The Gas Giant Twelve of Tau Ceti converted to sophont matter, becoming the Fifth Human Power. The failed star Siegfried of 61 Cygni converted, becoming the Sixth Power named Vonrothbarth.
• 44th Millennium A . D . / 26 V
Industrial growth on Earth leads to restoration of space colonies. First colonists on Venus are Pantropists, with genes evolved to track the progression of the terraforming due to the shepherding moon’s action.
• 45th Millennium A . D . / 25 V
Colony fails on Venus due to unexpected solar activities.
Second colonization attempt at Venus, this time, with human terraformers attempting to modify Shcachlil’s result.
The Sacerdotal Order issues an invitation for Splendids from Delta Pavonis to starfare to Venus as an act of religious merit, leaving homes and kith to be lost to the relativistic passage of years.
Alpha Draconis is the Pole Star
• 46th Millennium A . D . / 24 V
Venus occupied by a Splendor-dominated theocratic order devoted to the subjection of all human freedom to ecological interests. Venusians send a fleet toward Earth, which is wiped out by a single, scalding beam from Shcachlil.
Splendid Venusians betray their strict code of noninterference in the gene plasm, and produce a race of space-flying disease-spreading anthropophagic predators called Vampires. These entities are able to cross the distance between worlds during conjunction without vehicles.
Onset of the Plague Years.
• 47th Millennium A . D . / 23 V
Mars moved into a serviceable orbit by Shcachlil.
Shcachlil removed from the sun by the Domination of Hyades—perhaps in order to avoid some ever-mounting debt.
SALAMANDER DEPARTS
Shapetaker’s Millennium: Humans organize into permeable-barrier clades of fertile Nyctalops Melusine called Skulks, beneath the protection of totipotent Kitsune.
Beginning of the Tribulations, when no cliometric plans unfold as expected.
The Golden Lords are not overthrown, but reduced to ceremonial figureheads. Hierophants dwindle sharply in number.
(A.D. 46400) Third ignition of the deceleration beam directed at M3.
The Photinine Heresy reemerges under the leadership of a Heresiarch named Lemur, who demands a simplification of the cliometry calculus, and the creation of a race with a simpler psychology than man to make the calculation easier, creatures called Eidolons.
Lemur is assassinated and replaced by a Fox impersonator, but the Lemurian movement nonetheless fragments and mutates into a bewildering variety of revisionists and counter-revisionists.
Beta and Gamma Ursae Minoris are the Pole Stars
• 48th Millennium A . D . / 22 V
The Beautification
(A.D. 47000–47300) The beautification of man takes place during these years. Eidolons restored to full humanity. Fox Maidens meddle in the gene stock of firstlings, whose 350-year lifespans are quadrupled, and who retain their youth and beauty well into their later years, so that an earthwoman of 1,400 still looks like a fourteen-year-old, and can live to 1,600.
THE INTERSTELLAR WAR
(A.D. 47400) Cliometry Revisionists demand the halt of life-extension biotechnology and the destruction of all tomb slumberers older than nine hundred ninety-nine years. Starfaring ports and strongholds attacked, as well as biosuspension tombs.
(A.D. 47500) Revisionism spreads to other worlds.
(A.D. 47600) Immortalist colony at Odette attacked and destroyed by Crusaders from Odile. Surviving Immortals flee offplanet, including to Sol, suppress the Revisionists, and establish hegemony.
(A.D. 47700) On Venus, the Splendids are eaten by their creations, the Vampires. Vampires imitate Jupiter’s internal personality control system for their social order.
On Earth, rise of a class of land-owning peasants born of recently humanized Moreaus in Baltica overthrow the Immortalist hegemons and erect a communal form of Vassalage called the Five Thousand Fiefs. Some ceremonial functions are restored to the Golden Lords.
(A.D. 47800) The Fiefs grow corrupt, and yield power to various charismatic tyrants, gathered into a single alliance under Myrmidon control. These tyrants, called Lectors of the Analects, enforce a set of strict honor codes, prohibiting humanism and trans-humanism.
(A.D. 47900) Beginning of the Fox Hunts, the Lector-led genocide of the Kitsune.
• 49th Millennium A . D . / 21 V
Parthenocracy established, a Fox-Swan hybrid social order created in imitation (some say mockery) of the Hierophants, who were Man-Swan hybrids. The franchise is limited to virgin girls and unwalled cities.
Skulks, with Jupiter’s aid, gain predominance over the scattered Lectors. End of Lectorship. End of Fox Hunts.
Fox attempt to restore humanity to the Myrmidons fails. In disgust, Myrmidons sever all ties with biological life, becoming a spaceborne form of machine life called Megalodons.
Polaris is the Pole Star
Patrician Era
• 50th Millennium A . D . / 20 V
FIFTH HUMANS: PATRICIANS
The Megalodons, cooperating with the Gam City-Mind of the Ocean Palace (whom they oddly resemble), gain supremacy over the Parthenocrats. The Palatials take up the perquisites and forms of Golden Lords.
Meanwhile, the Vampire kings of Venus breed a race of men, called the Overlords, immune from all biological attacks, but who are so heavily modified that the Eco-theocracy of Splendid is discredited and forgotten.
Patricians Born. Foxes return the humanity to the vampire kings of Venus, a race now called the Fifth Men, or Patricians. This a monosexual species able to reproduce with any female human or Moreau. The resulting hybrid, called a Plebian, is self-aware, and possesses a Patrician-compatible nerve configuration, sanity, stability, and integrity.
End of the Crusader kingdoms. Moon loses atmosphere, becomes uninhabitable. Lunars migrate to the Chimerical penal colony on Mars.
Veneric ecology placed under interdict by the Patricians, forcing a return to Terrestrial norms. Timed extinctions, known as the Ineluctable Curses, are bio-programmed into xenophilic life.
Long-slumbering Eventide patriarchs hidden at the Martian core since the time of the Sculptured Lifeways are found and revived and rise to power. The Chimera, the Lunars, and the Eventides form The Anachronism, a system of life based on the ancient precepts of the Cryonarchy combined with cliometry, which encourages migration via hibernation to various foretold eras of time.
Martian terraforming begun by the Anachronistic Council (and completed in later years by the Conservator of the Museum of Man). Earthly creatures, many of Veneric decent, dependent on xenophilic life, migrate to Mars, in order to escape the Ineluctable Curses.
Alrai is the Pole Star