This is a strange story, a long and a sad story telling of the most improbable events. Nowhere among the thousands of the Earths of Man is there any evidence that such events ever occurred. Do not read it.
It is classified anyway.

Although the very thought of the Instrumentality acting not on the basis of solid knowledge and precise judgment may seem sacrilegious to a sane person, this is precisely what is implied in the common statement that no serious study was undertaken before the introduction of the underpeople. After all, the system thus initiated was stable for millennia - you may call it decadent, but it was a reliable, stable and dependable decadence. No one in his right mind would deny that all the possible research was done before the underpeople came into being. And furthermore, the concept was tested experimentally, though none of its participants lived to see the result.

Centuries before, a robot ship returned from a reconnaissance flight, one of the many sent far beyond the borders of the realm known to men. As usual, the valuable information it brought was scarce: space is infinite in size but not in diversity. The probe discovered, however, a rather strange system, for some now forgotten reason dubbed Ea, with two habitable planets, A₁ and A₂, revolving around the sun on the opposite sides of the orbit. It was an interesting phenomenon, and though for many years none of the lords of the Instrumentality could see any conceivable use for it, they still thought it could prove useful for some as yet unknown purpose. Therefore the system was never colonized - before the experiment.

The Lord Eru who have planned and arranged it was keen on obtaining new knowledge but also highly conscious of the certainty of a dreadful outcome if even a fragment of his plan became public. The plan was cruel, possibly not inhumanly cruel though criminally cruel nevertheless, but cruelty was not and never have been an obstacle for a Lord of Instrumentality. The plan was unlawful as well, and though each Lord was law incarnate, the plan violated so many laws of the Instrumentality that the Lord Eru did not discuss it even with the other Lords. This secrecy was the main reason why such precautions were taken and why, in the long run, the whole plan failed. For the same reason no Lord of Instrumentality was to be actually present in the Ea system.

Even by that time the Ea system was far remote from any inhabited world, planoforming ships the only reasonable means to reach it. Though an ardent student of sociology, the Lord Eru was rather innocent in technical matters. He believed therefore that anyone capable to navigate a space yacht needed only a short course to become a Go-captain. So Man Wee, a young subchief of the Instrumentality and already quite an expert in social sciences, was ordered to take such a course.

This diligent scholar, with his presumably Chinese ancestry, his vaguely Oriental blue robes, his fondness of elaborate games of Go, and his rather sentimental love of birds, kites, and Confucius-style airplanes, easily graduated with the highest marks of the decade: the theory of planoforming was just another Go game for him. The practical part proved quite different, in fact even more different than a space yacht for lunar cruises differs from an interstellar ship.

These were the early ages of planoforming, the period when the proud beauty of the sailships was still remembered, and when many of the perils of interstellar flight were as yet unknown. It took then much more than purely intellectual understanding to be a Go-captain, and the actual experiences of space₂ made Man Wee deeply though not as yet noticeably mad long before the ship reached the destination.

It was therefore rather fortunate that during the first decades after arrival he was not expected to do anything of importance. All the unloading and initial settling of both colonies was the Stop-captain Morgott’s responsibility.

For us, a Stop-captain is nothing more than a glorified supercargo, but then a Go-captain himself is now nothing more than a glorified driver. Appointing Morgott his Stop-captain was maybe the wisest thing the Lord Eru have done when planning the experiment. This capricious mixture of a devout troublemaker and a religious problem-fixer belonged to the type to which the Instrumentality of Mankind owed its most infamous and glorious achievements. Man Wee was certainly much closer to the popular image of a budding Lord, but then the Instrumentality have always been selecting and promoting not the most truthful popular images but the most appealing ones.

It was relatively easy to establish the colony on A₁; after all, it had simply to provide the highest reasonable level of comfort for the by no means numerous personnel of the Instrumentality. On A₂, however, thousands of adiabatic pods were to be landed, and the beings frozen inside revived. It may seem not an overly difficult task, but it included removal not only of the pods which were very conveniently self-destructing, but also of all the traces of the landing itself; the colonists were not supposed to know they were not the natives of A₂.

Although no reliable information is now available on the origin of the colonists, it is highly probable that all of them were derived from human stock, being therefore not homunculi-underpeople but hominids. Shocking as it seems, it was, strictly speaking, not illegal. Meddling with the human germ plasma was then simply a technical matter, as was a certain degree of genetic instability inherent to the far-from-perfect procedures of that time. What the law explicitly forbade was creating a form of life superior to man, and the ruling race of A₂, fair, mildly artistic and unthinkingly cruel, was exactly like the men of Old Earth, or rather like the Lord Eru’s idea of them. Due to the massive application of stroon, they even had the same centuries-long life spans. These beings called themselves the Eldar in the language that was natural to them though it never existed before. The Lord Eru believed that the Old Common Tongue implied too much of the high technology of mankind, and all the races of the colonists were imprinted with languages of their own. As the experiment matured, even the research personnel picked up these linguistic peculiarities, first out of sheer sociological necessity, then as an intellectual game, and finally as a mild mania. Thus the simple and understandable names A₁ and A₂ were habitually corrupted to Aman and Arta (or sometimes Arda), even in research reports.

The other races of A₂, though all of the same stock, were intended to play the role that in the worlds of man was finally delegated to the underpeople. They were designed for work and were in general stronger and somewhat more viable. There were sturdy, robust beings for mining, short, agile ones for fine work, and general-purpose hominids rather resembling the true humans of Ancient Earth. All these races coexisted peacefully. The skills and knowledge the Eldar possessed, though quite rudimentary by the standards of the Instrumentality, were sufficient to grant them the position of teachers of the other races and therefore of their natural lords. The Lord Eru would have been disappointed by how smoothly it all ran - if only there have been any possibility to send him a message. Such an idyll lasted till the first generation of the Eldar truly native to Arda was born.

In that epoch genetic manipulation was still very much like genetic tinkering, and the combined effect of these treatments, santaclara drug and the radiation of the Ea sun was to result in a frightening number of deformities among the newborn Eldar. Apart from visible ugliness, this disease, for disease it was, had deeper and more important psychological effects. Unlike their relaxed and decadent parents, these unfortunates were malicious, reckless and active to the point of being ferocious. They behaved as cunning, cruel, intelligent beasts of prey, and that was why on Aman they were named orcs, the name of by now extinct killer whales of Ancient Earth.

The disaster could not have been predicted, but the Stop-captain considered it his responsibility to find the cure. In a few years Morgott and his team managed to devise a reliable prophylactic treatment for the Eldar, although there was no way to heal the already numerous orcs. The treatment was delivered exactly the same undercover way as was the stroon - by means of tiny robots camouflaged as birds or insects; the Eldar therefore did not even know what really happened.

Everyone on Aman who cared sincerely about the experiment considered the matter settled. That is, everyone apart from the insane Go-captain Man Wee.

“The Eldar are the Children of the Lord Eru,” he said. “Their prosperity is our main goal, and they must be protected by whatever means we have.”

Man Wee was the Go-captain and chief sociologist at that, so no one argued. In any case, it would have been much more simple and convenient to study the Eldar on Aman. And so most of the Eldar were shipped to Aman and to their designated quarters there. Three technological complexes concealed in three spheres of startling brilliance and beauty were designed to provide for all the needs and luxuries the Eldar could ever conceive. Never before have they been better off, and some of them even developed what is called higher aspirations. The more socially adjusted simply indulged in fencing or seafaring, while the most intelligent became curious without either knowledge or discipline. Man Wee was adamant in providing the Eldar as much freedom as the colony could afford - and sometimes more. Since all the important machinery was heavily shielded anyway, traffic accidents, drownings and occasional duels were the worst disturbance the Eldar could or would create.

This was a stable situation acceptable to everyone except for a small minority, primarily Morgott and his team. Believing that the experiment was either to go on or to be abandoned altogether, these dissenters saw no reason for the Eldar to be kept on Aman, and even less reason for themselves to stay there.

“We certainly can remain here for the rest of our lives,” Morgott used to say. “Or rather till we exhaust our stroon supply. But do you see any goal? I mean the goal more decent than appeasing our Go-captain.”

For him, appeasing the Lord Eru, or rather disappointing him with the news of his pet experiment coming to such a complete and utterly unexpected failure, was certainly both a higher goal and a psychologically more satisfactory one. Resuming the experiment was the second-best possibility but still much more intriguing than the status quo.

Fond as he was of flabbergasting his superiors, and the higher the superior the better, Morgott did realize that his chances to planoform back to Earth, with the only Go-captain around unable and unwilling to leave, were virtually nil. He had therefore to return the Eldar to Arda and at the same time to prevent Man Wee from interfering. To a more literal mind this task would have meant a full-scale battle, extermination of his fellows of the Instrumentality and shipping back the unconscious Eldar. For Morgott it was more like a complex game of strategy. Man Wee could have been a better Go player, but he was by now too involved and too insane to maintain the proper Oriental detachment. This was certainly the reason why he never called Morgott his opponent, but rather his enemy, and finally the Enemy.

Morgott’s first move was propaganda, psychological warfare pure and simple. He knew that the men of Earth wished not only to enjoy all the privileges of the ruling race, but to be venerated as such. By appealing to this passion, he made the Eldar actually willing to return to Arda. Man Wee countered, rather weakly, by declaring Morgott a rebel and the source of all lie and misinformation.

When he thought the Eldar were ready for action, Morgott commandeered the technological complexes and moved them to Arda. He have taken only enough spaceships to carry himself, his cargo, and his team. There was no need for him to deprive Man Wee of the remaining fleet. The Eldar did take care of this.

The brilliant palaces of the Eldar were an artificially enclosed environment, and removing all the sources of energy and all the regulating machinery turned this into a dark, cold and altogether disagreeable place. The Instrumentality personnel, usually friendly and eager to entertain, was suddenly overwhelmed by the chores and problems far beyond the scope of the Eldar mind. And, furthermore, together with Morgott, they and even Man Wee himself belonged to the same superhuman entity. The Eldar consequently had two purposes, to regain their stolen treasure, and to get away from Man Wee. Spaceships were, even for the Eldar, the most reasonable way to reach both.

The shipyards were taken, the crews and technicians overwhelmed, and the ships captured. There is no doubt that in the resulting chaos a great many deeds of valor, malice, meanness and utter incompetence were done, but the sheer incoherence of the general picture makes it impossible to describe them in any detail. One story suffices to show that such level of madness have never before been reached on Aman.

Founding all the passenger ships either already in space or beyond repair, a late-coming company of Eldar boarded the unshielded cargo ships. Their resolution could have been due to ignorance, but nevertheless they were the first ones since the dawn of Space Age to brave the terror and agony of the up-and-out, and the first ones to survive it. Stroon made such a feat possible, albeit highly painful.

On arrival to Arda, the Eldar were quite genuinely surprised that none of the lesser races was willing to serve them. While for the long-lived Eldar their absence from Arda have been a brief interlude, for the other hominids it lasted not just several centuries, but several generations. They had ample time to surpass their former teachers and consequently to outgrow any need for the Eldar, both as mentors and as masters. The Eldar felt offended and turned to violence. As usual in the absence of strong and intelligent leadership, the resulting wars were numerous, long and extensive. By the time the Eldar discovered Morgott’s dwelling on Arda, battling him was still their holy duty - but not their highest priority.

Unhindered by both Man Wee and the Eldar, Morgott could prepare for his final move, the one in fact he contemplated from the very beginning. The mess he encountered on Arda was certainly not his idea of a good sociological experiment. But what was the use for even a perfect experiment unknown to the scientific community? At this stage Morgott felt no personal obligations to the Lord Eru who could have been already dead anyway.

It was far beyond his possibilities to build a planoforming ship, not to mention training a Go-captain. But the traditions of old-fashioned space travel were still alive then, and Morgott had both the knowledge and the equipment necessary to assemble a sailship. Even so, the purely technical task of building it was bound to take centuries. Well, for the personnel of the Instrumentality, centuries were practical. There was probably one more reason for Morgott to choose such a beautifully exotic way of transportation. It was hardly the main reason, but the notion that neither his opponent whom he by now held in low esteem nor all the Instrumentality had power over the solar wind was a source of sharp intellectual pleasure to him.

Man Wee, however, did not surrender that easily. After several centuries of concentrated work, his remaining spaceships were repaired, and several constructed from scratch. The invasion, or retaliation, or re-evacuation was imminent, and though this had high impact on the peoples of Arda, it missed Morgott by several years.

In that epoch, sailing, though still by no means a pleasant occupation, was not necessarily a kind of absurdly prolonged torture it used to be. Morgott needed to be fully functional, so he had arranged the condition he himself called “harmoniously retarded, er, slowed down.” It was rather demanding on his life span, but the santaclara, the relativistic effects, and his violent determination to put an end to this pain and boredom, gave him a good chance of reaching Earth - maybe just a few centuries or millennia after the Lord Eru was dead and his body launched into the up-and-out.