The Helianx Proposition/page 14
Just as most thoughtful species attempt to examine their origins, the more advanced
amongst them in those early days also enthusiastically explored what their futures might hold.
Some contemporary cosmologists have theorized that the space/time continuum
was more fluid, more malleable perhaps, more intimately entwined
with the consciousness of the beings who inhabited the superuniverses in those times.
These conditions appeared to have made it possible for the few adepts amongst the different races, who had achieved this state of union with the All, to gain brief glimpses into the future.
However, it was also the very plasticity of the temporal and physical substance of the cosmos that tended to make their prognostications unreliable. Not only did freedom of choice invariably enter the picture to make any prediction inherently fallible, but in many situations the collective consciousness of the concerned species made the necessary corrections to avoid the anticipated disaster, without any help from seers or prophets. Any vision of the future, the philosophers of most races came to believe, was based on the probability of an event occurring as an extrapolation of innumerable current factors and conditions--and those can always change with surprising speed.
There were always a few recorded situations in which these predictive visions had acted as a valuable warning and had allowed the race concerned to take the appropriate actions to avoid a coming catastrophe. Whether or not these cases were purely the result of good fortune, evidently they had occurred with sufficient frequency to pique the interest of the Helianx. In spite of their proficiency in the psychic arts they had received absolutely no warnings of the global calamity that changed their lives forever.
In the light of this unfortunate lacuna in what the Helianx had come to consider with some pride as their particular area of expertise, it had seemed supremely ironic to them that it was only after the addition of the cosmology of just one of these races that their computers had finally reached a conclusion in their galaxy-wide analysis of probable futures. In actuality, the determination at which the computers had arrived did not directly address the central issue that had so obsessed the Helianx: That of the deeper cause behind the catastrophe that had destroyed their precious world?
What they did learn turned out to be far more startling than any answer they might have received on this question and directly concerned the many intelligent species in the superuniverse. The rhythmiC expansion and contraction of the space/time continuum, or so the computers appeared to be counseling, would subject all matter to increasingly powerful gravitational forces as the Multiverse unfolded.
Not information of great interest to most short-lived species, but to a race that had become virtually immortal and whose bodies, though large, were structurally appallingly delicate, it was a terrifying prospect.
