The first image that was recovered from the destruction levels of Late Pangaia 3C

The destruction levels of Late Pangaia 3C

As everyone now knows, it has been established beyond doubt that Ultramarine, a planet of Helios which is named for the colour of its extensive oceans of saline water, seems once to have supported a ‘civilization’ of some kind – the civilization that we call ‘Pangaia’.

The robotic explorers that are now examining that planet have sent us data about successive layers of the planetary crust. Our analysis shows that in some places these layers record a great deal about the history and eventual destruction of that civilization.

We have identified and labeled three major historical phases – Early, Middle, and Late – each of which is now seen as a series of episodes. The whole series ends in the destruction levels of Late Pangaia 3C.

The cataclysmic events which are recorded in those destruction levels combine extreme levels of radioactivity, incineration, kinetic shock and (in many places) eventual but remarkably sudden oceanic inundation.

The Archives of Late Pangaia 3C

We have been fortunate in discovering that during the last brief flowering of Pangaian technology the Pangaians were beginning to use a genetic technology to create a massively redundant distributed store of all kinds of information and media.

The Pangaians had, like us, separately discovered the principles of mathematical information technology and they used this to encode information directly in the self-replicating genetic molecular structures of micro-organisms.

These micro-organisms in turn encoded that data in surprisingly durable inorganic nano-molecular structures of which huge numbers have survived relatively intact. The Pangaians used that technology to create their massively redundant distributed archives. Once our scientists and mathematicians had discovered this we found that we could recover millions of reasonably coherent if trivial elements of those archives.

As it happens, we ourselves only recently discovered the 3-dimensional probabilistic model of deeply structured linguistic, cognitive and consequential analysis that has enabled our quantum computing engines to understand and translate the various Early, Middle and Late Antediluvian languages and dialects of Pangaia. We believe that this system of automatic translation has advanced to the point where it can even be trusted to deal with verse, and perhaps, with poetry.

So we have been able to decode the output from our robotic explorers to examine in astonishing detail fragments that scatter an intense light at random on some aspects of the everyday personal, social and political life of Pangaia.

What do we know about Late Pangaia 3C?

Even with the benefit of these intellectual scalpels, we remain very much trapped in the predicament of the old story: a whole team of people are shut in absolute darkness with a Di-plegatrumpocatseezus and asked to describe what that creature is like. It is hard from the description of a whisker, some hair, a claw, some scales and an eyelid to get any sense of the thing as a whole.

As soon as we talk about Pangaia, we encounter the same questions again and again. Why do we call it Pangaia – is that the name they applied to themselves? Were those creatures subjected to some extra-galactic incursion, or did they in some way bring the calamity down upon their own heads?

The answer is of course, that we cannot as yet be certain. But a few key fragments exist which suggest that the name was current, that there may have been some possibly instinctive foreknowlege of the impending disaster, and that the civilization may have degenerated to such an extent that an endogenous destruction event became almost inevitable.

The first occurrence of the name ‘Pangaia’ occurs in one of the first fragments of text that we were able to recover and translate:

Pangaian Calendar Song

In days before Gondwana land
was sutured in a double spread
with dark Laurasian soil –
when Tethys was a little cove
on Great Pangaia's holy coast,
this calendar we sang:
On Duesday, he, Ubumápotus
Godbodaddy Drumpfish,
megaloctopus in chief,
the holder of one million eyes
and master of the tentacles,
did settle with his council
from their endless lists of doom
his victims for the week,
his sacrificial choice
of offerings to GWOT.
On Suddenday the flechettes fall,
By Murderday the deed is done.
On Duesday – yes – we choose again
the targets of a Warday's plans.
On Throttleday rev up, rev up,
keep Lieday to deny denials with an easy smile
On Shatterday break bones, break walls,
on Suddenday …

The cycle was repeated. This illustrates we think, obsessive traits, projective spite and rage that must explain how Great Pangaia fell, collapsing to the desert state we see today.

Now that a great deal of additional material has been translated, it has been a puzzle to relate the ritualistic and primitive character of this fragment to the rest of the Pangaian corpus and to the apparently advanced and destructive technology it describes.

That sense of impending doom which characterizes so much of the relatively small sample that we have been able to study in detail appears in the following text:

Volcanic dust

This fresco shows the place. An island,
Thera, with its palaces, its olive trees, its vines,
its ships. The people seem obsessed with bulls.
Young men leap over them. The girls that watch
have tiny waists, bare breasts, black hair,
dark eyes. Très chic, they look - but Greek
or something of that sort. All round their solid
rocky land a curling sea that comes and goes.
Perhaps there is a fumarole, volcanic smoke,
perhaps Cat Zandra says (but who knows what
Cat Zandra says? Who cares?) “Beware! Grim fate
whose words make little sense until too late
has shown me ice, and in that ice one layer
of dust is Thera, fire, fear, despair.”

Here again it is hard to relate this poem to the context in which it was found, or to the optimistic outlook of another poem which we recently translated.

That poem describes some kind of march or parade. It combines a sense of the past history of one small part of Pangaia with the personal experience of the writer, who claims to have taken part in a historical event that we now know did actually occur on the day identified as 20030215 in the chronology of Late Pangaia 3C:

A March in Time – 15 February 2003

Through maps of time, as ice withdrew
and glaciers melted, rising seas
drew british isles in lines of blue.
Through mists of time, as turmoil drove
strange distant tribes to seek new hope,
some drifted here: stone circle, grove –
through wrack of years – white horse
and fort still mark their track. Our words
and thoughts record their course
through grinding ages, many tongues
that mixed as peoples mix and thrive –
a march through time, with verse, with songs:
and now for peace on every side
we millions march with hope, with pride.