The Helianx Proposition/page 4
Over the hundreds of millions of years of their history the Helianx had achieved a state of balance with their planet. They had succeeded in evolving the perfect physical form for their environment and the preservation of all life on their world.
When the Elders amongst the Helianx had realized that the ocean was drying up they charged all who remained of their race to gather together for one complete orbit in every ten of their intertwined twin suns. During this time they were to bond their mental energies into one metaphysical standing wave and then start the exhausting process of downloading what they could from their biological computers before the machinery had completely failed. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. Only a fraction of the immense amount of information was successfully transferred to the bio electronic standing wave in the Helianx own memory banks before the computers had finally spluttered and died.
Poetry and the knowledge of the ages tends to become irrelevant to a species facing immediate extinction. For the Helianx the heat was on--quite literally. What had been an easygoing life, gently moving around their almost limitless underwater world, rising to the surface only intermittently to feed and to soak up the dreams and hopes of a sentient universe before returning to the deeps to ponder and assimilate what they had learned--all this, they knew, was soon to change quite irrevocably. Never in their previous experience, in all their explorations, had they heard of an entire biosphere disappearing almost overnight.
A note: it actually took almost two hundred thousand years for the entire evaporation to complete itself. However, to the long-lived Helianx--and by that time some of their lifespans had reached three million years--those two hundred thousand years felt like they passed in a flurry of horror.
Many of the Elders were amongst the first to die. The most ancient amongst them, their bodies weary from millennia of service, had found themselves no longer mentally nimble enough to modify their physical forms. It was the younger ones, with the notable exception of a few remarkably quick-witted Elders, who had found that they were able to accelerate the growth of small legs by focused intention. Coded into their ancient songs were stories of when their species first discovered that they could manipulate matter with focused sound waves. This astonishing revelation was quickly followed by a rapid expansion in medical practices,in particular, this included genetic modifications that they practiced almost for the fun of it--for the novelty of inhabiting new and different physical forms. Within a few tens of millions of years they had tired of this and had stabilized their great bodies.
Thus, it was many millions of years later, when this period had been long forgotten and was stored only as binary digits in their computers, that catastrophe had struck their planet and the seas had started to disappear.
