This work is dedicated the netizen known around these parts as
Toramatsu, without who's encouragement and help I doubt if I would have
ever posted my work, or gone beyond my first Tenchi fanfic.



This work is derived from Characters and Situations that are Copyright
and/or Trademark AIC, and Pioneer LDCA, all public or commercial use of
this material would require the very unlikely permission of the original
copyright holders.

The ideas projected in this work are strictly the product of the
imagination of the author, inevitably reflecting his mind, and should in
no way be taken to reflect on the originals from which they are derived.

Both new readers, and those who have read my work before may find this
work very metaphysical in nature and outlook. This is, as far as this
author is concerned, a natural consequence it's goals. Several readers
have inquired earnestly as to just what I think is going with the
goddesses, and their nature. This is my attempt to respond.

The results may go a ways in explaining my vision of a Tenchi Universe,
even in relation to my own; then again, maybe not.

At the end of this work you will find some explanatory notes; they are
placed there in deference to those who find such notes constitute
"Spoilers".


  
The Ship of the Beginning
An account of the origins of Tsunami


In a time and place unknown and unknowable, sister fought against
sister; anyway, one may consider them sisters. From their conception,
the sisters were conjoined at the roots of their power, by the will of
their creator, but the being of each sister extended individually down
into the various continua of space and time that constitute the
physical. Ultimately, the individual beings of these sisters could be,
by each one's own will, as separate and inaccessible from one another as
any created being.

Though by human reckoning they would be considered gods, the One God,
whom we will call Kami-sama, had given them the same freedom to choose,
and to suffer, as is the heritage of all lesser beings. By one of the
ironies of fate, the firstborn of the sisters was a strong and cruel
goddess, who's special strength was to control the flow of time; one of
her names amongst humans was Tokimi; it is by that name that we will
know her in this story.

>From before their conception, Tokimi determined to govern her younger
siblings with an iron will; binding whatever came under her sway in a
fabric of her own choosing. It would have seemed inevitable that she
would have her way with her sisters, for they were both dreamers,
idealists in the face of their self appointed pragmatist sister. 

Second of the sisters was the one who would come to be called Washu.
Kami-sama had conceived in her powers to sort the threads of infinite
and unknown possibilities, and bring them together as a common thread to
shape the fortunes of those under her sway. Always, this goddess of the
unknown future would have her eye on the next possibility, the next way
she might hope to improve the lot of her charges. She might sometimes
make mistakes, but she was always ready to pick up and try again.

The third sister was the one to bring together the fabric of time into a
seamless whole. The ever changing present took shape before her, seeming
to make her the most plain and obvious of the sisters; but in fact the
One God had endowed her with the mysterious vitality of organic life.
Everything about her was suffused with life, fertility, and fecundity.
Where commonly others may shy away from the mysteries of conception and
birth, it was not so with this goddess. It is perhaps fitting that this
sister came to be called the Lady of Mystery, Tsunami.

When they resisted her will, the angry Tokimi cast the substantial being
of her younger sisters out across the continua, wounded, blinded and
unknowing. Perhaps she could have regretted such inward violence, but it
was not in Tokimi's nature to admit error.



The spirits of Tsunami and Washu pierced the layered continua like a
skewer through an onion, or so it might seem to those minds confined to
the common three basic spatial dimensions. Though flying blind, Tsunami
could feel the tug, at each layer, from the burgeoning consciousness of
those troublesome but promising primates of Sol Three, who's world
dominates the fate of so many continua. At a continuum seemingly at
random, but perhaps touched by Kami-sama, the sisters dropped into
three-space, and flew apart, in different directions.

Drawn by the prodigious vitality of Sol Three's life, Tsunami plunged
into a primitive world. Drawn inevitably to a mind in it's most
receptive possible state, Tsunami found herself stuck fast in a state of
assimilation with that sentient mind. The organism bearing that mind
shuddered with relief to find the burden of assimilation unexpectedly
transformed.
	


Hours later, the gradually recovering consciousness of our goddess
reached out through the senses of her host These senses were like a
mind's eye, and gave an overall spatial image. About two meters away,
curled on a small stone slab, lay the no longer functioning body of a
young female primate, of the variety called "human". Next to her lay an
obsidian blade, and all around there was blood.

Reaching further out, our goddess could sense several others similar to
her new self, fine specimens of a leafy tree, each endowed with a
sentient, telepathic mind. Beyond an encircling twenty meter clearing
grew a dense forest of various other plants, all of them silent and
devoid of consciousness. Around her in the forest there was a faint
murmur of animal awareness, and about a kilometer away was a small
village of about a hundred humans.

Looking inward, she found the consciousness of her host, huddled behind
barriers of fear and remembered pain.

"Do you want me to leave?"

"We are assimilated, are we not? The only release for me would be true
death. I choose to trust that you, that we, are of good will. The
nightmare is over, and I choose life."

"Then, please, release the memories, that we might share and heal
together."

With that, our goddess remembered the rooted fears of the trees. It
seemed that as the human mind had taken form, over the previous aeons,
certain individuals had developed a psychic sensitivity to the awareness
of other animals and plants. These humans became the shamans of their
tribes. Self taught, emotionally fragile, and often unstable, these
shamans guided their tribes through the confusing web of Earth's life,
and led their people toward an understanding and cultivation of living
things.

Amongst all the life of Earth, the shamans found certain trees housed a
serene and powerful awareness that spilled over into the higher
dimensions; and they led the cultivation of these in sacred groves,
where the shamans would come to commune. For their part, the sentient
trees gained access to hands and feet that could move about and shape
the things that the mind conceived. 

The flip side of this relationship was that the human tribes were filled
with jealousies, petty rivalries, and hatreds. Now, instead of the
random pain of an ignorant human here or there felling a sentient tree,
they became a subject of the organized violence called war. A tree could
only await it's fate at the hands of ravaging humans with spears and
axes. Strong warriors would skewer the feeble, sensitive humans that
sought to protect their beloved sacred trees. Thus humans discovered the
phenomenon of assimilation.

>From the earliest days of human awareness, certain sensitive human
mothers, when forced to abandon and expose their (usually female)
infants, would expose them at the foot of a sentient tree. The sentient
trees had found that they could reach out with their ability to
manipulate the higher dimensions where the mind dwells, and join the
life of the infant with their own. Henceforth, the life of the child was
tied to the life of the tree, and the child could retreat within the
hidden dimensions of the tree, and find sustenance from the life of the
tree. But the trees kept this secret from the human tribes, and their
secrecy proved to be justified.

The first time a sentient tree heeded the desperate cries of a dying
shaman, the secret was out: the horror of human sacrifice began. Brutal
leaders would identify sensitive children, raise them to obedience, and
then slay them slowly in the presence of the trees, in the hopes of
capturing the power of tree and shaman, and enslaving them both. For the
trees, it was the beginning of an agony of horror; either watch what was
to them the best and brightest of humanity die in futile suffering, or
submit to the violation of their own persons. When tree or assimilated
human would not submit, they were hewn down. 

Such had been the fate of the little girl that now lay before the tree.

"I am sorry that my presence has interfered."

"It cannot be helped. I sense that we are now bound together beyond the
flow of time, and I am spared a certain slavery."

Our goddess reached out through the dimensions. Finding the spirit of
the little girl still lingering over her now useless body, she cherished
the spirit, and instinctively sent it on it's way through the continua
toward Kami-sama.



Two hours later, near sunset, Great Chief Uruk led his band of warrior
priests and chained pet shaman to the clearing.

"What is this? The girl is dead! Well then, worthless shrub, you shall
join her." Uruk raised his hafted stone axe and prepared to strike the
tree.

The chained shaman lunged forward, interposing his body between axe and
tree.

"Wait, O Great One, there is something different here. Assimilation has
taken place."

"What? The girl is dead. What treachery is this? Has some enemy placed a
sacrifice before mine? Answer me, shaman, or I shall strike both you and
the tree together."

"Great One, it is a goddess spirit that has stolen your assimilation;
but it is a strange one."

"I have no use for totemic spirits, or tribal spirits conjured by the
people. Uruk lives by his own might, and none other. Give me one good
reason, shaman, why I should not destroy this interloper."

"Great One, this is a great spirit, from beyond the Jurai, from the
realms of Kami-sama himself. If you destroy her, you risk the
displeasure of the higher gods."

"So? Mysterious Lady, I shall spare you for now, but soon you must show
your worth, or your carcass will be lighting my campfire."

So it was that Uruk was spared, on his first encounter with her power,
and our goddess was first called by the syllables that would come to be
pronounced Tsu-na-mi, the Lady of Mystery. 

Uruk gestured with his stone axe, and his band gathered around a larger,
more mature tree nearby. The chained shaman was handed an ornate staff,
and after a few preliminary chants entered a shallow trance. He rapped
with his staff three times on the trunk of the tree and cried out.

"Come forth, Misaki!"

The first ancestral female in the Misaki line stepped from her tree. To
the humans watching, it was impossible to tell how or where the girl
appeared, but suddenly there was a slight, naked girl of tender years,
just past puberty, stepping into the dim twilight clearing. The picture
of flawless fair health, the girl was a great contrast to the greasy,
scarred band of warrior priests crowding around, breathing in her clean
perfection, longing for this untouchable divinity. This perfect dryad
bowed her head of glossy blue-black hair and kneeled in the grass.

Five of the warrior priests, spear in hand, began chanting and dancing
in a small circle around the girl and her tree. Uruk spoke.

"Misaki, take my warriors to the Jurai, that they might raid and return
before the sun rises."

The pace of the chanting and dancing rose to a fever pitch, and the
circle of warriors, along with the girl, faded from sight. Only Tsunami
could see that they dissolved into a long corridor of streaked green
light, a wormhole of passage across the cosmos to another world. She
could now see that the chains on the shaman kept him from entering the
wormhole. The chains were of beaten native silver, and though physically
feeble, they grounded him with great surety

Uruk sat cross legged between two of his warrior priests and dozed as he
awaited the return of his raiding party. He had an entire summer's night
to wait. Six hours later, as first light graced the eastern sky, three
warriors and a limping girl returned.

"O Great One, they were waiting for us in the emerald land, and we
barely escaped with our little witch."

Uruk lunged to his feet and slapped the girl.

"Did you lead us into a trap? We have ways of dealing with that."

Misaki was shaking in negation, cowering under the blow.

Uruk's second slap recoiled so violently that it near dislocated his
shoulder. He wheeled on Tsunami's tree.

"So that's the way of it!"

Tsunami spoke through the chained shaman; confidence in her power was
rising.

"O Great Uruk, that is not the way of it. We fight, you lose; that is
the way of it. You give me your shamanic children, and I will give you
access beyond your dreams."

"I can dream really big, O Tsu-na-mi."

Tsunami thought darkly; the blood of a child cries up from the ground;
but she held her peace, needing time to discern her way. So the mind of
Tsunami followed Uruk to the village, and from there watched as his
messengers fanned out across his savage empire.

By tracing Uruk's messengers, Tsunami discovered that his demesne
encompassed about a hundred villages, and about twenty thousand humans,
sprawled over a thousand kilometer band, east to west. To the north lay
a cold and swampy wasteland of frozen soils, and pole forests, and
tundra. To the south there were arid basins and plains. In the middle
was a narrow band of forest and low mountains, home to the tribes under
Uruk's sway. Each village had it's sacred grove, each grove it's
bloodstained slab. To the east and west were similar lands under similar
overlords, exchanging raids both in this world, and across the void, in
the land beyond the trees, which the shamans called "Jurai"

Choosing to begin close to home, Tsunami addressed her nearest neighbor,
the Misaki tree.

"Come, Misaki, will you talk with me?"

"Tsu-na-mi, who are you?", Misaki hesitated, her mental voice tinged
with fear and caution.

"I do not remember who I was before the assimilation, save that I am
your younger sister tree. The shaman saw a vision that I am, as he said,
from beyond the Jurai, perhaps from the realm of the power he calls
Kami-sama."

"Can it be?", Misaki tried to muffle and conceal her rising excitement,
"Are you the one?"

"Eh?"

"Deep in the winter nights, when all the trees are at peace, and the
savage lords sleep, we dream in the higher realms, and have visions like
the shamans. In those dreams and visions, some of us see the promise of
one to come, the first mother of sacred trees, who in the tongue of
Uruk's people, with whom many of us have assimilated, has been called
Tsu-na-mi. Are you the one to come? The promised one to set us free?"

"I do not know who I am. I can only open my mind to and reveal myself as
I am."

As only telepaths can, Tsunami opened her mind and her self to Misaki.
It was a fearful process, for a mind wounded and in deep amnesia, but
she felt compelled to expose herself to this excited and, as it turned
out, vivacious half-girl, half-tree being. To encourage her, Misaki in
turn lowered all the defenses she had learned in the hardships of
service to Uruk and his clan.

What Misaki saw was a column of pure life reaching beyond the shamanic
realm she knew as the Jurai, deep into the continua, and on into the
light of ultimate being. Looking more closely, she assured herself of
the fundamental goodness and truthfullness of this being, this
Tsu-na-mi. Misaki's spirit trilled a joy across the cosmos, thrilling in
the flush of modest embarrassment that suffused her newfound goddess's
being.

What Tsunami saw, in turn, was a shy and wounded spirit reflecting the
joy of her vision. Beyond that, she saw the day of terror, when Uruk had
taken knife and spilled the girl Misaki's life upon the ground; and the
morning after, when she had awakened in the embrace of her beloved tree,
still alive.  The first time the chained shaman had commanded of her a
path to the Jurai. Misaki had turned her vision beyond the stars, and
found connection with another world very like the one on which she
stood. Uruk had been pleased, for a little while.

She also saw a myriad of possible futures, extending like threads into
the continua. Somewhere in those manifold possibilities, she had a
vision of a joining of her thread with Misaki's. On that thread stood a
little girl, with bright blue hair and luminous orange eyes, weeping,
chanting a shamanic chant to her ancestors, "the royal trees". Tsunami
knew, at that moment, momentarily forgotten, that that girl was one day
to be her self. With an aching longing, Tsunami chose that already
forgotten thread.

Descending from that ecstatic communion, Misaki and Tsunami returned to
a sacred grove where all the trees were awake and inquiring.

"Behold, sisters" Misaki proclaimed, for there were no male assimilies
in her grove,"I have seen her in the higher realms, and I proclaim her
Tsu-na-mi, the promised one; the mother of trees."

Of the twenty sentient trees in her grove, ten of them assimilated, all
but one, on sharing Misaki's vision, joined in acclamation. That one
exception, a lonely and twisted child, had owed her murder more to
mental illness, mistaken for shamanic sensitivity, than to sensitivity
itself. So, while eighteen trees and nine assimilated humans united to
acclaim Tsunami to their fellows across the land, a lone figure crept
unnoticed from the grove.

Great Chief Uruk sat brooding on his savage throne. Everything had been
going so well until the waxing of the most recent moon. He had been
feeling twinges of pain in his violent exertions, and felt his
mortality. His own son, Urslag, was his savage image, a perfectly fit
and cruel replacement, but damn it, he wasn't ready to be replaced. He
was of half a mind to stage an attack to take out this intruder among
his trees, that he had called the Lady of Mystery, Tsu-na-mi. The other
half of his mind said this whole business of shamans and trees was not
to his liking. 

Uruk would never admit to any man what he knew that the shamans knew;
that there was no taboo preventing him from entering the Jurai, rather
he was afraid. Everywhere he looked among his people, there were those
who had this vision, this sensitivity, to which he was blind. Uruk was
angry and afraid, and Uruk was a very dangerous man.

There was a faint telling sound as a small creature forced it's way
under the laced hides and thatching at the back of the hut that was
Uruk's throne-room.

"Masster, Masster", a sibilant voice whispered behind him.

"What is it, Urslek?", Uruk choose not to even look at the naked child
on hands and knees behind him, for it was not a comely child, this
unwanted daughter of his. It's presence sent cold shivers down his
mortal spine.

"Masster; the trees are whispering against you. They would put up this
Tsu-na-mi as their Queen."

"What? A mere female usurp me? An assimilated creature, no less?"

Rising from his throne, Uruk wheeled and struck the crawling child a
fatal blow.

"Guards! Guards! Where are my guards?"

A kilometer away, the village grove felt the death of Urslek, and looked
away from their evangelistic efforts. Even though she was a problem, the
trees mourned the passing of Urslek and her tree, for she had suffered.
Now they focused on the activities of the man who had fathered her once
and murdered her twice. They watched as he organized his men, sent out
messengers toward the other villages, and casually clubbed to death two
sensitive children. His meaning and his rage were clear to the trees: he
meant to purge sensitives and sacred trees from his lands.

"Tsunami!" The trees cried out. "Have you come to save us or to destroy
us?"

Tsunami thought quickly; it was too soon. She did not yet have her full
powers. In amnesia she was working blind. Turning her vision to the
higher dimensions she found two impromptu solutions.

First, grasping a skein of life-threads that encompassed all of Uruk's
people that carried the tree-sensitive genes, she pulled from other
dimensions, other times, other earths, a vision. It was a vision of
islands beyond the sunrise, blessed by a benign goddess, and raised up
out of the world ocean from the fires in the middle of the earth. A land
where these people could prosper and have their own place.

For the remainder of his days, Uruk remained baffled; how not only half
his people, but practically all the tree sensitives among them, could
slip from his grasp, merely by walking away.

Meanwhile, word was spreading from village to village, among Uruk's
loyal followers, warriors, warrior priests, and village chiefs. On the
night of the next full moon, they would strike against all sensitives
and trees in his own demesne. As far as Uruk and his followers were
concerned, elimination of the Tsunami threat was imperative. Next, he
would seize the groves and shamans of the people to the west, strange
people of pale complexion and hair, with blue eyes. Uruk was not one to
give up on raiding the cosmos, as long as there were trees and shamans
who could be made to serve.

Having discerned this, Tsunami made her second move; and here it need be
explained that, though some of the assimilated were male, all the
sentient trees were either female or hermaphroditic, if the gender of
plants is taken to have any reference to human sexuality at all, that
is.

"Sisters hear me!", she began her broadcast mental plea.

"Others have named me Tsu-na-mi, and in their visions have seen me as
the mother to be, of all sentient trees. They have told me that they can
see my being extending through the higher dimensions, beyond the Jurai,
and on to the realms of Kami-sama.

Like anyone, I cannot see myself as others see me. I have come into this
world in a state of amnesia, not remembering who I am or why I was sent
here; but as those who have communed with me can verify, I am endowed
with a vision of the lifelines and fates of living beings. In the brief
time that I have been here, I have discovered that of all the myriad of
possible worlds, across the continua, there is no possible future where
the aware trees are not hewn down by savage, unassimilated humans. The
ignorant and insensate will always fear us, or seek to use us. Only in
this continuum, and the ones spawned by it, where Kami-sama has chosen
to inject my presence, can there be hope.

This very night, Uruk and his men plan to strike against the trees of
his own realm, and replace them with those of the pale humans toward his
sunset; driving those people to the westward, and starting a migration
that will shape the patterns of humans in this world.

I ask of my sisters a difficult thing, faith. Please have faith in what
I say and do, though I pretend no certain knowledge of who or what I am.
If you will unite in faith and power, you can uproot yourselves and join
me. I will assemble a vessel, a container in which you can live, while I
transport you all to one of the lands of the Jurai, beyond the shamanic
vision-scape.

I know that this is a fearful and awful thing I ask. Each of you that
cares to listen, may commune with me and share my vision. Please
believe, for your own survival, I can do this thing."

Through the afternoon and evening great numbers of trees shared
Tsunami's vision. Many of them, in distant lands, seeing that their fate
was remote in time and space, only encompassing their distant
descendants, chose to remain in the world they knew. Those nearest to
the very real and immediate terror of Uruk, in his own lands, and those
just to the west, listened most closely. In the end, just over two
thousand assimilated trees, and about an equal number of unassimilated
sentient trees, joined in a great telepathic communion.
Examining the gathered life-threads of her followers, Tsunami realized
that the assimilated humans, about eighty percent female, represented a
very marginal breeding population. Mostly, they would be from among
Uruk's people, or the pale people. She also saw, though these customs
had little meaning to her at the time, that polygyny and raiding would
be prominent cultural features for her chosen people. 

Everything was in place for the unfolding drama, as the full moon rose
toward it's zenith. Uruk's men were creeping through the silent forests,
preparing to strike against the groves. Almost every sentient tree in
Uruk's or the pale people's lands was joined in a great telepathic
communion, that extended across much of the land that would one day be
called Asia. Tsunami had gathered her powers, and assembled a great
vessel for the voyage.

It began with a faint green glow around the sacred groves. In Uruk's
land, the warrior-priests heard a faint, rising hum from the trees. They
rushed forward, and found a barrier, an electric tingling that made them
drop their spears and fall back away from the margins of the groves. The
hum grew louder, with a deep thrumming rhythm, a throbbing like the
heartbeat of a world. A storm was rising, extending into the shamanic
planes. With great peals of thunder, the trees broke free from Earth and
began to rise, roots trailing, waving in counterpoint to the chaotic
symphony of rising power.

Uruk appeared near Tsunami's grove, the chained shaman in tow.

"Tsunami, I defy you!", the savage chieftain roared.

"Defy me? You can defy nothing, murderer!"

In a moment of inspiration, Tsunami reached out and snapped the chains
holding the shaman. Seeing his chance, the shaman leapt through the
green and lightning surround, and embraced the taproot of an
unassimilated tree. Swift as the human hand could move, Uruk swept up a
discarded spear and pinned the shaman to the root, dying, before Tsunami
could close the breech.

Tsunami reached out and slowed the shaman's death, so that the rising
tree would have time to assimilate. She looked into the higher
dimensions, tracing his thread, and knew in him the male line that would
be emperors in the new land.

Coming together from across the land that would be Asia, an uprooted
forest of sentient, living trees assembled above lake Baikal.

Summoning on faith powers that she had only dreamed, Tsunami drew waters
from the lake, and wood from a million insensate trees, to form a great
vessel, in which the uprooted trees could drink and breathe as they
passed into another space.  By means of this so-called sub-space, the
trip beyond the stars for such a massive payload, could be shortened to
a tolerable span of months.

During those months, the human that were assimilated within trees became
restive. At first Tsunami thought that was strange, but on
reconsidering, she realized that, while the humans had been quiet during
the months of the bitter North Asian winter, they had been asleep with
dormant trees. Here, in the warmth and wet of the vessel, Tsunami was
fueling photosynthesis with subtle vibrations from the higher
dimensions. The trees were awake, hence the humans were awake.

When humans emerged from their trees, they found themselves in a
twilight world of faintly glowing blue water, from which the trees stood
out, roots half above the water. As the humans would come out to bathe
and breathe, Tsunami would provide them with great blocks of wood,
perhaps two meters square, on which the humans could relax in the deep
twilight, and watch the passing splendor of the stars projected above.
When trees and humans slept, Tsunami would reach deep into the continua,
to pull out and examine the life threads, learning the qualities of each
one. These formerly much abused children, she knew, would one day be the
elite of a galactic empire.

When they had arrived at the chosen world, Tsunami made sure the humans
were all inside their trees, then she hummed the trees to sleep and
planted them all on a hillside above a splendid plain, scattered with
woods and parklands biologically akin to those of old Earth. As dawn
approached, she hummed the trees awake, and called forth all the human
children just in time to see their first dawn on a new world. Two
thousand humans, pale from months of darkness, but otherwise healthy,
danced and chanted simple remembered tribal songs till noon. Many of
them joining in innocent games and play that would become shocking to a
later, more straight-laced generation, and in the process insuring the
beginnings of a new generation of humans on this new world.
At noon, Tsunami gathered her human charges in the shade of their new
grove. Already established by consensus as leader among the humans was
the now-unchained shaman, whom Tsunami had named Azusa, after his yet
un-born descendant.

"I have brought you to a new beginning in a new world, safe from the
savagery of blood sacrifice, and the hewing axes of the ignorant."

Azusa replied.

"Since we have gone beyond the Jurai and returned, let us from now on
call this very world Jurai. You, are the vessel that brought us here, as
Kami-sama has allowed. We shall evermore name you Tsunami, the Ship of
the Beginning."




Thus concludes this account of the origins of Tsunami.

It is this author's firm conclusion that the three goddesses of the OAV
Tenchi Universe are, from the original creators, intended to be the
Three Fates, of Indo-European traditions. The Three Fates are held in
most traditions to be higher than the gods, but lesser than the One God.
(Braman in the Indian traditions, The AllFather in the Norse Tradition.)
The association of the Three Fates, and particularly Verthandi, the Fate
of the Present, with trees and water is from the Norse Eddas. I derived
the weaving and thread of life imagery from my exposure to Greek
mythology concerning the Fates.(Yep, that's me, not the original
creators)

The Poetic Edda is quite accessible. My own copy is The Poetic Edda,
Translated with an Introduction and Explanatory notes, by Lee M.
Hollander, Second Edition, Revised, University of Texas Press, Austin
1988.

Another firm conclusion of this author is that the idea of humanity
originating anywhere other than Earth is sufficiently preposterous that
to take an extra-terrestrial origin seriously would be to reduce the
Tenchi stories to mere cartoons.


Some Final notes about human prehistory:

It is quite unlikely that any identifiable proto-Japanese cultural
traits would be identifiable earlier than about 2000 BC; however, Mr.
Kajishima and Mr. Hayashi have presented us with a rather definite
20,000 year time horizon; I decided to go with that. (Author's
discretion, you know).

Also, on OUR Earth, AFAIK, 20,000 years ago was the tail end of the last
interglacial, and the middle of Asia was covered with vast tracts of
humid temperate forest, not the relatively narrow bands found in our
post glacial environment.

How do I explain the rise of the same nations and languages on somewhat
differing parallel Earths? Well, influence must pass between the nearby
parallel worlds. B-) Heh, Tenchi's Japan does seem to be somewhat more
verdant and pastoral than the one we know and love.

Enjoy.
 
Text Copyright 1997, Gregory W. Matteson. <matteson@jps.net>
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