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31st March 1855

Arthur Bell Nicholls wrote to Ellen Nussey; 'Our dear Charlotte is no more - She died last night of exhaustion...'

Ellen arriving the next day later recalled; 'Her maid Martha brought me a tray of evergreens and such flowers as she could procure to place on the lifeless form. What made it impossible at first was the rushing recollection of the flowers I had spread in her honour at her wedding, just nine months before'.

Rest in peace Charlotte Brontë, and my grandmother Kathleen who also passed on this date.


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In -7,980, the first orbital flights were made by the air force of eastern Dleqiats, followed quickly by flights from Qiknavra.  By -7,959 the first expedition to Viepchakl was mounted by eastern Dleqiats, and a base was permanently on the moon by -7,950.

In some ways, the exploration of Viepchakl was a replay of the exploration of Qiknavra.  There were Chirpers already there.

These Chirpers (called Viepchaklts -- people of Viepchakl) were the remnants of the Droyne who had inhabited Viepchakl City and somehow survived in the underground tunnels.  Some were in cold sleep for thousands of years, while others simply wandered the tunnels, tending hydroponics troughs, or eating from automated food producers.

Initially, it was human astronauts from eastern Dleqiats that contacted the Viepchaklts, but within a year, Qiknavra has launched its own expedition, one which included Chirpers.

The Chirpers from each world met in the depths of the ruined Viepchakl City, and within a few days the Qiknavra Chirpers fell ill and died.  Reacting quickly, the humans determined that the cause was a bacteriological weapon lying dormant since the Final War.  An agent specific to Qiknavrats was carried by the Viepchaklts; and an agent specific to the Viepchaklts was carried by the Qiknavrats.  When they met, the biological agents went to work.  Although an immediate quarantine was ordered, samples from Viepchaklts had already been sent to Zhdant (months before) and it was only a matter of time before the plague spread to Qiknavrats.  Apparently, biological agents specific to each type of Droyne were drop-launched during the Final War, but each went to the wrong world; they then waited as a bacteriological time bomb-waiting for the two branches of the same race to make contact.

The plague also affected humans.  On Viepchakl, most humans died within two weeks.  Within a year, the plague's first effects were being felt on humans on Zhdant.  Within two years, the human population was reduced by a third.  Within ten years, population had been reduced by two-thirds.  The human die-back ruined many of the gains of the past centuries.  Vast areas of the plains of eastern Dleqiats were abandoned, as were the Qiknavrats settlements in Qiknavra.  Cities were abandoned.  Attention turned to survival.  By -7,940, Zhdant had entered a second Dark Age.

-- "Exploration of Viepchakl" by J. Andrew Keith, Marc W. Miller, and John Harshman (pub. 1985)

"'Yes, said Victor uncertainly. 'But how does it work?'
Silverfish's face lit up.
'You want to know?' he said. 'You want to know how things work?'
'Yes, I-"
'You see, most people are so disappointing,' Silverfish said. 'You show them something really wonderful like the picture box, and they just go "oh".'"

("Moving Pictures", Terry Pratchett)

"Names for children, domestic animals, servants, pet animals such as dogs, cats, and rabbits, farm animals such as horses, cows, donkeys, racing animals such as horses and greyhounds, houses, businesses, and boats all reflect the value of society. Medieval Britons named their cups and swords, but cups and swords no longer hold social value and are no longer named. Names are initiated by the bestower, and uptaken and interpreted by everyone else."

"The way blood typing works is this: All blood cells are the same inside, but the outsides are covered with different kinds of antigens -- that is, proteins that project outward from the cell surface -- and that is what accounts for blood types."

Translated from "L'Amour Filial"
Emily Brontë, Belgium 1842

'Honour thy father and thy mother if thou wouldst live'. It is by such a commandment that God gives us knowledge of the baseness of our race, of how it appears in His sight. To fulfil the gentlest, the holiest of all duties, Man must be threatened; it is through fear that the maniac must be forced to sanctify himself. In this commandment is hidden a more bitter reproach than any open accusation could contain: a charge against us of absolute blindness or of infernal ingratitude.

"Here and there on the shore can be found cobbles of Torridonian sandstone - the remains of river beds over a billion years old. And in the cobbles lie shiny quartz pebbles that had once rolled and rattled along the floor of a riverbed long ago, after being eaten out of cliffs of jasper two billion years old. And in those jasper pebbles can be found microfossils from a world that is now two billion years past.

But that is a story that will have to wait for another time."
("Darwin's Lost World", Martin Brasier)

"During the first few hundred years of the Third Imperium, Psionics is an accepted part of life for most citizens.  Several branches of the Imperial government are rumored to include psionicists, some of whom (for example) are said to advise Cleon and his senior staff when opposing negotiators are not telling the truth.

On prominent worlds throughout the Imperium, citizens can attempt to learn psionic powers by going to
the neighborhood Psionics Institute.  On even the most sparsely settled worlds, there will sometimes be a local master of the art, helping to bring the ancient discipline to new frontiers.  On the other hand, there exist people and organizations adamantly opposed to the practice of psionics.

At the time of the founding of the Third Imperium, most people do not think about psionics much.  There are relatively few highly trained psionicists, so it simply is not a part of everyday life.  The most common
exposure to psionics is through action-packed holovids, wherein the heroine triumphs over evil through the use of her fantastic (special effects-created) psionic powers.  However, on worlds that favor psionics, there are those psionicists who seek to bring greater integration of their practices into the fabric of society.  On other worlds, there are those who would like to see an end to all psionicists and the institutes that train them."

-- "Psionics In The Third Imperium", Psionic Institutes, Marc Miller, page 5.

La vie de l'homme vertueux n'est qu'une lutte continuelle de la nature contra la religion; quant à l'homme vicieux il semble jouir d'une vie plus calme parcequ'il se livre sans résistance aux tentations qui l'obsédent.

La Chenille, Charlotte Brontë (Août 1842)



Translated
The life of a virtuous man is no more than a continual struggle of nature against religion. As for the vicious man, he seems to enjoy a calmer life because he delivers himself without resistance toward the temptations that obsess him.

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er, or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

MLK Jr.

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated."

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Matthew 23

A relevant metaphor for our troubled times:


"Human Justice" rushed before me in novel guise, a red, random beldame, with arms akimbo. I saw her in her house, the den of confusion: servants called to her for orders or help which she did not give; beggars stood at her door waiting and starving unnoticed; a swarm of children, sick and quarrelsome, crawled round her feet, and yelled in her ears appeals for notice, sympathy, cure, redress. The honest woman cared for none of these things. She had a warm seat of her own by the fire, she had her own solace in a short black pipe, and a bottle of Mrs. Sweeny's soothing syrup; she smoked and she sipped, and she enjoyed her paradise, and whenever a cry of the suffering souls about her pierced her ears too keenly--my jolly dame seized the poker or the hearth-brush: if the offender was weak, wronged, and sickly, she effectually settled him: if he was strong, lively, and violent, she only menaced, then plunged her hand in her deep pouch, and flung a liberal shower of sugar-plums.


Villette, Charlotte Brontë (1853)

From the book Housekeeping by Mary Lynn Robinson.

"When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate."