MULTISAPIENTS continued...
Matters might have gone on almost indefinitely with this greatest of the Multisapient collectives in its 'relaxed' state. In many ways, from the point of view of a single, semi-immortal organism, which is what this world-sized collective had become, its existence was somewhat idyllic in natural terms.
It possessed, after all, abundant food, water, physical safety, physical comfort, it was absolute master over its planet for most practical purposes, it had no immediate enemies, faced no predators, was secure in its niche.
Even in terms of mortality and reproduction, the situation of this entity was enviable in Darwinian/survival terms. It was not, technically, immortal. Like the smaller collectives that had occupied its planet in earlier ages, it would eventually reach an age at which it must fission. But the same development that had enabled this last collective on its world to grow to world-sized meant that its 'lifespan' would be measured in, at least, tens of millennia. Its own self-analysis, performed with leisurely care, suggested to itself that it might be able to endure for as much as one hundred thousand of its planetary years.
[1]
It was the situation of the local galactic neighborhood that brought more rapid changes to its slow-paced existence.
It so happened that the star system in which its world existed was a binary system. This is nothing rare in astronomical terms. The planet itself was the third world of a G3 dwarf star only slightly smaller and cooler than Sol. Five other worlds orbited that star, three rocky metal-iron bodies and two gas/ice giants with the usual retinue of satellites.
The other star is the binary pairing was a small class M1 star, a distant partner so far away the collective-inhabited world that to the naked eye, it was only just barely visible on a dark clear night to a sharp-eyed 'individual'.
What turned out to be the important thing was that the red dwarf was also host to a planetary system. Three worlds orbiting the distant red star, a rockball, a gas giant...and an outer world boasting a Heliugen biosphere.
Not only did this planet play host to a thriving array of Heliugen life forms, it had once, half a billion years before, been a settled world, home to a thriving population of sapient Helians. The Helians themselves, of course, were long gone, and little trace remained of their presence after the better part of half a billion years, at least on the planet itself.
[2]
In space, though, and on some of the airless bodies that circled the red dwarf, or on deep-frozen airless moons of the Heliugen planet itself, many remnants of the past remained.
The great collective, of course, had no idea that any of this was so. At this time, it knew nothing of Helians, or Heliugen life, nothing of any life beyond its own planet, for that matter. It certainly suspected the presence of planets around the binary partner star, it had long observed that star through telescopes and recognized the characteristic 'wobble'. Though the ecliptic plane of the red dwarf system was such that there was no confirmatory transit and 'light dip', the wobble was enough to tell the collective of the presence of planets, though it knew little about their nature.
Still, the presence of those worlds roused enough astronomic curiosity in the Collective that it took an interest. A time came when it had sent robot probes, fly-by and orbiters, landers and rovers, to the rocky worlds of its own subsystem, a time when it had probed and studied the gas giants orbiting its own stellar primary. Of course there was still far more to learn, but now it took an interest in the other subsystem of the combined star system, and began designing probes to study those worlds.
For Homosapients, sublight interstellar exploration always presents immense challenges of motivation. Unless unreasonable amounts of energy are available and applied, such exploration is a matter of decades or centuries. Even if unreasonable amounts of energy are available, it only reduces the time to a matter of many years, and only for the closest of star systems. The red dwarf companion star was about 0.2 light-years away from the Great Collective, give or take a little.
By this point the Great Collective had access to a technology base somewhat ahead of that of Earth in 2019, but even so, sending a probe that far would be expensive and very time consuming. It was looking at a journey of thousands of years just one-way. On the other hand, if we may apply such a singular metaphor to a creature with many millions of hands, it had for practical purposes almost unlimited supplies of time. If it took tens of centuries for the probe to reach its destination...what of that? The Great Collective was likely to still be alive and well when the data finally came back, after all.
So it was that the Great Collective constructed a trio of automated space probes, at great expense, and launched them toward the red dwarf star. Propelled by staged nuclear-thermal rockets, accelerated on their way by linear accelerators, they travelled at an average velocity of about 150 kilometers per second by the time they reached their cruise speed. They faced a journey of slightly over two Terran millennia.
To be continued...
[1] Its local year was about 1.2 Terran years.
[2] For information regarding the Helians, see:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=70229