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There was, during the first four centuries of the Tissean Era, a burst of
invention and progress.
Water and wind power were harnessed; a water-turbine was invented, and
mountain streams were dammed to furnish the pressure to operate it. On Zabash,
a crude steam turbine was invented.
Savagely persecuted at first, the followers of Tisse and his successor, Puzza,
involved themselves in politics out of self-defense. They entered into
conspiracies to overthrow local governments. Where they failed, they were put
to death in savagely spectacular fashion; where they succeeded, they were a
powerful faction in the new government, if they did not control it outright.
In some countries the worship of Vran was declared the only acceptable
religion by the state.
These centuries were crowded with violence and tumult. Civil wars blazed; mobs
howled in the streets and crossbow-bolts sleeted down on them; daggers were
reddened in palace coups; partisan feuds smoldered and flamed. Kings were
overthrown by dictators, dictators were toppled by popular revolt; democracies
hardened into dictatorships or disintegrated into anarchy. And in every pot of
violence that bubbled around the Central Sea, the religion of Tisse" was
always an ingredient.
Four centuries later, the social system solidified again. With the exception
of heretical splinter sects, the Creed of Puzza was the universal form of
Tisseism. Its priests turned ever sterner faces upon innovation; they
themselves had become the conservators of tradition. The bourgeoisie who had
come into secular power during the previous four hundred years had become no
less reactionary. Powerful guilds had sprung up in all the mercantile cities
around the Central Sea; having gained wealth by the skills and inventiveness
of their fathers, they were loath to encourage any sort of innovation which
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might threaten their own status. Technical improvements were suppressed or
shrouded in guild secrecy. The great slave-holding nobles saw the new
machinery as replacing the slave-labor in which their wealth was invested. For
another seven centuries the city-states and kingdoms, which were the remnants
of the old Tullonian Empire, lived in the glotfm of stultifying rigidity in
social conditions, actions, and thought. New ideas were ruthlessly suppressed,
and the only change was in the names of the overlords.
Then, in the year 1275 of The Books of Tisse, another book was published on
Dudak and it was called
The Confessions of Zaithu
.
Chapter Seven
The little villages of the craftsmen-gangs around Hetaira's Central Peaks were
visited regularly by the wagons and pack trains of traders, and by the
occasional lone wanderer.
The traders adopted the custom of establishing permanent base-camps at which
they could store goods, and these in time grew into market towns. The
wanderers had their rendezvous places too, where they met and exchanged news,
and left messages for one another. At first such places were caves or other
natural shelters, or merely stone cairns in which messages could be left.
Occasionally a wanderer, crippled or immobilized by age, would make his home
by one of these rendezvous-points in order to keep in touch with his life-long
friends, and perhaps perform a useful service for them. The wanderers, glad of
a warm place to stay, and a secure depository for their messages, and perhaps
even some of their goods, happily supported these way-stations.
It became customary in many gangs for a few of their youngsters to wander for
a time, meeting new people and learning new things. It was soon discovered
that more could be learned by the young people going to the nearest of the
wanderers' rendezvous, to stay with the resident and meet the lifelong
wanderers passing through. The youths would pay for their keep by hunting, and
farming, and doing housekeeping chores. Soon every young Hetairan of the
Central Mountain country was spending at least the time between two
hot-seasons at some rendezvous. The rendezvous grew, some of them arranging
with wanderers to visit at periodic intervals especially to teach. These
places became libraries, museums, institutes of technology, and eventually
universities. It was at one of them that a steam-engine for propelling barges
on the lakes was invented; at another, firearms were developed.
Civilization spread more slowly on the plains between the mountains and the
Horizon
Zone. The nomadic herders became settled ranchers, trading livestock and hides
for manufactured goods through the wagon-traders. Unsuccessful ranching gangs
became bandits and cattle-rustlers; the plains country was full of violent
crime, and violent justice.
The Horizon Zone developed a culture similar in pattern to that of the Central
Mountains, although always a few score years behind. Communities were
isolated, dispersed in a narrow ribbon forty thousand kilometers around the
planet. There were wanderers and wanderers' rendezvous there, too; but news
travelled more slowly and less certainly.
In the Outer Hemisphere there were more nomads; the mountains and uplands were
thinly peopled by gangs of hunters and farmers, and a few gangs roved around
the shores of the Central Sea.
When the Central Mountain people of the Inner Hemisphere were working steel,
the
Horizon Zone had barely progressed to the use of metals, and the whole Outer
Hemisphere was still Paleolithic. When the Central Mountain country had the
musket in common use, and was investigating the advantages of rifling the
barrels, the bow was still widely used in the Horizon Zone. As for the people
of the Outer Hemisphere, it was not until the railroads were extended into
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