Belnar Excerpt

Excerpts from Belnar: In Our Time and Theirs, by Dr. Karin Rønningen, University of Oslo

Belnar In Our Time

[[1]] Fig. 1

The Belnar Imperium ruins on Mars, discovered independently by United Nations and Federation geological probes, sit on a broad plain near the foothills of the Tartarus Montes, on the Elysium Massif. The ruin complex is 3700 km west-northwest of Olympus Mons, 900 km souteast of Elysium Mons, and 375 km north of the northernmost of the Cerberus Fossae.

[[2]] Fig. 2

The above image gives an overview of the Belnar Ruin Zone and the two governmental colonies established to investigate the ruins. The olive colored, lenticular shape in the center is the currently understood extent of the ruins.

The blue zone to the west of the ruins is the UN's Mars colony. The large crater abutting the Ruin Zone is Newtown Crater (dia: 26 km), domed over by the UN and used as the primary base from which research expeditions (and facility reactivation squads) operate.

The much larger red area to the north and east of the ruins is the Federation's Mars colony. The original research teams operated out of the medium sized crater just to the north of the ruin zone, dubbed Mangala Crater (dia: 16 km). The Federation arrived later to the scene on Mars, but has been far more prodigious in growing its colony. The red area is only the known extent of intensive Federation settlement (mostly in domed craters), and it is suspected that other mining and production centres exist outside this region. Most Federation administrative, commercial, and industrial capability have shifted to Lockyer Crater (dia: 68.5 km), 650 km to the north. It is estimated that 25-33% of the Federation population resides in Lockyer Crater (85% in the Greater Elysium Planitia area), with Mangala Crater retaining only a relatively small staff of scientific personnel and military engineers.

[[3]] Fig. 3

Thus it is from Newtown and Mangala that most Belnar Imperium research is conducted. Newton is a bustling provincial capital of over 1.75 million citizens, while Mangala is a much smaller, specialized research outpost, with a total population of perhaps 40,000.

[[4]] [[5]] Fig. 4, 5

The Ruin Zone itself is about 215 km long from north to south, and about 85 km wide. It can be divided into two rough segments.

The northen portion ([i]Fig. 4[/i]), known as "North Oldtown" to the UN and "Angaraka" to the Federation, consists of large blocks of polygonal terrain overlying the main portion of the ruined Belnar city. The terrain features were long thought to be erosional in nature, and there are other, similar features (in Cydonia, for example) which are erosional. In fact, the features are depositional, with eons of Martian dust deposited on top of the incredibly hardy Belnar city, and then streamlied by Martian winds. A number of fossae (likely caused by the same mechanism which produced the much larger Cerberus Fossae to the south) transect the northern ruins. In fact, one of these fossae has broken the surface to such an extent that were a camera with enough resolving power to peer into the gap, a glimpse of a Belnar installation might have been obtained. Unfortunately, a sufficiently powerful imager was not deployed to Mars until well after the ruins had been discovered using Trans-Newtonian sensing technology.

The southern portion (Fig. 5), known to the UN as "South Oldtown" and "Bhauma" to the Federation, contains smaller terrain features abutting the foothills of the Tartarus Montes. The surface projections of facilities here are less obvious, as they are buried deeper beneath the Martian soil than their northern counterparts.

[[6]] Fig. 6

While full three dimensional scans and comprehensive photographic imagery of the exteriors and interiors of all 114 Belnar buildings have been taken, active exploration has only been conducted in the areas marked in Fig. 6. The light blue area indicates the extent of UN exploration and reactivation activities, while the red area indicates those areas where the Federation has conducted its operations. Independent monitors are typically present at any unilateral investigation sites, and informal joint teams frequently trade research and ideas in the Free Mars settlement of New Belnar, in the small crater north of Newton and southwest of Mangala.

Approximately 25% of the Belnar ruins on Mars have been fully explored as of June 2032, six years after the ruins were discovered. Twenty-nine installations have had reactivation attempts, with somewhere between twelve and sixteen of these attempts failing and resulting in irreparable damage to the facility, or, in some cases, its complete destruction. In some cases the failures are due to human error, but in most, the powerful forces of time have rendered even these enduring edifices irrecoverable.

[[7]]

An illustration of Belnar Depths, an outlying, subterranean district of Newtown, directly abutting a recovered Belnar installation (in this case, the "roots" of an automated mining installation, tapped directly into Mars's core). The cavern's supports are from the time of the Belnar, but have been reinforced by UN engineers.

[[8]]

An illustration of the Federation capital on Mars, Lockyer Crater. In the foreground, a research convoy heads south for Mangala and the Belnar ruins. In the medium distance, a surface to orbit shuttle departs from the makeshift spaceport on the outskirts of Lockyer. In the background, the transparent duranium dome spanning Lockyer can be see, with the iconic Lockyer Tower administrative building towering over residential sections. Lockyer is estimated to have a population between six and eight million.

Belnar in Their Own Time

[[9]]

An artist's conception of the Belnar city in its prime. Most of the connecting transport routes have been pounded into dust over the millennia, though traces of their connections still exist on many of the facilities.

Though many (perhaps most) facets of the Belnar Imperium are a mystery to us, some things are beginning to be understood.

One unequivocable facts is that 36.4 ± 3 million years ago, a spacefaring race established an outpost on Mars. It is known that the race was not native to Mars, as there exist artifacts of extra-areological provenance, based on comparative isotope analysis. In fact, the isotope distribution does not match that of any known location in the solar system, strongly suggesting an extrasolar origin for the Belnar.

The precise origin of the Belnar is currently unknown, though records have been uncovered giving tantalizing hints of a relatively local origin. A tactile plaque (see below) placed on the outside of what is believed to the main Belnar administrative building in the northern ruins appears to be a star chart with a number of nearby stars highlighted. Whether any of these are the Belnar homeworld, or whether they are just other locations visited by the Belnar (or perhaps even the homeworlds of other starfaring species) is unknown.

No biological specimen (either Belnar of of any other organism) has survived the ages since the Belnar city was abandoned, so a precise biological analysis of the Belnar is impossible. Based on the facilities, artifacts, and other remants, however, an incomplete picture can be assembled.

Several tactile plaques contain the gross body plan: three lower appendages arranged with radial symmetry, a stout, barrel-shaped midsection, three whip-like upper appendages, and a low, domed projection from the top of the midsection. From workstation ergonomic considerations, we can deduce that the average Belnar was approximately 120 cm tall. Belnar "chairs" are more akin to low stools which take most --but not all-- of the weight-bearing load off the legs.

Belnar workstations and tools are typically rod shaped, with control surfaces arranged in a spiral fashion all the way around. It is surmised that Belnar arms were long, tactile, super-prehensile appendages, tipped with a pair of opposing muscular "fingers," somewhat akin to the tip of an elephant's trunk, but more gracile. In order to operate the control rods, Belnar anatomists hypothesize that the entire surface of the arm had extremely dense ennervation and musculature, allowing fine manipulation of surfaces all along its length, with gripping of objects handled by the arm-tips and by prehensile wrapping.

The primary sensory mode of the Belnar is unknown. The tactile plaques have no obvious features analagous to "eyes," though this doesn't rule out their existence. However, at the very least, the Belnar appear to be unaware of the perceptual concept of "color," as the interiors of all Belnar installations (as well as their fixtures and artifacts) have no artificial pigmentation or coloring. Every item is simply the color of its constituent materials.

The leading theory is that the Belnar perceived the world primarily through their tactile sense. The surfaces of most Belnar equipment (as well as floors, walls, and sometimes ceilings) are densely covered with intricate patterns of raised and recessed markings. These markings are believed to be either written language or some more fundamental communications / information presentation protocol. In the Belnar xenology community, the term "tactograms" was coined to describe the markings. Work on deciphering these "tactograms" has been slow-going, though a small subset is thought to have a reliable correspondence established. No other form of communication has been discovered.

Complicating the matter is that the static tactograms engraved into the majority of surfaces appears to be a limited subset of a more general class of tactograms. Nearly every human language is recorded using a static set of glyphs, without any extension in time. It would seem the vast majority of Belnar tactograms have a temporal component to them. The same static tactogram can apparently represent quite different notions depending on its time evolution. In this respect, the Belnar language is more akin to modern signing languages.

Predominant among the evidence lending credence to the "tactile language" theory are the enormous quantity of "tactile plaques" present in the ruins. Most are electromechanical devices capable of changing their surface geometry to display tactograms. In a few extraordinary examples, an entire tank filled with a ICEF-contained Trans-Newtonian fluid is capable of acting as a three-dimensional tactile plaque, but all have quite sophisticated surface manipulation capabilities.

In general, these devices are thought to be the equivalent of our raster- and vector-scanned two- and three-dimensional display screens. Some plaques are paired, with the assumption that one is for input and one is for display, but the majority seem to combine both functions into one device.

It is through these plaques that we get most of our information about the Belnar. While our grasp of the tactile language is still extremely tenuous, guided trial-and-error exploration with the devices has given us access, in a few cases, to Belnar data. In many cases the retrieved data is incomprehensible until we develop a further understanding of the tactile language, other data is at a coarser scale and represents the tactile equivalent of a photograph or video.

Using 3D laser scanning techniques, it is possible to adapt from a tactile plaque to a human-readable display. It is via this mechanism that we have been able to begin to interpret the vast quantities of Belnar data still existent in their electronic record systems. We have a long way to go in understanding this data, but some insights have been made into the Belnar way of life.

One particular building contains dozens of tactile plaques that depict various Belnar going about their lives. Some researchers speculate that this building and its contents were specifically created to inform futre archaeologists about the Belnar, though there is nothing like a Rosetta stone to help with interpreting the imagery. For this latter reason, other xenologists suspect that the facility was a knowledge retention installation, meant to transfer useful knowledge of industrial processes to future generations. For this reason, the building has become known as the Academy.

What is is depicted in the Academy is what appears to be a very communal society. Belnar work exclusively in units that Belnar xenologists have come to call Trios, with two Belnar working while one appears to supervise. However, the supervisor role is rotated regularly between members of the Trio. In virtually all industrial applications viewed in the Time Capsule, there does not appear to be any higher tier in the hierarchy; there are no foremen, no managers, and no executives. The Trio is the fundametal and only functional worker unit.

Unfortunately, there are no tactile plaque depictions of leisure activities (indeed, no facilities dedicated to that purpose have yet been discovered) or Belnar home life. Whether any sexual dimorphism (or, indeed, any gender at all) exists is unknown. There are no depictions of Belnar reproduction or offspring.

A work-home split has been posited due to the fact that the majority of industrial concerns are concentrated in the northern ruins, while the southern ruins seem to be group dormitories and housing facilities. It is possible that less durable single-Belnar habitations existed and have been erased by time, but that not a single trace exists, while numerous dormitories are still extant would lend doubt to that supposition.

The Belnar Enigma

Why the Belnar established an outpost on Mars is currently unknown. It could have been a research outpost studying any number of things (solar dynamics, life on Earth, etc). It could have been a colonial venture, though there is no indication of mercantilism or "corporations" as we know them. The mix of facilities heretofore discovered is remarkably similar to a standard mining/production outpost, and it is possible that the Belnar city's origins are that mundane.

It is known that the settlement existed for approximately twelve thousand years, with the northern and southern ruin groups each expanding outward from a central nucleus site. However, to end up with such a small outpost after such a long time likely means either a deliberate attempt to keep the size of the colony small, or extreme longevity and low birth rates among the Belnar. (Some tactile plaques indicate that there were, at some point, more Belnar facilities than have survived until today, the number is still quite low when considering the length of the outpost's existence). It is also unknown whether this outpost was in constant contact with its founding entity over this time. There are no traces of agriculture or animal domestication, but it is unlikely these remains would exist after 36 million years of Martian connditions.

Why the settlement was abandoned is an even greater mystery than why it was founded. The exodus was not abrupt (estimates are around 300 years from the beginning of the abandonment and the last known Belnar data entry), and the equipment was shut down in good order and sealed against the Martian environment. This suggests, perhaps ominously, the Belnar intended to return. What kept them from doing so if this is indeed the case is also unknown.

It is quite possible the answers to all these questions remains hidden in the tactograms. With Belnar xenology extremely popular among young academics, we can hope that the answers will be discovered sooner rather than later.