Station Of Seers : 01

The Season Of Innocence, also known as the Great Forgetting is an extended pause sitting across the track of the past. It is an age of absence, which tantalises the historian because it can only be known through thick veils of mystery and myth. Indeed, in every important sense it is an age without history. In the Season of Innocence, the clocks stopped. There was a wilful and universal refusal to make any record more persistent and less mutable than oral folklore. In that eternal now, tradition tells only of simple bucolic virtues and strange tales of the wonders of the new gene sea spreading like a healing balm over the planet. This is the time of the Legends of Klane Kalonia and his wandering over the grassy craters and glassy plains of an all but empty world. We know that the Season Of Innocence began with the Vow Of Earth between the Galactic Compact and the Guardians. We do not remember in this age, why such a Vow was taken. Some say it was a form of atonement for an unimaginable sin against the Galactic Compact. Others contend that it was an act of social therapy on a planetary scale, or a misguided political experiment. No one really knows. How long did the Season Of Innocence last? More than a thousand years? Certainly. Less than fifty thousand? Probably. The Geigamon might be able to tell us, for history did not stop in the Galactic Compact but the Geigamon were not party to the Vow of Earth and have little interest in it. Powerful winds of change blew across the Galactic Compact whilst the Earth slept through the Great Forgetting.
Let us say only that at length the pulse of history quickened to life again with the arrival of the New Sophisticates. In the time of Foundation they established their seven renowned cities, to be strongholds of learning and to bring the renewal of civilisation with all its goods and evils. And the Season Of Innocence was over...
Yet the Legends of Klane Kalonia have not lost their power even today. The cycle begins with the story of the Station Of Seers and of how Klane Kalonia came to free them from their strange curse. In those days the seas of the moon were still wet, though the long desiccation had begun to return them to their ancient lifeless dust. Under the mottled green and blue of a waxing moon, two riders crossed the chalk plain of Ilunon. In the warm spring sky above them, they began to sense that something watched...