Tom Noon's Tale

Tom is sent there in a small but top-of-the-line ship, early-to-mid-psi-tech , built by a multispecies group but customized for humans. He spends two years, in which he:

1. determines the Eilythri were not native to that planet

2. travels back in time by a series of exploratory jumps to the founding Eilythri

3. finds the Eilythri had settled this world while it was being terraformed by some future human group

4. suspects the people we met were lured or transplanted by the terraformers to form a subject population later

5. fails to make friendly contact with the founding Eilythri but does a memory audit on a captive and determines that they had fled to this planet from very far away, using their diadem segment (and also determined to deny the segment to their pursuers)

6. determines where and what they were fleeing from: a multi-species culture in a remote giant spherical galaxy, aggressive and expansionary, resembling the more aggreessive of Brin's Uplift cultures

7. finds a suitable second colony world for Eilythri near the human colony

8. goes and spies on the Uplift folk, who are pre-psi (barely) at the point when the Eilythri flee them, gathers data on their organization, ecologies, technologies, and stellographies

9. determines that some Eilythri are subjects of the Uplifters and there are other Eilythri colonies scattered equally far abroad in this continuum

In return for this data, Tom is allowed to drop the Eilythri "genocide" business and keep the ship, which he names the "Nones" (rhymes with "stones" -- the name of an old canonical hour and cognate of "Noon"). He is also, by the way, a KaiSenese Associate.

Puck spends this time with Tom's family on the Jack, and conceives an admiration for neo-gorillas.

Running total: 2 yrs (sub), 1 yr (obj)

Tom spends the next five years (subjective and objective) touring Terran Space and parts of the Ecumene as an escort for various field historians, Terran and otherwise, working for AE or KaiSen's temporal service. Mostly, he uses the ship "Nones," acquired in the Eilythri postlude. In between tours, he helps run Cantrel's courier service on Co-Dominion Hellene, with occasional visits to his family on the Jack.

Around this time, Tom acquires two small permanent dwellings on the two Hellenes, one near Cantrel's offices, the other near the KaiSenese Embassy.

On one occasion, Tom escorts a prominent non-human field-historian through Terran Space and beyond. He travels out and forward to the Authority Zone, where he and the ET are nearly captured by Bleneri pirates (Korando clan). Tom escapes only by pushing a panic button, which summons Elias. Elias, it turns out, has a contemporary branch of his tavern in the Authority Zone.

With Elias's help, Tom gives the Blenari the impression that the "Nones" disintegrated into tachyonic plasma as the result of a bad, panicked hyperjump. Ship, Tom, and ET passenger are all safe in Martshayla Port, the Conventional Enclave. Tom hands the ET off to AE agents and learns Semantic.

Tom also encounters an elf in Elias's tavern, is surprised, and deliberately strikes up acquaintance with him. The elf hails from that part of Faerie adjacent to Eastmarch. Tom here decides that his basic career is explorer, grand scale. If timelock means he can't publish in his home venue, never mind. He can at least inform himself and his friends. He asks the elf to take him to Faerie, in return for teaching psionic "magics." The elf agrees, the trade bound by telepathic promise (from Tom) and sworn name-oath (from the elf).

Before departing for Faerie, Tom sends messages to his friends and family, and asks Elias to send one to the Captain, calling in PART of the universe-saving favor by having Puck regenerated as a neo-gorilla.

Running total: 7 yrs (sub), 6 yrs (obj)

This chunk of Faerie is on another twig of the same world-tree as Eastmarch, though they've played rather free with the geometry here, and have lots of portals to elsewhere.

Tom takes up a rather elvish way of life -- hunter-gatherer assisted by special effects -- trading in skills and information. He migrates through portals to other fay lands and, in one, makes an enemy of a rising wizard-king with draconian interpretations on the adage "knowledge is power" -- he demands that Tom, with his exotic skills, work for him; Tom does not care to nor approve of his politics and must flee.

He jumps through another portal into the Faerie of the Hremish world. There, he hears rumors of "Old Faerie" and Alvirin. He also recognizes the fantasy races around him and bales out into mundane Hreme, near the Black Mage's citadel. (Since the Black Mage specializes in teleportation, it is relatively easy to find a portal that leads to him.)

After carefully making sure his prior visits are still prior, he presents himself at the citadel and is allowed to hang about until the Mage shows up from wherever he's been last. (This is not too long, since it is not good strategy for the Mage to let too much time lapse at home while he's off pantoping.)

He regales the Mage with his discoveries, which is both entertaining and useful to the Mage, and gets a ride back home to Home Line Hellene.

Running total: ~15 yrs (sub), 10 yrs (obj)

Tom hangs about doing nothing very exciting, working with Cantrel on Co-Dominion Hellene, visitng home, and re-acclimating himself to the group, for about two years, writing memoirs for the benefit of the group.

He then resumes the business of tour-guide/escort for field historians sent by KaiSen or AE. He makes occasional runs up to the Authority Zone, where Elias becomes a semi-regular contact and he establishes a condo in Martshayla Port. Over the next three years, he hears crosstime rumors of the Terraform Reach and, feeling increasingly itchy about the feet, goes to investigate it in the "Nones."

To make the time-trip in a reasonable subjective time requires either an omniport (or close approximation) or a very good radiation screen (since the journey must be made near light-speed). Tom tries for the portal, but settles for the radiation screen, given him by KaiSen in return for the last year of service. This is still a good deal, because the "screen" is monologue technology from the far future, and simply makes the ship fail to interact with electromagnetic radiation. Tom keeps this very secret.

Tom spends the next twelve years exploring the Terraform Reach. He spends one year working his way through their history to a point several dynasties into their Imperial period, learning languages. He then "settles down" and establishes bases and bolt-holes for himself around the Reach, setting up identities and making money by trade, high-speed courier work, psi-for-hire, and (very, very discreetly) temporal courier. This gets him some very interesting contacts, not all of them friendly, and a dockside apartment in Acropolis, the orbital spaceport of Impri, the capitol planet of the Empire.

Eventually, he gets homesick and returns to the Jack.

Running total: ~30 yrs (sub), 13 yrs (obj)

Tom is contacted on the Jack, after a couple of years, by Allied Epochs, who consult him to help them place a time-traveling Toon. Debriefing about the Classical Line, esp. in its far-future modes, is delicate.

Tom reluctantly agrees to take the Toon back to the far-future Classical line, with a borrowed pantope from way up the line. The Toon, however, is an explorer, and has other ideas. It winds up crashing them into the Toon line, where Tom spends at least an hour as a very grumpy monkey. He entirely loses track of the explorer Toon and tries to get home via some magic done by a Toon fairy. This winds him up in the human dreamworld. It takes him some time to figure out where he is and even longer to figure out how to get out. There are very few portals to other worlds. The only one that is half-familiar is Old Faerie. He takes that one.

He comes out in the Crownpoint Mountains, wanders into Taurion, and thence to the Iron Mountains and High Dwarrowgard. He finds the elven and dwarvish nobles bemusedly helpful rather than draconian, and strikes up a technology- exchange partnership with the scholars of High Dwarrowgard.

The dwarves catch Tom's interest in cosmological exploration. He aids them in teleportation experiments that aim for the dreamWORLD but hit the DreamTIME, where he encounters old friends.

He has spent the last twenty years in Faerie, wandering the Chaos Marches, or at the labs at High Dwarrowgard, or in Vinyagerond, with occasional trips back to Hellene or the Jack, and short field trips to stranger places.

Running total: ~50 yrs (sub), ~20 yrs (obj, i.e. Homeline)