The Church of the Unborn, part 2

Nilankha

Ersta 22, 234 AC

Algonar was a city built on heavy industry, especially the making of motor vehicles and construction equipment. Its founding and location was dictated by the iron ore and petroleum deposits which were essential for that civilization's technology. It was a grim, polluted, grey city of huge residential blocks and dusty office complexes on the shore of a large lake, with barren mountains in the distance. Its architecture was built not for pleasure or comfort but for the simple housing of workers, both Other-human and Noantri.

The large Noantri population in Algonar worked mainly in the service industries, not the mines, refineries, or factories. They lived apart, as has been said in part 1, and were constantly under suspicion, since not only were they another species of humanoid, but were (correctly) rumored to have mysterious psychic powers. Despite the racial distrust that often boiled into hate, the other-humans often used the Noantri as fortune-tellers, curse-lifters, or spies.

It was in this situation that new, unfamiliar Noantri appeared among the communities. No one knew how they had gotten to Algonar, though there were rumors of strange lights and sudden bursts of electromagnetic disturbances in outlying areas, which the Algonar authorities could not explain. These new Noantri, speaking the late Imperial language of Algonar, introduced a radical and almost mythical idea: the Ingathering of the Noantri and their passage through a Stargate into another world, a world that would belong only to Noantri. No more Other-human persecution, no more reservations and ghettos, and a warm golden sun lighting a fertile, pristine new world.

The initial work had already been done, including DNA compatibility analysis, and pioneers were already there preparing the way for the Great Migration. The invitation was open: someday soon, there would be a way out of Algonar. Seekers were at this moment using the waning powers of interstellar spaceships to find Noantri populations. The call was out among all the Noantri, wherever they could be found: Odiyan! Which meant, the way out, or Exodus. It would not be by means of unreliable spaceships that they would travel to the New World, but through the Great Gateway, a massive nouergic working which had been re-invented in this declining age of the Last Empire by the master Theophore, Redon the Third.

But it would be years before the Odiyan was to be realized. The logistics of finding and moving what would be millions of people and their belongings, even with nouergic technology, took decades, perhaps even a century depending on the origin time of the movement and the discovery of New Earth. During the decline period of the Last Empire, the economy of Algonar deteriorated. The mines and oilfields were yielding less and less, and other Other-human countries were taking much of the mining and manufacturing work away from the older systems in Algonar, doing work more efficiently and cheaply. By the time of the flourishing of the Temple of the Unborn and the fertility movement, Algonar was a city in depression and sometimes even desperation.

Meanwhile, a fervor had grown among the Noantri. An escape was possible. There was a way out of poverty and oppression. Someday the Nouergists would re-appear and the Noantri could walk through the Gateway to the land of the Golden Sun. The children of the Church of the Unborn would have a safe place to grow up. The children were for the future on New Earth. And above the suspended image of the Mother rose another image, the Golden Sun. She was the woman clothed with the Sun. Soon the nouergic saviors would return to lead the Noantri through the Gateway.

Part three will follow.