’ve seen in action in a couple of
One of those happenstances, it was generally agreed, was that gunpowder weapons had appeared in the West amid a chaos of competing sovereignties, and therefore set off an ongoing, self-regenerating “arms race” that drove technological innovation. Introduced into a society’s universal empire, such weapons merely froze that society into a stasis by making the empire invincible. Earth had seen the beginnings of this often enough—in China and India and others—before the arrival of the Western ferment.
And this, it appeared, had happened on Zirankhu, HC-4 9701 III. Thousands of years before, the Manziru Empire had established unchallengeable hegemony over the entire planet, aided by its geography. (This was a less massive planet than Earth, with extensive but landlocked seas rather than island-continents in a world-ocean.) The other cultures of the Zirankh’shi had continued to exist, but forced into unnatural Manziru patterns—a “pseudomorphosis,” as a human historian named Spengler had once called it. And the empire had settled into the normal state of unchallenged empires: an extravagant, degenerate imperial court; a fossilized bureaucracy whose corruption was no longer even perceived as corruption; an intellectual establishment mired in pedantic worship of an approved version of the past; and all the rest.
Then the humans had arrived. And the resulting social dissolution had been as Karl Marx, in the mid-nineteenth century, had once described the opening of China to the West: a long-buried mummy in a hermetically sealed tomb suddenly exposed to the open air.
They landed at the spaceport that the imperial court had grudgingly allowed by treaty on the outskirts of the city of Khankhazh, about a thousand miles south of the capital city of Shandu.
“We’re still negotiating to get a permanent embassy established at Shandu,” said Evan Orsini, the young staffer who had come from the Earth legation to meet them, as he led them across the tarmac to his glide car. “But they’re resisting it every step of the way, by every tactic of diplomatic delay and obstruction they can think of, because the whole idea of recognizing another sovereignty is repugnant to them. As far as they’re concerned, there’s the Manziru Empire and there are savages—period.”
“But,” ventured Chantal, “can’t they see that we’re civilized, and far more powerful than themselves? Surely our technological superiority speaks for itself.”
“If only in the form of our advanced weapons,” added Mondrago. “Which they’ve seen in action in a couple of
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