The Helians
Johnny1A
completely unrelated biologically to the CHON-life that dominates the
Milky Way Galaxy in later times (and which is all derived at various
levels of remove from Earth).
The Helians were, in fact, the first naturally sapient entities to
appear in this part of the Universe, (the Eldren are older, but
they're a special case, as much force of nature as living race). They
appeared on their homeworld in the Greater Cloud of Magellan about 700
million years before present (BP).
That homeworld was odd, planetologically. Orbiting a red dwarf star,
it was mostly silcate, with a thin layer of icy volatiles and an
atmosphere of slightly lower vaporization point volatiles. Most
worlds in its position and at its temperature would be 'iceballs', not
icy rockballs. It's surface gravity was about .94 Terran standard,
it's atmosphere comparable to Terra's in density, though utterly
different in composition.
It was also host to an unusual feature, 'oceans' of liquid helium,
which formed the medium of suspension for the life-forms of the
planet. At some times in the planet's orbit, it drew just enough
closer to its primary that helium boil off from the 'seas' filled the
air with helium, but most of the time the temperature hovered just
below the liquifaction point of helium for those planetary conditions.
The life-forms of the planet were _utterly_ alien by the standards of
Terra-derived CHON life. They were at home in almost inconceivably
cold temperatures, their metabolisms operated _far_ more slowly than
the most sedate Terran animals and plants, and they were intensely
psionic. Almost every living thing of this life-order incorporated
psionic phenomena into their nature in one way or another, as
routinely as CHON life makes use of ATP. It was in part this psionic
element of their biology that enabled them to exist at all.
The actual intelligent entities that Terrans would later call 'the
Helians', due to their liquid-helium biology, were asexual
heterotrophs. They reproduced by a process perhaps most similar to
budding, and the reproductive process was only partly under conscious
control, under they began to develop advanced technology.
They were individually extremely variant, far more so than most Human
species would ever be, including H. sapiens.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the reproductive process of
the Helians was that Lamarke would have liked them: within limits,
acquired characteristics could be inherited by offspring. A Helian
could, over time, choose to grow additional limbs, or absorb present
ones, alter the structure of the internal organs (within limits!),
even grow and shrink itself over time, by ingesting additional food or
refraining from eating and 'converting' body mass into energy. A
Human can do the same by dieting or overeating, but a Helian could do
so on a far grander scale. The structural changes would be
automatically inherited by any offspring the Helian 'budded' off
during that period.
The Helians 'ate' (actually absorbed) another life-form vaguely
analogous to bacteria, in that they were individually microscopic and
filled something distantly like the niches held on Earth by bacteria.
The upper layers of the Helian 'seas' were thick with a layer of these
organisms, to a depth of several meters, forming the basis of the
entire energy/nutrient economy of the biosphere. They could be
cultured in smaller pools of liquid helium (with the proper other
trace substances), enabling the Helians to practice something a little
like agriculture, and permitting them to move onto the Helian
continents and away from the coasts of the 'seas'.
Unlike Terra, _all_ the life-forms of the Helian homeworld were either
sea-based or lived near the ocean-margins, feeding one way or another
on the pseudobacteria layer of the oceans. While Helian life might be
distinguised into groupings like kingdoms or phyla, there was no
division matching the Terran divide between animal and plant. Some
creatures were mobile throughout life, some sessile for life, some
alternated, but a sessile creature might be first cousin to a highly
mobile one, their evolutionary history was quite different from that
of Terra.
Thus, in Terran terminology, all life forms on the planet were
'amphibious', right up until the dawn of sapience. It was the sapient
Helians who were the _first_ life forms to colonize the continental
highlands. It was their realization that the food-organisms could be
cultured away from the oceans that permitted this, and opened the door
to their version of civiliation.
The original race of Helians was highly various, because of their
self-control over bodily structure, and because they could partially
inherit acquired traits, with matters further complicated by the fact
that two or more Helians could exchange genetic material when creating
offspring-buds (they didn't _have_ to, but they could, and any Helian
could do so with any other, they had no sexual divisions whatever),
thus producing a tremendous range of body forms and adult sizes.
Further, the sapient Helians could also exchange hereditary material
with _some- of the non-sapient 'subsentient' life of the planet, thus
adding still other traits. The biological defintition of 'species'
was very blurry on this world.
--------------------------------------------------------------
A 'typical' Helian:
IQ: 11 DX: 7-15 ST: 5-30 HT: 8-50 Size: 1 hex to 10 hexes
DR: Highly variable, but low by Terran standards. By the
rough-and-tumble high-energy standards of a Terra or Terra-derived
biosphere, the Helians and their ilk are delicate entities. A
ferocious predator (by Helian standards) would be little match for a
Terran animal of half its size, even a gentle herbivore, even assuming
they could both live in the same environment. (There _are_ a few
interesting exceptions to that rule, let the explorer beware...)
NOTE 1: Speed does not derive normally, these creatures are by CHON
standards _very_ slow in 1G.
NOTE 2: Though the Helians _averaged_ one level more intelligent than
most Human species, the curve was flatter. There are more Human
geniuses (IQ 15 or higher) than there were Helian geniuses.
NOTE 3: Because of the slow metabolism and life-rate of the Helians,
even their most intelligent individuals thought and reacted very
slowly by Human standards, about 5 times slower for a given thought or
action than a typical Human in the same situation.
MORE TO COME
Bryan J. Maloney
This is good. Too bad you had to invoke magic to permit them to exist,
but at least you made it a Maguffin.
David Johnston
>
> This is good. Too bad you had to invoke magic to permit them to exist,
That magic being?
> but at least you made it a Maguffin.
I seem to have missed that.
Johnny1A
> Bryan J. Maloney wrote:
> >
> > This is good. Too bad you had to invoke magic to permit them to exist,
>
> That magic being?
The presence of psionic phenomena in their metabolism/biology.
When I invoke 'magic' in that way, I try to do so 'realistically'.
That is, I asked myself "Supposing reliable, verifiable psionic powers
were discovered to exist, what does that imply?" Most stories simply
give the superpowers to the characters and let the rest of the
background universe sit unchanged, which is to my mind 'unrealistic'.
But it occurred to me that if psionics _did_ exist (as they do for the
purposes of my background), then evolution would tend to use them.
You could have life forms overcoming/adapting to their environments by
use of such phenomena, in theory, assuming they existed. Thus, the
Helians, who use cryokinesis, pyrokinesis, etc, as routine parts of
their automatic metabolism.
Other implications of verifiably real GURPS style psi that occurred to
me:
If ESPers can see the future, then the effect can, to a degree,
precede the cause. This has potential implications for FTL travel and
time travel, since causality violations are implied by both.
If Psychokinetics can manipulate matter, then energy is being drawn
from some source. For high-Power PKs, it sure isn't from the chemical
energy in their food, so some source of energy exists that current
physics doesn't recognize.
Etc.
Shermanlee
Bryan J. Maloney
thusnews:3F6418...@telusplanet.net:
> Bryan J. Maloney wrote:
>>
>> This is good. Too bad you had to invoke magic to permit them to exist,
>
> That magic being?
Psionics. "Psionics" is nothing but magic with science-fictiony window
dressing. It's still "funky boojum stuff".
>
>> but at least you made it a Maguffin.
>
> I seem to have missed that.
>
A maguffin is a concept or situation that is merely used to introduce a
story or setting that turns out not to be critical to the whole movie.
Hitchcock made good use of maguffins.
Johnny1A
> In my backstory, the 'Helians' are an ancient race of sapient aliens,
> completely unrelated biologically to the CHON-life that dominates the
> Milky Way Galaxy in later times (and which is all derived at various
> levels of remove from Earth).
>
>
The Helians homeworld (usually called Helius by later Terrans) had a
very peculiar biosphere. On Earth, the primary energy source for the
biosphere is sunlight, driving photosynthesis. This was totally
useless on Helius, because the planeted orbited well out from a dim
class-M star. At high noon, the 'sun' of Helius was little more than
a brilliant pinpoint.
The biosphere of Helius drew its needed energy from geothermal heat,
and from chemosynthesis, as their primary sources. Being basically
silicate, Helius had a fraction of its mass in the form of such
elements as uranium-285/8, thorium-232, and potassium-40, which heated
the interior of the planet just as they do on Terra. In fact, because
the local region had been enriched by a couple of supernovae not long
before Helius' star was born, it was gifted with more of these
materials than most worlds.
Also, the early stages of the formation of the planet were marked by
an 'iron catastrophe', in which the formation of an iron-rich
planetary core released considerable heat. This, along with
radioactive heating, gave Helius a lively internal heat budget.
Volcanoes were not rare on Helius, nor groundquakes.
Thus, in the liquid-helium seas, around undersea volcanoes and other
heat sources, there was energy to be had, if hazardous energy. Every
volcanic eruption released enough heat to cause huge volumes of helium
to flash into a gaseous state, followed by helium 'rains' over much of
the planet.
Along with geothermal heat, and somewhat related to it, was
chemosynthesis. The floors of the helium-sea were covered to a depth
of some meters by microorganisms 'feeding' on various chemical
reactions, and on each other's waste products and each other, to some
degree. A tremendous complex micro-scale ecology operated on the sea
floors.
Likewise, the tops of the seas were also filled with microorganisms,
which also tended to be chemosynthetic. Their source of nutrients was
twofold: some lived near the coasts, and drew their nutrients from
the shallows and the shores. All around the rim of the seas, the
layers of bottom-feeders and top-dwellers overlapped each other and
reached up a short distance onto the shore.
The other nutrient source was a 'conveyor' effect. In a symbiotic
relationship, many of the microorganisms drew additional nutrients and
spread them out into the seas, where they would feed other strains.
In return, nutrients that the shore-strains couldn't digest were
converted into forms they could, or locally rare minerals and
nutrients were 'exchanged' across intervening open 'water'.
In shallow areas of the open ocean, the 'seafloor' layer of organisms
also exchanged minerals and nutrients with the 'seatop' layer, which
had access to the atmosphere and its useful gases. The details of the
ecosystems of the Helian seas would have been sufficient to keep an
army of biologists, chemists, and ecologists occupied for centuries.
Psionics played a significant role in these processes. For ex,
telekinesis was used to drive nutrients up through shallow areas of
the seas to the upper layer of organisms (along with currents in other
places, or areas of volcanic upwelling (which had the added benefit of
often being nutrient-rich)). A more significant psionic aspect of the
ecology was the fact that the organisms of the upper level of the seas
collectively generated pyrokinetic heat to keep the atmosphere warmer
than it would otherwise have been. That was why the seas could be
liquid helium (one of the lowest liquifaction-point elements known)
while the atmosphere could remain gaseous at such low temps.
Thus, the atmosphere of Helius, in a different way than that of Earth,
was still the product of life.
There were countless different strains of microorganism in both layers
of the Helian oceanic ecology. Some were predatory on others, some
symbiotic. Some were parts of interlocked food-networks of staggering
complexity, others relative 'loners'.
One thing life on Helius had in common with life on Earth was that the
larger entities, when they appeared, were actually collections of
microorganisms. Though they weren't really 'cells' in the Terran
sense, these creatures did form 'multicellular' collectives and
eventually large organisms. Appearing in the especially complex
'shallows' along the shorelines, these creatures evolved and
differentiated into a huge variety of forms, many of them partly
interfertile with each other, all capable of lone reproduction.
MORE LATER
Shermanlee
Ben Finney
> A maguffin is a concept or situation that is merely used to introduce
> a story or setting that turns out not to be critical to the whole
> movie. Hitchcock made good use of maguffins.
For those interested in using the term, it's actually "MacGuffin",
coined by Alfred Hitchcock.
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin>
<http://homevideo.about.com/library/weekly/aa080301a.htm>
--
\ "Yesterday I told a chicken to cross the road. It said, 'What |
`\ for?'" -- Steven Wright |
_o__) |
Ben Finney <http://bignose.squidly.org/>
Mike Miller
Not too much later, I hope. This is cool (awful pun intended) stuff.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Johnny1A
OUCH! :)
I'll try to get some more posted soon, I'm glad people are interested.
Sooner or later, I'll even try to explain how all this connects to
the Atlanteans.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> One thing life on Helius had in common with life on Earth was that the
> larger entities, when they appeared, were actually collections of
> microorganisms. Though they weren't really 'cells' in the Terran
> sense, these creatures did form 'multicellular' collectives and
> eventually large organisms. Appearing in the especially complex
> 'shallows' along the shorelines, these creatures evolved and
> differentiated into a huge variety of forms, many of them partly
> interfertile with each other, all capable of lone reproduction.
>
> MORE LATER
>
> Shermanlee
Macroscale life on Helius emerged relatively early in the biological
history of the planet, compared to Earth. Once it did emerge,
however, it advanced steadily, if sedately. The standard means of
reproduction for macrolife on Helius was 'budding'. Since every
individual could (and indeed _had_ to) reproduce by this process,
populations could rise relatively rapidly. Since most large
life-forms on Helius could exchange 'genetic' material in creating
their 'offspring', variation could still occur.
The definition of 'species' was very fuzzy on Helius, because
different traits could reshuffle totally separately, due to the nature
of their genetic mechanisms. Not all large-scale life on Helius could
exchange genetic data with all other creatures, but many could, and
there was overlap. Thus, 'species' A might be able to exchange
genetic data regarding such things as limbs and body-frame with
Species B, but not for chemosynthetic processes. Species A might be
able to exchange chemosynthetic 'genes' with Species C, but not with
Species B, which being unable to exchange body-structure data with C.
Thus, instead of specific species, large life-forms on Helius forms
great 'pools' of semi-cross-fertile life. They rapidly developed
instincts for which cross-breedings were workable and which were not,
though errors were sometimes made. These errors were usually
disastrous, but occasionally acted to produce improved forms, and they
were a primary evolutionary driver on Helius.
(On Earth, one of the primary drivers of evolutionary diversity is
thought to be 'genetic errors' involved in sexual reproduction.)
The drivers of evolutionary selection on Helius were not entirely the
same as those of Earth. For most life-forms on Helius, finding food
was not a major difficulty. The 'seas' of Helius were rich in food
for the amphibious macroforms, and their numbers were not so great as
to overstrain the supplies of the two great metabolic layers of the
seas. Finding certain _specific_ nutrients might be another matter,
though, and many life-forms and pools of life-forms were selected for
the ability to seek out certain specific nutrients efficiently, or to
use the rare nutrients efficiently.
Of course, though food was plentiful in the seas, it was diffuse food,
and required time to consume sufficiently to fuel a large organism.
Naturally, predation emerged as a tactic to deal with this, enabling
large quantities of useful nutrients and energy to be obtained at a
stroke. Thus, the large life-forms of Helius had their equivalent of
'herbivores', who fed directly on the microorganisms and their
by-products at the top and bottom of the seas, and who were preyed
upon by the equivalent of 'carnivores'. Of course, there were also
'omnivores' who could and did do both.
From one such omnivore breed emerged the sapeint Helians.
The drivers for the emergence of sentience on Helius were not utterly
unlike those of Earth. There was competition for rare nutrients, the
need to evade threats such as predators, and over time, the need for
more and more effective ways to dealing with steadily more intelligent
fellow Helians. By the time the relatively stable sentient Helian
'breed' had emerged, the minds of those beings had been adapted and
selected for operation in a form of society.
It was a form of society or set of societies, however, rather unlike
_anything_ Homosentients (the collective name for the various sapient
species of Genus Homo that would emerge hundreds of megayears later)
would ever create. These were quite alien beings, and their society
was alien to match. Their 'world history' was unlike anything
Homosentients would recognize as well. They lacked what we would call
nations. Indeed, in one sense they were a unified planetary society
from the very beginning of their 'species'.
This was made possible by their natural mode of communications. Just
as with Homosentients, they communicated by a combination of means,
including gestures, vocalizations (though not spoken words), and by
changing their physical appearance, especially the color patterns in
their semi-transparent 'skins'.
But their primary means of communication was telepathy.
All Helians had Telepathy as a racial psionic ability, usually at
about Power 21, but with Extended Range: Global. Any Helian could
communicate at will with any other Helian it knew about, _anywhere on
Helius_. This required no technology, it was as basic to these
entities as speech is to H. sapiens. Though they could communicate
more subtly if they were close enough to also use gesture, color, etc,
they could engage in basic communication world-wide. The difference
might be something like the difference between e-mail, stripped of
nuances such as facial expression and voice tone, and verbal
conversation.
(Ironically, for a race in which psionic phenomena formed the basis of
their life-processes, this Telepathy was the limit of their active
Powers. There were no Helian Psychokinetics, ESPers, etc. None.
They came, in time, to comprehend the physics of psi, but the psi
potential that in other species might have gone into active Powers in
the Helians was occupied simply maintaining their existence.)
Thus, a planet-wide culture emerged from the very beginning of Helian
consciousness, with a cultural history going back in a nearly
uninterrupted line back to their very beginnings.
OTOH, that did not mean Helius was a peaceful place. A world-wide
society did not necessarily imply a world-wide government. Indeed,
the Helians had no institutions precisely equivalent to what
Homosentients would know as government or politics. Rather, the
Helian equivalent of politics was spread across all activities of life
in a way alien to the thinking of most humans.
Helians had no childhoods. When one Helian budded off a new entity,
as soon as its internal organization reached a sufficient level, that
mind of that offspring 'awakened', even while it remained physically
attached to its singular 'parent'. The 'brain' of the offspring was
itself 'budded' from the 'nervous system' of the parent, and it
carried much of the same information and _life experience_ that its
parent possessed.
A Helian 'parent' needed to spend little or no time and effort in
educating its offspring, since all such matters were dealt with during
the budding process, in which the mind, much as the body, was budded
off. By default, much of the basic knowledge of the parent was
incorporated into the offspring, though the exact details could be
predetermined by the parental entity during the formative stages.
Thus, by the time a new individual was budded off from the parent, it
was already an adult. It even (usually) had access to a considerable
amount of practical experience 'inherited' from its parent. Thus, the
very concept of childhood was profoundly alien to the Helians.
This was profoundly important. Beginning life as fully adult, if
miniature, versions of their parent, knowing no universal period of
intellectual or emotional dependence such as childhood, the Helians
were the very epitome of individualism, in a way simply impossible for
and all but incomprehensible to Homosentients.
The absence of childhood had a profound effect on their culture. One
of the basic purposes of Homosentient social organizations is the
protection and education of the young. Homosentient societies that
don't incorporate this function into their basic nature simply don't
survive. This motivator was absent from the Helian worldview.
Likewise, since Helian faculties did not, for practical purposes,
decrease with age, the motivator of caring for the aged was also
lacking. Helians were by no means immortal, but their ending modes
were very different than those of Homosentients. Thus, one more limit
which might otherwise create societies more familiar to us was absent.
The Helians as a breed were thus almost (by Homosentient standards)
_insanely_ individualistic. Individual 'cities', regions, continents,
had no true governments since no Helian would consider itself bound,
_ever_, by the decision or promise of another, unless it was in the
self-interest of that Helian (which would include avoiding
punishment).
If all these motives for the formation of societies are lacking, what
did drive the creation of the Helian culture? Some motivations common
to Homosentients did exist among the Helians.
For one, just as with Homosentient societies, collections of organized
Helians could do far more than a lone Helian could ever hope to
manage. Also, organization provided protection against predators,
natural disasters, and hostile fellow Helians.
Also, there were motivators among the Helians that are no more
comprehensible to Homosentient observers than our own motivations
would be to a Helian.
Other Helian social motivators were derived from the very nature of
their defining _personal sovereignty_. The interaction between the
Helians was, by the standards of most Homosentient societies,
profoundly amoral. To slay a rival or take the possessions of those
weaker than oneself was so natural and ingrained to their psyches that
it carried no moral valuation of any sort. On the other hand, the one
universal motivator that linked Helian and Homosentient was
self-preservation.
The conflict between these innate drives was mediated by the Helian
culture, which operated in practice somewhat like the theoretical
models of Homosentient society created by the Terran Western
Enlightenment 'social contract' theorists.
There was little of what a Homosentient would call an 'emotional' bond
to that society, it was a 'cold-blooded' matter, at risk of sounding
punny.
Thus, the Helian society was one in which a stronger Helian might
steal from or murder a weaker Helian to get something the weaker one
had that the stronger one wanted, and it would be considered 'normal',
and nothing personal. Various mutually enforceable 'defense pacts'
moderated this. Indeed, the concept of 'mutual assured destruction'
permeated _every_ level of Helian society and thought. It was the
basis of their idea of morality.
No Homosentient species could ever have functioned in such a society,
but the Helians were aliens, it it worked _for them_. It worked well
enough, in fact, that they were able to spread out and out away from
the seas, once they discovered their version of agriculture
(helium-pool based), gaining access to the resources of the highlands.
It enabled them to developed a slowly, but steadily, advancing
technology base.
It did not, however, prevent all violence. Violence, under the
peculiar rules of Helian society, ranged from interpersonal levels up
to the highest levels made possible by their technology. Two Helians
who had spend years trying to kill each other could set aside their
personal war if faced by a larger-level war, work together
efficiently, and then go back to trying to kill each other. It was,
after all, 'nothing personal'. Though they fought to survive with
ferocity, they held no grudges. They couldn't even really
_comprehend_ what a grudge was.
The Helians climbed the technological ladder slowly but steadily,
overcoming challenges set by their bizarre environment (raise
temperatures high enough to melt metals on Helius, and they risked
vaporizing solid oxygen with spectacularly disastrous results, for
ex), and yet gaining from its odd properties as well (room-temp
superconductors were _easy_ for the Helians, for ex!) They had reached
TL6 when a history-changing event occurred: the Helians were
discovered by the Eldren.
Bryan J. Maloney
thusnews:b3030854.03092...@posting.google.com:
> The definition of 'species' was very fuzzy on Helius, because
> different traits could reshuffle totally separately, due to the nature
> of their genetic mechanisms. Not all large-scale life on Helius could
> exchange genetic data with all other creatures, but many could, and
> there was overlap.
Shades of "Retief's War"...
Do sapient Helians "mine" the "lower" species for new genes to
incorporate?
I'd wager that Helians have no concept of "cute".
Mike Miller
> They had reached
> TL6 when a history-changing event occurred: the Helians were
> discovered by the Eldren.
Cool! And then what happened? :)
I'd comment more on that fascinating biology and society, but work calls.
Mike Miller, MatE
Jim Nelson
deciding what knowledge their offspring have when budded.
To me this would imply that a Helian "parent" would would program each
offspring to be an ally or minion. They might even mix their genetic code
with "animals" to produce non sentient or low sentient offspring programmed
for a specific task. Assasination for instance.
Instead of Helians all being extremely individualistic, most Helians would
be programmed lakeys for their indivualistic parents.
In this case competition would be between the minion groups of the free
willed individuals.
Johnny1A
> The Helians are highly competitive as individuals and are capable of
> deciding what knowledge their offspring have when budded.
> To me this would imply that a Helian "parent" would would program each
> offspring to be an ally or minion. They might even mix their genetic code
> with "animals" to produce non sentient or low sentient offspring programmed
> for a specific task. Assasination for instance.
Indeed, that's just precisely what many Helians did, when it was
useful. To them, 'reproductive manipulations' be they purely
biological or technologically manipulated, had no moral dimension.
The use of low-sentience offspring as biological machines had the
added advantage of controlability.
> Instead of Helians all being extremely individualistic, most Helians would
> be programmed lakeys for their indivualistic parents.
>
> In this case competition would be between the minion groups of the free
> willed individuals.
For full-sentient Helians, this was difficult. They could program the
knowledge and inherited memory of full-sentient offspring, _within
limits_. Some things automatically got imprinted, and control over
the details of the rest was never perfect.
Further, all the full-sentient Helians had their own strong genetic
instinct for personal sovereignty. Thus, though edited
inheritance-memory could be used to make an offspring easier to
influence, full-sentient offspring were still driven by self-interest,
from the very structure of their brain-organs.
Note that Helians did have a very limited instinct to protect genetic
kin, for basic reasons of evolutionary biology. Since the investment
in individual offspring was low (a typical Helian might 'bud off'
hundreds of offspring over the course of a lifespan), there was less
incentive for intense parental protectiveness. It was certainly not
unknown for Helians to sacrifice offspring in the name of
self-interest, especially while they could hope to produce more later.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
Yes, as a matter of fact they did just precisely that, when it suited
them. They also used 'domesticated' 'lower' species to 'breed'
desirable traits at times, something they were doing at their
equivalent of TL2 or TL3.
>
> I'd wager that Helians have no concept of "cute".
None. They _did_ have an aesthetic sense, one quite alien to
Homosentients, but 'cute' was a null word to them. The moreso since
the familiar concept of 'cute' appears to usually draw on visual
images derived from human babies, something that didn't apply to
Helians.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The Helians climbed the technological ladder slowly but steadily,
> overcoming challenges set by their bizarre environment (raise
> temperatures high enough to melt metals on Helius, and they risked
> vaporizing solid oxygen with spectacularly disastrous results, for
> ex), and yet gaining from its odd properties as well (room-temp
> superconductors were _easy_ for the Helians, for ex!) They had reached
> TL6 when a history-changing event occurred: the Helians were
> discovered by the Eldren.
LATER.
This discovery happened partly by accident, partly by natural course
of events. The TL6 Helians were beginning to generate noticeable
amounts of electromagnetic radiation, especially in the microwave and
radio regions of the spectrum, both from deliberate signalling and
'noise' from their electrical machines. This made Helius something of
a beacon in those frequencies.
The accidental part came from the fact that an Eldren happened to be
in that region of the universe, at the right time. This entity
detected the radio noise, recognizing it as peculiar (there should
have been no process generating such energy emission in such a cold
region), and out of idle curiousity, investigated the matter, tracing
the emission back to the source.
Johnny1A
>
> The Helians climbed the technological ladder slowly but steadily,
> overcoming challenges set by their bizarre environment (raise
> temperatures high enough to melt metals on Helius, and they risked
> vaporizing solid oxygen with spectacularly disastrous results, for
> ex), and yet gaining from its odd properties as well (room-temp
> superconductors were _easy_ for the Helians, for ex!) They had reached
> TL6 when a history-changing event occurred: the Helians were
> discovered by the Eldren.
{NOTE: I accidentally posted just a few paragraphs of this a day or
three ago, sorry. Here's the whole posting for those who are
interested.)
LATER.
This discovery happened partly by accident, partly by natural course
of events. The TL6 Helians were beginning to generate noticeable
amounts of electromagnetic radiation, especially in the microwave and
radio regions of the spectrum, both from deliberate signalling and
'noise' from their electrical machines. This made Helius something of
a beacon in those frequencies.
The accidental part came from the fact that an Eldren happened to be
in that region of the universe, at the right time. This entity
detected the radio noise, recognizing it as peculiar (there should
have been no process generating such energy emission in such a cold
region), and out of idle curiousity, investigated the matter, tracing
the emission back to the source.
The Eldren are free-space creatures, fully at home in the vacuum of
interstellar or even intergalactic space. Up until this point, this
particular Eldren, a relatively young one as his race measured time,
had never even _thought_ about the possibility of life-forms confined
to a planetary surface. In fact, the very idea of non-Eldren life was
something he'd never considered. He was only a few million years old
at that point, after all.
(What the gigayears-old elders of his people knew or had considered,
who could say?)
This Eldren youth approached Helius, and found himself fascinated by
what he discovered as he observed them from space. With the senses at
the disposal of an Eldren, doing so was not difficult, and after
spending a mere 1000 Terran years or so quietly and secretly orbiting
Helius, he had learned a great deal about what were (to him) an
utterly new and unexpected discovery.
In that time, the Helians advanced from TL6 to TL7, in their slow,
steady manner, and entered into TL8. Space flight became possible for
the Helians, but they found themselves with a dearth of destinations,
due to the particular 'layout' of their star system.
The planet Helius orbited an M class 'dwarf' star, considerably
smaller and cooler than Sol (thus making it a typical star, Sol is
exceptional). Helius was the outermost of three planets.
The second planet was a Huge gas giant, about 70% more massive than
Jupiter, with a smattering of small satellary bodies, the size of
large asteroids. The moonlets were none of them larger than 300 miles
in diameter, and by Helian standards they were searingly hot, with
temperatures reaching up to -135 degrees F in places. Though the
radiation belt of the gas giant was feeble compared to that of Jupiter
or even Saturn, it was present, and to the radiation-sensitive
Helians, it was strong enough to be a nuisance.
The innermost world of the system was a rockball, orbiting so close to
the red dwarf that it was tide-locked to it, and it was actually warm
even by Homosentient standards, making it hellish to Helians. The
dayside temperatures of the innermost planet reached as high as +140
degrees F, the star filling a huge swath of the sky of the airless
rockball. OTOH, the nightside was forever turned away from the star,
and its temperatures were cold enough for Helians to tolerate, leaving
only the lack of atmosphere and helium as problems.
Helius itself had two tiny moonlets, one about 40 miles in diameter
and the outer one about 20. The inner one was similar to Helius in
composition, having originated with the planet itself, with
significant metal and rock; the outer was a captured 'KBO' from the
spare edges of the system, rich in volatiles and ices.
Except for the three planets and their satellites, the star system was
very sparse. It did have a certain amount of detritus, the equivalent
of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Shell, but they were very thin and very
far-flung. Most of the mass that might have gone into planets and
moons had been 'vacuumed up' by the gas giant in the formation stages
of the system.
As their unknown Eldren watcher (whom we will call simply the Watcher)
observed them, the Eldren developed the technology to reach their
moonlets, and then later to explore the rest of their star system.
They sent unmanned probes to the moons of the gas giant, and into its
atmosphere, but they found little of immediate use there. They send
probes, and later manned ships, to the innermost world, and
established bases on the cold side of the innermost world, for
research purposes, and later for some limited mining.
But with a limited range of destinations, space flight technology
languished, even as the Helians were well into TL8. Meanwhile, the
Watcher had informed some of his fellows, and by about 1500 years
after the first discovery, quite a few young Eldren were secretly in
the star system watching the Helians, like a group of human children
studying an ant hill.
Fascinated by their discovery, these Eldren were dismayed to realize
that their new interest faced a problem in the near-future, as Eldren
saw time. For when the Watcher and his fellows looked at the larger
picture, peering into surrounding space and into the future via
calculation and ESP, what they saw was that the Helians were very
likely doomed.
The problem lay in the astrography of the region. Heliustar was
located on the edges of the Greater Cloud of Magellan, and its
neighbor stars were dozens of light-years away, with one exception: a
massive red giant only a few light-years from Helius. It had been
there in the sky throughout the remembered and recorded history of the
Helians, a brilliant red spark rivaling their own dim sun in
brightness when it was in the sky.
It was about the same age as Heliustar, but tremendously more massive,
and as such it was spendthrift, rushing through its fuel supply in a
fraction of the time its tiny sibling would have done. Large stars
age _much_ faster than samll ones, and this star was a monster. It
had burned through its supply of hydrogen, then fused the helium up to
carbon, and on, and on. Now iron was accumulating in the core of the
star, a stellar death sentence. Iron is useless as nuclear 'fuel'.
Both fission and fusion of iron nuclei are endothermic processes,
draining energy _out_ of the system. Once the core was sufficiently
enriched in iron, the reaction that drove the star would cease, and
gravity would take over. The star would begin to collapse,
gravitational potential energy would convert to heat, and a supernova
explosion would ensue.
The Helians had more than sufficient comprehension of astronomy and
physics by
this time to realize that the red giant in their skies was on its last
legs, of course. But what cosmically speaking is 'last legs' is a
very, very long time for either Helian or Homosentient. The red giant
had been on its 'last legs' throughout Helian history, and they didn't
give any more worry to the possibility of near-future (as mortals view
time) changes than a typical Terran would to the chance of a major
meteoric impact. They knew it was _possible_, but what were the odds?
What the Watcher and his fellow Eldren hobbyists knew, though, was
that this was a gamble the Helians would lose. The red giant was less
than a thousand Terran years from its death in a major supernova. At
such close distance, the entire Heliustar System would be bathed in
deadly levels of radiation, radiation to which the macroforms of
Helius were particularly vulnerable. The microorganisms would be
devastated, but the overall biosphere _might_ survive the largest
extinction event Helius had ever known. The macroforms, including the
sentient Helians, could not possibly do so.
The Helians had no workable way to realize how close to the edge the
red giant was, but to the senses, psionic and other, of the Eldren, it
was a clear as crystal. Indeed, they could compute within a few
minutes the exact time that the supernova would begin.
The Watcher and his fellows, but this point numbering a few hundred,
found themselves in a quandary. The Helians were the most fascinating
new thing they had encountered in hundreds of thousands of years. But
in a mere few hundred orbits of Helius around its star, they were
would gone. What they should do, if anything, occupied their debates
for some Terran decades.
What they decided to do would change the course of Helian and
Homosentient history.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
> The Watcher and his fellows, but this point numbering a few hundred,
> found themselves in a quandary. The Helians were the most fascinating
> new thing they had encountered in hundreds of thousands of years. But
> in a mere few hundred orbits of Helius around its star, they were
> would gone. What they should do, if anything, occupied their debates
> for some Terran decades.
>
> What they decided to do would change the course of Helian and
> Homosentient history.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
The Eldren searched the Greater and Lesser Clouds of Magellan
initially, then, finding little in the way of suitable planetary
bodies, they searched the nearby Milky Way Galaxy and the immense
spiral of the Andromeda Galaxy as well.
Some worlds they found that were of a kinship with Helius. But for
the most part, those planets that circled their primary stars at a
distance great enough for the needs of the Helians were 'iceballs',
masses of frozen volatiles with rocky cores. Only a handful of
icy-silicate worlds were to be found, for indeed the process of
formation for Helius-like worlds required a rocky world to form near
its star, and be moved outward to a distant orbit of frozen cold.
There were silicate worlds of the appropriate distance to be found, to
be sure. Perhaps one star in a thousand had such a world, and given
that the red dwarf stars are much the most numerous of all sorts, that
meant that there were such worlds in abundance.
But few such worlds were right in the details for the use of the
lifeforms of Helius. They lacked helium oceans, or the appropriate
atmosphere, or they were too massive or not massive enough, or they
were tide-locked to other worlds or they lacked necessary chemicals,
or any of a thousand other details might make such a world of no use.
The Eldren debated, and decided to attempt to change some suitable
worlds for use as habitats after the supernova rendered Helius itself
largely uninhabitable by its macroforms. They had only a few
centuries with which to work, but even these relatively junior Eldren
could command awesome energies and resources by Homosentient or Helian
standards, and they had plenty of worlds that might be made
more-or-less habitable with effort.
Since they had never done anything quite like what they were
attempting before, and they were facing time limits, they decided to
make multiple attempts in parallel. Instead of trying to 'heliuform'
one world, they attempted it with dozens at once. Out of their
initial 144 attempts, only 7 were enough like Helus to be called
'marginally habitable', and only two were close enough to be really
hospitable to the Helian macroforms.
This was none too soon, either. By this point the supernova was less
than a Terran century away. While the Eldren had been going about
trying to produce a Helius-like world, the Helians themselves had
continued in blissful ignorance of both the impending supernova and
the existence of their Eldren observers. Over several centuries, they
had advanced to high TL9 in most areas, and had made the intriging
discovery that it was possible after all to create and receive FTL
signals, though terribly difficult in practice.
They still had no notion of whether or not it was possible for matter
to _travel_ faster than light, but they had some intriguing ideas.
Still, there was no way they would have developed FTL travel before
the supernova, even had they known that the time for that event was
near.
As soon as the Eldren felt the time was right and the recipient
environments were ready, they began the resettlement of the Helians to
their new homes. Up until now, the Helians had never suspected even
the existence of the Eldren, now that existence was made quite clear.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> As soon as the Eldren felt the time was right and the recipient
> environments were ready, they began the resettlement of the Helians to
> their new homes. Up until now, the Helians had never suspected even
> the existence of the Eldren, now that existence was made quite clear.
> Shermanlee
The Eldren now faced the task of transporting the Helian macroforms to
their new homes. They decided to go the simple (for them) route:
mass bulk transport. Thus, at the selected time, the Watcher and his
fellow Eldren hobbyists arrived on Helius, and proceeded to 'wrap'
entire Helian population centers (calling them 'cities' might not be
quite right) in protective bubbles of energy and discontinuous
spacetime, and essentially placing the contents of those bubbles in a
form of stasis. Along with large populations, various facilities were
'lifted' as well, taken directly into space within their protective
bubbles of stasis. The Eldren made sure to scoop up plentiful samples
of the 'interfertile' other subsentient macroforms as well.
All this occurred over the course of a few hours. Within 24 hours (as
modern Terrans measure time), every major population center of Helius
was gone, along with a vast (and slightly random) selection of their
industrial facilities, storehouses, research instruments, etc. Where
once population centers humming with the life and activity of tens of
millions of Helians had sat, now were only vast shallow craters, left
as 'cities' and a thin layer of underlying bedrock or bedice were
'scooped' up.
The Eldren wasted little time, since even their vast powers had some
ultimate limits, they could suspend and protect the contents of the
'bubbles' only for so long, in outside time. Across the Greater Cloud
of Magellan, and even across the void to the Lesser Cloud and the
Milky Way, the encapsulated 'cities' were carried, their unwilling and
indeed unwitting passengers unaware of the passage of time or change.
At quantum transit-levels so high that light-millennia could be
covered in days or weeks, even through hyperspatial shortcuts
eliminating light-millennia in moments, the Eldren moved their
'cargo'.
Eventually, each group of Eldren arrived at one of the 'heliuformed'
worlds. On most such worlds, one of the great population centers was
deposited in what looked to the Eldren like a workable location, and
the protective stasis fields were allowed to collapse, freeing the
inhabitants. On some especially well-heliuformed worlds, two or even
three population centers were desposited, usually at large local
distances, often on different continents entirely.
The first the inhabitants of these 'cities' new of the change was when
the stasis fields collapsed. From their point of view, one instant
they were at home, all things normal, the next, they suddenly found
their entire 'city' to be in a different location! The sky would be
different, the stars different, even the local gravity slightly
different. The transition, from their vantage point, was
_instantaneous_!
For another shock, recall that throughout their sentient history, all
Helians had been in telepathic contact with the rest of their race.
Their range was sufficient that any Helian could contact any other on
their homeworld pretty much at will. The only Helians out of touch
with the rest of their race had been a few space explorers in their
home system, and they had been prepared for this. Now, from the point
of view of the involuntary colonists, it was as if all the rest of
their race had simply vanished out of ken, since no Helian had even a
tiny fraction of the telepathic range necessary for interstellar
linkage.
Had such a thing happened to a Terran (or any Homosentient) city, the
immediate result would have been panic and chaos. The Helians, in the
cool and detached way, came as close to that state as they were
capable of doing, as well. But no Helian was actually capable of true
panic, and over the course of weeks and months, they restored some
order in their suddenly isolated societies. In the meantime, it
didn't take long for the Helian scientific communities in most of the
population centers to figure out approximately _what_ had happened,
even though they were utterly in the dark as to how and why.
They were able to discern (TL 9 societies to start with) that they had
somehow been transported to new worlds, orbiting other stars. That
much could be learned by simple observation. They had no idea HOW
such a thing could occur, however. They didn't have much time to
spend wondering, either, since the immediate needs of survival took
precendence.
Even with whole 'cities' transported, this was difficult. Helius had
been interconnected into a single civilization, and now the
industrial, transportation, resource-allocation, and organizational
networks were broken and rent beyond repair. Each new colony had to
create a new support structure to sustain themselves. At the same
time, Helian nature was such that power struggles erupted, as the
former balances were disrupted. Helians who had been held in
subordination to other Helians outside their 'city' were suddenly free
agents, Helians with extensive power bases external to their 'city'
were suddenly weaker.
Violence inevitably erupted, the oddly restrained, impersonal violence
the Helians were so prone to. Where a human community in their
situation would have been riven and torn by fear and panic, the Helian
colonies were riven by struggles for power and freedom from external
power, in the same individuals.
The population of Helius prior to the Helian Diaspora had been 9
billion. Being inclined toward clustering in population centers (in
spite of the apparent contradiction with the Helian urge for personal
sovereignty, another alien combination), they had formed huge
'megalopoli' that had housed most of the population. Only a few
percent had been more 'rural'.
The Eldren had lifted about 95% of all Helians into space during the
Helian Diaspora. The planetary population went from ~9 billion to
~400 million over the course of 24 Terran hours or so. About 500 of
these megalopoli were lifted, and spread out over about 350 new
worlds, ranging from planets that were nearly perfectly heliuformed to
worlds only just barely, marginally classifiable as 'habitable' at
all.
Naturally, even equipped with large resource bases of tools and
equipment and knowledge (whole cities), the majority of the
involuntary colonists died within 5 years of the moment of arrival.
In many cases, the entire population of involuntary settlers perished
to the last Helian. In others, even though a viable population was
established, technological civilization could not be sustained.
After all, the Eldren didn't really _understand_ the requirements of
of a mortal technological civilization. They could half-grasp what it
must be like to be mortal and tool-dependent, but only that much.
Thus, even on well-heliuformed worlds, often they would deposit what
could otherwise have been a viable colonial city in some horribly
unsuitable specific location. Or they might place them too far from
critical resources, or they might have overlooked some apparently
trivial detail in the heliuforming process.
Even in the most successful cases, technological skills were lost and
the general level of society fell several tech levels. Even the few
most successful of the involuntary colonies dropped to the Helian
equivalent of TL6 before beginning to regain lost ground, many
surviving colonies dropped back to TL3 or TL4 from their starting base
at TL9!
But the species did survive. Their incredible physical adaptivity
helped, and indeed the 'Helians' of one colony might end up with an
average morphology totally unlike the average morphology of another,
though all remained fully 'interfertile'. Populations began to rise
on many of the colony worlds, and after a couple of centuries, new
cities were rising.
But they never forgot their sudden transition to their new worlds, and
the psychological shock of that unexplained event became THE most
important turning point in their historical consciousness and
world-view. To the end of their existence as a race, the effect of
their mysterious transition never ceased to resonate among them
culturally and psychologically.
This was amplified because, in the colonies, they STILL did not know
_why_ or _how_ this transition had occurred. Even as the more
successful Helian colony-worlds were again regaining lost TLs and
their populations were burgeoning anew, the mystery remained, as well
as the cool fear that such an unexplained event might occur anew.
Within 10 Terran centuries after the Diaspora, some Helian worlds had
regained TL9 technology and resources, and were beginning to explore
their new star systems and again to experiment with FTL physics, but
always the need to solve the puzzle of their involuntary exodus
remained a burning, driving cultural need.
Of course, there was still the matter of what had been happening back
'home'.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> Of course, there was still the matter of what had been happening back
> 'home'.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
Out of all the billions of sentient Helians, after the Diaspora only
~400 million were left, spread more or less randomly around the
planet. The largest single population center that did _not_ get
transported away to another world had a population of less than
100,000 Helians, on a world where a few days before there had been
population concentrations of over 20 million.
Most of the industrial, technical, and academic resources of Helius
had been 'taken'. Those missed by the Eldren actually had a better
idea of what was occurring than the transportees, since they were
_not_ held in stasis and could observe what was occurring.
From the point of view of those Helians close enough to see it but far
enough away to be missed, the departure of their population centers
was quite a sight. It is hard to describe what they perceived through
their alien senses. Let us instead consider what a Homosentient in
the right place and with the right perspective would have seen. Such
a Homosentient observer would have seen the population center in
question suddenly surrounded by a shimmering sphere of haze, emitting
a soft glow of light in constantly shifting colors, through which the
structures and other elements of the population center could still be
dimly made out. The sphere would appear to have its lower fifth or so
below ground level, as was indeed the case. All motion within the
hazy sphere would have ceased, however. Even objects in the process
of falling would appear to have stopped in mid-fall.
Then, the light emitted from the hazy surface of the sphere would have
brightened over the course of an hour or so, until the entire sphere
suddenly began to rise, along with its contents. The contents would
be nearly invisible through the blazing glare, but with the right
instruments a Homosentient observer would be able to see that there
was still no sign of any motion within the sphere, even the individual
Helians in the 'streets' of the population center would be frozen
motionless, as if time had stopped.
The spheres would rise slowly at first, but accelerating steadily as
they did. It would take perhaps two hours for the bottom of the
sphere to clear the pit out of which it rose, carrying a chunk of
underlying bedrock as it did, another hour for the sphere to dwindle
to a point of light. After that, though, the point of light would
dwindle rapidly until invisible to the naked eye, even in the nearly
total darkness of Helius.
With a good optical telescope, our hypothetical Homosentient observer
would be able to watch the sphere accelerate away from Helius, along
with similar spheres encapsulating other population centers, all
accelerating away from Helius along different vectors, save for a
handful that moved in groups of two or three on one vector.
But soon, even the telescope would lose all utility, as the Eldren
'upshifted' their encapsulated population centers to higher
quantum-states, where translight velocities would be possible. Our
hypothetical observer with his telescope would see a last flash of
brilliant light along the appropriate vectors, coming after the
spheres had dwindled to invisibility, then nothing.
The Helians watching their fellows' sudden and unwitting departure
perceived it with other senses, using other forms of mental imagery,
but the upshot was much the the same.
Helians are incapable of panic, but as with their fellows' reactions
later when the stasis fields opened, the reaction of those left behind
came as close to panic as Helians could come. Also, like their
fellows, the Helians immediately turned more violent, as new balances
of power worked themselves out. Then came the aftermath.
On the one tentacle, there were still more Helians on Helius than
there would be on any one of the new involuntary colonies, more by at
least an order of magnitude. Further, the planet Helius was still the
best world in existence for Helian life, better than the best of the
heliuformed worlds the Eldren were transplanting colonists too.
On the other tentacle, the vast majority of the technological and
industrial resources of their civilization were gone, scattered to the
stars and beyond recovery. By all objective rights, the Helians left
on Helius should have collapsed back to stone age, or at best TL2 or
TL3 level, existence. They should then have stayed there for a long,
long time, or at least until the supernova made the whole matter moot.
Yes, that's what any objective observer would have calculated the most
likely outcome to be. But the objective observer would have lost any
money he/she/it placed in a bet about the outcome based on that.
What made the difference was something the Eldren themselves had
overlooked. Had they realized it existed, they would probably have
scooped it up as well, as just one more facility to be transported to
some randomly selected new Helian world. But it was well hidden, and
the Eldren were simply not wired to think that way, not yet.
The facility in question was a robofactory, or rather, it was an
uber-robofactory. Created by a 'consortium' of junior-level Helians
as part of their plan to overthrow the senior members of their power
structure, it was buried deep in the bedrock of Helius, having been
constructed over the course of many years and designed in every
element for secrecy, it was so well hidden that it was concealed not
only from its creators' Helian rivals but from the Eldren Watchers as
well.
Of the conspirators, all but one were swept away to the new worlds.
The one left behind now found himself in control of the single most
valuable resource on Helius. Being a Helian, it promptly set out to
take advantage of that fact to serve its own self-interest. Perfectly
natural and respectable behavior, as the Helians saw such things.
Let us pass over the small details of the plots and schemes of the
time, they are of little concern to us, and indeed only somewhat
comprehensible across the void between the Helian and Homosentient
mentalities. Suffice it to say that the master of the superfactory
failed it its attempt to seize total power, and the superfactory
itself passed from tentacle to pseudopod to mandible before the new
power structure finally stabilized, a few years after the Departure.
But once the new power structure did come to a moderately stable
state, the enormous resources of the superfactory were turned to the
tasks of rebuilding some kind of advanced society on Helius. The
superfactory was almost totally automated and was in fact over the
line into the lower reaches of TL10.
With a new society growing around the nucleus of the superfactory, it
was possible to examine old records made by surviving automatic
sensors and other devices, and to correlate sense-witness accounts, of
the great Departure. A society based on mutual surveillance and
balances of power at all levels naturally had extensive sensors and
observation devices in place, and many of those records had survived
the Departure and the aftermath and were available for close up study
by the recovering society.
Close up, minute observation and analysis of the recordings revealed
that around each of the immense spheres of stasis that had taken the
majority of Helius' population, were dozens or hundreds of _tiny_
energy sources, moving around the great globes of stasis in a clearly
intelligent way. These tiny sources of energy emission were usually
no more than 10-100 feet in diameter, mere specks on the scale of the
event, but they were unquestionably there.
The energy radiated by these objects was not great, but it was very,
_very_ complex, and as they studied the records, the Helian scientists
began to grasp a bit of the physics involved. They became the first
Helians to have direct sensor evidence of the Eldren.
Once they found this information, they began to correlate it with old
reports of those few Helians who spent much time alone out in the vast
continental highlands. There had been the occasional report of globes
of light, 10 to 100 feet in diameter, seen out there, but there had
never been any evidence, and the reports had never received much
credence from the practical-minded Helians.
Gradually, the remaining Helians pieced together a more-or-less
accurate idea of what had happened on the day of Departure. They still
had no real idea of _why_, and no real understanding of the Eldren,
but they now knew that the Eldren _existed_, and that for reasons
unknown, they had spirited away 95% of the population of Helius,
displaying nearly god-like power in the process.
Lacking any knowledge of _why_ the Eldren had done what they had done,
and with only the faintest theoretical glimmerings of _how_, the
Helians resolved to do what they could to make any repeat of it much
harder.
Correctly surmising that the superfactory had been spared simply
because the aliens had missed detecting it, the Eldren rebuilt their
society with secrecy as watchword. Where the former population
centers had been on the open surface, the new and vastly smaller
cities were located almost entirely underground. Vast galleries were
cut into the continental bedrock, duplicates of the superfactory were
constructed, the remaining resources of the surface were taken below
the surface. Enormous underground lakes and tanks of liquid helium
were created, to form the basis of an underground 'agricultural'
system.
Instead of nuclear fission, the primary power source for the new
cities and superfactories was geothermal, to minimize the tell-tale
thermal energy emissions. Deeper and deeper they dug, until most of
their cities were buried beneath at least half a mile of rock and ice.
All this proved vitally important, not long afterward. Though the
Helians had burrowed underground for the sake of secrecy, it would
prove more useful as protection against a quite different threat.
For, as the Eldren had perceived a thousand years earlier, the nearby
red giant was close to its spectacular end. Now, just as the Eldren
had perceived/calculated, the supernova came, within minutes of the
most likely moment the Eldren had calculated.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> For, as the Eldren had perceived a thousand years earlier, the nearby
> red giant was close to its spectacular end. Now, just as the Eldren
> had perceived/calculated, the supernova came, within minutes of the
> most likely moment the Eldren had calculated.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
LATER
The supernova occurred 14 years before the Helians learned of it. The
effects that mattered to the Helians propagated at the velocity of
light or slower. The FTL effects of the supernova were subtle. The
Helians were beginning to experiment with FTL phenomena, and a few
experiments they were doing were indeed affected by the supernova, but
the Helian experimenters had no way to know what the things they were
detecting meant.
Thus, when the brilliant red spark that had glimmered in the skies of
Helius throughout history suddenly flared up, the Helians had no real
warning. The red giant blazed with new energy, the brightest object
in the Greater Cloud of Magellan, for a little while.
The Heliustar System was flooded with hard radiation, gamma rays,
neutrons, plus forms of energy unfamiliar to TL7 physics. Those few
Helians in space at the time were killed.
These Helians on the surface were forced underground, as the radiation
levels on the surface of Helius rapidly rose to lethal levels whenever
the nova was above the horizon.
But because the remaining Helians had already moved most of their
society deep underground, and because they had created what amounted
to a self-sustaining (if simplified) underground ecology to support
themselves, the Helian society that had been restored after the
Departure was largely protected by thousands of meters of rock and
ice, a superb radiation shield.
The surface biosphere of Helius took an incredible hit from the
supernova radiation. Essentially all the macroform life of Helius was
killed, except for that in the Helians' underground warrens. The two
great layers of the oceanic ecosystem were disrupted, and the upper
surface layer was essentially destroyed. The deep-ocean layer along
the floor of the sea was destroyed a the coastal margins, but the
deep-sea portions survived in a greatly reduced form. Even many of
those deep-sea microorganisms that were safe from the surface
radiation died from lack of the other parts of the former ecosystem.
When the initial wave of radiation from the supernova peaked and
passed, the background level remained very high, because the supernova
remnant, with the new black hole at the center, continued to spray a
steady stream of dangerous particles and energy, though a gradually
declining one. It would be well over a Terran century before it would
be entirely safe to return to the surface of Helius when the nova was
above the horizon.
The effect on Helian psychology was complex. First 95% of the
population was spirited away without warning, then, after less than
100 Terran years of work to recover came the supernova, which reduced
the biosphere of Helius to shreds. Some Helians speculated that the
aliens had remove their fellow Helians to protect them from the nova
(which was more or less the truth), but this sort of thinking was
rather alien to Helians, and they had a hard time crediting it.
The other theory was that the aliens might well have been
_responsible_ for the supernova. This, however, seemed unlikely as
well. Given the power the aliens had demonstrated on the day of
Departure, they would hardly have needed to create a supernova (even
if they could) to finish off the biosphere of Helius.
Still, the society on Helius had now survived both the forced sudden
removal of 95% of its population and a near-space supernova and the
collapse of the Helian biosphere, and it was still functional.
MORE LATER
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> For, as the Eldren had perceived a thousand years earlier, the nearby
> red giant was close to its spectacular end. Now, just as the Eldren
> had perceived/calculated, the supernova came, within minutes of the
> most likely moment the Eldren had calculated.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
LATER
Johnny1A
>
> Still, the society on Helius had now survived both the forced sudden
> removal of 95% of its population and a near-space supernova and the
> collapse of the Helian biosphere, and it was still functional.
>
> MORE LATER
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
With the surface biosphere of Helius basically ravaged, the remaining
Helians of Helius now had no choice but to continue with and expand
upon the underground existence they had already embarked upon. Over
the following Terran century or so, the underground galleries and
labyrinths were expanded and extended, both laterally away from the
coastlands where they began, and vertically, cutting ever-deeper into
the crust of Helius. Their technology began to grow again, especially
those aspects of it that touched on artificial biosystems and
life-support systems and mining and underground architecture. By the
time the Helians reached early TL10 in most fields, they were well
into TL11 in those areas.
The Helians had allowed their space flight technology to languish in
comparison, for lack of any immediate place to go, and out of the
necessities of secrecy and survival. But their theoretical physicists
had been on the track of new developments, which were now beginning to
bear fruit.
A growing understanding of the underlying nature of reality, of the
interactions and events that occur at the Planck scale, had already
led them to the experimental verification that faster than light
information transfer was indeed possible. Now their studies led them
to calculate the existence of 'parallel' forms of matter, bearing a
partial relationship to the periodic table, but with very different
properties as well.
Their theories indicated that such parallel matter should be
vanishingly rare in the parts of the Universe familiar to Helians,
with one exception: one of the parallel analogues of copper should be
relatively common in normal space.
The theoretical properties this material should possess were wild
enough to stir excitement even in the natively calm Helian soul, but
the phrase 'relatively common' was indeed relative. In practical
terms, their theoretical understanding said that the stuff should be
incredibly rare by practical mining and processing standards.
Further, their best theoretical understanding suggested that when it
did occur, it ought to tend to end up deep within large bodies such as
planets.
(The material in question, of course, is what the Atlanteans would,
half a billion years later, call orichalcum.)
The Helians began a search for the material, since even modest amounts
would have vast theoretical applications. But they knew that the bulk
of whatever orichalcum their star system had been endowed with could
be expected to be within the star itself. Further, since Heliustar
was a red dwarf, the low initial mass of the star system meant a low
likelihood of large amounts of orichalcum.
What orichalcum existed outside the star would most likely tend to end
up deep within the major worlds, especially the innermost planet,
since it was closest to the star, or so their theoretical models
suggested. All in all, finding orichalcum was a daunting challenge.
It took them 50 Terran years or so of careful searching and tremendous
effort to find enough orichalcum to make a one gram pellet. As they
had expected, most of that had come from the innermost world, obtained
by processing millions of tons of copper-bearing rock.
The surface conditions of Heliustar I were hellish by Helians
standards. The remaining radiation from the supernova required an
inconvenient amount of shielding for their spacecraft, and the yield
was low enough to make the work frustrating even by Helian standards.
Robots did most of the mining and processing work, since they were
physically tough and endlessly patient.
The advanced mining tech of the Helians enabled the robots to
gradually cut their way down and down, further and further into the
crust of innermost planet, until they finally began to find orichalcum
in tiny 'veins' and masses of orichalcum, and the annual output rose
first to grams, then to decagrams.
Finally, they had enough orichalcum to begin putting it to practical
use, and one of the first theoretical applications actually
implemented was to use a decagram of the precious stuff to build an
orichalcum-detector.
That device enabled the process of prospecting and mining to become
orders of magnitude more efficient and effective. Less than 20 Terran
years after the first orichalcum detector was built, the Helians had
amassed several tons of the substance, the product of a century of
effort and 2 centuries of thought.
Now, at last, the Helians could actually build the faster-than-light
propulsion systems they had theoretically grasped for over a century.
The work began immediately, but it would be yet another half a century
or so, by Terran reckoning, before the theory could be converted into
practical engineering, and the first true Helian starship launched.
MORE LATER.
Johnny1A
>
> Now, at last, the Helians could actually build the faster-than-light
> propulsion systems they had theoretically grasped for over a century.
> The work began immediately, but it would be yet another half a century
> or so, by Terran reckoning, before the theory could be converted into
> practical engineering, and the first true Helian starship launched.
>
> MORE LATER.
LATER.
The starship the Helians constructed would have looked strange indeed
to Homosentient eyes. The outer hull was composed of a type of
'living plastic' the Helians had developed, much of the interior
structure was composed of some very odd ultra-low-temperature forms of
water-ice.
This ship was the first to launch, followed every 20 years or so by
another. They were slow, compared to the ships the Helians would
later build, limited in practical terms to velocities of about 50
times the speed of light. They could be launched no more regularly
than every 20 Terran years or so, because it took that long to
assemble enough orichalcum to spare a few hundred kilograms for a new
starship.
The starships had various missions, all combined. They were to
explore nearby star systems, while all the time looking for some sign
of those Helians suddenly taken nearly 4 centuries before, on
Departure day. They were to watch for signs of the aliens
responsible, and learn whatever they could about them. Additionally,
of course, they were on the lookout for new sources of orichalcum.
It would be some time before the first objective was fulfilled:
though the Helians of Helius had no way to know it, the nearest world
on which their long-lost cousins still lived was over 1000 light-years
away. The large majority of those worlds where the involuntary
colonists had successfully thrived were in the Milky Way Galaxy,
across an intergalactic void from Helius.
In the search for orichalcum, they were slightly more successful in
the short term. Armed with their o-detectors, they tracked down small
accessible deposits that eventually enabled the Helians to build
faster, more capable starships.
In the meantime, some star systems proved to have sites sufficiently
hospitable for voluntary colonization, and so a second wave of Helian
settlement began to spread outward from Helius.
None of the new voluntary colonies were anything like as clement as
Helius had once been, since none had been heliuformed, but some were
nearly as good as Helius now was, in the aftermath of the supernova.
Already used to living underground and surviving using artificial
life-support systems and artificial ecologies, settlement on barren
alien worlds was not that large a mental shift for the Helians by this
time.
Over the course of the next 500 Terran years or so, the Helians
continued to expand outward from Helius, their ships and other
technologies improving slowly but steadily. Colony worlds rose, on
planets as different from Helius as Mars is from Earth, save only that
the temperature was always cold, and liquid helium had to be present.
Asteroids were settled, moonlets converted, and free-space habitats
built. Ironically, as technology advanced, the free-space habitats
became the environment most like what Helius had once been, the only
places where Helians could experience an existence something like what
their ancestors had known on Helius itself (not counting the
heliuformed worlds which they had not yet regained contact with).
By about 1000 Terran years after the start of star flight, the Helians
had reached early TL11 and their technological advancement had reached
a plateau of slower development. They were spreading steadily
outward, and they finally made a physics discovery that revolutionized
interstellar travel. They learned how to construct enormous
trans-light teleportation systems, which could bridge thousands of
light-years in an instant, though gateway apparatus on each end was
necessary. Once this technology was developed, the Core Helians
(meaning the descendents of those left behind by the Eldren on Helius)
began to expand at a tremendous rate.
Culturally, too, the Core Helians were changing. Up until the
Departure Day, all Helians had been in telepathic contact, so one
group could not change much culturally separately from the rest. The
Departure changed that.
With ever-faster ships and teleportation machines to throw those ships
from star to star in the blink of a perceptor, it was inevitable that
sooner or later, the Core Helians would come back into contact with
their sundered kin.
When it happened, though, it surprised everyone.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
> sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A) wrote in message
>
> from star to star in the blink of a perceptor, it was inevitable that
> sooner or later, the Core Helians would come back into contact with
> their sundered kin.
>
> When it happened, though, it surprised everyone.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
The Core Helians had undergone extensive changes since the Diaspora
and the Nova. Their homeworld's biosphere had been utterly
devastated, and they had been driven into a largely subsurface
existence, which had paradoxically made their expansion into space
easier.
Recall that the Helians had extensive, though not unlimited, control
over their bodily structures, including the ability to gradually
change from from relatively small (1 hex) to very large (10+ hexes)
scales. But life underground had forced the Core Helians to adopt
1-hex scale almost universally, since space was forever at a premium
even in the enormous underground cities.
This trait carried over as the Core Helians expanded out into space,
first across their star system once again, then out to the stars on
their own. Volume aboard their early interstellar spacecraft was even
more limited than the free volume in their underground cities. The
1-hex size limit became ingrained into the Core Helian culture, as
well as a common physiotype.
Where once Helians on Helius had used hundreds of bizarrely different
forms, adapted for countless different purposes, the later Core
Helians came to regard that sort of individuality as a mark of the old
times, before their history changed forever in the Diaspora. Their
culture came to mandate a single form of phsyiology, much like many
Homosentient cultures would mandate only certain forms of clothing.
Though the Core Helians retained the ability to alter their
morphology, it became a _strongly_ disapproved of behavior, to the
point of physical force being used to discourage such behavior.
The cultural change was rooted in practicality. Just as a compact
size was more practical for life underground and aboardship, the
design of both cavern-city and starship was greatly simplified by the
adoption of a single morphology. (For comparison, imagine the
difficulty of designing automobiles if the number of limbs, heads,
eyes, etc, could vary at random among humans).
As Core Helian technology continued to advance, eventually they were
able to construct immense space habitats, within which conditions were
actually more Helius-like than Helius itself, post-Nova. But the
cultural change was too ingrained to change, even though the immense
O'Neill-like habitats could have supported a more relaxed range of
forms. The Core Helians retained their intense, driven devotion to
personal sovereignty, but at the same time their collective will to
enforce social discipline was equally ruthless. The tension between
these impulses provided the dynamism of their very alien society.
Meanwhile, what of those enormous numbers of Helians who had been
taken to other worlds by the Eldren?
The large majority of all sapient Helians had been taken from Helius,
and scattered across the heliuformed worlds the Eldren had prepared.
Naturally, most of these involuntary colonies failed rapidly, all of
the transportees dying within a generation or three. But some
succeeded, some in improbable circumstances. In all cases, the tech
level fell backward, from the high TL9 that had prevailed on Helius at
the time of the Diaspora, sometimes down to TL0.
But in the more successful worlds, the tech level began to rise again,
as populations rose and the populations increased. Indeed, after the
Nova, most of the heliuformed worlds were considerably more clement
and familiar to Helians than Helius itself had become for the Core
Helians. Some of the worlds, more successful than average examples of
the Eldren's heliuforming abilities, were nearly paradisical compared
to Helius post-Nova.
Some of the involuntary colonies thrived sufficiently that they began
to expand back into space themselves. In some cases, they found star
systems more rewarding of exploration than the tiny Heliustar System's
three worlds had been.
Out of the vast number of colonies, perhaps 100 really throve. Of
those, 10 or 15 hit the lucky break of having sufficient supplies of
orichalcum in their star systems to 'jump start' interstellar travel.
Sufficient supplies, of course, being relatively tiny, but still more
than most. Absent such available supplies, interstellar travel had to
wait for theoretical physics to predict the existence of orichalcum,
which absent samples usually needed high TL10, as it had for the Core
Helians.
Of the 10 or 15 that had sufficient orichalcum to get the short-cut,
one star system had even more.
A typical star system in which the Eldren had placed a colony might
have had 1 to 5 teratons (trillion tons) of orichalcum, which sounds
like a lot, and isn't.
Those 1 to 5 teratons were the total supply for the ENTIRE star
system, and the large majority of that orichalcum would inevitably be
inside the stellar primary, and most of what was left tended to be
deep within planetary bodies. Generally, only unusual circumstances
would bring a relatively large amount of the stuff within easy
discovery distance of the surface, such as would later happen on Eos I
or Earth.
But every rule has its exceptions.
One of the heliuformed worlds the Eldren placed a colony on circled a
star in the Milky Way Galaxy (as did most of the colonies, actually).
This star was an odd choice for such a heliuformation. Most of the
new colonies were on worlds that orbited spectral-class M dwarf stars.
This world orbited a brilliant, massive spectral-class 'A' sun.
Naturally, it orbited it at a tremendous distance, much further than
Pluto orbits Sol, and even so the finished heliuformation left what
was, by Helian standards, a sweltering tropical world.
But it was still just within their habitability range, and it was rich
in useful metals and resources. Furthermore, the Eldren, for whatever
reason, gifted it with two transported population centers, and a total
starting population of over 60 million Helians. Once the initial
confusion and chaos passed, and the new power structures the Helians
inevitably created stabilized, this colony throve rather better than
most. Their population fell to no lower than 40 million, their
technology base bottomed out at TL7 and began to rise again.
This big, hot star had a big stellar system. It had 18 major planets,
three asteroid belts, and 10 of the 18 planets were gas giants with
more-or-less extensive satellite systems, including several moons of
planetary scale. One of the gas giants, the seventh world out, was a
monster, much more massive than Jupiter, and it had an incredible 131
moons, 21 of which were of Luna-size or bigger.
Let us call this star what Terrans would someday call it, Ophiris, and
its Helians the Ophirian Helians (to distinguish from the Core
Helians). The actual heliuformed world Terrans would someday call
simply Ophiris XVIII, and the super-scale gas giant would be known to
Terrans as Colossus.
Though the Ophirian Helians were doing well in their new home, they
did encounter things they had never experienced on Helius, and one of
those things was something they came to call 'the Static' (or that
would be the closest translation). Recall that the primary means of
Helian communication was Telepathy. They discovered that every so
often, telepathic 'noise' filled the ether, reducing their normally
global range to a few miles or less, varying during these periods so
that range might vary from a mile to 10 miles up and down, until the
Static period passed. Then many years would pass, and the Static
would return again, in a regular cycle.
The Ophiran Helians explored their new home system, discovering many
useful things, though their ultimate-cold nature made colonization of
any of the other worlds an iffy proposition. But as they explored,
they discovered something which made the Ophiria System nearly unique
in the Local Group of galaxies.
Their tech base had recovered to the TL8/9 border, and their ships
exploring the system eventually explored the satellites of the largest
gas giant. At first glance, it wasn't the most interesting of the 131
moons, a rocky globe about 300 miles in diameter, more of a big
asteroid than a full-scale moon. It wasn't the first to be visited,
both because of its modest size and because it was one of the inner
moons, deep inside a radiation belt larger and rather more intense
than that of Jupiter. To the Ophirian Helians, even more vulnerable
to hard radiation than Homosentients, this object was hard to reach
and appeared uninteresting anyway. But eventually, curiousity and
their thorough nature led them to pay it a visit.
The reason for their curiousity was that they had found, when their
ships approached Colossus, that the Static was constant near the
megagiant. The reason it came and went cyclically was that when
Colossus and Ophiria XVIII were on the same side of the star, and the
two worlds were more or less lined up, the Static flooded outward to
engulf the new Helian world. As the faster-moving inner world moved
on in its orbit, the Static would pass. It only reached out to
Ophiria XVIII when the star, Colossus, and the Helian world were in a
line within a few degrees of each other.
But any Helian ship that got close to Colossus encountered the same
telepathic Static, flooding the ether near the gas giant. (Near
meaning about 2 or 3 AU.)
Eventually, they traced the Static down to its source: the modest
little moonlet orbiting close in to the gas giant, in the deadly
depths of the radiation belts. When they finally landed, they
discovered dozens of other weird effects. Machinery behaved oddly.
Magnetic sensors went mad, and telepathic trasnmission (Telesend) was
impossible even at physical-contact distances. On the other hand,
once they actually landed, at times receptivity was so high that the
Helian astronauts could listen in on conversations back on the new
homeworld, which normally have been out of range by orders of
magnitude.
The reason for this was that the tiny body on which they landed
contained the single richest lode of orichalcum that would ever be
discovered in the Milky Way Galaxy, the largest supply of the
miracle-material to be found outside a star or a major gas giant.
Most star systems might have 1 to 5 teratons for an entire system,
this one tiny body contained more than that. Much, much more. It was
so rich in the extradimensional material that it sprayed a constant
cone of telepathic noise outward away from the star, generated by the
interaction of all that orichalcum, the magnetic and radiation fields
of Colossus, and the energy pouring from the star. When that cone of
telepathic radiation swept over Ophiria XVIII ever so often, it
produced 'the Static'.
Half a billion years later, Terrans would name this moonlet 'Ophir',
after the legendary source of King Solomon's gold. This moonlet would
provide the name for the star as well. The moonlet was rich beyond
belief in orichalcum, the miracle-substance making up no less than
.008% of the moonlet's mass! Where the Core Helians had needed 50
Terran years to assemble _one gram_ of orichalcum, scouring their star
system to do it, Ophir contained _thousands_ of teratons of the
material. Even the outer surface crust of the body contained readily
available _gigatons_ of the rarest technologically useful substance
known!
The Ophiran Helians, of course, had no idea of just what they had, not
yet.
MORE LATER.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The Ophiran Helians, of course, had no idea of just what they had, not
> yet.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
The Ophirian Helians begant to experiment with their peculiar
discovery, and it didn't take them long to discovery many of its weird
properties. Unlike most peoples after their discovery of orichalcum's
existence, they had tons of sample to work with, not micrograms, and
as a result, they were able to 'shortcut' through much of the
development process their Core Helians cousins were experiencing. The
Ophirian Helians developed faster-than-light travel and
communications, and the TL 11-12 'force' physics, far sooner than the
Core Helians did, though their application was necessarily cruder,
given that their engineering implementation was two tech levels lower.
Just as the Core Helians would later do, the Ophirian Helians began to
expand outward from their new homeworld, seeking both an explanation
for what had brought their ancestors from Helius to Ophiria XVIII, and
new resources and new lands for settlement. Ironically, the expanding
new empire of the Ophirian Helians was, culturally and
physiologically, much more like the pre-nova Helians that the Helians
left behind on Helius maintained.
With the broad stable biosphere and immense resources of their
heliuformed new homeworld, the Ophirian Helians had no need to retreat
underground, and thus no reason to adopt a single, one-hex physical
structure species-wide. With enormous supplies of food and other
natural resources, they could afford to be more profligate. This was
a two-edged sword, of course. Though it made their live on Ophiria
XVIII far easier than life on post-nova Helius, they also weren't
driven to develop the life-support technologies and other techniques
that their Core Helians cousins found so useful in space exploration.
The starships of the Ophirian Helians were peculiar, in a sense.
Their enormous reserves of easily accessible orichalcum enabled them
to build starships capable of enormous trans-light velocities. They
were very inefficient, compared to the Core Helians ships, because of
their lower tech level, but the Ophirian Helians had plenty of
orichalcum and plenty of fissionable metal for fuel, to make up the
difference. The odd result was the TL9 starships of the Ophirian
Helians were considerable _faster_ than the more advanced TL11
starships of the Core Helians.
With their faster ships and large fuel supplies, they were limited (at
first) only by their poorer life-support, computer, sensor, and
protective technologies. As those improved, the Ophirian Helians
spread like wildfire, exploring as many star systems in their first 10
years of star flight as their Core Helians cousins would explore in
50.
About 30 years after they developed star flight, the Ophirian Helians
came across the first of their cousin-worlds, orbiting a star some 300
light-years from Ophiria. Soon after that, they encountered another,
470 light-years from Ophiria in another direction. As was always the
case with Helians, these encounters resulted in complex, multifaceted,
subtly ruthless power struggles, on every level from the individual to
the full-scale culture. Of course, given their immense resources, the
Ophirian Helians always won.
These encounters brought something to the Helians that the species had
never known before in all its sapient history: cultural conflict.
Always before, throughout their history, their planetary-range
telepathic abilities had meant that there was a single, unified
world-wide culture, even at TL0. Struggles existed between
individuals, tribes, cities, 'nations', 'religions', and many other
categories half-comprehensible or utterly incomprehensible to a
Homosentient, but always they'd known a common background, a common
language, a common set of basic assumptions.
Separated by the Eldren Diaspora, for the first time in all their
history, different groups of Helians began to develop in different
directions. By the time they began to meet again, they had been apart
long enough, and changed enough, to know really different cultures.
Among Homosentients, contact between really different cultures often
would lead to violence. Among Helians, with their almost absolute
self-focus and delicately balanced stress between personal sovereignty
and a balance of power, it pretty much _always_ resulted in violence.
A new unified culture began to emerge, almost entirely derived from
and controlled by the Ophirian Helians. As their ships expanded
outward, they discovered other Helian-settled worlds every so often,
and in each case the new world was ruthlessly absorbed into the
growing empire, its people and resources directed to the task of
further expansion. No practical resistance was possible, since the
Ophirians had a technology edge over most of the other involuntary
colonists, and they had the _overwhelming_ advantage of the orichalcum
reserves of Ophir itself, a military/economic edge against which their
conquered territories and peoples could make no meaningful response.
The Ophiria System was in the Milky Way Galaxy, on the side facing the
Clouds of Magellan. The Ophirian Helians were quite able to compute
where Helius was, in the far-off Greater Cloud, but it was as yet
beyond their technology to send ships across intergalactic space, even
with their huge orichalcum supply. But they began to spread around
their own region of the Milky Way, and ~1000 Terran years after they
achieved FTL starflight, the Ophirian Helians had subordinated fully
20 other Helian colony-worlds, and had established hundreds of
'secondary' colonies on worlds not technically habitable to Helians,
but useful for one reason or another. Their populations had grown
enormously, to the point that Ophiria XVIII itself was becoming a
city-girded planet.
It was at about this time that the questing ships from their Core
Helian cousins in the Greater Cloud of Magellan finally regained
contact with the Ophirian Helians of the Milky Way Galaxy.
MORE LATER
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> It was at about this time that the questing ships from their Core
> Helian cousins in the Greater Cloud of Magellan finally regained
> contact with the Ophirian Helians of the Milky Way Galaxy.
>
> MORE LATER
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
Contact between the Core Helians and the Ophirian Helians came about
when the Core Helians developed a new generation of their stargate
technology, one advanced enough to bridge the gap between the Greater
Cloud of Magellan and the Milky Way.
The instantaneous-transport technology of the Core Helians required
apparatus at both ends, so before the ships could be teleported to the
Milky Way Galaxy, the Core Helians had to send an ships across the
intergalactic void by conventional means, using 'ordinary' FTL tech.
This was a daunting task, even for the high TL11 technology of the
Core Helians in the Greater Cloud. Such an expedition would have to
fly free of support, tens of thousands of light-years from any
possible source of supply or assistance. Their various mechanisms
would have to remain operational for a period of decades, and their
supplies would have to be recycled with sufficient perfection to
sustain a crew for decades.
At first, in the face of the enormous obstacles, the Core Helians
attempted to send automated ships. They made dozens of such attempts,
in fact, but in every case, the limited abilities of the cybernetic
intellects the Core Helians could construct proved unequal to the
unexpected challenges of such a tremendous journey. The Core Helian
computer technology was not deficient, but true artificial
consciousness was a tremendously difficult project even at TL11.
After dozens of failed automated attempts, the Core Helians decided
that they would have to resort to sending a 'manned' expedition to the
Milky Way to set up the other end of the teleportal system.
Even with their technology, there was no way to reduce the travel time
below roughly 60 Terran years. Sixty years of flight time, without
support or resupply, far beyond communications range, far beyond any
possible assistance. The ships would have to be stripped down for
reliability and efficiency, meaning that the enormous trip time (over
half of a Helian lifetime) would be neither particularly pleasant nor
very interesting, barring emergencies. Altogether, it promised to be
a difficult and dangerous matter.
Among Homosentients, such a crew would be selected either by offering
enormous potential rewards for themselves or their families, or by
appealing to intangibles such as patriotism, religious fervor, or
concern for community, or by drafting unwilling crew. The later would
in fact be unlikely for such a mission, since an unwilling crew would
be inclined to sabotage the mission.
Among Helians, concepts like 'willing' or 'unwilling' would be hard to
even express meaningfully. Naturally, no Helian wanted to be on this
mission, it was a low-personal-reward matter by its very nature.
While the Core Helian culture was quite capable of offering rewards
for desired choices, but they were still Helians, and psychologically
unable to offer more of a reward than the bare minimum necessary.
Thus, in the end, the ships were crewed by Helians from the bottom of
the various ladders of authority and status, who couldn't get out of
it. With Homosentients, that would have been a recipe for disaster,
with Helians, it was just 'normal'. The crew were incapable of being
angry about it, it was 'just life'.
The expeditionary fleet (fully 72 ships) made the difficult and
dangerous journey, and out of the 72 ships that left the Greater Cloud
of Magellan, four ships finally reached the Milky Way Galaxy, all of
them with their various onboard systems near failure and none of them
with their full crew complement still alive. But they did make it,
just barely, where the robot ships had not.
The only way the survivors could return home, of course, was to
activate the teleportal linkage. There wasn't a ghost of a chance
that the nearly exhausted starships could make the intergalactic
journey again through open space. This was part of the plan, of
course, and arose both from the limits of Core Helian technology and
the characteristic ruthlessness of the Helian mentality.
The survivors of the journey selected a suitable star system, with
suitable sources of the necessary raw materials. It was also
necessary that the selected location be relatively close to a 'neutron
star', since one of the necessary resources to build a stargate could
be found only near such a body.
The later requirement forced the ragged survivors to spend another
couple of years of searching, but at last they had what they needed,
close enough: a red dwarf system with several planets within 30
light-years of a neutron-star remnant from a long-previous supernova.
Having found that, construction began.
The tiny handful of survivors couldn't do much construction on their
own, but they could and did deploy robots, which duplicated themselves
several times over, and then began construction on the immense
mechanisms necessary to create a teleportal. This required about 7
Terran years, but in the end, they succeeded in activating the
gateway, enabling the survivors to teleport home in a split-instant.
With the initial connection open, it was simple to open additional
links, and a wave of Core Helian starships poured through from the
Greater Cloud to the Milky Way. Less than 20 years later, the Core
Helians encountered the edges of the steadily expanding Ophirian
Helian empire.
MORE LATER
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> With the initial connection open, it was simple to open additional
> links, and a wave of Core Helian starships poured through from the
> Greater Cloud to the Milky Way. Less than 20 years later, the Core
> Helians encountered the edges of the steadily expanding Ophirian
> Helian empire.
>
> MORE LATER
>
> Shermanlee
LATER
The first encounters came as something of a shock, or would have if
Helians were psychologically capable of shock. Even for the staid
Helians, the encounters were interesting, beause the Core Helians were
greatly changed from what their ancestors had been a few thousand
years before, while the Ophirian Helians were more-or-less similar to
that earlier cultural/physionomic form.
Given Helian nature, it was perhaps inevitable that the initial
contact between these long-lost kin would rapidly blossom into
full-blown warfare. It was peculiar warfare even by Helian standards,
however, being both incredibly ferocious and also oddly restrained in
sme ways.
Each side of the power struggle had some major advantages. The Core
Helians had a TL11 tech base, a culture well adapted to making
effective use of limited resources, and above all else, a nearly
unassailable home base. Helius itself, and its associated worlds and
habitats, were in the Greater Cloud of Magellan, accessible only via
the teleportal gates the Core Helians controlled.
The Ophirian Helians, on the other hand, had a much larger resource
base, a larger population base, shorter supply lines, more practical
experience in spatial warfare, both strategic and tactical, and above
all else, access to nearly unlimited supplies of orichalcum, the
extradimensional substance that was the indispensable base of the FTL
travel/communications and much of their other tech used by both sides.
The war raged on for over 1000 Terran years. In the course of it,
entire heliuformed biospheres were wrecked, worlds that had been
living and habitable for only a few centuries reduced to barely living
echoes of themselves. Other worlds endured, but heavily damaged.
Entire fleets of starships were vaporized, shredded, entrapped,
destroyed, as each side struggled to establish dominance as their
instinct demanded. Each side would periodically be rent as a major
shift in internal power balances (sometimes caused by enemy action)
broke down the internal peace and ignited local power struggles.
The initial advantages eroded as the war went on. The Core Helians
discovered some other sources of orichalcum, nothing remotely as rich
as Ophir itself, but enough to keep their war machine rolling along.
The Ophirian Helians eventually learned how to build their own
teleportal systems, or captured Core Helians gate stations.
Neither side was able to gain a permanent advantage, but neither was
able to let go, either, their instincts were too strong. The war went
on, and on, and on, until at last, it began to appear that there was a
real danger that the Helians would wipe themselves out, taking their
worlds' biospheres with them.
Through all this, the Watcher and his fellow Eldren observed in
fascination, confusion, and sometimes dismay. They did not
particularly like watching their heliuformed worlds reduced to
lifelessness again, after their hard work, and they hated seeing their
fascinating 'pets' risk annihiliating each other entirely, thus
depriving the Watcher and his fellows of their hobby. After some
debate, the Watcher decided that intervention would be necessary.
The Core Helians and the Ophirian Helians had waged war for over 1000
Terran years, and had gotten very very good at it. They had TL11
technology, enormous resource bases, gigantic fleets of warships, and
literally hundreds of billions of warriors. It took the hundred or so
Eldren who 'intervened' less than 24 Terran hours to suppress the war,
across both galaxies.
This exercise of raw power reminded the Helians on both sides of the
fact that the Eldren, though they might directly intervene in Helian
affairs only on the rarest of occasions, _could_ do so at will and
with terrifying effectiveness. In the coure of about a day, the war
ended, and the Helians were compelled to begin working out an enforced
peace. What resistance was attempted was crushed with ruthless
efficiency, albeit more or less humanely.
The Eldren compelled the Ophirian Helians to grant the Core Helians
full access to the orichalcum reserves of Ophir. The Core Helians
were constrained to permit the Ophirian Helians to make full use of
their hyper-teleportation machines. Gradually, a single Helian power
structure emerged, and a new Helian society began to spread across the
still unexplored regions of the Milky Way and the Greater and lesser
Clouds of Magellan.
Though it began inauspiciously, with an imposed peace, this was in
fact to be the beginning of what passed for the Helians for their
golden age.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
> Though it began inauspiciously, with an imposed peace, this was in
> fact to be the beginning of what passed for the Helians for their
> golden age.
>
> Shermanlee
LATER.
Under the imposed peace laid upon them by their Eldren
observers/benefactors, the Helians were forced to establish a new
combined power structure without their usual technique of large-scale
violence, though individual violence remained in use as they always
had. Had the Helians been Homosentients, tremendous resentment would
have accompanied the enforced peace, but Helians just could not think
that way.
What the Helians _did_ experience was a fear-based recognition of just
how overwhelming the power gap between the Eldren and themselves
really was. One emotion that Helians experienced that Homosentients
would fully comprehend was sheer, basic _fear_. They were now all too
aware that their continued existence hinged on the sufferance of a
handful of alien beings older than the Helian species.
The Helians had known that the Eldren _existed_ since the Day of the
Diaspora, and the Core Helians had learned a little after that, but
direct contact did not occur until the Eldren intervened to stop the
Helians' war. After that, some direct communication began, and the
Helians learned a little. However, what they learned only tended to
reinforce the Helians' correct impression that the Eldren possessed
overwhelming power.
The shared fear of Eldren power helped drive the Helians to establish
their common power structure. A great deal of assassination,
intimidation, theft, extortion, and other means Homosentients usually
consider unsavory were joined by persuasion, and other means, and over
the course of a hundred Terran years or so a stable new power
structure emerged.
With the distraction of the large-scale power struggles removed, the
Helians began to divert the energy they had spent in striving for
power within their societies to gaining power and possession by
expanding into new worlds and new regions of space.
What followed was a period of steady expansion unmatched in previous
Helian history. Populations swelled, and world after world was
explored and settled. Every so often a new Helian world, settled by
the involuntary diaspora centuries earlier, would be encountered and
absorbed into the growing joint power-structure, usually by
intimidation or other low-key means, sometimes by force. A thousand
Terran years after the Eldren ended their great war, the Helians had
spread across 5000 worlds.
The Eldren, for their own reasons, lent occasional aid to the Helians.
Sometimes they heliuformed additional worlds, to increase the number
of Helian environments and their own potential entertainment.
Ten thousand years after the end of the Helian War, they had expanded
to a million worlds. Another 5000 years was sufficient for the
Helians to expand up to 100 million worlds spread across the Milky Way
Galaxy, the Clouds of Magellan, and some other 'satellite' galaxies of
the Milky Way, similar to the Clouds but not visible from Sol.
The majority of the Helian worlds, either heliuformed or otherwise
settled, were in orbit around cool spectral class M dwarf stars. Most
of the worlds that did orbit hotter stars orbited _far_ out, on the
fringes of their respective star systems. But some Helians settled in
space-borne habitats, usually in the outer reaches of a star system,
and some settled on comet-like bodies, in Kuiper Regions and Oort
Shell zones.
But the expanding Helian society finally began to reach a period of
stability. Having spread all over the Milky Way and its satellite
mini-galaxies, and with a technology that had stabilized at the high
end of TL11, the Helians now settled into a long period of relative
stability. A very long period, in fact, a period on the order of a
million Terran years.
This was the greatest age of the Helian civilization. After their
expansion in space ended, their populations continued to grow, until
some worlds were covered in immense cities that reached from ocean to
ocean. Fleets of starships ranged from world to world, eventually
numbering into the hundreds of millions of ships.
The Watcher and his fellow Eldren watched in interest as the Helian
society settled into a stable state, and even after it did, the
details remained interesting. However, toward the end of this period,
the Eldren discovered something that they found both quite surprising
and also fascinating, but which the Helians found to be rather
disturbing.
MORE LATER
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The Watcher and his fellow Eldren watched in interest as the Helian
> society settled into a stable state, and even after it did, the
> details remained interesting. However, toward the end of this period,
> the Eldren discovered something that they found both quite surprising
> and also fascinating, but which the Helians found to be rather
> disturbing.
>
> MORE LATER
>
> Shermanlee
LATER
The discovery of intelligent life on Helius a bit over a million years
previously had startled the Watcher and his fellows. It was something
they had never even imagined, self-replicating beings of the Helian
sort, living on planetary surfaces, etc.
They discovered the Helians by detecting the electromagnetic emissions
of the Helian civilization on Helius. The Watcher and his fellows
kept their senses attuned after that for the tell-tale signs of
intelligent EM signals, but they never found any not of Eldren or
Helian origin.
However, a little over a million years after the discovery of the
Helians, one of the Watcher's compatriots happened to be crossing the
Milky Way, on her own incomprehensible business, when she happened to
detect a pulse of telepathic activity that was clearly neither of
Helian nor Eldren origin.
The detection showed little or no trace of thought, _per se_. It was
more of a simple pulse of activity, life's dial tone, for want of any
better phrase. To even call it 'telepathic' was not really accurate,
it was more basic, more primitive than that, more of a simple but
steady psionic radiation.
Intrigued, she traced the faint emission, following it across the
light-years toward a star the Eldren (or the Watcher's group, anyway)
had never visited previously. As she approached, she perceived and
analyzed the star and its environs with senses both physical and
psionic, as well as senses totally unrecognizable to Homosentients.
What she found as she approached the source of the odd psionic 'tone'
she had sensed was a spectral-G2 yellow star, a bit heavy on
heavy-element content but otherwise more or less typical of its type.
Orbiting it was a family of worlds, asteroids, and icy debris, again
fairly typical. But there was something very _atypical_ to be found
on the third planet of this star.
To her stunned surprise and amazed shock, the third planet of this
star boasted something that until that moment she and her fellows had
known of only on Helius: a native biosphere.
It was unquestionably a living world, but the biosphere on this planet
was utterly unlike that of Helius. Helius had been a world of
liquid-helium oceans and temperatures barely above absolute zero.
This world was marked by oceans of liquid water and temperature ranges
hundreds of Kelvin degrees above absolute zero. The ferocious yellow
star poured such copious amounts of energy onto the planet that the
biosphere was energized by light, not the geothermal and chemical
energy that had powered life on Helius.
On Helius, life had been confined to the oceans and the coasts. Here,
life forms had spread across the continental highlands without
technology or sapience. Life forms had spread from the depths of the
oceans to the highest peaks, and as she probed, she kept discovering
new niches into which the local life forms had moved.
She summoned the Watcher and her fellow observer/experimenters, and
the awed Eldren assembled to examine this incredible discovery. The
more they probed and studied, the more surprises they found.
The immense energy budget available from the hot stellar primary made
for a biosphere that was far more complex and energetic than Helius
had ever come close to boasting. The bulk of the living matter was
comprised of microscopic organisms, but there were multicellular
creatures, some photosynthetic autotrophs, some heterotrophs feeding
on the autotrophs or other heterotrophs.
As the Eldren probed, their amazement at the vitality of this new form
of planetary life kept growing. They discovered microscopic life
forms in essentially every possible niche on the planet, in the
oceans, the soil, the atmosphere, the poles, the tropics, the
underground depths miles below the surface, and other even more
obscure places. [1]
As the Watcher and the others studied this new kind of life, they kept
finding new surprises. They had been observing for over a local
century before they found a major new shock: this new kind of life
had managed to cross from one planet to another unaided![2]
The third planet was by far the most clement and rich in life, but the
fourth world had a thinning atmosphere and some liquid water. The
Eldren discovered that life-forms clearly related to those of the
third planet were also to be found on the fourth world. [3]
The biosphere on the fourth planet was mostly microscopic, but in a
few oceans and seas larger forms were appearing. In the colder
environs of the fourth world, the life forms were less diverse and
successful, and the Eldren realized that their presence was something
of an accident. They were able to deduce that microorganisms from the
third world had been brought to the fourth by meteoritic matter
exchange, and a few had survived the journey and managed to eke out a
new existence on the fourth planet.
Amazed to discover that planetary life forms could survive such a
trip, the Eldren began to search the rest of the local system, and
they did indeed find other places in the local star system where the
life of the third world had taken precarious root. But by far the
richest and most complex ecosphere was that of the home world itself,
the third planet.
The fourth world, the Eldren saw, was too small and too cold to
sustain its biosphere long, on a cosmic scale. Already, its local
atmosphere was thinning, the water freezing or photodisassociating,
the radiation levels rising. The Watcher calculated that the fourth
world would 'freeze out' in only another few tens of millions of
years, already it had declined from its living height.
But to the fascination of the Watcher and his fellows, this new type
of life had managed to bring forth multicellular life forms on both
the third and fourth worlds. The ones on the fourth world appeared to
be rather older, but also less complex and interesting. They were
also almost surely doomed as the fourth world's decline continued.
On the third, they made up a symphony of living shapes and forms the
like of which the Eldren had never conceived. Then, to the Eldren's
further delighted surprise, they found yet another set of macroforms,
derived again from the third planet, on still another world of that
star system. [4]
The star system, of course, was Sol, and the third planet was none
other than our own Earth. The time was the late Cambrian/early
Ordovician period, and the Watcher and the other Eldren were looking
down upon the last stages of that biological megaburst that would
someday be called the 'Cambrian Explosion'.
MORE LATER.
Note [1]: I mention that Earth's lands and air abounded with plants
and animals at a time before most of the current occupants of those
niches evolved. I didn't say that the flying and land-moving
creatures of that period were anything familiar to us. The first true
fish were only just appearing at this point in time. In my story
background, there was a lot going on 500 million years ago on Earth
that hasn't yet been found in the fossil record. The first land
plants _of our sort_ appeared later, during the Silurian Period. The
plants before them were different.
Note [2]: It's been speculated that microorganisms could survive an
interplanetary journey as 'passengers' on planetary material ejected
by impacts, and thus move from world to world. Samples of Martian
rock have made their way to Earth after being kicked free of Mars by
big impacts. It's harder for the process to work in reverse, but not
impossible in theory. I assume that microbial life appeared on Terra
early, in the last stages of the intense early bombardment, and that
enough of it was thrown free of Earth and reached Mars to seed a
biosphere in the then-receptive environment of the someday-to-be-Red
Planet. Mars became the main 'secondary' biosphere of Sol System, but
no the only one.
Note [3]: The 'fourth planet' is of course Mars. I assume for my
purposes that it's 'warm and wet' period extended further forward than
most real-world estimates currently suspect. For the Mars of 500
megayears ago, picture the ancient living Mars of THS from "In The
Well", with a slightly more clement environment and more biodiversity.
Note [4]: Where else in the Sol System did Terran microorganisms get
carried during earlier ages, and did any survive into later ages?
That remains to be revealed.
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> The star system, of course, was Sol, and the third planet was none
> other than our own Earth. The time was the late Cambrian/early
> Ordovician period, and the Watcher and the other Eldren were looking
> down upon the last stages of that biological megaburst that would
> someday be called the 'Cambrian Explosion'.
>
> MORE LATER.
>
LATER.
In their amazement at their discovery, the Watcher and his
followers/fellow hobbyists did little for some time. The discovery of
Helius and the Helians had revealed to them the _possibility_ of
planetary life, and thus the possibility of additional examples, but
in their theorizing they had been generalizing from one example, which
tends to lead to erroneous conclusions, even when the 'gods' do it.
For several thousand Terran years, they studied the intricacies of the
primary biosphere on Earth, and the secondary biosphere on Mars. The
third main Earth-derived Solarian biosphere was in such a surprising
place that it took even the Eldren did not find it until they had been
present in the Solar System for some centuries.
One of the things that the Watcher and his followers rapidly came to
realize, as they studied their new lifeforms, was that the potential
variations on this theme were orders of magnitude greater than the
variation potential of Helian life. As they studied the hereditary
mechanisms of DNA and RNA and the related epigenetic mechanisms, the
were awed by the potential for successful variation.
Already, they observed an amazing variety of niches on Earth itself,
with the potential for many more, but Earth was still only one world.
Mars, likewise, was a single planet, and it had fewer 'niches' than
Earth did by its very nature. It was probably inevitable that one of
the Eldren would wonder what would happen if more possibilities were
made available.
This was certainly within their power. Already, they had transformed
barren worlds into more-or-less functional biospheres derived from
pre-nova Helius. In those cases, they had been facing a time limit
and forced to hurry their work. For this project, they could afford
to take their time and do the work carefully and properly, since it
was not overshadowed by any particular time limit.
Once they reached the decision to go forward, a few thousand years
after their discovered the Solar System and its native life-forms,
they began work immediately on the largest project the Watcher's
Eldren had ever attempted. It was a major effort, even by Eldren
standards.
They began to scout the Milky Way Galaxy and its satellite galaxies
for suitable worlds, places to establish new biospheres into which
Terran life-forms could be introduced, to provide more potential
niches, more chances for the fascinating possibilities of this new
kind of life to manifest. The great search would go on for ages, and
in a sense it never entirely ended.
Even the ability of the Eldren has limits. They might as well have
been gods by most mortal standards, but they were gods with a small
'g'. They had to have stars and planets sufficiently like Sol and
Earth as a starting resource before they could begin terraforming.
Though such were the exception, they did exist, and the Eldren built
up a list of several thousand candidates on their initial survey, a
list that would grow longer with time and further exploration.
Then came the actual terraformation processes. On planet after
planet, the Eldren began to change such things as atmospheric
composition, planetary temperature, even rotation rates. Some worlds
had thick reducing atmospheres stripped away, others had oceans of
water brought in from outside. Frigid worlds were heated, broiling
hot planets cooled. In a few cases, worlds were altered by especially
intrusive means (the 'rings of light' the Eosians would someday
discover, for ex).
In all this, they exercised much greater care and took more time and
precautions than they had for their work in 'heliuforming', since
there was no particular hurry. Some efforts went disastrously wrong,
some just didn't quite work right, but they could afford to experiment
and learn from their errrors.
By ~20,000 years after the Eldrens' discovery of the Solar System, the
Watchers had transformed about a million worlds into more-or-less
similar versions of Earth, complete with functional, self-sustaining
biospheres based on the life of Earth, with species imported from
Earth or Mars or both. Some of these worlds were so like Earth that
they were near-duplicates in terms of surface conditions. Others were
more exotic, though all could be considered generally 'Earth-like' in
a broad sense.
Of course, they were 'Earth-like' for an Earth on the
Cambrian-Ordovician border, not Earth-like in the sense of modern
Earth. But now evolution, which had been working with a life-type on
only 3 worlds, had a million, and the expanded possibilities began to
work themselves out.
The Eldren did not _stop_ with that first million or so, of course.
They continued to tweak and refine those worlds, as well as continuing
to terraform more elsewhere. After that first million worlds was
established, the Eldren had plenty of action zones to watch, and they
could cease worrying about some major extinction event taking away
their fascinating new entertainment, but the great project continued
at a slower pace even so. The first million worlds were mostly in the
Milky Way, with some spread out over the satellite bodies such as the
Clouds of Magellen (and others). Later, the Eldren would expand the
scale until they were spreading life derived from Earth across the
entire Local Group of galaxies, but that would take some time.
One rule the Watcher laid down at the very beginning, though, was to
minimize direct interference with Earth or Mars. As they were the
_source_ of the new kind of life, it was decided that it was best to
avoid more than minimal tampering. Even with the Eldren skill in
terraformation, Earth still remained the most complex and vital
biosphere they knew of, and they didn't wish to risk disrupting it
when it could still produce such fascinating results.
Meanwhile, the Helian civilization was not unaware of all this
activity on the part of the Eldren. Indeed, they could hardly _help_
but be aware of it, since the Eldren were unleashing energies on a
fantastic scale in the process of transforming entire worlds. The
power necessary to seriously alter planetary rotations and axial
tilts, to strip away Venus-type atmospheres, and warm frozen iceballs
to clement CHON temperatures could hardly be hidden from a TL11
civilization such as that of the Helians.
Further, the Eldren made no particular secret of their activities.
They were in communication with the Helians all through this, and had
been throughout the million-year plus time that the Helian
civilization had existed after the Nova. The Helians could simply ask
them what was happening, and they got a fairly accurate answer, since
it never occurred to the Eldren that the Helians might not approve of
this activity, or that they would even care.
The Helians, however, saw matters rather differently.
MORE LATER
Shermanlee
Mike Miller
> For several thousand Terran years, they studied the intricacies of the
> primary biosphere on Earth, and the secondary biosphere on Mars. The
> third main Earth-derived Solarian biosphere was in such a surprising
> place that it took even the Eldren did not find it until they had been
> present in the Solar System for some centuries.
Fascinating. Where's the third one? Europa? Saturn? Sol?
> The Helians, however, saw matters rather differently.
Interesting. Hurry up with the next installment. I command thee. ;)
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Prince Charon
> sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A) wrote in message news:<b3030854.03121...@posting.google.com>...
>
> > For several thousand Terran years, they studied the intricacies of the
> > primary biosphere on Earth, and the secondary biosphere on Mars. The
> > third main Earth-derived Solarian biosphere was in such a surprising
> > place that it took even the Eldren did not find it until they had been
> > present in the Solar System for some centuries.
>
> Fascinating. Where's the third one? Europa?
That would be my guess.
> Saturn?
Not at all likely.
> Sol?
Um, no. I really don't think so.
>
> > The Helians, however, saw matters rather differently.
>
> Interesting. Hurry up with the next installment. I command thee. ;)
Please do, this is facinating.
>
> Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Prince Charon, Unemployed Slacker
Joshua Stratton
> cra...@hotmail.com (Mike Miller) wrote in message news:<5dcb47db.03121...@posting.google.com>...
> > sherm...@hotmail.com (Johnny1A) wrote in message news:<b3030854.03121...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > > For several thousand Terran years, they studied the intricacies of the
> > > primary biosphere on Earth, and the secondary biosphere on Mars. The
> > > third main Earth-derived Solarian biosphere was in such a surprising
> > > place that it took even the Eldren did not find it until they had been
> > > present in the Solar System for some centuries.
> >
> > Fascinating. Where's the third one? Europa?
>
> That would be my guess.
>
> > Saturn?
>
> Not at all likely.
>
> > Sol?
>
> Um, no. I really don't think so.
Well, I figured either Jupiter or Saturn, though that'd be pretty
impressive. However, given that we're accepting interplanetary biological
exchange, I wonder if it might be possible to have simple life on comets,
perhaps _slowly_ spreading through the Oort cloud. It would only be active
really towards the comet's perihelion though.
Mike Miller
> > Saturn?
>
> Not at all likely.
Why not?
Saturn has warmth, pressure, moisture, organic chemicals and
reasonable sunlight levels in its clouds. Microbes, especially those
with relatively large surface areas, could easily remain suspended in
the gas giant atmosphere.
Here's the sci.astro FAQ on the matter:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part6/section-6.html
And a speculative document (for Jovian life):
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/J/Jupiterlife.html
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Johnny1A
> Further, the Eldren made no particular secret of their activities.
> They were in communication with the Helians all through this, and had
> been throughout the million-year plus time that the Helian
> civilization had existed after the Nova. The Helians could simply ask
> them what was happening, and they got a fairly accurate answer, since
> it never occurred to the Eldren that the Helians might not approve of
> this activity, or that they would even care.
>
> The Helians, however, saw matters rather differently.
>
> MORE LATER
>
> Shermanlee
LATER
The Helian civilization had grown, in the megayear or more since the
Eldren forced an end to their internecine warfare, into a gargantuan
entity. Spread across the disk and halo of the Milky Way Galaxy and
its satellite galaxies (the 'Greater Milky Way'), it was composed of
quintillions of individual Helians spread across tens of millions of
worlds and myriad artificial habitats. These later were immense and
elaborate structures, distant cryogenic cousins of the habitats which
a Homosentient named Gerald O'Neill would propose, half a billion
years later.
Helian starships ranged all over the Greater Milky Way, by means of
refined drives and their instantaneous stargate machines. A few
expeditions had even made the epic crossing to the Triangulum and the
Great Spiral in Andromeda, but the enormous travel times involved made
even simple exploration something of a problematic proposition.
However, for all their size and age, technological advancement among
the Helians had slowed to a crawl. In a million years, they had not
passed TL11. In part, this was because of a natural 'plateau' between
TL11 and the higher levels, but much more so it was the result of the
alien psychology of the Helians, and the very stability that made
their civilization possible.
The Helians, as has already been revealed, had a 'political' structure
that was simpler in essence than any Homosentient one, though
ferociously complex in practice. Basically, all Helian politics was
about the creation of a power structure, without the other elements
that usually figure into Homosentient politics.
The massive, Galaxy-wide power structure that made the Helian society
work, indeed, that _was_ their society in many ways, had developed a
tremendous number of features that served to maintain stability.
Stability was, indeed, the 'core value' of the Helian power structure.
So perfectly balanced had the power structure become that a
near-stasis has settled across the Helian civilization.
Earth's civilized history would, in fact, have a few examples of
similar societies, with stability as the core element, but no
Homosentient society would ever be so perfectly stable as the Helian
society became in its long golden age. We're just not wired for that
level of flawless stasis.
Individual Helians, of course, came and went. But the overall power
structure was self-sustaining and self-maintaining. Within the
framework of that power structure, the ancient power struggles of the
Helians continued as always.
When they learned of the existence of the CHON life that the Eldren
had discovered in the Sol System, the reaction of the Helians varied.
The vast majority were mildly interested, but their own affairs and
their own interests kept most of their attention. Some of the
Helians, in high places within the power structure, were more
interested, some scientifically and some 'politically'.
One common concern of these later Helians was that the Eldren,
occupied with their new interest, might lose interest in the Helians
and begin doing things not in Helian interest in the course of their
new experiments.
This fear was almost entirely unfounded. The Eldren were still
interested in the Helians, and the worlds and star systems in which
the Eldren were establishing their new biospheres were rarely star
systems Helians would have any use for. Indeed, the red dwarf stars
that Helians favored were and are much the most common of all stars,
while most of the new CHON biospheres were being established in K, G,
and F star systems.
This realization came to most of the powerful Helians early on.
Indeed, Helian scientists were in their own way as fascinated by the
'Solarigen' life as the Eldren. Helian starships watched from a safe
distance as the Eldren transformed worlds into new earths, and with
Eldren permission, even entered the Sol System to study Solarigen life
'at the source'.
There were a few Helians who were not reassured, however. Their
motives varied, but they remained convinced that the existence of
Solarigen life was a threat to either the Helian society as a whole,
or at least to their own interests. This group was never more than a
tiny fraction of the total Helian decision-making class, but they were
spread all over the Helian empire, and they kept in touch. A quiet,
secretive subset of the great power structure had now formed, a subset
with many goals, but united and defined by a hostility to the
existence of 'Solarigen' life.
This group was not all of one mind about goals. Some merely opposed
the Eldren's plans to spread Solarigen life beyond the Sol System.
Others believed that the danger was not ended until the new kind of
life was gone entirely. Still others merely wanted some way to
control where the new forms of life were established.
In later years, considerable puzzlement would exist over the source of
the fear that generated this subgroup, and united it. It was almost
totally irrational, and the Helians were always a very 'rational'
people, by their own standards of rationality.
Historians studying the records of this time, first Helian historians
and ages later Homosentient historians as well, would puzzle over the
fact that the ideas driving this odd sort 'conspiracy' seemed to
emerge on hundreds or thousands of Helian worlds independently of each
other, but with similar ideas, similar forms of expression, even
similar means of organization.
This puzzled the Helian rulers, because the substructure seemed to
erupt on worlds and in habitats separated by light-millennia,
operating along similar lines with similar means and goals, all
apparently independent of each other. The separate movements merged,
becoming an ongoing part of what passed for 'politics' in the ancient
Helian Galactic empire.[1]
Some of the Helians in this group had an altogether irrational fear of
the implications of the existence of Solarigen life. Others were more
rational about Solarigen life, but saw a rare and possibly unique
political opportunity in the division among the Helian ruling class.
The power structure of the Helian empire had been more-or-less stable
for over a million years. Individuals came and went within the power
structure, but changes to the structure itself was more-or-less
impossible.
Now, some Helians with no real chance to getting to the top slots saw
a possible way to dethrone the top tier and rework the power pyramid
in their own favor.
Their plan was complicated, and elegant in theory. Observing that the
Eldren was fascinated by the new kind of life and involved in
elaborate experiments with it. If they could encourage their more
paranoid fellows to inflict some damage to those experiments, the
Eldren would inevitably react. If the trail of evidence could be so
arranged that the blame could be thrown onto the current rulers of the
Helians (who had nothing to do with it), the Eldren revenge could be
directed there.
The goal was to arrange for the Eldren to slice off the top of the
Eldren power structure, leaving the upper levels open for the
conspirators to step in. If they handled it all right, the Eldren
could be tricked into taking out their more gullible coconspirators as
well, neat and clean.
In theory, the plan was elegant and neat. In practice, of course, it
was full of moving parts. The million-year stasis had left the
Helians a little out-of-practice at this sort of machiavellian
plotting. But the plan was put into action, setting into motion a
sequence of events that would culminate in catastrophe.
The conspirators debated carefully on the best way to implement their
scheme. The key element of the plot was how to inflict sufficient
damage to the Solarigen life-forms to anger the Eldren, without
driving them into a full bore fury.
The care was necessary because of the power differential. The
conspirators hoped to 'con' the Eldren into blaming the upper tier of
the Helian empire, and into taking action against them. They wanted
to produce a measured response, because the risk of provoking too
large a response.
If the Eldren were angered sufficiently to strike out at the Helians
generally, instead of just at the leadership, that could
be...unfortunate, and the conspirators knew it well. For all the size
and power and numbers of the Helians, any direct confrontation between
them and the Eldren Watchers would have had a distinct 'Bambi Meets
Godzilla' flavor, with the Helians vast in the role of Bambi.
Thus, they had to figure out a way to inflict damage on the Solarigen
life, but not so much damage as to produce berserk fury. They also
had to set up a fake chain of evidence to 'frame' their targets in the
Helian leadership, while making arrangements for their gullible pawns
to indulge their paranoid fears. All this took some time, on the
order of several hundred Terran years.
By this time, their advanced tech had extended Helian lifespans to
about 2500 Terran years on average, so they had time. When all was
ready, the conspirators actually set their complicated plan into
motion.
The plan began with a Helian starship of special design travelling to
the Sol System. Helians had been there before, scientific expeditions
present with Eldren consent, but this ship had to enter the Solar
System in secret. Given the psionic and physical senses of the Eldren
present in the Sol System, that was not a simple matter.
The ship the conspirators prepared was very unusual for the Helians.
Because it had to approach much closer to a hot star than most Helian
ships ever would, it had to have a high-temperature hull. Instead of
ice and cryogenic 'plastics', this ship's hull was of iron and
aluminum and other high-temperature refractory metals.
In order to enter the Solar System in secret, the starship was
embedded within a chunk of nickel-iron detritus, which dropped into
the Sol System on a long-orbit trajectory, engines off and active
sensors and communications carefully shut down.
Even the crew was in a drugged daze, to minimize the faint risk that
an Eldren would sense their active minds in what was supposed to
appear to be just another chunk of asteroidal junk.
The trajectory of the ship/rock was carefully calculated to bring it
close enough to Jupiter for that giant world's gravity field to
deflect its path, throwing it onto a collision course with one of the
objects that would someday be called the Galilean satellites. This
was hardly the first time such a thing had happened, asteroids and
comets had impacted on the moons of Jupiter countless times over the
ages since the birth of the Solar System.
The 'rock' was not very big, about 100 meters in diameter. The impact
was not so large as to be a global event, even on the scale of a
satellite. Buried within the 100 meter chunk of rock was a 35 meters
sphere that was the actual Helian spacecraft. It was carefully
designed to survive even the enormous shock of the impact. The
Helians within the ship were suspended within liquid baths, sheathed
in shock-absorption devices, and otherwise carefully protected.
When the impact was over, the ship had been driven into the surface,
under the crater created by the impact. Automatic systems activated
and the ship was rapidly buried under a layer of detritus and junk
from the impact, just in case an Eldren looked to see what had just
impacted on one of Jupiter's large satellites.
The Helians within now began the next stage of their plan. These were
not the conspiratorial leaders, these were the Helians who sincerely
saw the Solarigen life-forms as a threat, and who were ideal pawns for
their more pragmatic leaders.
Patience was a key element of the plan. Waiting a while after the
apparent asteroid impact, for the sake of further secrecy, the crew
used tools and equipment to mine raw material from the satellite on
which they had crashed, to quietly construct a fleet of small
automatic drone spacecraft, no more than a few meters across each.
They were little more than a small engine, a cargo unit, and a simple
control module.
The crew spent several years on this project, building literally
thousands of these devices, and preparing them for use. When they
finished, they had over ten thousand of the devices.
The crew knew there was no realistic way to conceal the nature of the
attack once it actually began, but they hoped to conceal the location
from which it came. Though these Helians sincerely saw their effort
as removing a threat to their species, and they were prepared to take
a great risk to do so [2], they still hoped to survive.
When the time for the attack came, they began to loft their tiny
missiles into space, using simple rocket power instead of anything
more elegant, launching only a few at a time with the absolute minimum
signature, taking advantage of natural phenomena in the Jupiter
subsystem to help cover the evidence of the launches. When they had
lofted their entire stock of weapons, they waited, as the selected
orbits around the Sun carried the power-down devices into various
parts of the inner Solar System.
The weapons had their engines off, their power plants barely ticking
over, everything set up to be as 'quiet' as they could manage. It's
very hard, verging on impossible, to hide active energy sources in
space, from someone looking for them. But powered-down,
background-temp small objects are another matter, especially if they
aren't being actively watched for.
The patient attackers waited for over five Terran years for their
weapons to orbit into the appropriate positions. Still mindful of the
need for secrecy, the crew triggered their weapons by using a single
tight-beam laser pulse to one device, which then sent pulses to other
weapons. In a testimony to the Helian technical and planning skill,
the weapons were in the right places to receive the microsecond pulses
of laser-light, thousands of times over.
Shortly afterward, the engines of the weapons came to life, and the
ones nearest Earth and Mars dropped into the atmospheres of their
target worlds. In a testimony to the effort at secrecy on the part of
the attackers, the Eldren were caught totally by surprise by the
advent of the attack.
The first the Eldren really knew of what was happening was that
objects began to drop onto Earth and Mars, releasing various
destructive cargoes. Some released microbot attack swarms, others
released high-potency chemical toxins, still others massive doses of
cobalt-60. The results were quiet effective, whenever these
death-packages arrived in the middle of a flourishing living
community. Entire local niches were cleansed of life.
But the attackers were pawns, as noted above. They expected far
greater results than their weapons were actually designed or able to
produce, because their leaders had planned from the get-go to leave
them hung out to dry.
Thus, the attack did not produce anything like the massive extinction
event the attackers had expected. Indeed, they had expected the
entire biospheres of Earth and Mars to be wiped out. Instead, the
results were relatively minor on the grand scale. Some species were
extinguished, some genera wiped out. Few or no families or orders or
classes were eliminated. As extinction events went, it was trivial.
But on a more detailed scale, it was carnage enough. The Eldren who
had been watching over and studying Earth and Mars suddenly found
death raining from the skies in a clearly intentional attack. They
had no idea of who or why or what was causing it, but before their
horrified senses, in the course of a few days, vast damage was
inflicted onto their pristine biospheres. Radioactive dust was dumped
into the oceanic circulation system, microbots tore up sea-floor
communities, stable toxins rendered entire regions uninhabitable, at
least on a time scale of centuries.
When the realized more-or-less _what_ was happening (though they still
had no idea of who was doing it or why), the Eldren reacted. Not all
the missiles reached their targets, over half of them were destroyed
in space by outraged Eldren. Still, considerable damage had been
inflicted to the life-forms of Earth and Mars, and it looked worse in
the short term than it would later turn out to be.
Hidden on one of Jupiter's moons, the actual attackers celebrated.
They did not immediately realize how far short of their goals the
attack had actually gone. As far as they knew, they had just
inflicted irreversible damage to a potential danger to their species,
and they had managed it in secrecy!
In fact, their plan had already gone totally wrong, from a flaw they
had overlooked at their initial arrival in the Solar System. Before
long, they would pay a steep price for this error.
Shermanlee
[1]This was not a coincidence. There was something going on deep
beneath the surface that connected the different groups.
[2]That might seem contradictory with the utter self-absorption of the
Helian psyche, but recall that these beings were very very _alien_.
They combined a nearly total self-focus with a strong impetus for
species survival, producing an alien pattern of behavior.
Johnny1A
>
> Hidden on one of Jupiter's moons, the actual attackers celebrated.
> They did not immediately realize how far short of their goals the
> attack had actually gone. As far as they knew, they had just
> inflicted irreversible damage to a potential danger to their species,
> and they had managed it in secrecy!
>
> In fact, their plan had already gone totally wrong, from a flaw they
> had overlooked at their initial arrival in the Solar System. Before
> long, they would pay a steep price for this error.
>
>
> Shermanlee
The first sign the celebrating Helian attackers had that something had
gone awry was that their long-range sensor scans showed tremendous
temperatures around the areas where their missiles had reached the
surface of Earth and Mars. Temperatures reaching stellar levels in
very localized, contained zones. It was clear that the Eldren were
heating the impact sites to staggering temperatures, but not why,
since the damage was already _done_.
Within a matter of hours, their puzzlement turned to fear, as the
sensors detected the signature of Eldren teleportation psi-fields
forming up around the Jovian satellite on which their ship was hidden.
They had counted on staying hidden for weeks or more, as the Eldren
searched the Solar System. Instead, the Eldren had tracked them to
the specific world on which they hid in less than one Terran day.
It took only a few more fear-soaked hours for the Eldren to find the
specific hiding place of the Eldren ship. There was no way to escape,
no hope to summon that was close enough to arrive, or powerful enough
to matter if they could. Some ten hours after the Eldren arrived on
the specific moon, the Helian attackers and their ship were wrenched
from its underground shelter by a Psychokinetic field stronger than
any starship's engines. What followed for the attackers was
terrifying, but mercifully brief.
Several dozen Eldren peeled open the starship like a piece of rotten
fruit. Before the crew died, their minds were invaded by means of
Telereceive, none too gently, and what they knew became known to the
Eldren. The Eldren interrogators were not cruel. They didn't have to
be. It took only moments for them to learn what they wanted. A few
moments later the attackers were painlessly dead.
The conspiratorial leader had always intended their pawns to be found
out, but they had counted on it taking months or longer, not hours.
They had no way to know that the attackers had managed, by accident,
to have their location given away by the existence of Sol's third
biosphere.
As already mentioned, the life that originated on Earth had been
spread by natural phenomena, primarily meteoric impacts, to other
sites in the Solar System. This overall type of life, called
Solarigen life by biologists half a billion years later, formed three
main biospheres in the Solar System. The main one was of course on
Earth. Here was the origin, and here was the most complex and
intricate ecology.
Another existed on doomed and dying Mars, facing eventual doom as that
planet, too small to retain its atmosphere and maintain its heat,
faced frozen death, but at this time it remained somewhat vibrant,
with its own metazoans.
To call the remaining biosphere the 'third' is a misnomer, in a way.
This biosphere was older than the one on Mars by a considerable
margin. It was almost as old as life on Earth itself. Its origin lay
far deeper in time than the day of the Helians and the arrival of the
Eldren in the Solar System.
To find the source of the third biosphere, we must go further back,
not the mere 500 megayears back to the Helian Empire, but further
back, across almost incomprehensible vistas of time, back to the time
when life was first born on Earth, in the last stages of the rain of
planetesimals that went into the formation of the worlds. The time
was ~4 _billion_ years ago.
For my story, life was born _during_ the last stages of the impact
rain. It wasn't yet so advanced that it could be called anything
recognizable as a modern domain, much less a kingdom. The cells were
as simple as they could be and still be called living things. It
began to differentiate, of course, from the very beginning. Some
forms lived in those times that would not endure past the end of the
formation of the Earth, microorganisms adapted to the conditions made
possible by the relatively rapid major impacts. Others survived
(barely) the impacts, to become the ancestral forms of all later
Terran and Martian life.
It was an alien Earth in those days. No free oxygen existed in the
atmosphere, the air was a soup of methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide
and sulfides. The Sun was far cooler then than it would later be,
giving Earth only 3/4 or so of the energy Earth receives today. There
was little dry land, little sign of anything we would call familiar
today.
It so happens that during the last stages of the impact phase, a
period between 4.0 and 3.8 billion years ago, a few particularly big
impacts struck Earth, hurling large masses of crustal rock and ice and
into space. With that particularly heavy impact went a cargo of
microorganisms, since even in those days, Earth was already seeing
unicellular life spreading all over the oceans and into the crust.
Eternity has been laughingly defined as the time it takes for
everything possible, no matter how improbable, to happen at least
once. A series of unlikely events led to the formation of the third
biosphere. The impact that hurled the microorganisms into space was
large, even by the standards of that period, and the orbital pathway
of the impactor had been altered by close encounters with Jupiter and
other major objects to give it an unusual approach angle. The orbit
onto which the escaped material was thrown was steeper, more so than
would have been normal.
The planet Jupiter happened to be in the right place for what happened
next: some of that debris was thrown into an orbit that carried it
back around the Sun a few times, until eventually the track again
approached Jupiter. Eventually, some of it splattered across the face
of the four growing moons that would eventually be the Galilean
Satellites. Like Earth itself, they were still the last stages of
their formation at this time.
On three of the four moons, nothing came of it. One one of them,
though, the microorganisms that had survived the trip from Earth found
an interesting welcome. Those organisms had traveled in a state
something like stasis, or suspended animation. Not all of them had
survived their years in space, but some of them, sheltered within the
chunks of debris from heat and cold and radiation, did. Some of those
survived their spectacular landing.
The world they now found themselves on was nothing like Earth, even
the Earth of that day. But it was more like Earth then than it would
be later. There was water. Not a lot, but enough. There was heat,
not conveniently located or of a convenient degree, but it was
present, so there was energy. There was carbon and thus organic
molecules. Not much, but enough.
These life-forms, far simpler than Archaea, had relatively simpler
needs. They were chemosynthesizers even before they left Earth.
Here, they found sulfur compounds and carbon dioxide, and even a
little nitrogen, though none too much.
Most of the involuntary immigrants died immediately or shortly after
they began to revive, but a few, a very few, survived and reproduced,
and began to adapt.
The moons of Jupiter were very young, as was the entire Solar System.
Conditions were changing relatively fast. But these microorganisms,
once established, could reproduce at tremendous speed whenever the raw
materials and energy were available. Evolution moved fast here, just
as it was on Earth during this period. Here, it had to move fast,
because conditions were worsening steadily. The supply of water was
diminishing fast, as the remaining water was driven away into space.
The temperature conditions were becoming steadily more extreme.
Radiation levels rose and fell, ranging from about background-normal
for the Solar System to nearly incredible levels.
It was perhaps inevitable that life was driven underground here.
Seeking safety from the extremes of temperature and radiation, the new
biosphere sank into the crust of the moon. But the breakthrough that
enabled life to survive in this bizarre locality was the development
of multicellular cooperatives, ages earlier than it would occur on
Earth.
It took a different form here. Instead of localized multicellular
clusters such as animals and plants, cells formed larger aggregations,
interacting communities that hoarded and rationed the precious,
desperately scarce necessities for life.
Here, life learned to form hollow spaces underground, and to line them
with membranes of cells that held the precious water inside. As the
water supply fell, the efficiency of these storage processes improved,
until they were better than the best TL8 technological equivalents.
The communities formed specialized macrostructures that conserved and
recycled nitrogen, carbon, and water far more efficiently than
anything Earth-residing life would ever produce.
The radiation, initially a hazard, became a resource, as other strains
of life learned to create enormous mineralized structures that acted
as natural coils, cutting into Jupiter's magnetic field to create
currents. These weak currents became useful resources for chemical
processing.
Volcanic vents became centers of biological activity, providing
precious heat and vital compounds for a planet-wide network of
ecological exchange. Almost all aspects of this system were
underground, nearly invisible from space. Different kinds of organism
specialized for tasks as diverse as maintaining underground connecting
tubes against pressure and heat, for transporting iron and copper for
the use of the electrical organisms, for pumping heat from volcanic
centers to more remote biological communities in the relative
stability but energy-poverty of the open plains.
Individual organisms remained unicellular, but they cooperatively
formed macrostructures, perhaps comparable to coral reefs on a grander
scale, that were so biologically interconnected that they could be
considered life-forms themselves. The various species were so
different from their distant Terran cousins that they shared little
save the most basic elements. These life-forms were not archaea or
bacteria or eucaryotes. They were different biodomains entirely.
By ~2 billion years ago, the new biosphere had developed its own
stability, or metastability. It didn't stay the _same_ from megayear
to megayear, any more than the biospheres of Earth or Mars did, but it
had its own patterns that endured just as Earth did. Individual
species specialized here to a degree never matched on Terra. As with
Earth and Mars, individual species came and went, but larger
classifications endured, and niches were repeatedly filled with other
species that filled the same ecological roles.
The domains of this biosphere would eventually be classified by human
biologists, gigayears later. Among them would be the
'electromanipulatives', the 'water-shapers', the 'heat-shapers', and
the 'pressure-lovers', the later being the kingdoms of life that
throve deep below the level of the other forms, the most independent
of the domains.
It was perhaps as alien an environment as Solarigen life could ever
have come to thrive in. But thrive they did, and thriving the distant
descendants of those space-travelling primitive cells still were, ~3.5
billion years later, when the Helian attackers hid here to launch
their attacks on Terra.
The Helians who hid here to prepare their attack were not scientists
of any sort, much less Solarigen biologists. The life-forms of this
moon were mostly underground, and those signs of their presence that
were to be observed on the surface were not obviously 'unnatural'.
Had these Helians been geologists, they might have wondered why small
but conveniently pure deposits of conductive metal were to be found
scattered all over the planet. They might have wondered why they
occasionally struck pockets of anomalously pure water as they mined
out those pure strands and veins of metal. But they weren't, and so
they merely considered it a lucky break and went on working. They
made no effort at sterilization or even checking for the presence of
life in their mined material.
Thus, when they launched their missiles against Earth, they had no way
to know that they were unwittingly giving some local organisms, mined
from their subsurface world, a free ride back to their ancestral
homeland.
It was a homeland changed beyond recognition. By the time the
missiles brought back these life-forms to Earth, the atmosphere was
filled with free oxygen, the Sun was enormously brighter, and the seas
were full of distant cousins grown to giant sizes. Billions of years
of separate evolution had transformed the returning life and the world
returned all but beyond recognition. Most of the few life-forms that
had survived the return trip through space died instantly on exposure
to Earth's environs. The Eldren were taking no chances, though. The
instant they realized that these life-forms from the third biosphere
were present, they sterilized the entire regions in which they landed,
raising the temperatures to levels so high that no organic molecule
could endure.
Earth was, after all, the ancient source of all Solarigen life. The
chance that the returning life could survive or thrive or harm the
local biosphere was infinitesimal by any biological standard the
Eldren knew, but they were not taking the chance. They had already
seen that this kind of life was fantastically tenacious and incredibly
unpredictable in some modes. Thus the sterilizing, cleansing blasts
of million degree heat that had so puzzled that Helian attackers when
they detected them.
By the presence of the remains of the DNA and RNA and other tell-tale
molecular markers of that kind of life in the missiles, the Eldren
knew their source. The Eldren themselves had missed the third
biosphere for some centuries after they found the Solar System, since
it was in such a peculiar place, but they had in due time discovered
it, and now they recognized it.
Thus it was that the Helians had already given away their hiding
place, or had it given away. The hiding place of the enemy of Terran
and Martian life had been revealed by their distant cousins, the
life-forms of Sol's third biosphere.
After all, how likely was it that the Helians would _ever_ have
suspected the presence of Solarigen life on _Io_? [1]
Shermanlee
[1] I _said_ before that it was an unlikely place!
MORE LATER
Mike Miller
> After all, how likely was it that the Helians would _ever_ have
> suspected the presence of Solarigen life on _Io_? [1]
Well, I wasn't expecting that. Jupiter or Europa maybe, but Io has its
points. More energy for life, for one thing.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Johnny1A
I figured I might catch some people by surprise. I wondered if
anybody would guess where it was going as I described the moon in
question, while avoiding the name. :)
Europe was the obvious choice, but it's almost _too_ obvious, these
days.
Arthur Clarke set it going in _2010_, and these days people almost
expect life on Europa the way they once expected it on Mars.
Certainly it's possible, from what we know, but maybe not altogether
likely. Energy is likely to be at a premium on Europa, for ex. Also,
since I needed the life-forms to have arrived from Earth, that thick
sheet of ice was problem. How to get microorganisms through miles of
ice to the sea below, without an impact so big that there was no
conceivable way anything organic could survive it?
Ganymede and Callisto are even colder than Europa, and have a higher
percentage of ices in their composition to boot.
Io today is easily one of the least hospitable environments in the
Solar System. But I started thinking that it might not have been quite
so bad, a few billion years ago. It might have had some water then,
not yet cooked away by the tidal volcanic activity. There probably
never was a lot, since the ratio of refractory to volatile rises as
you get closer to Jupiter, but it could have had some, probably in the
form of ice.
If ice was present, that provides hydrogen. I make a guess that there
was enough carbon to be useful, even today there's a little carbon
dioxide observable on Io, IIANM. Nitrogen was a problem. I simply
assumed that Io had sufficient quantities then by fiat. It might be
true. There's plenty of oxygen on Io, even today.
If we assume that there was ice on Io 4 billion years ago, volcanic
activity could melt enough of it to produce liquid water, which is
necessary for life of our type. Again, probably not much, but maybe
just enough. Maybe.
I assume that once established, the organisms could evolve to match
their rapidly declining environment, and to alter it. On Earth, for
ex, the free oxygen in the atmosphere, a significant amount of the
rock weathering that produces soil, a whole range of other things,
were produced or influenced by life. Our type of life can transform
planets, given time and energy and the bare necessities of support.
On Io, the life-forms 'learned' to horde the precious remaining water
and nitrogen, to create underground environments suited to their
survival, to recycle critical substances with surpassing efficiency.
I don't assume it was easy, you can write whatver mass extinctions and
near-totality extinctions into Io's history you wish (though there was
one particular one I've already decided on). So efficient is their
encapsulation and reuse of the water, especially, that almost no trace
of water vapor shows up spectrographically. Essentially all of the
tiny amount remaining is trapped by life-forms.
I assume for backstory purposes that today, some features of Io's
surface are the product of life, but that we haven't recognized them
as such yet. Most of the evidence is below-ground, in the vast
networks of tunnels and passages that riddle the crust, shifting and
renewing with each volcanic eruption. The volcanoes and other
geothermal/geophysical activity also provide the largest single source
of necessary energy for Io's biosphere (they're too far from the Sun
for practical photosynthesis).
As for Io's other big modern problem, the radiation...well, that
hinges on Jupiter's monstrously huge magnetic field, which Io spins
through. By some calculations, 5 minutes exposure to the surface
radiation on Io would be lethal to a human being. But was that
radiation always there?
IMHO, there are a lot of unanswered questions, even today, but the
sources and mechanisms of planetary magnetism. Even Earth's magnetic
properties are not perfectly understood. Earth's field apparently
shuts down every so often, or reverses polarity, for imperfectly
understood reasons. Predictions about the magnetic status of other
planets have not been terribly accurate so far.
I assume that Jupiter, like Earth, sometimes loses or weakens its
magnetic field. At the time the Terran cells arrived, the field was
weak, and radiation levels tolerable. When the field returned, the
organisms were established and partly underground and had time to
adapt, and eventually even convert the field and the flux tube into a
resource.
Anyway, I wanted to put life in the Solar System somewhere unusual.
Mars was necessary for story reasons. Europa was cliched. But as I
started thinking about the extremophiles, and asking 'what if', Io
began to seem at least remotely workable, if a super-super longshot.
Good enough for a story, anyway. :)
Shermanlee
Mike Miller
> since I needed the life-forms to have arrived from Earth, that thick
> sheet of ice was problem. How to get microorganisms through miles of
> ice to the sea below, without an impact so big that there was no
> conceivable way anything organic could survive it?
4 billion years ago, Jupiter was probably pumping out a lot more heat
from its initial formation. It still is today, but it might've warmed
up its moons a lot more, giving Europa a thinner ice shell.
Also, the moons would've been warmer - they were probably still being
pounded by large debris from the birth of the solar system, their
orbits hadn't smoothed out (more tidal flexing), and the big Galilean
moons were probably sweeping up a lot of initial, lesser Jovian
satellites. That makes for a good chance for thin ice crusts, or even
open oceans under a carbon dioxide/water vapor atmosphere, on Europa.
(Mind you, I'm not saying, 'Use Europa!' I like the use of Io. I was
just speculating how Europa might've been viable, too.)
> As for Io's other big modern problem, the radiation...well, that
> hinges on Jupiter's monstrously huge magnetic field, which Io spins
> through. By some calculations, 5 minutes exposure to the surface
> radiation on Io would be lethal to a human being. But was that
> radiation always there?
Yes. It would've been worse 'back in the day.' Planets and stars alike
show gradually declining magnetic fields as their cores cool and
stabilize. If not for the impact that formed the moon, Earth would
probably have a quiet core, no plate tectonics, and very different
vulcanism than it does today - it'd probably be more like Venus or
Mars. Earth's magnetic field is dependent on the swirling of its
liquid outer core, which is cooling and slowing.
> I assume that Jupiter, like Earth, sometimes loses or weakens its
> magnetic field.
That would work, too.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Johnny1A
> > Also,
> > since I needed the life-forms to have arrived from Earth, that thick
> > sheet of ice was problem. How to get microorganisms through miles of
> > ice to the sea below, without an impact so big that there was no
> > conceivable way anything organic could survive it?
>
> 4 billion years ago, Jupiter was probably pumping out a lot more heat
> from its initial formation. It still is today, but it might've warmed
> up its moons a lot more, giving Europa a thinner ice shell.
>
> Also, the moons would've been warmer - they were probably still being
> pounded by large debris from the birth of the solar system, their
> orbits hadn't smoothed out (more tidal flexing), and the big Galilean
> moons were probably sweeping up a lot of initial, lesser Jovian
> satellites. That makes for a good chance for thin ice crusts, or even
> open oceans under a carbon dioxide/water vapor atmosphere, on Europa.
>
> (Mind you, I'm not saying, 'Use Europa!' I like the use of Io. I was
> just speculating how Europa might've been viable, too.)
Good point about the possibility of open water on Europa. Hmm...even
though Solarigen life-forms didn't end up there on their own, the
possibility always exists that the Eldren would have introduced some,
just to see what happened. After all, most of the necessary
ingredients are already there, and it's conveniently close to Earth,
as the Eldren see such distances...
They just might have. Europa makes for a fun place for submarine
adventures, after all, complete with miles of claustrophobic ice
overhead. :)
Shermanlee
Johnny1A
>
> After all, how likely was it that the Helians would _ever_ have
> suspected the presence of Solarigen life on _Io_? [1]
>
> Shermanlee
>
> [1] I _said_ before that it was an unlikely place!
>
>
> MORE LATER
What followed was tragic.
The Eldren, infuriated by the interference in their plans, and armed
with the knowledge taken from the attackers' minds, proceeded to seek
out the masterminds of the attack. Recall that the attackers were
_intended_ to be caught, and interrogated. The conspirators had hoped
to throw the blame for the ineffectual (though bloody) attacks on
Earth and Mars onto the uppermost leadership of the Helian power
structure. Once the Eldren removed them, the conspirators (who were
pretty high up in the chain themselves) could step into their places.
The attack crew had misguided ideas of who they were taking their
orders from, but the Eldren found them and interrogated them far
sooner than the plan had called for. The Eldren also learned of the
individual contacts who had provided the attackers with their
semi-falsified orders.
The Eldren now initiated a general counter-attack against the
perceived threat, and it hit closer to home than the conspiratorial
leaders had hoped. The individuals who had (under false pretenses)
given the attack orders were hit first, and the information taken from
their minds led to the next links in the conspiratorial chain. The
conspiracy was carefully organized into cells and hidden layers, but
Telepathy was a marvelously useful tool of interrogation, especially
in the 'hands' of entities with Power 100+!
The Eldren did not bother to explain what they were doing, why they
were doing it, or otherwise communicate their intentions to the
Helians in general. A typical instance would be for a Helian of high
rank, going about its business, to suddenly find itself surrounded by
several Eldren teleporting in, snatching it out, and vanishing without
a word of explanation. Occasionally, the security personnel would
attempt futile resistance, mostly there wasn't even time for futility.
Over the course of several Terran days, Helian conspirators across the
Milky Way and its satellite galaxies were captured, interrogated, and
disposed of, with a sort of humane ruthlessness. Many of these
Helians were highly placed in the vast, Galaxy-wide power structure of
the Helian empire. A few were in the very top circles.
Unfortunately, too, the false evidence and trail of deception the
conspirators had been laying was sufficiently effective to lead the
Eldren to snatch up a few Helian leaders who were innocent of any part
in the conspiracy.
In most of these later cases, telepathic interrogation 'cleared' the
innocents, who were returned to their places of 'residence' or 'work'
(closest translations of the Helian concepts) unharmed except for a
_very_ bad fright. A few, though, died as a result of over-intense
telepathic questioning.
Within a few days, the conspiracy, as such, was gone. Over 90% of its
members, both the dupes at the lower level and the machiavellian
planners, were dead. Unfortunately, the Eldren's rapid response had a
side-effect they did not really anticipate, nor did they care very
much about it, at first.
The Helian empire was 'governed' by a single, interlocked network of
power relationships. It was a very 'stripped-down' thing, compared to
a Homosentient political government. Like any such network, it had
certain tendencies inherent in its structure. One such tendency was
that vast numbers of otherwise unrelated subnetworks came together at
the top, in a few individuals.
The Eldren had _removed_ a small but significant number of these
critical nodes in the vast network. The Helian power-structure had
been so elegantly balanced, so perfectly integrated, that it had
endured for well over a million years against the usual stresses and
strains of Helian 'politics'. But with several key-nodes gone, some
30% of the network suddenly broke into separate smaller networks and
isolated groups, leaving the rest teetering on the brink of total
instability.
Desperate attempts were made to stabilize matters. It was made the
worse by the fact that almost no Helian had the slightest idea of what
was going on! All they knew was that for reason or reasons unknown,
the Eldren had suddenly killed a number of their highest-ranking
individuals, having given no explanation and making no sign of giving
any. Confusion reigned.
Helian nature being what it was, power struggles broke out wherever
the great stabilizing network fell apart. Within weeks, local warfare
had broken out on some worlds. Within Terran months, interplanetary
and interstellar warfare was raging in some regions of the Milky Way
and in some of its satellite galaxies.
While internecine violence had never entirely stopped in the Helian
domains, and indeed such a thing couldn't happen with their
psychology, it had always been contained to a very local and
individual level, never permitted to rise to the level of mass
warfare, throughout the million-plus years of the Helian unity since
the Eldren intervened to stop their last great war. In that long
peace, while technology had not advanced all that much, resources had
grown immensely, new worlds settled, new habitats built, vast fleets
of ships constructed.
The warfare that now broke out was incredibly damaging. TL11 weapons
were used, and whole cities, entire regions, were burned, blasts,
seared, rendered useless for Helian life. Before long, entire
planetary populations were perishing in mass attacks involving
saturation assault with _millions_ of megatons of power.
The core power structure, weakened but not utterly broken, strove
futilely to reassert order, but it was all they could do to maintain
their own network intact. Realizing they could not compel peace, the
central 'government' (such as it was) pragmatically decided to wait it
out, and reconquer the weakened factions after they finished bombing
each other back to a pretechnical level.
The plan might have worked, except that one of the areas of the Galaxy
that the fighting spread into was the Ophiris System. Caught by
surprise, the central 'government' was unable to prevent one of the
factions from seizing control of Ophiris, its planets, and its
precious mega-source of orichalcum.
So rich was the orichalcum supply from Ophir that it had become the
critical supply source for the entire Helian civilization. The
implications of its loss were staggering, the core power structure
_had_ to get it back. They launched several attempts, but the efforts
were riven by the spreading chaos in their ranks. The Helian
power-network had been pushed over into a different state, one in
which their long stability was coming undone at nightmare speed.
The faction that had captured Ophiris, OTOH, found that their prize
was a poisoned fruit, because it instantly made them a target both for
attack from the formerly neutral main power structure and from the
other competing factions. Furthermore, the strains _within_ their
factional power structure were exacerbated by struggles for control of
the most precious star system in Helian space. Within a Terran
decade, that faction had broken apart, and the Ophiris System had
changed tentacles a dozen times.
Those factions too far from Ophiris to take part in the struggle for
control found that they were affected by losing their best source of
the miracle-metal. For the first time in ages, they found that the
supply of orichalcum limited their ability to build starships, TL11
superweapons, and a dozen other things dependent on the
extradimensional material.
As the warfare escalated, the damage to the Helian society kept
mounting. About 25 years into the war, the 'capitol' (or the closest
thing the Helians had), a world orbiting a red dwarf in the inner
reaches of the Milky Way, was sterilized in a cross-fire involving a
dozen fleets and literally millions of atomic bombs. With it went the
last remnants of the top tiers of the former power structure, and the
Helian 'civil war' now rippled out across the entire Milky Way and
throughout the satellites, leaving almost no world untouched.
Up until this point, the Eldren had paid little attention to the
Helian warfare, other than their usual interest in the doings of the
planetary life-forms. As the warfare mounted up, and up, and up,
though, they began to wonder if it would be necessary to intervene
again, as they had over a million years earlier, to stop the fighting
to prevent the Helians from wiping themselves out.
Before they could make up their minds whether this was called for,
however, events escalated. Someone among the Helians, some faction or
group or some brilliant, ruthless (even by Helian standards)
individual, fielded a new weapon.
It was something keyed to their alien biology, a living weapon.
The closest thing in Solarigen experience to it would be a virus, but
it wasn't exactly that, nor exactly a bacterium. It was a set of
'instructions' coded in the Helian genetic material, in a microscopic
life-form that could be introduced into any Helian biosphere. Once it
was, it would replicate, like any other microorganism in the local
biosphere, feeding and reproducing independently.
It was highly adaptable, almost impossible to distinguish from the
local life forms after a few reproductive cycles among them. It could
survive almost the full range of environmental conditions that all
Helian macroforms could. It could survive as a free-living
microorganism almost indefinitely, reproducing like any other such.
Recall that Helians were asexual, reproducing by a sort of budding
process, and that they could, but did not absolutely have to, exchange
'genetic' material with other Helians to 'customize' their offspring.
Finally, recall that the 'species' boundary for their type of life was
fuzzy, they could and did exchange genetic information with
non-sentient breeds of their life-type, for further diversity of form
and function in offspring.
This new bioweapon was like any other microorganism in a local
environment until it came into contact with a Helian. It could do so
by ingestion/absorption, or just plain contact, taking advantage of
the genetic-exchange mechanism. In Terran animal macroforms, the
reproductive system and the waste-removal system evolved in related
systems, in Helians, the food-intake and reproductive systems were
linked through related biological systems.
As soon as contact was made, latent instructions in the microorganisms
hereditary information were triggered, and it transferred those
instructions to the Helian's system. Even _one_ microbe in physical
contact was enough to make the transfer, given a few moments. Once
the transfer was made, the microbe went about its own business. If it
eventually made contact with another Helian, it would do the same
thing again. If it didn't, it finished out its life-cycle, and
reproduced itself.
The 'infected' Helian showed no ill effects. But its offspring,
afterward, were subtly different. Furthermore, any Helian it 'mated'
with afterward would be infected with the same 'bad data', resulting
it the offspring of that Helian being subtly different. Any offspring
produced by the 'altered' offspring carried the taint, it perpetuated
itself. These offspring, mated to an untainted Helian, spread the
'infection' as well.
When certain environmental triggers were present, the 'altered'
offspring _changed_, suddenly displaying Helian-cidal tendencies. The
compulsion to kill other Helians became overwhelming, while leaving
all other faculties intact. It was a difference in basic 'brain'
(Helians didn't actually have brains, as such, but they had tissues
and organs that did the same tasks) structure, magnifying the native
ruthlessness of the Helian psyche and coupling it to a reward mode for
destroying Helians.
Imagine a Homosentient heroin or cocaine addict, somehow set up in
such a way that every time he kills someone, he gets an instant 'hit'.
Further assume that this hypothetical addict is otherwise unaffected,
that is, he retains all his intelligence and skills whether or not
he's 'high', and that he has no conscience whatever.
Then imagine that several hundred million such people were lose at
once.
This is something approximating what would happen on an 'infected'
Helian world or habitat, when the triggers were right. The altered
Helians didn't show any external sign of the change until the trigger
was encountered, they themselves didn't know they were different. One
of the requirements for the trigger condition was that the 'altered'
Helians make up a minimum percentage of the local population, usually
at least 10 or 15%, sometimes more. The urge to kill, however, was so
wired into the altered brains of the tainted offspring that it was far
_stronger_ than anything a drug addicted Homosentient would be likely
to experience. Add in the natural Helian ruthlessness always present,
and the result was almost beyond human comprehension.
The weapon could be 'seeded' into almost any Helian environment, where
it would reproduce and merge itself into the local ecology. Even _one
microbe_ could theoretically infect an entire world, given time. It
was equally at home on land, in the helium oceans, or in the weird
atmospheres of Helian worlds. The slightest physical contact could
'taint' the 'bloodline' of a Helian. The 'taint', once contracted,
was independent of the presence of the microbe (in that, it was a
little like a virus that writes its DNA into the nucleus of a
Solarigen cell), and the taint was the Helian equivalent of an STD as
well.
A Helian whose bloodline had been tainted did not look or feel any
different. It might be two, three, four, or more generations before
the necessary level of attaintment and the other factors were present,
and the Helians in those generations would seem utterly normal, even
to themselves. Space flight and the subtlety of the infection made it
easy for it to spread from world to world before the slightest symptom
appeared.
The creator of this weapon seeded it, secretly, by a variety of means,
onto several hundred Helian worlds, and into a variety of Helian space
habitats, settlements, and other Helian centers of life. Then he/they
waited, planning to offer the cure and preventive measures for 'sale'
once the full scale and danger of the weapon became apparent.
But Something Went Wrong.
Shermanlee
MORE LATER.
Johnny1A
>
> The creator of this weapon seeded it, secretly, by a variety of means,
> onto several hundred Helian worlds, and into a variety of Helian space
> habitats, settlements, and other Helian centers of life. Then he/they
> waited, planning to offer the cure and preventive measures for 'sale'
> once the full scale and danger of the weapon became apparent.
>
> But Something Went Wrong.
>
> Shermanlee
>
> MORE LATER.
The long 'incubation' period of this artificial disease meant that any
given Helian environment, especially a large one such as an inhabited
planet, could be 'infected' for decades or centuries before the
effects appeared. Indeed, it was over five Terran decade before the
first outbreaks occured, in limited-scale environments such as space
habitats. The first outbreaks occurred in places and situations far
enough apart that they were scarcely noted amid all the chaos of an
ever-escalating civil war.
The first planetary-scale outbreak was nearly a Terran century after
the initial 'seeding' of the Weapon, but the effects were horrible.
It was a heavily urbanized world, and the taint had spread across much
of the population pool. The carnage that followed the 'activation' of
the latent taint was nothing that a sane Helian could have imagined.
The planetary infrastructure was wrecked and the population crashed,
billions killed in a matter of weeks.
Once 'triggered', a tainted Helian would preferentially attack
untainted Helians, but when those ran short, they would unhesitatingly
attack each other, driven by an irrational hatred few could resist.
The first planet-wide outbreak was followed in fairly short order by
others, as various 'infected' worlds reached the critical points for
triggering the effects.
The outbreaks were all over the Galaxy. Space flight and the long
'incubation' period had permitted the Weapon to spread from one edge
of the Helian empire to the other before it began to manifest on a
large scale. Caught by surprise, the Helians had no idea what was
happening, how it was happening, or why. Entire worlds that had
managed to stay aloof from the warfare abruptly self-destructed, and
the remnants of the former unified power structures shattered.
The creators of the Weapon that planned to 'sell' the cure in exchange
for a dominant position within the new power structure that almost all
Helians still took for granted would form. But ironically, not long
after the initial 'seeding' of the Weapon, the facilities where the
Weapon had been created and most of the Helians involved in the
creation were killed in an attack by a rival faction. With them went
the information to deal with the Weapon. This attack slew the
Weapon's creators only a Terran year or two after the seeding, thus
taking away the potential cure for the greatest threat the Helians had
ever faced.
This threat would have been hard to cope with even if there had been a
unified power structure in place. Erupting in the midst of an
already-extant civil war, there was little chance of containing its
spread, the moreso since it was Terran centuries before the Helians
even figured out what the Weapon was. Much of the resources that
might have been used to cope with the Weapon had already been
destroyed by the sudden eruptions of mass-homicidal madness.
Communications were spotty between Helian biologists, travel was
difficult and made the more dangerous and sometimes impossible by the
threat of the Weapon itself.
When the nature of the Weapon did become clear, matters were hardly
helped. The only way to contain it was to cut off _all_ physical
contact between the infected and uninfected Helians. The only way to
guarantee that separation was to destroy the infected, and the Helian
ruthlessness made that decision thinkable.
Whole worlds were blasted and seared by megaweapons, as the surviving
factions fought desperately to contain the Weapon. Worlds merely
_suspected_ of infection were blasted down to the bedrock, and worlds
knowing their peril tried to fight back or strike first. If it became
clear that a planetary population was infected, even though it had not
manifested yet, interpersonal violence would promptly erupt as the
untainted struggled to destroy those who might become a threat to
them, and those others struggled to survive.
But for all the ruthless efforts, the Weapon could not be entirely
contained. Its spread was slowed. But every so often, a world
thought untouched would erupt into a spasm of violence that would
wreck civilization there. Some still untouched worlds became so
paranoid that they forbade all space travel to and from their
atmospheres, and would open fire on _any_ ship that approached for any
reason. Draconian though this approach was, those worlds adopting it
did fare better, on the average, than those who did not.
The Eldren watched all this in dismayed confusion. A straightforward
war they could have intervened to end. But how to end _this_?!
As world after world fell, either to conventional military damage or
the Weapon, whole sections of the Greater Milky Way fell out of
communication with each other entirely. The 'horizon' of Helian
awareness was closing in, as their society disintegrated. Matters
were made the worse by the fact that any world where the Weapon had
wrecked civilization had to remain off-limits, since the Weapon itself
was self-perpetuating. Even if every last Helian was dead on a world,
as long as the biosphere remained intact, odds were good that the
Weapon remained present as well. Thus, even worlds which might
otherwise have been able to provide valuable salvaged resources were
off-limits to all use, save by remotely operated or self-operated
robots.
One thousand years after the civil war had begun, the combined damage
from the war itself and the greater damage from the Weapon reached
some critical tipping point, and the Helian galactic civilization
began to come apart in earnest. Star systems, regions, individual
planets, lost contact with each other. The breakup of the incredibly
complex galactic trade networks left planetary infrastructures unable
to operate. Where a Terran millennium earlier a message could be
easily sent from one edge of the Milky Way to the other, now in much
of the Helian realm, it was difficult to send a message from side of a
planet to the other.
With average life-spans in the neighborhood of 2000 years or so, this
was rapid chance, especially for a civilization that had endured for
over a million years.
It was at this time that the realization began to spread among the
majority of the Helians that some point of no return had been passed,
and that no recovery was going to be possible, or at least no recovery
of the sort they had hoped for. The Helian empire was a dying thing.
The breakup left thousands, or tens of thousands, of isolated
communities of Helians scattered across the Greater Milky Way. In
some places, entire planetary societies had survived, usually by
'seceding' early and refusing to permit any intercourse whatever with
the outside Galaxy. In other places, local small cities in asteroid
crusts or airless planets managed to become self-sustaining. But only
in a handful of places was a serious technical base and resource base
still intact.
The Eldren watched the Helian empire destroy itself in confusion and
dismay. Unable to decide what they could or should do, they ended by
doing, essentially, nothing, save to guard Sol and their newly
established Solarigen biospheres around the galaxy from being damaged
by the overflow of the Helian collapse.
The war that destroyed the Helian empire finally came to an effective
end after about 1500 years of fighting. The empire had endured not
quite 1.5 million years, and died over the course of 1.5 thousand
years, a year of collapse for every thousand years of peace.
The handful of remaining Helians were a pathetic lot. Where the
empire had had a population of quintillions, 1500 years later there
were perhaps one hundred billion Helians left _in the entire Greater
Milky Way_. Most of those were dwelling on a hundred or so isolated
planetary communities, separated by thousands of light-years. A few
remained in other divers places.
The largest cluster of Helians remaining occupied one of the last
regions to retain interstellar travel. Twenty worlds happened to be
closer to each other than most, and had 'seceded' early, refusing all
intercourse with the outside Galaxy, and thus spared themselves the
civil warfare and the Weapon. These worlds had been a bit isolated
even before the war began, which had led them to have a slightly more
self-sufficient economy. This proved beneficial to them when they had
to cut themselves off from the trade networks. The isolation also
made them untempting targets for the great contending factions. Their
early isolation unquestionably saved them from the horror of the
Weapon.
In the aftermath of the war, the Helians of these worlds faced a basic
problem: their worlds could operate in a self-sustaining way for a
very long time, but not forever. Their resources were not infinite,
and their populations would in time grow until expansion was again
likely. Unfortunately, how could they dare attempt to spread outward
into a Galaxy in which the Weapon remained viable and a ready threat?
Furthermore, though the war was over, the various dangers from its
more conventional weapons was not. There were automated attack ships
still flying from star to star, ready to blast a world with saturation
atomic attack in obedience to programming from dead masters, to serve
dead agendas. Further, they knew that other Helian survivors might
eventually find them, and covet their safety and intact
infrastructures and ecologies.
A thousand years after the end of the war, the majority of the
population of the 20 worlds had decided that their only option was to
strike out for greener pastures. Construction began on the largest
starships ever built in Helian history, flying arks designed to carry
self-sustaining ecologies to a new and hopefully more peaceful and
prosperous goal. Every scrap of orichalcum in the 20 worlds was
gradually used to construct the engines and other systems of the new
ships, and for the first time since the early war, they sent out ships
to the outside galaxy, scouting for raw materials and necessary
equipment, always avoiding the living worlds where the Weapon lurked.
In the later stages of the war, many of the former great shipping
organizations and other groups with fleets of ships had 'parked' them
in great 'drydock' centers, usually in moonlets orbiting inhabited
worlds. The would-be emigrants now scoured the galaxy for these
centers, in order to strip them of useful equipment and precious
orichalcum for the new space arks.
(They found and ransacked many such 'garages', but not nearly all.
Half a billion years later, the expanding Eosian explorers would
discover one such, and its treasure-trove of orichalcum, as mentioned
earlier).
They could, of course, have simply gone to Ophir and mined orichalcum
from that nearly inexhaustible source, but it was across the galaxy
from the Twenty Worlds, and all too likely to be thoroughly
contaminated with the Weapon, automated defenses, and other dangers.
Also, any other surviving faction of Helians might well be drawn there
as well. All in all, the Twenty Worlds thought the Ophiris System a
good place to avoid.
At last, after some Terran centuries of work, the great star arks were
completed, enough to carry the majority of the population of the
Twenty Worlds. A few opted to stay behind, but most had no wish to
remain, knowing it was likely to be a death sentence sooner or later.
One thousand arks left the stars of the Twenty Worlds, heading
outward, and eventually, leaving the Milky Way entirely. With their
self-sustaining ecologies and extensive preparation, they set out for
the Great Spiral in Andromeda, seeking worlds safe from the Weapon and
the other legacies of the death of their empire.
For now, we must take our leave of this largest group of Helian
survivors, as they leave the stage. (Though they may yet again
appear.)
The greatest number of Helian 'survivors' had left the Greater Milky
Way entirely, but there were still a scattered few left. Most were in
tiny isolated communities such as domed mining cities on remote
Kuiper-type iceoids, or similar tiny groups. One by one, these
isolated groups perished, as their desperate efforts to survive proved
unequal to their limited resources and the dangers they faced.
But there was a last group that had greater resources. It was a group
which would leave a legacy that would echo down the megayears.
Shermanlee
MORE LATER.