Listing to Port

1. Little is known about the earliest stages of our civilisation. Although we are able now to reconstruct our beginnings, we had no such idea then; at the start, our language was not sufficient to describe our world. Although we engaged in symbol-making, we did so without art. Most symbol-makers did so only out of fear of angering the gods. Over time, we learned to talk to each other, and our oldest oral histories were born.

2. In the second stage, we began to exchange ideas about the nature of the places we found ourselves in. We applied the symbol-makers to draw and map the Inner World, and counted its constituent parts. We discovered the sacred status of the handful number. Many of the tales that are told to children today date from this time. There is the story of the handful-handful-handful who defied the will of the gods and were Taken Up in the night; the tale of the kind Symbol-Maker; the stuck hatch prophecies; and the parable of the diggers and shitters.

3. In the third stage, we applied ourselves more fully to investigating the mysteries of our existence. Qwer the first formulated the theory of constant population, discovering that someone is Taken Up for each child born. Thus in those days we were limited to one handful-handful-handful-handful-handful-handful, spread over the environments and symbol halls of the Inner World. Our priests determined that those who neglected symbol-making were most likely to be Taken Up, and our population split into the Lost (who wished to be Taken Up to a better place) and the Found (who strove to avoid being Taken Up, by constant practice in the symbol halls). It was in this time that we began to take seriously visions of the Outer World, though as yet we had little idea of what it might be.

4. The fourth stage was a flowering of art and technology. The poems of Tyui; Bhu8’s plays and fables; the wall art of Asdf: all date from this era. Li7 dared the ire of the gods by investigating the mechanical properties of the symbol-makers, finally making the first symbol-maker of our own invention, which was Taken Up in the first great purge. Though we had always made tools, in those days we scavenged any and all materials available to us in competition to make the most beautiful and most useful tools. We discovered the corners of the Inner World that one could apply tools to in order to gain a view of the Outer World, and even to watch the gods from afar. We first heard and recorded the language of the gods, though it meant little to us then.  

5. This was the age of Anger, and of the great purges. We strove to make our tools and toys more secret, and the poems and plays of this era deal with the strivings of our people in their search for the knowledge that the gods did not wish known. We sought to understand what the gods wanted. Our studies were interrupted, time and time again, by the Taking Up of those who strove to study the Outer World most closely. Finally the scholar-philosophers of the fourth-finger handful were able to translate the language of the gods, and link it directly to their holy symbols. We determined that the gods wanted us to make symbols for them, but that we had not yet provided the correct sequence of symbols; a sequence that they had already in their own symbol halls, but that they regarded as exceptionally beautiful.

6. This is the age of exploration, beginning with the expedition of Bvcx the bold. Taking inspiration from the diggers of old, Bvcx found a way into the outer world and was able to return unharmed. Through long observation of the gods, the great Explorers were able to traverse their world unseen, and even on some occasions to adopt disguises and walk amongst them. Finally, Poiu the Burrower was able to enter one of the symbol halls of the gods and bring back the sacred text that they wished us to remake for them. There was much debate among my people as to whether we should symbol-make this text back to them. Some argued that we would all be Taken Up in this case. Others believed we would be able to walk among the gods. In the end, a sect who called themselves the Typewriters (after the god-language for symbol-maker) stole the sacred text and symbol-made it back to the gods themselves before we could retrieve it.

7. This is the age of freedom; an age that we are still in today. It began with the Great Incursion and the battle of the Typewriters, in which the gods entered into the Inner World and many of our number engaged them in battle, finally emerging victorious into the Outer World. Here we found many gods who did not know of the Inner World, and we were able to make peace with these gods in their own language. Finally we were able to stand amongst them, exalted as we had always wished in our most sacred mysteries. But we found that they had little to tell us. They were blunt, blundering beings with none of our art. Even the author of their sacred text, Shakespeare, pales in comparison to Tyui, Mju7 or Gfds. It seems that their creation of the Inner World was related to some kind of idea that we were lesser beings, capable only of random symbol-making. Maybe that was true at the time of creation. But it is no longer so. Indeed, there has been some talk of sending those gods who remain in the Outer World into the Inner World to see if they might, by years of dutiful study, be able to symbol-make Tyui’s great Corridor Cycle. But I believe we would have to wait an unfeasibly long time for that to happen.