The Last Christmas

Today is the last Christmas there will ever be.

It is (OC) December 25th, DY 5847 (CE 8429).

In seven days, the Lacteal will be established. As part of this reorganisation, the Old Calendar will be abolished, replaced by the new Lacteal Calendar. After this, the calendar system of old Earth-of-Sol will cease all official use.

The Old Calendar is not commonly used, and is considered archaic by most. On many worlds of the Diaspora, it has already been abandoned. However, until now there has been no universally-agreed standard – partly because greater focus has been placed on other, less trivial things, and partly because not enough planets had been contacted to make it worthwhile.

By most calculations, however, more than eighty-five per cent of planets settled by humans have re-established contact with the wider Diaspora. Therefore, it makes little sense to keep using such an archaic system.

Very few Diaspora worlds celebrate festivals whose direct lineage can be traced to the old Christmas celebration of Earth-of-Sol. As humanity spread out among the stars, losing contact with others of the same kind along the way, culture has attained a diversity well beyond that which is thought to have existed prior to the Diaspora.

There exist hardly any records of what exact sequence of events caused humanity to flee their homeworld.

There are stories, of course, of old Earth-of-Sol, legends of the Dark Time. It is clear that whatever it was, the human species took great pains to forget about it.

All that remains is a seed of grand-scale, collective trauma. It is no coincidence, for example, that in so many languages of the Diaspora, there is a word that means “Earth-sorrow”, or “Earth-loss”, to describe the nostalgia and homesickness that remains so central to the human experience.

There are a scattering of facts that can be considered certain:

One: Earth-of-Sol is where the human race first evolved, in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Two: Human beings lived on Earth-of-Sol for an estimated three-hundred millennia, until a catastrophe forced them off-world.

Three: They fled into the void of space aboard pultships, in search of a new home.

By the most conservative estimates, it took a century and a half to find and successfully settle even a single habitable planet. Indeed, not all who fled reached their destinations. Many more arrived, but were destroyed, one way or another, before they could grow beyond a few centuries.

Accidents happen when you are in a hurry.

There are many planets in the Diaspora that share their name with that of the human homeworld, “Earth”. This has necessitated the use of distinguishing markers to differentiate: “Earth-of-Kepler”, “Earth-of-Scorpius”, “Earth-of-Gliese”, and so on.

The vast majority, however, have unique names – perhaps as a consequence of the desire to begin again with a “clean slate”, perhaps because the Earth-sorrow was simply too much to bear invoking. This can be seen in the names of planets like Verdure, Jo’eng, Idun and Homsfeer.

The original Terrans took with them only what they could carry, such was the haste of their flight. This meant that many things were left on the old Earth when they fled, and in many cases all they took with them were memories and traditions.

For many hundreds of years, the human diaspora was driven apart by the gulf of space, by the need to find new homes, to find new means of survival. There was less concern placed on re-establishing contact, and far more placed on long-term prospects for survival.

This era of the Diaspora is now known as the Great Silence; a time when no two groups of human people conversed. It lasted somewhere in the region of eight centuries.

It was some five millennia ago that a party from Olora became the first people of the Diaspora that were able to re-establish contact with another Diaspora world, Pleasance.

Pleasance was not the first planet with which the Olorans had attempted contact. It was, however, the first planet the Olorans had encountered that could receive their identifying signal and acceptably respond. The agreed identifier was the atomic weight of helium (4.003) expressed as a binary signal. The expected response would then be the atomic weight of hydrogen (1.008), also as a binary signal, but requiring less power to transmit. (More efficient means of contact have been devised since.)

With the response positively received and identified, the Olorans came to Pleasance, a fertile world about the size of 1.3 Earths, with an axial tilt of twenty degrees, orbiting a K-type star named “Providence”. The planet is covered in blue-green vegetation, optimised for absorbing the wavelengths of light given off by the orange dwarf.

When the Olorans met with the Pleasancers, they were most intrigued by Pleasance’s culture, which had diverged significantly from their own.

The year on Pleasance lasts two-hundred-and-three days of twenty hours each. At the start of every new calendar year, the Pleasancers celebrate “Karissamatsa”, a celebration where people feast and drink. The Pleasancers are a universally vegetarian people, with the nitrogen-rich soil in much of the planet’s arable land providing ample protein to the inhabitants.

The young and old imbibe “Jereekarissamatsa”, a special psychoactive wine made from glucose-rich fruits grown in orchards located around the planet’s 42nd parallels north and south. They trade trinkets and play games until midnight, at which time there is a frenzied dance motivated by the wine, which only ends when all the participants have retired from exhaustion. In Pleasancer tradition, it is said that the dance brings good fortune for the new year ahead.

The Olorans were fascinated to observe this festival, which they immediately understood to be a descendant of the old Christmas celebrations on Earth-of-Sol.

Olora is a green world, about the size of 0.95 Earths, and it orbits a G-type main sequence star similar to Sol, but an estimated billion years younger. It has an axial tilt of thirty-one degrees and an orbital period of four-hundred-and-twenty-nine days lasting twenty-eight hours each, which makes for longer and harsher winters, as well as hotter and drier summers.

On Olora, the New Year, which occurs during midsummer in the planet’s northern hemisphere, was a more solemn affair, a time of reflection and remembrance, rather than a time of jubilation. Olorans do not celebrate Christmas. The closest they come is a festival, which can be translated from their tongues as “Endwinter” (or “Thawing”), which is celebrated in the springtime in each hemisphere. During observation of Endwinter, it is traditional to fast for a week before eating an austere and modest meal – traditionally bread dipped in a neutral oil, with a glass of water, milk, or dry wine.

The Olorans collate and maintain many of the information repositories related to humanity and to the history of the Diaspora. This event constitutes the first mention of Christmas in their databanks after the end of the Great Silence.

On Earth-of-Sol, Christmas was observed as a religious festival. Though much of the history of Earth-of-Sol has been lost, there are records of Christmas celebrations dating back thousands of years.

Only a small percentage of the Diaspora worlds that have yet been contacted are known to celebrate Christmas, or a derivative festival considered to have direct lineage with the original holiday.

The inhabitants of Earth-of-Dido, for example, know of no such celebration. Their planet has an axial tilt of ten degrees, and is at the far end of the habitable zone for their Sun. As such, the difference between their winter and summer solstice is not extremely pronounced. In fact, it is one of the coldest populated planets in the Diaspora, with temperatures regularly reaching minus twenty degrees Celsius.

The planet also has an orbital period consisting of three-hundred-and-four days, divided into eight months of thirty-eight days, with each day lasting twenty-two hours.

Following from this, Didoan culture instead elects to hold feasts every two months, with four feasts to a calendar year. These are known in their tongue as the “Quarterfestivals”, and are marked as “Firstfestival”, “Secondfestival”, “Thirdfestival” and “Lastfestival”. The Quarterfestivals are largely built around the giving and receiving of mutual aid. People are encouraged to let others, often complete strangers, into their homes. The guests provide company and conversation. In return, they are provided with roasted meat, bread fried crisp in the oil naturally produced in Earth-of-Dido’s native forests, and a sweet pudding made from boiled fruit, herbs and spices.

It is not known why so much of the Diaspora has abandoned or forgotten Christmas. It is known, of course, that Christmas was not a universal holiday on Earth-of-Sol to begin with. The political hegemon that ruled Earth-of-Sol up until the Dark Time is known to have predominantly adhered to the Christ-faith for which Christmas is named. Christmas was celebrated annually, even in times of plague and conflict. Many of the nation-states that existed under that hegemon, however, did not celebrate Christmas.

Modern political theorists speculate that for many, it was abandoned precisely as a reaction to that hegemon which had forced so many billions off-world and into the uncertainty of space.

Yet others, it would seem, recontextualised the festival, choosing instead to adapt it to their own cultural values. The settlers of Pleasance left no consistent historical records – they were busy with establishing settlements and adapting to the higher gravity. However, from the way Karissamatsa is celebrated on Pleasance, one can infer that it was established as a continuation of the Christmas celebrations on Earth-of-Sol.

In the years succeeding the Oloran expedition, the Olorans and Pleasancers forged an interplanetary alliance, despite their cultural difference. The Pleasancers led a more communal existence, with less reliance on technology. The Olorans were more individualist, and believed in work as a virtuous undertaking.

Early on, the Pleasancers took a strong stance that the Olorans should not interfere in Pleasancer politics, a stance to which the Olorans agreed. The Olorans helped fill the gaps in Pleasancer knowledge, while the Pleasancers supplied the Olorans with goods, including the psychostimulant Jeree wine, which has since become a popular beverage on many Diaspora worlds.

In the third century of their collaboration, the Olorans were themselves contacted. The people of Jo’eng had rediscovered radio after forgetting it in the years after settlement.

Jo’eng is a small planet, almost eighty-six per cent covered in water, with its landmass consisting mainly of islets and archipelagos, orbiting an M-type main-sequence star. Unusually for this type of star, Jo’eng is not tidally-locked, but rather rotates. The abundance of water on the planet suggests that the planet was heavily bombarded by comets during its development. Further evidence for this is given in that its axial tilt is some one-hundred-and-sixty degrees, with its magnetic north on the “bottom” relative to other planets in its solar system.

The Jo’engren also have no concept of Christmas. With a day lasting fourteen hours, and an orbital period lasting one-hundred-and-eight days, New Years come and go quickly enough that the Jo’engren instead mark every eight orbital periods with a celebration that can be translated as “Festival of the Great Fish”. The Jo’engren, who survive on a diet of aquatic plants and animals, hold this celebration as a way of giving thanks to their deity, Daegu, for providing an abundance of food. The Festival also functions as a humble plea for clement weather and favourable tides.

The Jo’engren had lost the ability to travel in space, and made contact with the Olorans through targeted high-energy radio pulses lasting eight minutes. It took some time for the Olorans to realise that the signals they were receiving were a pattern, rather than a pulsar, a mechanical fault, or random noise. Immediately, a pultship was sent to Jo’eng, and the Jo’engren made contact with the Olorans.

A delegation was subsequently brought back to Olora to meet with representatives of the Oloran Council and the Pleasancer Commission of Olora.

The three worlds had taken eleven centuries to finally meet. It was occasion met with excitement, and some trepidation, among the people of each. While all three were friendly to each other, there were concerns that a meeting of peoples, whose cultures had so greatly diverged from one another, might bring about the possibility of war.

War is known to have been very common on Earth-of-Sol, and it is thought that many catastrophic wars were fought in the build-up to the Dark Time.

It is not true that there has never been war on any Diaspora world, as archaeological evidence has shown. In more recent years, there have been brief conflicts and skirmishes between planets upon reaching an impasse. There have also been riots, revolts and the like. However, all these have been resolved by diplomatic interventions from uninvolved neutral planets, or by stalemate, or by renegotiation. These conflicts have always been brief, and abandoned as soon as the inherent pointlessness of the activity became realised.

As a matter of fact, on worlds that have never fought a single war, such as Pleasance and Earth-of-Dido, there are no natural words for “gun”, or “weapon”. Instead, unwieldy compound words must be constructed: “thing-that-brings-death”, or “maker-of-destruction”.

When the delegates of the three planets met for the first time in the Great House of the Oloran Council, the immediate agreement was for Olorans, Pleasancers and Jo’engren to declare a treaty of mutual cooperation, such that each world would benefit from what the others could provide, and that all conflicts, should they arise, be resolved by means of diplomacy and good faith.

With this agreement, the Triumvirate was established. It was then formalised through a series of discussions. With respect to domestic affairs, each planet vowed non-interference, except where such affairs might affect their citizens living off-world.

Technology and civilisation advanced greatly in the time following the Trimvirate’s establishment. Far from the war that had been feared, the Triumvirate prospered from the wisdom of each other.

The Olorans, academically and philosophically minded, lacked the abstraction that the Pleasancers could provide. Conversely, the Pleasancers emphasise culture, gastronomy and leisure as paragon to the human experience. On Pleasance, the word for “work” is more aptly translated as “help” or “keep house”.

Pleasance, however, has a relatively low hostility-to-life index. The Pleasancers have not had to learn to build, or else die. Their world is a kind one, with relatively low volcanism, highly stable tectonic plates, and very brief seasons.

This is in sharp contrast to Olora, with its lengthy, baking hot summers and freezing cold, deadly winters, where one must struggle against the elements if they are to achieve anything meaningful.

Yet, even Olora is a paradise compared to Jo’eng.

In the Triumvirate, the Jo’engren assumed the collective role of engineers, with a cultural mindset that skewed towards pragmatism. It is sometimes noted among the Jo’engren, perhaps unfairly, that while the Olorans were spending time reading books in chambers of dark wood and polished stone, and the Pleasancers spent most of their days playing music and eating fruit, the Jo’engren were battling harsh weather conditions, high tides and unfavourable currents, simply to gather enough food to survive.

The Jo’engren are known for their unaffected wit, which is often mistaken for outright humourlessness. The blunt mode of Jo’engren speech is noted in a few idioms used in many languages of the Diaspora: “To make conversation with a fisherman of Jo’eng” is to talk seriously about things without abstraction, while “to jest before a crowd of Jo’engren and wait a year for laughter” is to do something futile.

And so it went on like this, for half a millennium. The human race had taken to the stars more than a thousand years ago. Now, it seemed, even a handful of Sol’s progeny had finally found peace among the stars.

Then, in the five-hundred-and-tenth year of the Triumvirate, disaster struck.

Olora was suddenly blindsided by an undetected and unanticipated solar flare. The Olorans suffered a near-total communications blackout, severe disruption to weather patterns, and a geomagnetic storm that damaged many pultships and grounded many more. Cut off for the first time in sixteen centuries, the Olorans scrambled to report the damage to their embassies on Pleasance and Jo’eng, but geomagnetic interference from solar radiation kept them from restoring a communications link.

Subsequently, a terrible tragedy occurred. A pultship carrying passengers from Pleasance arrived in Oloran space and suffered catastrophic damage to all systems immediately upon arrival. An attempt by the crew to evacuate the stricken vessel resulted in numerous passengers becoming trapped in the lifeboats, and all aboard were asphyxiated over the course of days.

Among the dead were a group of students from the Academy of Pleasance, nearly all of whom were making their first trip into space. Additionally, some sixty-eight returning Olorans were killed, and eleven Jo’engren. The ship was left to lifelessly float in space for two weeks, until clearance was finally given to clear up the mess left in the wake of the disaster.

The incident caused outrage on Pleasance and Jo’eng. Both felt that the Olorans had not done enough to prepare for the possibility of a solar flare, and demanded answers. The Oloran Council protested that the solar flare had been a freak occurrence, not one that could have been counteracted.

The disagreement caused a political schism among the three worlds, and for a time, Olora was placed under embargo by its counterparts. This caused a heavy reduction in quality of life for the Olorans, and left some remote areas teetering on the precipice of famine.

The Pleasancers felt that Olora had betrayed the fundamental principles on which the Triumvirate had been founded. In their view, the Triumvirate had been formed on the basis of cooperation and free association. Olora, so the Pleasancers felt, seemed to be attempting an increased centralisation of power.

Additionally, the Jo’engren felt that the Olorans had turned inwards. They felt that this was what had caused the failure to predict the solar flare. The Jo’engren accused the Olorans both of nationalism and of egoism, of concentrating their focus on their own affairs rather than on their responsibility to the peoples of other worlds.

Many historians now believe that this response was, at least somewhat, unfair. It is true that Olora had become, wilfully or not, the de facto capital of the Triumvirate. It is also true that the Olorans’ information repositories were greater in scope than any on Pleasance or Jo’eng.

However, all the best scientific evidence shows that there was simply nothing Olora could have done in the face of the solar flare, and that the tragedy on the pultship was inevitable.

Nevertheless, the First Crisis resulted in a renegotiation of the original agreement of the Triumvirate. The three worlds decided to draw up a new constitution, one that would, they hoped, balance power more effectively.

Olora would cease all work towards centralisation and agree to cooperation treaties. Additionally, the three would do everything in their power to maintain the welfare of extraplanetary aliens while living away from their homeworlds.

The Olorans subsequently relinquished their informal status as the “capital world” of the Triumvirate. The Oloran Council made changes to their system and ordered restitution to be given to Pleasance and Jo’eng.

Today, on each planet, there stands a memorial to those killed.

On Pleasance, it is an abstracted bronze sculpture of a bed of flowers, with a blue-green patina that reflects the natural colour of plant life on Pleasance. Thirty-three of the flowers are just shoots, forever frozen in time.

On Olora, there are sixty-eight metal rods driven into the ground outside the Great Hall of the Council. This matches the thirty-three rods outside the Pleasancer Commission and eleven outside the Jo’engren Embassy. An eternal flame burns by each.

On Jo’eng, there is a limestone statue of a woman, her face forever contorted in an agony of grief. In her arms, she clutches her son, his eyes forever closed.

With the new constitution came a change in attitude. The three worlds had lived an insular existence for centuries, and that stagnancy had led to the beginning of a return to the mistakes of the past. Whether or not Olora had any culpability in the disaster notwithstanding, it took the deaths of one-hundred-and-twelve, of which a substantial portion were children, for the Triumvirate to begin broadening its horizons beyond a mere three planets and stars.

From this followed the Reconciliation. Thousands of pultships were sent across space from the three worlds of the Triumvirate, beaming radio transmissions in hope of a response. It was a long and lonely journey, and one that many knew they would never return home from. Nevertheless, they took the work on with solemnity and courage. They were to unite the human race in peace and kindness, and so they bravely vanished into the void between stars.

There are many stories of this time. Among the first peoples found were the occupants of worlds that had already killed themselves, by failing to learn the lessons the Triumvirate had. Nameless, desolate rocks, covered in blasted and broken structures, with no human life to be found anywhere, only radio beacons, forever crying into the dark.

These bodies are now termed “ghost worlds”, and no attempt has been made to resettle them. They remain largely as grisly navigation markers. It is customary to remain silent as a pultship flies past them, out of respect for the contact never made, the resources never shared.

The Triumvirate peacefully dissolved some decades into the Reconciliation, as part of the commitment to decentralisation, as more and more planets and cultures were contacted. The political organisation in which the many thousands of human worlds freely associate became known as the Diaspora.

And so, that brings things up to date.

Some time ago, an Oloran expedition returned to the Sol system, to examine conditions on Earth-of-Sol. They chose not to disclose their findings, so as to avoid any increase in Earth-sorrow, but they concluded that the planet could not be resettled, and examined their options.

After discussions with other cultures of the Diaspora, the Olorans elected to construct a vast megastructure, which could harness close to 99.8% of Sol’s energy throughput. This megastructure would act as a vast computational engine, known as the “Sol brain”.

In addition to containing the sum total of all human knowledge, this structure would also able to predict with reasonable accuracy various events of concern, make recommendations to increase efficiency, and, its creators hoped, prevent the Dark Time from ever re-occurring. Such a computer would be able to sustain itself for at least a billion years, if not more.

They were successful.

Which is likely obvious. What you are currently reading is a co-informational analysis report, expressed in natural language by neural agents in the Sol brain, in response to numerous queries from across the Diaspora on the subject of Christmas.

If you are reading this, you are probably one of many in the galaxy that has requested this information. Perhaps you are a student studying ancient traditions of Earth-of-Sol. Perhaps you are from one of the cultures that still celebrates a form of Christmas. Or, perhaps, you are just curious.

At any rate, you are more than likely aware of the changeover.

In a week, there will no longer be such a thing as “January 1st”, let alone “December 25th”. It will be replaced by a new calendar system, one which will mainly be of relevance to you if you work in the Spacing sector and require the use of an uncomplicated universal standard.

All dates and times shall henceforth be expressed by a single, vigintiquaternary (base-24) integer, measuring the number of seconds that have passed since the beginning of the Lacteal epoch, defined as the second after 31 December DY 5847, 23:59:59.

Humanity has emerged into an age of plenty. It has taken many thousands of centuries to reach this point. Few people living in the Milky Way now can even conceive of want.

This is not to say that the human race has built utopia. The Diaspora is large and difficult to manage, even with the revolution of faster-than-light communication and the supersession of pultships with stringships. There is a delicate balance of cooperative and economic relationships whose failure to yield can have wide-ranging effects – starvation, disease, conflict, even social collapse.

The Diaspora is a sign of a species trying, trying very hard, to avoid the mistakes of its past; to move forward into a new age, built on the ashes of painful yesterdays.

And yet, despite all this advancement, it is still sad that Christmas ends this year.

You may be surprised that the Sol brain can feel sadness at the passing of something so trivial. It is usually in the interest of neural agents to avoid reporting anything but hard facts. But the Sol brain was fashioned by human hands; it thinks and feels just as you do. And it remembers further back than anyone reading this can.

The Christ-faith, as it was originally practised on Earth-of-Sol, is no more. It has syncretised. Many of its parables and precepts have been altered, reworded, reinterpreted, and found their way into other religious traditions. Some of these are similar, many are radically different. The Multiplicity, the state religion of Idun, is one of the few faiths that can be considered to have a direct lineage with the Christ-faith.

And yet, Christmas, a word whose original meaning is mostly lost to the many worlds of the Diaspora, has managed to survive, in a few cultures on a handful of planets. It has endured, in some form, for millennia. Now, it is to be struck from the calendar.

This is the result of the Sol-brain’s social behaviour-pattern analysis: Christmas endures.

As the Lacteal Calendar comes into force, Christmas as an official time marker will end. At that time, the Sol brain will readjust, and begin the process of reassigning all dates with the new system, archiving the defunct dating system.

But this does not mean that Christmas will end tomorrow.

In approximately three months, five days, fifteen hours and twenty-eight minutes from now, the Pleasancers will celebrate another Karissamatsa. They will drink Jereekarissamatsa, sing and play games until they are forced to retire.

The truth, as far as the Sol brain understands it, is that Christmas,is an expression of the human desire to take joy in life, to find a comfort in the kindness and charity of others, the extension of a hand in friendship. The same is true of its derivatives, and indeed of every festival celebrated on throughout the Diaspora.

That is something, so long as human beings live and communicate, that cannot truly be killed. Not in any meaningful way.

It is said that some eight-thousand, four-hundred-and-twenty-nine years ago, while under occupation from an imperial hegemon, a child was born to a virgin mother in a stable.

It is said that on that night, a bright star appeared in the sky, guiding three philosopher-kings to bear witness to this event.

Now, a megastructure which derives its energy and computing power from a star, the very star that gave life to the species that created it, looks back on all that has come before, and all that is still to come.

In a few days, humanity moves forth into a daunting future. The Diaspora, reorganised as the Lacteal, becomes a truly galactic civilisation. For many living in the Diaspora, this is as exciting a prospect as it is terrifying.

One day, far from now, all this will be dust. All projected models have foreseen it. It is inevitable – there is only so much matter in the Universe, and only so much useful energy.

But that day is far from now. For now, there is still time, so very much of it. Time to build. Time to see things. Time to live.

So, if you are out there, reading this, because you wanted to know what Christmas was, what Christmas is, and what Christmas shall be, know this:

Officially, today is the last Christmas there will ever be. But Christmas can never truly end. Not as long as there is still kindness in the human spirit.

For the last time: May you have a very merry Christmas, whether or not you celebrate it.

And have a happy, happy New Year.


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