The Helianx Proposition/page 55
Life on the continental land masses continued to be a challenging affair,
as climatic conditions varied wildly between the periods of glaciation,
the ice sheets driving all the creatures towards the warmer equatorial regions;
and other times of intense vulcanism,
when entire islands of magma, almost overnight, emerged steaming from the ocean.
Although Noe's preference was to spend most of hir time swimming in the seas which covered the greater part of the planet, sHe made sure to take regular exploratory flights over the grasslands and jungles to see how landbased life was progressing. With the extinction of the large reptiles so many millions of years earlier, Noe had found hirself continuingly surprised at the way the mammals simply took over the ecological niches left by the dinosaurs. Many species of mammals had grown very large by this time and although they never reached the proportions of the dinosaurs, the predators amongst them were every bit as fierce as the reptiles, and considerably more cunning.
Noe's vastly diminished size by now made hir more vulnerable to these large beasts, forcing hir up into the safety of the treetops. It was there, high in the canopy one early evening, and just after the sun had set, that sHe had first spotted the small creature which had so excited hir interest. Bright eyes, full of intelligence and set in a small furry face, had peered out from around a tree branch, before slipping back into the gathering darkness. But not before Nos had felt a palpable glow of recognition rising in hir heart. Whether or not the little lemur had experienced a reciprocal emotion, Noe doubted, but when sHe pondered the event later, sHe could recall only calm curiosity in those large, reflective eyes.
Not quite believing what hir intuition was telling hir, Noe continued to keep watch on what had turned out to be a small clan of these creatures. They nested, clustered together in the canopy and seldom, if ever, climbed down to the ground. Appearing to be most active at night, they fed on anything they could get their little claws on. In their favor, Noe had noted they were quite capable of acting collaboratively on the rare occasion when they were threatened by one of the large cats. Nimbly jumping from branch to branch, they had lured the much larger animal into the higher reaches of the canopy, until the predator, half-hypnotized by hunger, became overconfident, and leapt onto a branch that splintered beneath the animal's weight, plunging it to its death.
Once Noe had satisfied hirself that this species would be the one to watch, and was pondering hir next movements, sHe suddenly recalled the computers' warning that although sHe might be tempted, sHe was to make sure to involve hirself as little as possible with the natural course of events. The evolutionary process, unique to this experimental world, had to be allowed to unfold with a minimal amount of influence from an external, and unanticipated, source. Or, at least, until Noe made hir move.
