Vale of Xian

Poetry by Bunny Burns (source). NASA image.

In my previous blog post I described an active investigation aimed at discovering if a useful form of nanotechnology might be recoverable from Deep Time. "Useful" in the sense of helping we Earthlings defend ourselves. Here, I want to mention some additional clues from the fiction of Jack Vance that might help us solve the mystery of how nanites can be used by aliens to control human behavior.

Green Star
In the novel Throy, Vance mentioned a mystery involving Gilbert's Green Star. Previously, I realized that there was a long-standing confusion about the existence of "green nanites" as a relatively new type of nanite that had been deployed on Earth as part of the endosymbionts that reside within we humans.

original cover art by Paul Chadwick

Those new nanites were not actually green, they were named after a Kac'hin agent of the pek: Grean. Grean developed these special nanites with the help of the Phari during the Asimov Reality.

Yōd recently revealed that an analogue of Jack Vance who lived in the Ekcolir Reality wrote about the importance of "green stars" for teleportation. The closest "green star" to Earth is about 185 light years away, located in the constellation libra. These "green stars" are full of special sedrons that allow them to act as foci within the pek teleportation network of our galaxy.

When Ekcolir was sent into the past, he was well aware of the location of Grean's Star and 20,000 years ago he named a constellation the "star fisher". That "star fisher" was at the boundary between the modern scorpius and libra constellations. In the sky, find Antares and then imagine a starfish with arms pointed at both Antares and the two brightest stars in libra.

Zubeneschamali, the star of the northern claw.

Previously, I assumed that the pek systematically gathered sedrons from planets like Earth because sedrons are needed for fast-than-light space travel. However, there are many types of sedrons, some of which will interfere with long distance teleportation through the galaxy unless their natural distribution in the universe is altered. Apparently the pek have been making the needed alterations in our galaxy for the past couple of billion years.

The different types of Hierions and Sedrons.

To correctly arrange the distribution of sedrons for teleportation, the main source of sedrons, the stars, must be mined for sedrons. Most of the sedrons of a galaxy must be concentrated in a few special locations. Doing so will simplify the quantum computations that make teleportation possible.

It is difficult to imagine how sedrons might be extracted from stars, but doing so may be no more difficult for the pek than it is for us to refine metals like gold from raw gold-containing ore. How the pek might transport vast quantities of sedrons from star to star is another mystery, but if they have advanced teleportation technology, maybe they can teleport sedrons from star to star.

According to Yōd and her collaborators at the library of the Writers Block, Grean had a base of operations in the Zubeneschamali star system, which functions as a long-range teleportation node. Zeta believes that Ekcolir was trained for his missions to Earth at Grean's base. Then, while on Earth and talking to Earthlings, Ekcolir apparently never hesitated to point out the location of the star that he came from.

Anney's report from the Buld Reality

The Vale of Xian
Jack Vance was fond of including mention of ghosts in his stories. In Trullion, both Duissane and Glinnes casually discuss the habits of ghosts on Trullion.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original art by Luis Royo.

Reporting from the Hierion Domain, Yōd's replicoid has seen a report from Angela and Anney Fersoni about the alien creatures who were the original inhabitants of Trullion. After humans arrived on Trullion, it was possible to have some degree of contact with those aliens in the Vale of Xian. Humans such as Duissane, who could use their Bimanoid Interface to contact the natives of Trullion, sometimes reported seeing ghost-like birds in the Vale. The legend was that those "ghosts" could collect human souls and archive them in the Vale of Xian.

original art work by Virgil Finlay

Yōd suggests that the "ghosts of Xian" were part of the Phari-designed network of sedronic species that had been collected together in Alastor Cluster. Zeta is skeptical that those "ghosts" were actually green. Grean discovered critical human gene combinations on Trullion and assembled them to make possible a Bimanoid Interface that allows some humans to make contact with their replicoids in the Hierion Domain. Once again, humans who overheard discussion of Grean's "ghosts" on Trullion apparently mistakenly applied the term "green ghost" to the sedronic inhabitants of Trullion. Zeta suggests that these "human errors" are most likely the result of "information editing" performed on human minds by the tryp'At Overseers.

Next: 11 science fiction-oriented episodes of The X-Files

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