Eye of the Beholder

Prologue

HIBERNIA

I

We are the Hibernians. We are your ancestors, and we have been your gods. Many are the legends among your peoples that speak of us, but rarely with clarity, for we chose to cloak ourselves in mystery. That served us well in the past, but soon it may be our undoing.

We are not of your world, and that alone in an earlier age made us your masters. We descended upon your world and made you our slaves, and sat upon thrones as your rulers. You held us in awe, and we took advantage of you while we could.

But in this age your young race is reaching outward, and our old one may soon be at your mercy. For this reason, I have chosen to reveal to you our true history, and our true relationship to yourselves, that when the time comes your mercy may be tempered by the truth, and not distorted for lack of it.

You will hear echoes of legends passed down to you by your own story tellers in the story I will tell you now. You will know from those echoes that what I say is true, and perhaps from this truth you will discern among your legends the truth of things I may leave unsaid.

Any such omissions will be for the sake of brevity, for it is not my purpose here to hide anything. I will tell the story of my people straight out, with as few twists and digressions as the truth of it will permit, hiding nothing. You may wonder at how I come to be among you, to tell this story. That too will I make clear in due course.

II

I am Ishnu, an historian among a race of historians. We call our world Iberu, or in your tongue Hibernia, the place of the long winter sleep. We all by habit and culture record the key events of our lives upon tablets of imperishable stone each time the long sleep approaches, so that we may reorient ourselves to the order of things as we awaken from these periods of hibernation.

We are an ancient race, inhabitants of an ancient planet. For long that planet spun its way through the heart of the galaxy, where life first evolved and began spreading its seed outward. In the chaotic billiard-ball dance of many suns, our planet was slung out of that bright heart, and carried our ancestors with it through thinning space along a galactic arm spiraling toward the rim. Warmed by its own inner heat and the energies of interstellar space, lit by the auroras of its vast and powerful geomagnetic fields, our homeworld continued to nurture life in all its varieties through many ages, until by chance its path brought it close to a young new sun, where after a tumultuous passage it became bound.

But our planet was not bound as the original orbiting members of this system were. Instead, it plunged in to nearly penetrate the heart of the system, then swung back out far beyond all the others, taking 3200 of your Earth years for one orbit.

Our planet did not escape the tumult of its capture unscathed. Its very core was tortured by the passage, surface features were tumbled and twisted, and only a fraction of its life survived.

Our ancestors who witnessed these events recorded them in their way. In the ages that followed, as the devastated civilization slowly recovered and was gradually rebuilt, those ancient records, which for a time had been reduced to dimly remembered legends, were found and finally deciphered, so knowledge of our long history remains unbroken.

III

Later ancestors during the following ages recorded a further consequence of the capture: the interstellar energies through which our planet had previously coursed had helped sustain life. Though similar energies existed in the vicinity of this new sun, in its revolutions our planet swept them up. With each pass through the intervening space less of this energizing medium was left behind. The energies were dwindling, and the planet's surface began to cool.