On Ionian Paranoia (from a Human Perspective)

NOTE: portions of the following are superseded. The language and names, as well as the existence of human "daughter worlds," is no longer applicable. 

Humans have found Ionians incredibly frustrating and baffling, over the long history of their connections to them. This frustration has to be balanced against the fact that, however mercurial, bizarre, uncommunicative, condescending, or otherwise annoying the reality of Ionians may be, the human population of the Daughter Worlds and other habitats in Human Space owe their very existence to their altruism and technology. It was Ionians who saw fit to rescue some human beings who (at least, so the story went) were in imminent danger of extinction. This was during the tail end of the Wisconsin glaciation on Old Earth, at the time of the original discovery by Ionians of the Solar System Link to Ionian Space and consequently of Earth itself.

Ionians of that era provided the means (including transportation) to inhabit a new world, Zubos, a remarkably Earthlike world which they set aside specifically for these humans. Zubos was partially terraformed (having already been relatively habitable), and various geoengineering tweaks have been undertaken over the time of its habitation. In fact, Ionians seem to pay attention to their charges, and have frequently offered help just in time when systems were failing, politics had made a particular world or habitat ungovernable, or other serious problems threatened catastrophe. They didn’t interfere, exactly, but just made available some out or fix that defused the situation. It was disconcerting, in a way, and humiliating, more than once, but people just came to think of it as part of the way things are.

The Ionians originally shared some basic science and technology with the primitive humans, and made some of the infrastructure of their vast civilization available. Within a millennium after the First Contact, there were several human worlds, and humans had access to spacefaring technology. But these things were consciously doled out. There was never general access or acceptance of humanity as belonging to the Ionian supercivilization in any meaningful way.

Ionians kept the locations of links to their own home systems secret, and did not share with humans the techniques of locating and prospecting for spatial links. Even after millennia, this technology and even the basic science behind it proved elusive. Nor did the Ionians share with humans much information about themselves or their history, or any of the other civilizations they had encountered. They were very careful not to share technology that could be transformed into weapons, and when they did communicate directly and straightforwardly with human leaders and scientists (which was infrequently), as often as not it was to warn them to stay away from any destructive or weapons technologies, which, they made clear, would simply not be tolerated. But, apart from this, they were benign zookeepers, whose motto seemed to be Live and let live, mostly separate from us, thank you very much. In fact, only one of the Human Worlds had any permanent Ionian population, that being Koros (also called Corrace), which was the location of the Ionian Institute of Earth and which had a population of very eccentric Ionian pure-biologicals who apparently thought it acceptable to share a world with humans of Earth (not something which the vast bulk of Ionians would consider as even sane). All of this was the case, even though to a close approximation Ionians and humans are biologically similar enough that the worlds they would choose to inhabit would tend to be the same worlds, and their artificial habitats would have roughly the same internal conditions of gravity, pressure, temperature, air mixture, etc. 

The general belief among humans came to be that Ionians are just naturally paranoid. They will not take any chances with upstart races. They aren't hostile, but they don't let them in; they keep them at long-arms' length and carefully control not only contact, but technology and information transfer as well. The principle of both of these being: only that which benefits the Great and Glorious Totality of Ionus will be allowed. The secondary goal of benefiting the aliens (i.e., us) is not ignored, but it is subservient. And nothing not actively useful to them, or at least harmless to them, and important to the well-being of their client (again, that being us), is allowed to pass between them and us. So, millennia after Contact, humans still know relatively little about them, and have surprisingly little actual direct contact with them and their technology. 

As a result, although the broad outlines were known, of how Human Space and its worlds and habitats came to be, and how they were dependent on and connected to the ancient and almost unimaginably powerful civilization of the Ionians, the sweep and grandeur of Ionian history, the scope and geography of the Connected Space known to them, and the bulk of their scientific knowledge, are and always have been  mostly a matter of conjecture and mystery. 

Yet, whatever the frustrations and alienation people have felt over the long years of co-existence with Ionians in their various forms and apparitions, there has never been anything like enmity: Ionians have not actually harmed humans in any verifiable incident, ever. They just haven't been forthcoming. This is frustrating to human beings, but it is also generally understood that, however baffling and annoying they may be, they are, ultimately, benign. This is presumptively a hard-wired feature of their civilization by now; there do not appear to be any exceptions, or even any near-exceptions. Ionians have from time to time rescued humans from accidents (although not reliably: it would seem that their surveillance of human activity is at most sporadic). They have, again, from time to time and somewhat unpredictably, provided needed technologies when systems failed; offered new links to new worlds (at odd and unpredictable times, however). Occasionally in history, this particular move has defused tensions that appeared to be on the verge of leading to human/human conflict.  It could even be said that they have, invariably, been humanity's benefactors, if not always in quite the ways that the humans involved would prefer.

Given the penchant of humans on Earth to make gods of what they don't understand, it might be expected that at various points along the way of the relations between Ionians and humans there might have arisen cults or even full blown institutions of worship or supplication to these mysterious, seemingly invariably beneficent, if distant and uncommunicative, beings. But this, too, the Ionians have managed to quash: one thing they have let be generally known, in no uncertain terms, is that they are not essentially different from us. They are living beings, or the augmented descendants of living beings. They are, indeed, more advanced, both technologically and even in their intrinsic, artificially enhanced, biological nature, but originally they evolved naturally on a world not unlike Earth (somewhere, and they aren't saying where), and they believe that life in the various forms in which it has arisen is intrinsically valuable. (And that intelligent life, which they know to be exceedingly rare, is truly precious and worthy of preservation even at great cost). They have a civilization-wide value of biophilia, which they will discuss, at least to some extent, and they have managed to inculcate something of this philosophy in virtually all of the diverse cultures that make up the humans of Human Space (not including Old Earth).