The Helianx Proposition/page 15

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Commentary

Life for the Helianx in the course of their long joumey on the Great Ship through the vastness of the superuniverse had become increasingly easygoing, as the persistent reverberations of the explosive exodus from their planetary home gradually diminished in their collective memory. Unfortunately, old habits started to reassert themselves as the enormous creatures lazed away the galactic night in the dreaming chambers on the ship. Once the initial excitement of meeting other species face to face, as it were, had subsided, the Helianx tended to slip back into their previous ways. This mood was compounded by the immense distances that generally separated different star systems, each with their inhabited worlds. However fascinating their encounters in the flesh had been, they also had considerable limitations.

The Helianx soon found that their sheer physical size, which was not an issue when they were traveling in an out-of-the-body state, was so vastly different from almost all the species they met in their travels that it tended to make communication somewhat unrewarding. The very size of the Great Ship was enough to inhibit all but the most urbane of planetary envoys and there was little the Helianx could do to disguise their own appearance. The ship's translation devices, by reducing the volume and bandwidth used by the Helianx in non-telepathic mode, made sure that their complex soundings could be heard and understood by those envoys who had overcome their initial terror.

This disappointing tendency led to even greater efforts by the Helianx to soften the negative effects they had on those with whom they had managed to establish contact. After a few unfortunate encounters they repressed even more firmly the intensity of their desire to understand what had happened to their world, and how, in a benign Creation, such a thing might have been permitted to occur.

They immersed themselves in the subtleties of those cosmologies that particularly intrigued them, giving themselves so selflessly to the task that their very sense of themselves--always somewhat tenuous, as with most telepathic species--gradually started to dissipate. Without quite realizing how it had taken place they found themselves less and less inclined to continue their explorations. The songs that issued from the computers had become increasingly mournful over time as the shape-of-things-to-come slowly formed within their prodigal circuitry.

As has been the case with many technologically savvy species, over time the Helianx had allowed themselves to become increasingly reliant on their sophisticated tools. So different from their simple lives on Womb Planet, this unfortunate dependence had led, in turn, to a further weakening in the life-force of the creatures.

All of which made it even more shocking when their computers finally predicted that their gelatinous bodies would not be able to survive the gravitational stresses of such a massive reversal in the space/time continuum.

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