Excerpt: Auteria

PROLOGUE

“Thus thou hast seen one world begin and end;
And man as from a second stock proceed.”
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 12, Lines 6-7

The people of the world of Talvony hardly remembered their heritage. Of course, all of the data from Earth was recorded and kept safe in libraries and other public records. All of the books, the classical tomes such as Homer’s The Iliad and Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the more recent though still archaic stories like Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings and Orwell’s 1984; yes, they were all preserved many times over in electronic form. From the oldest silent motion picture to the last 3D, effects-overloaded action flick, all of the Earth movies were available for viewing at any person’s leisure. From the first radio broadcast to the last beat-packed, melody-iced trance epic, yes, it could all be acquired in digital form.

Auteria, the sole nation on the planet of Talvony, rather preferred to educate its children on only the very significant historical points from Earth’s past, reserving more time to focus on Auterian history. The educators pointed out classical Greece with the first philosophers, and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, during which a man named Jesus was born and died, whose remembrance went on to create ongoing conflict that never ended until the world itself ended. Auterian students could hardly remember the Crusades, or the Renaissance, or the American Revolution. They remembered World War II, the China Wars, and World War V.

But they only got interested when the subject of World War VII came up. They listened to the story of the rise of the Republic of Elbar and its war against the United States of America. Their eyes glazed over when presented with films of the hydrogen bombs exploding over major cities like New York and Los Angeles. They read with interest the records of the American astronomers who discovered Talvony and provided for a few thousand Americans to go and live there, escaping the imminent nuclear war. And they watched as the planet Earth gradually turned to darkness, going silent as more and more died every day. They heard the clutter of satellite and long-distance space communication suddenly switch off, when the new nation’s government on Talvony decided to cut off all communication with Earth.

The Auterian people were quite content with focusing instead on their own nation’s history. The newcomers to the planet had named the new country, rather strangely, after the brilliant autistic scientist who first took note of Talvony. When they first landed about a hundred years ago, the Auterians settled on the southern end of an Australia-sized island, split in half by a mountain range running east and west. They had spread out slightly to not-very-distant lands south of the island, but had not wandered much farther than that. They had mapped out the whole planet with satellite imaging, and they had the aircraft to take them quickly to the other side of the globe. But they were afraid of straying out of the vicinity of the nation, because far away on other continents there were frightening beasts reminiscent of the dinosaur drawings they had from Earth.

The Auterians were completely happy with staying on their safe home island, developing their technology and the public well-being. It was a generally peaceful society; the governors devoted themselves to learning what worked and what didn’t work with Earth governments. There had never been a war or even a full-out battle on Talvony. And so they were deluded into thinking that there never would be one. But what they never conceived was an unexpected attack from the outside, from something that had been hidden for decades.