The Helianx Proposition/page 39
By the time the computers had announced their audacious plan for the survival of the Helianx,
the space gypsies had mastered enough of the subtleties of the Hub
to be able to move with relative ease through the primary dimensions.
Regardless, it had been a humbling learning experience for them.
Having become accustomed to thinking of themselves as the oldest and wisest race
they had ever encountered in their travels, it had shaken them deeply
to observe the true hidden workings of the Multiverse.
At the higher frequencies, magnificent beings, entities, forces and energies, some personified and some not, but all well beyond the current comprehension of the Helianx, fulfilled their wide-ranging celestial functions in the Multiverse Administration. The Helianx had felt slightly more comfortable In the lower, more ponderous, frequencies of the worlds in-the-making; those of the rock, floral and animal dimensions, despite the inherent violence they observed on those levels. Prior to the revelations of the Hub, the Helianx had become aware of the intelligence inherent in the natural world. But they had to admit to themselves that they had no idea of the extraordinary complexity of devic life that lay behind the organization of physical matter.
Planetary anthropologists have since speculated that it was their very biotechnological skills that had blind-sided the Helianx to the true nature of these devic dimensions. They had never had a need-to-know. The catastrophe that had propelled them off Womb Planet, and their subsequent collective emotional trauma, had also fed a growing skepticism as to whether the Multiverse really was as benign as their legendary songs had insisted.
As the Helianx became more adept at melding with the Hub, their doubts tended to drop away when they started to appreciate the difficulties faced by virtually every level of sentient life. On the very highest rungs of the ladder of functional intelligence the Helianx had watched those magnificent celestials in the sixth and seventh dimensions, working with an almost mechanical diligence to lay down the spiritual circuitry upon which the smooth administration of the Multiverse depended. But, as the Helianx became more familiar with the lower three dimensions, they were initially astonished to realize the challenges that had helped to shape life into its most basic forms, grew more violent as they descended the dimensional ladder. At the most fundamental level of planetary organization stars blasted out white-hot plasma; worlds heaved with volcanism; asteroids smashed heedlessly onto the already-pitted surfaces of planets and moons; oceans carved into cliffs, and torrential rivers and glaciers sliced their way through mountains. When organic life eventually emerged on a planet, it seemed to the Helianx that the evolutionary processes employed were no less brutal. Up and down the food chain predators preyed on other creatures; massive die-offs and extinctions invariably followed as different species fought for survival and dominance.
It was not a pretty picture, but it was one that their computers had insisted that Noe would need to experience if sHe was to complete hir mission.
