The Helianx Proposition/page 16

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Commentary


The Helianx had sorely needed to pull themselves together and take some definitive action if they were to continue to exist. The shocking news their computers had been so embarrassed to tell them continued to reverberate through their collective consciousness, reactivating the trauma they had tried so hard to repress. Evolutionarily unaccustomed to such powerful negative emotions, and yet now faced by a second--manifestly earthshaking--cosmic drama, the Helianx found themselves forced to come to terms with what seemed to be their destiny.

Their extensive researches into the natural history of all those millions of species they had visited in their travels around the superuniverse had convinced them that, with very few exceptions, they had been the only race of intelligent beings who had managed to leave their planet before their biosphere was destroyed. The few exceptions, however, were those worlds in which the mass extinction of life had occurred before the planetary inhabitants had become aware of what was happening, and these catastrophes the Helianx had only heard about from their occasional encounters with other space-faring explorers.

Realizing that a few other worlds had suffered the same fate had helped mitigate the sense the Helianx had that they had been unfairly selected by forces they had not understood, for a singular and horrible end. And as they pondered the recent information on the fate of the space/time continuum, they understood that this future challenge would intimately concern all sentient life. At least, the Helianx felt, they had not been singled out this time.

These hard-won realizations allowed them enough psychological breathing space once again to stabilize the Web and to help the younger Helianx, those who had not been among the original 58 to leave Womb Planet, to come to terms with a past from which they had been so thoroughly cloaked by their Elders. Fearful of passing on the brunt of the trauma they had undergone, the surviving Elders had delayed the decision to procreate until they had so firmly repressed the painful memories that barely a trace remained in the Web.

It was many millions of years before the Helianx had managed to restore sufficient confidence in themselves and the Multiverse to think of bringing their numbers back up again to their optimal 210. Even then, they tried their best to make sure that the youngsters knew as little as possible about the true nature of the tragedy that had befallen them. The Elders felt this justified them in raising their progeny to be conscious only of their shipboard life. And when the young ones inevitably stumbled on the faint echoes of a tragic prehistory never mentioned by their teachers, the minute reverberations that continued to vibrate in the telepathic matrix had to be explained away as a vague, but mythologized, past.

All this changed, however, when the computers finally revealed their disturbing shared destiny. The Helianx now knew they had to gather all their resources to confront, and somehow to deal with, what appeared to them to be an inevitable doom.

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