Features of the Syai people and their planet (as T. described them)
The Syai planet is slightly larger than Earth. As a consequence of this as well as of their different evolutionary ancestry, Syai people have averagely shorter thicker limbs and stockier bodies than would be the average here. Comparing them with humans their features are quite similar, but might be described as slightly “beaver-like”. Because the race seems to have branched from a rodent-like mammalian stem, T. called them h-r-umans.
Their planet has a moon about the size of Earth’s moon and a much smaller moon called the tail moon or the pointer. Each of the planet’s hemispheres has a continent. In the most navigable oceanic region between them is an island with a temperate climate.
That island is the Syai historic centre and has the name Fahshwowl-Tivana (FT). The ancient name of the planet was Okraalom, but The Syai popular movement re-named the planet Feishoafeis, Home-away-from-home. According to T., Syai wisdom teachers say there is no heavenly place of origin somewhere away from the world - a place that gave birth to the species. All the same, that place, called The Mountain of The First, is a much-honoured cultural myth, and the story around it will be included somewhere in the completion of in this work. The wise ones teach that a sun-circling rocky planet is – by itself - just a place to stand and move around on. Its biosphere comes from many cosmic influences on a planetary surface suitable for life to evolve. The real home of every mortal being is the Universe Itself with all its living planets.
A sketch of ‘pre-Syai’ history
The Fahshwowl people were the first to settle on the island of Fahshwowl-Tivana (FT). They claim they were always there from the world’s creation. Part of their religion survives in Syai mythology. The main religion of the Northern Continent was basically derived from the same Fahshwowl religion, centred on the goddess called Sunchild. The North developed a kind of ‘new testament’ version of the Fahshwowl religion. The lands of the Southern Continent were unified under an unrelated religion having some likeness to Christianity. It was founded on the revelations of a martyred shoemaker, hung on a tree and beaten to death; hence the name Treeism.
In what might be called the Middle Epoch of written history, Treeist invaders from the southern continent – the Tivanans - established their kingdoms on FT and attempted with limited success to subjugate and convert the Fahshwowl natives. This was disturbing to the people of the Northern Continent who had several holy shrines in FT, dedicated to Sunchild and to their prophet Kafneesa. They launched several invasions into the island of Fahshwowl-Tivana, but their rule over the Tivanan and Fahshwowl people never became firmly established and long-lasting. (Ref. to ‘Dove and Eagle’.)
The Syai movement inspired by a historic hero
Seventeen centuries ago (from the planet’s present time in relation to Earth), in a north-eastern Tivanan kingdom, a princess was born who provided much inspiration to the founder of the Syai popular movement five centuries later. She was Mairiloi and the story Dove and Eagle provides a glimpse of Mariloi’s times and of the circumstances when the Earth-equivalent modernization of the people of the planet began. From then on, wars and discoveries produced an industrial revolution with urbanized, ever-expanding populations. Developments in atomic energy and weaponry began, with FT becoming a pawn in the rivalry of the two continents. The Tivanan historic conquerors united with the native Fahshwowl population to resist demands and impositions pressed on them by the rival power-elites of each of the continents. War was made on FT, mainly by the South, using tactical atomic weapons. The Fahshwowl reacted with fanaticism, including suicide attacks, and large areas of the island remain polluted to this day with dangerous levels of residual radiation. Because the whole of FT became too devastated and dangerous to be of strategic value, it was left out of the even worse war that followed between North and South. This war was fought not with nuclear but with biochemical weapons. About 95% of the population of both continents died, leading to what is known as The Great Collapse.
Recovery from civilization’s collapse
Recovery from The Great Collapse began in FT, in the least damaged corner of the island in what had been Mariloi’s kingdom. It was led by one of her blood-line called Fahraa, a princess of what by then was a constitutional monarchy called Mommeipshei. She created and organized the Syai movement, uniting the two races and making plans for the new and better world that would make the mistakes of the past unrepeatable. (Ref. The Insistent Dream.)
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Some comments on this brief background sketch
The present-day popular writers of dystopias may well write novels about equivalents of The Great Collapse. I have been more concerned with how a utopia of a kind arose, phoenix-like, from global disaster. The forces of renewal were led by the Syai and spread over most lands of the continents. Their leader, whom they call First Empress Fahraa, managed at some cost to banished war and established regimes based on social stability and environmental sustainability.
Fahraa insisted on freedoms balance by incorruptible disciplines. What was needed to accomplish this was good education (fostering internal discipline), and transparency in all transaction. An electronic web of communication and information - similar this world’s internet - is so organized that no individual or group can use it to take advantage over another. In what T. refers to as “the Syai world of today”, no affairs between people, or between a person and the commonwealth of all Syai people, are private except the strictly personal and consentient.
The present-day Syai Empire - so called by T. - might not be what some well-set-up people on present-day Earth would prefer to live under, but it is the home of the stable Syai culture. With its spread, the Syai movement created the lingua franca (the Syai language) that played a major part in unifying all the peoples of the planet. Another factor in its success is that the founder of Syai, Princess Fahraa (who became First Empress for a day only), was determined that the communities of the Syai empire would never have to put up with social conditions whereby demonstrable harm from crime and corruption was only partially suppressed. Neither would the subjects of the Empire have to put up with rulers, money-monopolists, overlords of any kind, setting up and prolonging their tyranny indefinitely. In her determination over these things, she famously commented:
#“The bindweed forms part of (the) flourishing garden, yes? It does not. Uproot it. Kill it completely.”
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