"The Mardak Vol were within a generation of terraforming and of a drive without a Pillai radius when they died. We have found their notes and cannot read the last page."Institute of Xenology, judgment on the Mardak Vol engineering programme, 2320
The Mardak Vol were a spacefaring species that settled at least a dozen stars to the north and east of the Sun and died out, everywhere at once, about 100,000 years ago. Their monuments were the first evidence humanity found that it was not alone: observation posts at Sirius, a colony ship at Tadasca, a capsule at Yildun with its pilot still in the chair, ruined worlds in the region now called the Mardak Cluster, and a garden world at Daranma that humanity settled in 2323 and named for them. They built in a grey alloy humanity can analyse and cannot make, counted in base twelve and stored their records on crystalline lattices that have held for a thousand centuries.
The Mardak Vol were looking, on every record humanity has read, for a garden. Their own worlds, for reasons their records never give, no longer were one. They found it at Daranma, settled it for four to six centuries, and died there with the rest of their people. Their end was unexplained for two centuries after the first monument was found. The Institute of Xenology's Mardak Cluster expedition of 2502 to 2505 found the Mardak Vol's own record of it: they were destroyed by the fleets of the Fevarian golden age, under a leader they named the Golden One. The Institute sealed the report in 2505 and published it in 2515.
Name
The Mardak Vol are known by the name they gave themselves on the Tadasca ship's lattice, which the Institute's team under Pavel Petrenko transliterated. The federation adopted it in 2309 in place of the Magellan Consortium's first label. The Voor knew their ruins and called their builders the Wayfinders. The Institute has never established what the name means. Its philologists read the second element, "Vol", as the word the lattices use for a people travelling together.
The name passed to the garden world at Daranma in 2309, and since then "Mardak Vol" has meant both the species and the world. The Republic's histories write "the Mardak Vol" for the people and "Mardak Vol" for the world.
Biology
The Mardak Vol were bipeds of about two and a half metres, with a long spine and four-fingered hands. Their eyes were large and set forward, adapted to a dimmer star than the Sun. The Yildun capsule's chair was built for such a body, and humanity has recovered about 20,000 sets of their bones, most of them from the Tadasca colony ship. The bones show a species that lived long and took decades to mature. The Tadasca berths show that they travelled in family groups of five or six.
The bones show no sign of disease at death. The Institute's physicians found healed injuries consistent with long lives of physical work, and no marks of violence on the Tadasca dead, who died in their berths.
Civilisation
Engineering
The Mardak Vol built in a grey alloy that the Consortium's metallurgists can analyse and cannot make. Their colony ship at Tadasca carried a drive that was neither a Pillai drive nor an Imaeda drive. The Consortium spent 200 billion credits over the 2310s trying to reconstruct it and produced nothing but a better understanding of the Pillai drive's limits. The machinery in the ruins and wrecks on Mardak Vol was built to change a world's climate and to move a ship between stars by a principle that was not the Pillai drive's. The Consortium's engineers, who spent 300 billion credits on it from 2310 to 2320, concluded that they could describe it and could not build it.
Records
The Mardak Vol counted in base twelve and stored what they counted on crystalline lattices. Petrenko's team at Sirius read the first lattices after three years' work, and the key it found reached the Gagarin by courier in April 2308. The key opened the Mardak Vol's symbols in part. The maps on the lattices at Mardak Vol show 400 stars across a region humanity's charts do not reach. On their far edge stands a symbol the key does not contain and the Institute has not read.
Surveys
The Mardak Vol surveyed worlds for three hundred years before they settled them. The six observation posts at Sirius recorded the seasons, weather, biosphere and tides of the system's third planet, the world humanity settled in 2317 as Serenity, over a period of 300 years.
The garden
Every Mardak Vol record humanity has read is concerned with one search: for a garden, unspoiled, which their own worlds no longer were. The records do not say why their worlds no longer were. The Tadasca ship was bound for a world its builders called, in the symbol the Institute reads as "the promised garden", a paradise. The Yildun capsule carried a chart of 40 stars with the Sun on it, and Sirius, Tadasca and Daranma, and Daranma marked with the symbol for the garden. Their home world has not been found.
Monuments
By 2312 humanity had found four kinds of Mardak Vol monument, and the Mardak Vol world at Daranma was a fifth.
The Tadasca ship
The Gagarin under Tian Shen entered a colony ship in a decaying orbit around Tadasca's fourth planet in May 2303. It was 3 kilometres long, opened along one side, and carried 200,000 berths and the remains of about 20,000 of their occupants. It was in orbit around a gas giant it had not been bound for. The Gagarin's laboratory dated its dead in 2304 to about 100,000 years before. Shen kept the Gagarin at Tadasca from 2303 to 2308, against the Office of Settlement's orders, reading the wreck's records.
The Sirius posts
The Asimov under Pavel Petrenko found the first of six observation stations in the outer Sirius system in 2305. Each was 400 metres long, powerless and intact, with an aperture on the inner system and a lattice that had recorded the third planet for 300 years. The posts had been left to watch a world, and the world was Serenity.
The Yildun capsule
The Grissom found a capsule on its second pass through Yildun on 14 December 2307, in a long orbit 30 astronomical units from the star. It was 40 metres long, a blunt cylinder of the grey alloy, and it had been in its orbit for about 100,000 years. The drone that reached it on 16 December found a single chamber and a chair, and in the chair the body of its pilot, mummified by vacuum, intact, its head turned toward a viewport that faced the inner system. The capsule's pictures were published at Sol on 3 February 2308, and humanity knew for the first time that it was not alone. The pilot was left in the chair, and the capsule in its orbit, with a courier station beside it.
The Mardak Cluster
The region north-east of Sol beyond Torrom and Uzun, which the charts have called the Mardak Cluster since 2309, holds ruins on eleven worlds, none inhabited, all of the same age. The Gagarin found them after Daranma. They are the remains of a people who had settled a dozen stars and then, in a span the dating could not narrow below a century, stopped.
Mardak Vol
The Gagarin reached Daranma on 2 November 2308 and found the garden: a world of forests and grasslands with 400 ruined sites across three continents, settlements that had held perhaps 2 million people, terraced orchard gardens, and the wrecks of three ships in a valley the crew named the Harbour. The Mardak Vol had lived there for four to six centuries. The settlements were not burned, the last orchards had been pruned, and the ships had not left. See Mardak Vol (planet).
Extinction
The era's question
The dating gave a single century, about 100,000 years ago, in which every Mardak Vol site humanity found fell silent. The colony ship at Tadasca and the pilot at Yildun died in it, and so did the garden at Daranma. The records humanity read before 2505 stop without recording a war, a plague or a flight. The Voor, asked in 2318, knew the ruins and had no more idea than humanity. The Maweer, the Voor said, might know, and the Maweer were not asked.
The question shaped the era. One reading, the inheritance reading, held that a people who had searched for a garden and died in it had left it to whoever came next, and that humanity, arriving with the Mardak Vol's own chart, was the heir. The other held that the world was a warning: that a people a hundred thousand years ahead of humanity had died in a century, without a mark, and that the federation was building colonies on the grave of a civilisation whose cause of death it did not know. The Navy's request of 2309 for a jump-capable battle fleet cited the Mardak Cluster's eleven silent worlds in its first paragraph.
The Mardak Cluster expedition
The Institute's Mardak Cluster expedition, authorised by the Chamber in 2500 and funded by Mardak Vol's assembly, left Torrom on 2 March 2502 in four ships of the fifth drive generation. It carried 1,200 of the Institute's staff, the engineers of the Institute's monolith section and the two senior masters of the Fevarian clan D'Mareth, who had asked to go. It surveyed the eleven worlds between 2503 and 2505.
The eleven worlds had been settled by the Mardak Vol between about 102,000 and 100,000 years before the Republic's era. They had been destroyed, all eleven, within about a century, by weapons that cut from orbit. The monolith section's engineers recognised the patterns on the first world the expedition landed on, and the clan D'Mareth's masters named them on the second. On the fourth world, in a vault the Mardak Vol had sealed, the expedition found the Mardak Vol's own record of the end. The lattice, in the base-twelve notation Petrenko's key had opened in 2308, described the ships that came, their shape, their number and their shields, which the Mardak Vol's weapons did not touch. It described their crews, long-limbed and maned, who took the Mardak Vol's people from the worlds they burned. It gave the ships' leader a name that the Institute's philologists rendered, with a confidence the report stated as high, as the Golden One.
The ships were Fevarian monoliths, and the Golden One was Vak D'Dhen, the Golden Khan of the Fevarian golden age. The Fevarian monoliths the Republic destroyed by the score in the Scouring of 2449 to 2458 had been built for that age.
The seal
The report was delivered to the Institute's director at Magellan on 20 November 2505. She sealed it the same day under the Institute's charter. Her minute recorded that the Republic was fifty-five years from the Scouring, held 9 million Fevarians at Vel's Rest and 300,000 in a monolith at Haedius under its protection, and had signed the Great Promise with the Veil Clans. She judged that the Republic was not ready to hold the finding and that the Fevarians of Vel's Rest were not safe to have it known. The seal held for ten years, and the report was published in 2515.
The Golden Khan
The Fevarian clans remembered Vak D'Dhen as the Golden Khan, the leader of their golden age, and the Republic's histories had treated the name as one khan's. The Haedius hulk, the monolith the Republic bought in 2474, was dated by the Institute's monolith section to about 3,000 years before the Republic's era, under Vak D'Dhen. The Institute's Fevarian section reconciled the two dates after 2515. It reads Vak D'Dhen as the throne-name of the golden age's khans, held by a line of rulers across tens of thousands of years. The khan who emptied the Mardak Vol's worlds and the khan under whom the hulk was built were different holders of the same name. The clans' own memory, which kept one Golden Khan, had folded the line into a single figure.
The Fevarian Acolytes had read the Mardak Vol monuments as the golden age's own work, and named Mardak Vol, in 2445, as the last world of the Return after Earth.
Legacy
The federation made the monuments law before it understood them. The Ancient Sites Act of 11 June 2308, passed by 640 votes to 30, gave the Office of Settlement custody of every non-human artefact found beyond the Sun, forbade their sale or removal, and established the Institute of Xenology at Magellan. Enrolment in the Institute's programmes rose from 200 students in 2308 to 20,000 in 2312. The Mardak Vol's engineering taught the era its most useful lesson about the galaxy: that humanity was not the first, would not be the last, and was late.
The inheritance reading outlived its first century. The universities of Nkrumah on Mardak Vol kept it alive, and from it came the Inari Ascension Movement of the 2350s, which held that humanity, as the Mardak Vol's heir, had a duty to the people the ancients had not lived to find. The report of 2515 changed the reading's terms. The garden had not been left to whoever came next. It had been emptied, and the heirs had arrived 100,000 years after the people who emptied it.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.2 "On the Solar Wind: The Four Explorers"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.3 "In the Shadow of Ancients: Mardak Vol Monuments"
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.5 "Discovery of Eden: Mardak Vol"
- Solar Eternal, Part X, §10.7 "The Inari Ascension Movement"
- Solar Eternal, Part XIII, §13.1 "The Darkest Hour"
- Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.9 "The Hulk, the Fifth Drive and the Mardak Cluster"