Out in the dark, I've run across all manner of strange things. Thousands of planets around hundreds of stars and more asteroids than I can count. Iriil storms swirling around black holes, like the water pouring down some cosmic drain. Fields of grass with nameless monoliths and the last stronghold of the Elessi before their end. I've found creatures made of stone, of wood, of coral, of slime; things with tentacles for faces and teeth for hands. I've traced out messages in the dust of Rama and drank lapteth with an Ixodon. But the strangest thing I've ever seen in all my lonely days is this:
Every so often, you'll fly past a planet and you'll spy a spindle poking up from the ground, cutting the clouds in two as they blow past. An old space elevator, always the same obscure design. Ruins surround it, always on a flatish bit of ground at roughly the same latitude. Two moons will orbit it, just out of range of a ring of ice and rocks and what might have once been parts to an ancient space station. Nothing lives there, or at least nothing that responds to hails. Eventually, you move on.
Only, later, you see the same damn planet in a different system, orbiting a different star. Xanerty, at CA-3635, just between Uycheon and Benu Wen. Porbel, at RS-7754, a few subsecs shy of Ylneri. Pellis, at RS-4944, on the coreward border of the Selassian Empire. Other places too, ones that I didn't bother noting down after the first three, after I started to realize why the place looked so hauntingly familiar.
They're all Glisal. Same composition, same gravity, same two moons of the same size and same glittering rings of the same diameter and thickness. Each the same distance from their suns. And they all have the same space elevator, stretched up past the clouds like a strand of Aes'ti's hair. Everyone from the Ascendancy knows the Glisal is an old world, and that Litharge is an old city. That it had its teeming billions long before the fires of the Bushraki War forged the founding races into a single Celestine people. I just never quite realized how old it really was.
Who built these cities? The architectural minds of the now-extinct Vyar are a natural first thought - they would have had the reach through their Voidgate network and plenty of reason to want a friendly looking world at every end of the network. The Sooq and the Quix are also suspects - they both would have had ample reason to shift as much material as they could into space. For all we know, it could have been the Elessi, or even Ishvana itself - they all have a certain eerie sameness to them, after all. It's hard to say, not without doing more digging than my shovel could handle and more archeology than I'm qualified to do.
But it does make you think. Who's graves are we standing on? And who will stand upon our own?
