The Helianx Proposition/page 17
Multiverse historians have frequently commented
on the unlikely emergence of altruism in intelligent life.
Although the maternal impulse in most species can lead to acts
of remarkable self-sacrifice, these were seen as being strictly personal
and tended to have little impact on the way societies made their decisions.
While theories of kin selection can be widened
to include a species behavior under a threat to its collective survival,
many evolutionary biologists would argue that this is better explained as a selfish action on behalf of the species as a whole.
And perhaps the decision by the Helianx to set off on yet another cosmic journey,
this time to inform all the races they encountered of the ultimate fate
of the space/time continuum, was also colored by self-interest.
After all, they sorely needed the time to work out
what they were going to do about this new impending disaster.
Whereas reciprocal altruism between different species is occasionally seen in the simpler orders of life, by the time a planetary culture becomes aware that other intelligent races exist, it is very much in their self-interest to treat well the extraterrestrials they encounter. Knowing the levels of cooperation needed for a race to be able to develop the technology to travel between the stars, and with all they had gathered through their links with other worlds over the broadcast circuits, the planetary culture in question would have been reassured that any off-world visitation was benign.
The suffering the surviving Helianx had undergone when they had to witness their beloved companions dying in the harsh sunlight had shattered their placid, easygoing, existence. Although they were well aware of life on other planets through their out-of-the-body travels, it had taken the disaster to make real to them just how vulnerable all sentient species were to arbitrary cosmic forces. Out of this realization came the desire to warn the intelligent races they visited in the Great Ship of what they had learned of the times to come.
For the Helianx it was disappointing, but barely surprising, that their warning was so largely ignored. It was not a subject that most races wanted to think about, and besides, even if the computers' predicted timeline was accurate, no one really knew what a reversal of the space/time continuum actually entailed for the life forms alive at that time. The computers had shown the Helianx that they would not be able to survive the extreme gravitational forces, the violent stresses would tear their massive bodies apart. Other races were quick to point out that this was unlikely to happen to them since who knew what they were destined to become, or where they were likely to be, in 460 million years. And, since even the long-lived species rarely lived for more than four or five hundred years, they were able to dismiss the forecast as of no immediate concern to them.
Refusing to be discouraged by the disinterest of other races the Helianx could only observe this willful blindness with a sad detachment, while they continued to hatch their plans to escape their inexorable fate.
