The Helianx Proposition/page 11
Galactic social engineers have long noted that intelligent species, evolving under particularly benign conditions, tend over time to slip into intellectual and spiritual complacency.
Life is too easy; the challenges, too few.
The Helianx had been more than content to bask in the golden light of their two suns and to dive and play in the cool depth of Mother Ocean. Living long, languorous lives, their joy and fascination derived mainly from the complex subtleties embedded within even the most trivial of encounters between members of a telepathic race. The Helianx had never given much time to the deeper questions that beset all creatures capable of pondering their own existence.
Since they were a mature species they had long since learned how to control their population and had chosen to follow a tradition of keeping their number to a stable 210, a level they felt their biosphere could comfortably support on Womb Planet. As an inevitable consequence, this limiting factor, as well as their exceptionally long lives, required individual Helianx to become masters of diplomacy. Constant attention to the state of the telepathic Web that linked all Helianx into one coherent group mind demanded a rare sensitivity to the needs of others. The slightest shift in consciousness of a single Helianx directly impacted on all, needing constant adjustments in each of their psychospheres while they juggled their psychic energies to bring the Web back into equilibrium.
It had not always been this way. The Helianx had developed telepathy as a natural result of being an aquatic species, water being a much more efficient carrier medium than air for subtle energies. Although the evolution of an effective group mind occurred many generations before the catastrophe, the legends coded into the songs of the Helianx still spoke of a time when individuals floated alone and isolated one from another. Locked within their own psychospheres and trapped in mountains of blubber, they were able to communicate with each other only through their songs and the movement of their massive bodies. It was a long, lonely and frustrating epoch in the history of their species.
Telepathy had come to them gradually when the younger and more experimental amongst them had started exploring the possibility of overlaying their elaborate songs with sonic holograms. Over time, they discovered the sound waves that they were capable of generating were able to carry far more information than the mere meaning of the song. With discipline and after much practice, they discovered they could create coherent visual thoughtforms within their own psychospheres, which could be then transmitted over the sound waves. As musicians might communicate a wide range of subtle feelings by the way they modulate the sound created, so the Helianx found themselves gradually able to deepen their contact with one another to a previously unfathomable degree.
It was the start of a new era in social relationships for the Helianx and had led directly to the creation of the Web and to their ability to travel collectively out of their bodies.
