Eventually, everyone on the planet became part of this dream world, as the minds of the nobles stretched across the world. Those known to the nobles were added to the dreaming, while the rest of the population became little more than automatons, moving to fulfill the dreams and needs of their masters. Some necessary jobs were continued, such as the growing and distribution of food, while the others simply faded away and vanished from the dreaming to die where they stood or lay. To sustain themselves, some nobles developed the psychic ability to drain the life forces from the servants around them, while others unconsciously instructed their servants to feed and care for them; a few nobles would even awaken from the dream to eat and drink, yet they would return to the dream as quickly as possible.
Soon the dreaming world became more important than the real world. The overwhelming attraction of the dream world was because it was indeed a dream come true. The old nobles rediscovered their youth in their dreams, while the young discovered new worlds with every new dreamer that became part of the dream. Their only limits were the strength of their own wills against the wills of the other dreamers. Any desire would be fulfilled, and any pleasure supplied and satisfied, if the will proved strong enough.
The dreams also became the defense of the planet. A military dictatorship, one of the largest inheritors of the fallen and shattered galactic empire, eventually returned to the planet of Darkover, seeking to claim the psychic powers there or to destroy them utterly. But as soon as the dreadnoughts of the fleet came within the bounds of the dreaming minds, their crews were joined to the dream, and their intentions were immediately discovered.
The united minds of the dreaming nobles lashed out in an instinctive attack. The ships’ officers and crew were rendered mindless with a single thought. The few who resisted were driven to madness by hallucinations of their deepest fears or to unquestioning obedience by hallucinations of their deepest desires. Yet the nobility learned that more ships would come, the next time commanded not by human minds but by mindless machines and soulless Artificial Intelligences, so the nobles devised their defense of the plant.
The ships were manned by Darkovan crews by implanting the minds copied from their servants into the mindless crewmen. Knowledge of how to pilot the ships was stolen from the maddened minds of the original crews. So that they could continue to use their psionic advantages, a powerful noble was installed as commander of each great ship of the fleet, and the ship’s environmental systems were modified to add the kiereseth pollen to the atmosphere. Through their telepathic powers, the nobles would be able to continue to communicate with each other and to maintain the dream on the homeworld as well as on their ship as they traveled. When the fleet was ready, they set out on a mission to gather other ships, to add them to the planet’s defenses.
The fleet spread far and wide. Some took other ships, adding them to their fleet, then returned home to Darkover to protect it. Others came upon human worlds, conquered them, and brought the Darkovan civilization and dream to them. Within a century, the civilization that had developed on Darkover had spread to all but a few worlds of the old Galactic Empire. Every former citizen, human or alien, except for dwindling numbers on the outermost colony worlds, were entered into the dream. Strong minds among them took their place among the nobles, and it became a time of subtle political conflicts played out in a myriad of dream worlds.
Within a millennium, the dream had expanded to the length and breadth of the galactic spiral. Friendly and hostile alien civilizations were all added to the dream. The dreaming network had grown so powerful that it wasn’t necessary to physically travel: combining their mental power, the nobles conquered world after world, civilization after civilization, by the power of their minds, until only their civilization was left.
In this period, the Imperial worlds became two worlds: one in the physical world and one in the mental world. The physical world existed only to satisfy the mental world. Imperial technology replaced the need of the nobles for human servants, at the same time lengthening their already long life span, so the human population began to decline, until there were only the participants of the dream worlds and the few technicians who maintained the machines that kept those participants alive.
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