OU The Helians...

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Individual organisms remained unicellular, but they cooperatively
formed macrostructures, perhaps comparable to coral reefs on a grander
scale, that were so biologically interconnected that they could be
considered life-forms themselves. The various species were so
different from their distant Terran cousins that they shared little
save the most basic elements. These life-forms were not archaea or
bacteria or eucaryotes. They were different biodomains entirely.

By ~2 billion years ago, the new biosphere had developed its own
stability, or metastability. It didn't stay the _same_ from megayear
to megayear, any more than the biospheres of Earth or Mars did, but it
had its own patterns that endured just as Earth did. Individual
species specialized here to a degree never matched on Terra. As with
Earth and Mars, individual species came and went, but larger
classifications endured, and niches were repeatedly filled with other
species that filled the same ecological roles.

The domains of this biosphere would eventually be classified by human
biologists, gigayears later. Among them would be the
'electromanipulatives', the 'water-shapers', the 'heat-shapers', and
the 'pressure-lovers', the later being the kingdoms of life that
throve deep below the level of the other forms, the most independent
of the domains.

It was perhaps as alien an environment as Solarigen life could ever
have come to thrive in. But thrive they did, and thriving the distant
descendants of those space-travelling primitive cells still were, ~3.5
billion years later, when the Helian attackers hid here to launch
their attacks on Terra.

The Helians who hid here to prepare their attack were not scientists
of any sort, much less Solarigen biologists. The life-forms of this
moon were mostly underground, and those signs of their presence that
were to be observed on the surface were not obviously 'unnatural'.
Had these Helians been geologists, they might have wondered why small
but conveniently pure deposits of conductive metal were to be found
scattered all over the planet. They might have wondered why they
occasionally struck pockets of anomalously pure water as they mined
out those pure strands and veins of metal. But they weren't, and so
they merely considered it a lucky break and went on working. They
made no effort at sterilization or even checking for the presence of
life in their mined material.

Thus, when they launched their missiles against Earth, they had no way
to know that they were unwittingly giving some local organisms, mined
from their subsurface world, a free ride back to their ancestral
homeland.

It was a homeland changed beyond recognition. By the time the
missiles brought back these life-forms to Earth, the atmosphere was
filled with free oxygen, the Sun was enormously brighter, and the seas
were full of distant cousins grown to giant sizes. Billions of years
of separate evolution had transformed the returning life and the world
returned all but beyond recognition. Most of the few life-forms that
had survived the return trip through space died instantly on exposure
to Earth's environs. The Eldren were taking no chances, though. The
instant they realized that these life-forms from the third biosphere
were present, they sterilized the entire regions in which they landed,
raising the temperatures to levels so high that no organic molecule
could endure.

Earth was, after all, the ancient source of all Solarigen life. The
chance that the returning life could survive or thrive or harm the
local biosphere was infinitesimal by any biological standard the
Eldren knew, but they were not taking the chance. They had already
seen that this kind of life was fantastically tenacious and incredibly
unpredictable in some modes. Thus the sterilizing, cleansing blasts
of million degree heat that had so puzzled that Helian attackers when
they detected them.

By the presence of the remains of the DNA and RNA and other tell-tale
molecular markers of that kind of life in the missiles, the Eldren
knew their source. The Eldren themselves had missed the third
biosphere for some centuries after they found the Solar System, since
it was in such a peculiar place, but they had in due time discovered
it, and now they recognized it.

Thus it was that the Helians had already given away their hiding
place, or had it given away. The hiding place of the enemy of Terran
and Martian life had been revealed by their distant cousins, the
life-forms of Sol's third biosphere.

After all, how likely was it that the Helians would ever have
suspected the presence of Solarigen life on Io? [1]

MORE LATER.

[1] I said before that it was an unlikely place!

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

What followed was tragic.

The Eldren, infuriated by the interference in their plans, and armed
with the knowledge taken from the attackers' minds, proceeded to seek
out the masterminds of the attack. Recall that the attackers were
intended to be caught, and interrogated. The conspirators had hoped
to throw the blame for the ineffectual (though bloody) attacks on
Earth and Mars onto the uppermost leadership of the Helian power
structure. Once the Eldren removed them, the conspirators (who were
pretty high up in the chain themselves) could step into their places.

The attack crew had misguided ideas of who they were taking their
orders from, but the Eldren found them and interrogated them far
sooner than the plan had called for. The Eldren also learned of the
individual contacts who had provided the attackers with their
semi-falsified orders.

The Eldren now initiated a general counter-attack against the
perceived threat, and it hit closer to home than the conspiratorial
leaders had hoped. The individuals who had (under false pretenses)
given the attack orders were hit first, and the information taken from
their minds led to the next links in the conspiratorial chain. The
conspiracy was carefully organized into cells and hidden layers, but
Telepathy was a marvelously useful tool of interrogation, especially
in the 'hands' of entities with Power 40+!

The Eldren did not bother to explain what they were doing, why they
were doing it, or otherwise communicate their intentions to the
Helians in general. A typical instance would be for a Helian of high
rank, going about its business, to suddenly find itself surrounded by
several Eldren teleporting in, snatching it out, and vanishing without
a word of explanation. Occasionally, the security personnel would
attempt futile resistance, mostly there wasn't even time for futility.

Over the course of several Terran days, Helian conspirators across the
Milky Way and its satellite galaxies were captured, interrogated, and
disposed of, with a sort of humane ruthlessness. Many of these
Helians were highly placed in the vast, Galaxy-wide power structure of
the Helian empire. A few were in the very top circles.
Unfortunately, too, the false evidence and trail of deception the
conspirators had been laying was sufficiently effective to lead the
Eldren to snatch up a few Helian leaders who were innocent of any part
in the conspiracy.

In most of these later cases, telepathic interrogation 'cleared' the
innocents, who were returned to their places of 'residence' or 'work'
(closest translations of the Helian concepts) unharmed except for a
very bad fright. A few, though, died as a result of over-intense
telepathic questioning.

Within a few days, the conspiracy, as such, was gone. Over 90% of its
members, both the dupes at the lower level and the machiavellian
planners, were dead. Unfortunately, the Eldren's rapid response had a
side-effect they did not really anticipate, nor did they care very
much about it, at first.

The Helian empire was 'governed' by a single, interlocked network of
power relationships. It was a very 'stripped-down' thing, compared to
a Homosentient political government. Like any such network, it had
certain tendencies inherent in its structure. One such tendency was
that vast numbers of otherwise unrelated subnetworks came together at
the top, in a few individuals.

The Eldren had removed a small but significant number of these
critical nodes in the vast network. The Helian power-structure had
been so elegantly balanced, so perfectly integrated, that it had
endured for well over a million years against the usual stresses and
strains of Helian 'politics'. But with several key-nodes gone, some
30% of the network suddenly broke into separate smaller networks and
isolated groups, leaving the rest teetering on the brink of total
instability.

Desperate attempts were made to stabilize matters. It was made the
worse by the fact that almost no Helian had the slightest idea of what
was going on! All they knew was that for reason or reasons unknown,
the Eldren had suddenly killed a number of their highest-ranking
individuals, having given no explanation and making no sign of giving
any. Confusion reigned.

Helian nature being what it was, power struggles broke out wherever
the great stabilizing network fell apart. Within weeks, local warfare
had broken out on some worlds. Within Terran months, interplanetary
and interstellar warfare was raging in some regions of the Milky Way
and in some of its satellite galaxies.

While internecine violence had never entirely stopped in the Helian
domains, and indeed such a thing couldn't happen with their
psychology, it had always been contained to a very local and
individual level, never permitted to rise to the level of mass
warfare, throughout the million-plus years of the Helian unity since
the Eldren intervened to stop their last great war. In that long
peace, while technology had not advanced all that much, resources had
grown immensely, new worlds settled, new habitats built, vast fleets
of ships constructed.

The warfare that now broke out was incredibly damaging. TL9-11
weapons were used, and whole cities, entire regions, were burned,
blasted, seared, rendered useless for Helian life. Before long, entire
planetary populations were perishing in mass attacks involving
saturation assault with millions of megatons of power.

The core power structure, weakened but not utterly broken, strove
futilely to reassert order, but it was all they could do to maintain
their own network intact. Realizing they could not compel peace, the
central 'government' (such as it was) pragmatically decided to wait it
out, and reconquer the weakened factions after they finished bombing
each other back to a pretechnical level.

The plan might have worked, except that one of the areas of the Galaxy
that the fighting spread into was the Ophiris System. Caught by
surprise, the central 'government' was unable to prevent one of the
factions from seizing control of Ophiris, its planets, and its
precious mega-source of orichalcum.

So rich was the orichalcum supply from Ophir that it had become the
critical supply source for the entire Helian civilization. The
implications of its loss were staggering, the core power structure
had to get it back. They launched several attempts, but the efforts
were riven by the spreading chaos in their ranks. The Helian
power-network had been pushed over into a different state, one in
which their long stability was coming undone at nightmare speed.

The faction that had captured Ophiris, OTOH, found that their prize
was a poisoned fruit, because it instantly made them a target both for
attack from the formerly neutral main power structure and from the
other competing factions. Furthermore, the strains within their
factional power structure were exacerbated by struggles for control of
the most precious star system in Helian space. Within a Terran
decade, that faction had broken apart, and the Ophiris System had
changed tentacles a dozen times.

Those factions too far from Ophiris to take part in the struggle for
control found that they were affected by losing their best source of
the miracle-metal. For the first time in ages, they found that the
supply of orichalcum limited their ability to build starships, TL11
superweapons, and a dozen other things dependent on the
extradimensional material.

As the warfare escalated, the damage to the Helian society kept
mounting. About 25 years into the war, the 'capitol' (or the closest
thing the Helians had), a world orbiting a red dwarf in the inner
reaches of the Milky Way, was sterilized in a cross-fire involving a
dozen fleets and literally millions of atomic bombs. With it went the
last remnants of the top tiers of the former power structure, and the
Helian 'civil war' now rippled out across the entire Milky Way and
throughout the satellites, leaving almost no world untouched.

Up until this point, the Eldren had paid little attention to the
Helian warfare, other than their usual interest in the doings of the
planetary life-forms. As the warfare mounted up, and up, and up,
though, they began to wonder if it would be necessary to intervene
again, as they had over a million years earlier, to stop the fighting
to prevent the Helians from wiping themselves out.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Before they could make up their minds whether this was called for,
however, events escalated. Someone among the Helians, some faction or
group or some brilliant, ruthless (even by Helian standards)
individual, fielded a new weapon.

It was something keyed to their alien biology, a living weapon.

The closest thing in Solarigen experience to it would be a virus, but
it wasn't exactly that, nor exactly a bacterium. It was a set of
'instructions' coded in the Helian genetic material, in a microscopic
life-form that could be introduced into any Helian biosphere. Once it
was, it would replicate, like any other microorganism in the local
biosphere, feeding and reproducing independently.

It was highly adaptable, almost impossible to distinguish from the
local life forms after a few reproductive cycles among them. It could
survive almost the full range of environmental conditions that all
Helian macroforms could. It could survive as a free-living
microorganism almost indefinitely, reproducing like any other such.

Recall that Helians were asexual, reproducing by a sort of budding
process, and that they could, but did not absolutely have to, exchange
'genetic' material with other Helians to 'customize' their offspring.
Finally, recall that the 'species' boundary for their type of life was
fuzzy, they could and did exchange genetic information with
non-sentient breeds of their life-type, for further diversity of form
and function in offspring.

This new bioweapon was like any other microorganism in a local
environment until it came into contact with a Helian. It could do so
by ingestion/absorption, or just plain contact, taking advantage of
the genetic-exchange mechanism. In Terran animal macroforms, the
reproductive system and the waste-removal system evolved in related
systems, in Helians, the food-intake and reproductive systems were
linked through related biological systems.

As soon as contact was made, latent instructions in the microorganisms
hereditary information were triggered, and it transferred those
instructions to the Helian's system. Even one microbe in physical
contact was enough to make the transfer, given a few moments. Once
the transfer was made, the microbe went about its own business. If it
eventually made contact with another Helian, it would do the same
thing again. If it didn't, it finished out its life-cycle, and
reproduced itself.

The 'infected' Helian showed no ill effects. But its offspring,
afterward, were subtly different. Furthermore, any Helian it 'mated'
with afterward would be infected with the same 'bad data', resulting
it the offspring of that Helian being subtly different. Any offspring
produced by the 'altered' offspring carried the taint, it perpetuated
itself. These offspring, mated to an untainted Helian, spread the
'infection' as well.

When certain environmental triggers were present, the 'altered'
offspring changed, suddenly displaying Helian-cidal tendencies. The
compulsion to kill other Helians became overwhelming, while leaving
all other faculties intact. It was a difference in basic 'brain'
(Helians didn't actually have brains, as such, but they had tissues
and organs that did the same tasks) structure, magnifying the native
ruthlessness of the Helian psyche and coupling it to a reward mode for
destroying Helians.

Imagine a Homosentient heroin or cocaine addict, somehow set up in
such a way that every time he kills someone, he gets an instant 'hit'.
Further assume that this hypothetical addict is otherwise unaffected,
that is, he retains all his intelligence and skills whether or not
he's 'high', and that he has no conscience whatever.

Then imagine that several hundred million such people were lose at
once.

This is something approximating what would happen on an 'infected'
Helian world or habitat, when the triggers were right. The altered
Helians didn't show any external sign of the change until the trigger
was encountered, they themselves didn't know they were different. One
of the requirements for the trigger condition was that the 'altered'
Helians make up a minimum percentage of the local population, usually
at least 10 or 15%, sometimes more. The urge to kill, however, was so
wired into the altered brains of the tainted offspring that it was far
stronger than anything a drug addicted Homosentient would be likely
to experience. Add in the natural Helian ruthlessness always present,
and the result was almost beyond human comprehension.

The weapon could be 'seeded' into almost any Helian environment, where
it would reproduce and merge itself into the local ecology. Even one
microbe could theoretically infect an entire planet, given time. It
was equally at home on land, in the helium oceans, or in the weird
atmospheres of Helian worlds. The slightest physical contact could
'taint' the 'bloodline' of a Helian. The 'taint', once contracted,
was independent of the presence of the microbe (in that, it was a
little like a virus that writes its DNA into the nucleus of a
Solarigen cell), and the taint was the Helian equivalent of an STD as
well.

A Helian whose bloodline had been tainted did not look or feel any
different. It might be two, three, four, or more generations before
the necessary level of attaintment and the other factors were present,
and the Helians in those generations would seem utterly normal, even
to themselves. Space flight and the subtlety of the infection made it
easy for it to spread from world to world before the slightest symptom
appeared.

The creator of this weapon seeded it, secretly, by a variety of means,
onto several hundred Helian worlds, and into a variety of Helian space
habitats, settlements, and other Helian centers of life. Then he/they
waited, planning to offer the cure and preventive measures for 'sale'
once the full scale and danger of the weapon became apparent.

But Something Went Wrong.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The long 'incubation' period of this artificial disease meant that any
given Helian environment, especially a large one such as an inhabited
planet, could be 'infected' for decades or centuries before the
effects appeared. Indeed, it was over five Terran decade before the
first outbreaks occured, in limited-scale environments such as space
habitats. The first outbreaks occurred in places and situations far
enough apart that they were scarcely noted amid all the chaos of an
ever-escalating civil war.

The first planetary-scale outbreak was nearly a Terran century after
the initial 'seeding' of the Weapon, but the effects were horrible.
It was a heavily urbanized world, and the taint had spread across much
of the population pool. The carnage that followed the 'activation' of
the latent taint was nothing that a sane Helian could have imagined.
The planetary infrastructure was wrecked and the population crashed,
billions killed in a matter of weeks.

Once 'triggered', a tainted Helian would preferentially attack
untainted Helians, but when those ran short, they would unhesitatingly
attack each other, driven by an irrational hatred few could resist.
The first planet-wide outbreak was followed in fairly short order by
others, as various 'infected' worlds reached the critical points for
triggering the effects.

The outbreaks were all over the Galaxy. Space flight and the long
'incubation' period had permitted the Weapon to spread from one edge
of the Helian empire to the other before it began to manifest on a
large scale. Caught by surprise, the Helians had no idea what was
happening, how it was happening, or why. Entire worlds that had
managed to stay aloof from the warfare abruptly self-destructed, and
the remnants of the former unified power structures shattered.

The creators of the Weapon that planned to 'sell' the cure in exchange
for a dominant position within the new power structure that almost all
Helians still took for granted would form. But ironically, not long
after the initial 'seeding' of the Weapon, the facilities where the
Weapon had been created and most of the Helians involved in the
creation were killed in an attack by a rival faction. With them went
the information to deal with the Weapon. This attack slew the
Weapon's creators only a Terran year or two after the seeding, thus
taking away the potential cure for the greatest threat the Helians had
ever faced.

This threat would have been hard to cope with even if there had been a
unified power structure in place. Erupting in the midst of an
already-extant civil war, there was little chance of containing its
spread, the moreso since it was Terran centuries before the Helians
even figured out what the Weapon was. Much of the resources that
might have been used to cope with the Weapon had already been
destroyed by the sudden eruptions of mass-homicidal madness.
Communications were spotty between Helian biologists, travel was
difficult and made the more dangerous and sometimes impossible by the
threat of the Weapon itself.

When the nature of the Weapon did become clear, matters were hardly
helped. The only way to contain it was to cut off all physical
contact between the infected and uninfected Helians. The only way to
guarantee that separation was to destroy the infected, and the Helian
ruthlessness made that decision thinkable.

Whole worlds were blasted and seared by megaweapons, as the surviving
factions fought desperately to contain the Weapon. Worlds merely
suspected of infection were blasted down to the bedrock, and worlds
knowing their peril tried to fight back or strike first. If it became
clear that a planetary population was infected, even though it had not
manifested yet, interpersonal violence would promptly erupt as the
untainted struggled to destroy those who might become a threat to
them, and those others struggled to survive.

But for all the ruthless efforts, the Weapon could not be entirely
contained. Its spread was slowed. But every so often, a world
thought untouched would erupt into a spasm of violence that would
wreck civilization there. Some still untouched worlds became so
paranoid that they forbade all space travel to and from their
atmospheres, and would open fire on any ship that approached for any
reason. Draconian though this approach was, those worlds adopting it
did fare better, on the average, than those who did not.

The Eldren watched all this in dismayed confusion. A straightforward
war they could have intervened to end. But how to end this?!

As world after world fell, either to conventional military damage or
the Weapon, whole sections of the Greater Milky Way fell out of
communication with each other entirely. The 'horizon' of Helian
awareness was closing in, as their society disintegrated. Matters
were made the worse by the fact that any world where the Weapon had
wrecked civilization had to remain off-limits, since the Weapon itself
was self-perpetuating. Even if every last Helian was dead on a world,
as long as the biosphere remained intact, odds were good that the
Weapon remained present as well. Thus, even worlds which might
otherwise have been able to provide valuable salvaged resources were
off-limits to all use, save by remotely operated or self-operated
robots.

One thousand years after the civil war had begun, the combined damage
from the war itself and the greater damage from the Weapon reached
some critical tipping point, and the Helian galactic civilization
began to come apart in earnest. Star systems, regions, individual
planets, lost contact with each other. The breakup of the incredibly
complex galactic trade networks left planetary infrastructures unable
to operate. Where a Terran millennium earlier a message could be
easily sent from one edge of the Milky Way to the other, now in much
of the Helian realm, it was difficult to send a message from side of a
planet to the other.

With average life-spans in the neighborhood of 2000 years or so, this
was rapid chance, especially for a civilization that had endured for
over a million years.

It was at this time that the realization began to spread among the
majority of the Helians that some point of no return had been passed,
and that no recovery was going to be possible, or at least no recovery
of the sort they had hoped for. The Helian empire was a dying thing.

The breakup left thousands, or tens of thousands, of isolated
communities of Helians scattered across the Greater Milky Way. In
some places, entire planetary societies had survived, usually by
'seceding' early and refusing to permit any intercourse whatever with
the outside Galaxy. In other places, local small cities in asteroid
crusts or airless planets managed to become self-sustaining. But only
in a handful of places was a serious technical base and resource base
still intact.

The Eldren watched the Helian empire destroy itself in confusion and
dismay. Unable to decide what they could or should do, they ended by
doing, essentially, nothing, save to guard Sol and their newly
established Solarigen biospheres around the galaxy from being damaged
by the overflow of the Helian collapse.

The war that destroyed the Helian empire finally came to an effective
end after about 1500 years of fighting. The empire had endured not
quite 1.5 million years, and died over the course of 1.5 thousand
years, a year of collapse for every thousand years of peace.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The handful of remaining Helians were a pathetic lot. Where the
empire had had a population of quintillions, 1500 years later there
were perhaps one hundred billion Helians left in the entire Greater
Milky Way. Most of those were dwelling on a hundred or so isolated
planetary communities, separated by thousands of light-years. A few
remained in other divers places.

The largest cluster of Helians remaining occupied one of the last
regions to retain interstellar travel. Twenty worlds happened to be
closer to each other than most, and had 'seceded' early, refusing all
intercourse with the outside Galaxy, and thus spared themselves the
civil warfare and the Weapon. These worlds had been a bit isolated
even before the war began, which had led them to have a slightly more
self-sufficient economy. This proved beneficial to them when they had
to cut themselves off from the trade networks. The isolation also
made them untempting targets for the great contending factions. Their
early isolation unquestionably saved them from the horror of the
Weapon.

In the aftermath of the war, the Helians of these worlds faced a basic
problem: their worlds could operate in a self-sustaining way for a
very long time, but not forever. Their resources were not infinite,
and their populations would in time grow until expansion was again
likely. Unfortunately, how could they dare attempt to spread outward
into a Galaxy in which the Weapon remained viable and a ready threat?

Furthermore, though the war was over, the various dangers from its
more conventional weapons was not. There were automated attack ships
still flying from star to star, ready to blast a world with saturation
atomic attack in obedience to programming from dead masters, to serve
dead agendas. Further, they knew that other Helian survivors might
eventually find them, and covet their safety and intact
infrastructures and ecologies.

A thousand years after the end of the war, the majority of the
population of the 20 worlds had decided that their only option was to
strike out for greener pastures. Construction began on the largest
starships ever built in Helian history, flying arks designed to carry
self-sustaining ecologies to a new and hopefully more peaceful and
prosperous goal. Every scrap of orichalcum in the 20 worlds was
gradually used to construct the engines and other systems of the new
ships, and for the first time since the early war, they sent out ships
to the outside galaxy, scouting for raw materials and necessary
equipment, always avoiding the living worlds where the Weapon lurked.

In the later stages of the war, many of the former great shipping
organizations and other groups with fleets of ships had 'parked' them
in great 'drydock' centers, usually in moonlets orbiting inhabited
worlds. The would-be emigrants now scoured the galaxy for these
centers, in order to strip them of useful equipment and precious
orichalcum for the new space arks.

They could, of course, have simply gone to Ophir and mined orichalcum
from that nearly inexhaustible source, but it was across the galaxy
from the Twenty Worlds, and all too likely to be thoroughly
contaminated with the Weapon, automated defenses, and other dangers.
Also, any other surviving faction of Helians might well be drawn there
as well. All in all, the Twenty Worlds thought the Ophiris System a
good place to avoid.

At last, after some Terran centuries of work, the great star arks were
completed, enough to carry the majority of the population of the
Twenty Worlds. A few opted to stay behind, but most had no wish to
remain, knowing it was likely to be a death sentence sooner or later.
One thousand arks left the stars of the Twenty Worlds, heading
outward, and eventually, leaving the Milky Way entirely. With their
self-sustaining ecologies and extensive preparation, they set out for
the Great Spiral in Andromeda, seeking worlds safe from the Weapon and
the other legacies of the death of their empire.

For now, we must take our leave of this largest group of Helian
survivors, as they leave the stage. (Though they may yet again
appear.)

The greatest number of Helian 'survivors' had left the Greater Milky
Way entirely, but there were still a scattered few left. Most were in
tiny isolated communities such as domed mining cities on remote
Kuiper-type iceoids, or similar tiny groups. One by one, these
isolated groups perished, as their desperate efforts to survive proved
unequal to their limited resources and the dangers they faced.

But there was a last group that had greater resources. It was a group
which would leave a legacy that would echo down the megayears.

----------------------------------------------

OK, now I've told the story of the ancient (on a geological scale!) Helian Civilization.
The story goes on, but the next step in the story is best told in the next 'section',
the overview of the history of Solarigen Life, to be found here:

The Solarigens