The Helianx Proposition/page 18
The intimate, almost symbiotic, relationship between the Helianx and their computers
had proved to be a boon through their difficult last years on Womb Planet.
Granted, their reliance on these intelligent biomechanisms to act as repositories
for all the knowledge the Helianx had gathered, had shaded,in time, into dependence,
but all in all, they felt the exchange had been worthwhile.
Being able to call on the vast libraries for an analysis of their situation
when their ocean had started to dry up
had led them directly to the design and creation of the Great Ship.
Apart from their computers, which they considered should be described more correctly as biological than mechanical, the Helianx had not been considered to be a particularly technologically advanced species prior to the calamity that destroyed their biosphere. The conditions of their underwater world naturally discouraged the need for external devices. Their out-of-the-body adventures had precluded a desire to build spaceships and their telepathic abilities had satisfied any inclination for long-distance telephony. With nutrition so easily acquired on Womb Planet, and all they ever needed readily available in the friendly seas, competition between individual Helianx was all but unknown. There was no impulse to construct dwellings, or to hoard personal belongings, since life in all its simplicity seemed to them to be fascinating enough. Conflicts and disagreements between individual Helianx, as in any sentient species, were inevitable but rare, and could always be settled on the Web before any serious physical confrontation might develop.
While this gentle tolerance of others had led naturally to many millions of years of peaceful coexistence amongst the Helianx, it had ill-prepared them for the stellar explosion that was to strip their planet of life. Another species with more highly developed technological skills and facing the same conditions, might well have tried to avoid the disaster by taking some form of preemptive action. The Helianx, struggling to come to terms with the psychic turbulence in the Web, were not equipped emotionally, or technologically, to do anything but flee the disaster by any means they could come up with.
It was in the chaos of those traumatic times that the cool detachment of their computers had proved to be so invaluable. When the Helianx had originally designed and fashioned them, they had assumed their main use would be data storage, thus relieving their creators of having to retain all they had absorbed in their astral travels. Being technically inexperienced the Helianx had not realized that their bioplasmic creations eventually would evolve a mind of their of their own-- a cool, dry, and rather judgmental mind. Its countless interconnections were created and structured from the constant complex analyses of the philosophies and belief systems of all those many millions of species that the Helianx had studied silently from their astral perches.
