OU The Helians...

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.


The Core Helians had undergone extensive changes since the Diaspora
and the Nova. Their homeworld's biosphere had been utterly
devastated, and they had been driven into a largely subsurface
existence, which had paradoxically made their expansion into space
easier.

Recall that the Helians had extensive, though not unlimited, control
over their bodily structures, including the ability to gradually
change from from relatively small (1 hex) to very large (10+ hexes)
scales. But life underground had forced the Core Helians to adopt
1-hex scale almost universally, since space was forever at a premium
even in the enormous underground cities.

This trait carried over as the Core Helians expanded out into space,
first across their star system once again, then out to the stars on
their own. Volume aboard their early interstellar spacecraft was even
more limited than the free volume in their underground cities. The
1-hex size limit became ingrained into the Core Helian culture, as
well as a common physiotype.

Where once Helians on Helius had used hundreds of bizarrely different
forms, adapted for countless different purposes, the later Core
Helians came to regard that sort of individuality as a mark of the old
times, before their history changed forever in the Diaspora. Their
culture came to mandate a single form of phsyiology, much like many
Homosentient cultures would mandate only certain forms of clothing.

Though the Core Helians retained the ability to alter their
morphology, it became a strongly disapproved of behavior, to the
point of physical force being used to discourage such behavior.

The cultural change was rooted in practicality. Just as a compact
size was more practical for life underground and aboardship, the
design of both cavern-city and starship was greatly simplified by the
adoption of a single morphology. (For comparison, imagine the
difficulty of designing automobiles if the number of limbs, heads,
eyes, etc, could vary at random among humans).

As Core Helian technology continued to advance, eventually they were
able to construct immense space habitats, within which conditions were
actually more Helius-like than Helius itself, post-Nova. But the
cultural change was too ingrained to change, even though the immense
O'Neill-like habitats could have supported a more relaxed range of
forms. The Core Helians retained their intense, driven devotion to
personal sovereignty, but at the same time their collective will to
enforce social discipline was equally ruthless. The tension between
these impulses provided the dynamism of their very alien society.

Meanwhile, what of those enormous numbers of Helians who had been
taken to other worlds by the Eldren?

The large majority of all sapient Helians had been taken from Helius,
and scattered across the heliuformed worlds the Eldren had prepared.
Naturally, most of these involuntary colonies failed rapidly, all of
the transportees dying within a generation or three. But some
succeeded, some in improbable circumstances. In all cases, the tech
level fell backward, from the high TL9 that had prevailed on Helius at
the time of the Diaspora, sometimes down to TL0.

But in the more successful worlds, the tech level began to rise again,
as populations rose and the populations increased. Indeed, after the
Nova, most of the heliuformed worlds were considerably more clement
and familiar to Helians than Helius itself had become for the Core
Helians. Some of the worlds, more successful than average examples of
the Eldren's heliuforming abilities, were nearly paradisical compared
to Helius post-Nova.

Some of the involuntary colonies thrived sufficiently that they began
to expand back into space themselves. In some cases, they found star
systems more rewarding of exploration than the tiny Heliustar System's
three worlds had been.

Out of the vast number of colonies, perhaps 100 really throve. Of
those, 10 or 15 hit the lucky break of having sufficient supplies of
orichalcum in their star systems to 'jump start' interstellar travel.
Sufficient supplies, of course, being relatively tiny, but still more
than most. Absent such available supplies, interstellar travel had to
wait for theoretical physics to predict the existence of orichalcum,
which absent samples usually needed high TL10, as it had for the Core
Helians.

Of the 10 or 15 that had sufficient orichalcum to get the short-cut,
one star system had even more.

A typical star system in which the Eldren had placed a colony might
have had 1 to 5 teratons (trillion tons) of orichalcum, which sounds
like a lot, and isn't.

Those 1 to 5 teratons were the total supply for the ENTIRE star
system, and the large majority of that orichalcum would inevitably be
inside the stellar primary, and most of what was left tended to be
deep within planetary bodies. Generally, only unusual circumstances
would bring a relatively large amount of the stuff within easy
discovery distance of the surface, such as would later happen on Eos I
or Earth.

But every rule has its exceptions.

One of the heliuformed worlds the Eldren placed a colony on circled a
star in the Milky Way Galaxy (as did most of the colonies, actually).
This star was an odd choice for such a heliuformation. Most of the
new colonies were on worlds that orbited spectral-class M dwarf stars.

This world orbited a brilliant, massive spectral-class 'A' sun.
Naturally, it orbited it at a tremendous distance, much further than
Pluto orbits Sol, and even so the finished heliuformation left what
was, by Helian standards, a sweltering tropical world.

But it was still just within their habitability range, and it was rich
in useful metals and resources. Furthermore, the Eldren, for whatever
reason, gifted it with two transported population centers, and a total
starting population of over 60 million Helians. Once the initial
confusion and chaos passed, and the new power structures the Helians
inevitably created stabilized, this colony throve rather better than
most. Their population fell to no lower than 40 million, their
technology base bottomed out at TL7 and began to rise again.

This big, hot star had a big stellar system. It had 18 major planets,
three asteroid belts, and 10 of the 18 planets were gas giants with
more-or-less extensive satellite systems, including several moons of
planetary scale. One of the gas giants, the seventh world out, was a
monster, much more massive than Jupiter, and it had an incredible 131
moons, 21 of which were of Luna-size or bigger.

Let us call this star what Terrans would someday call it, Ophiris, and
its Helians the Ophirian Helians (to distinguish from the Core
Helians). The actual heliuformed world Terrans would someday call
simply Ophiris XVIII, and the super-scale gas giant would be known to
Terrans as Colossus.

Though the Ophirian Helians were doing well in their new home, they
did encounter things they had never experienced on Helius, and one of
those things was something they came to call 'the Static' (or that
would be the closest translation). Recall that the primary means of
Helian communication was Telepathy. They discovered that every so
often, telepathic 'noise' filled the ether, reducing their normally
global range to a few miles or less, varying during these periods so
that range might vary from a mile to 10 miles up and down, until the
Static period passed. Then many years would pass, and the Static
would return again, in a regular cycle.

The Ophiran Helians explored their new home system, discovering many
useful things, though their ultimate-cold nature made colonization of
any of the other worlds an iffy proposition. But as they explored,
they discovered something which made the Ophiria System nearly unique
in the Local Group of galaxies.

Their tech base had recovered to the TL8/9 border, and their ships
exploring the system eventually explored the satellites of the largest
gas giant. At first glance, it wasn't the most interesting of the 131
moons, a rocky globe about 300 miles in diameter, more of a big
asteroid than a full-scale moon. It wasn't the first to be visited,
both because of its modest size and because it was one of the inner
moons, deep inside a radiation belt larger and rather more intense
than that of Jupiter. To the Ophirian Helians, even more vulnerable
to hard radiation than Homosentients, this object was hard to reach
and appeared uninteresting anyway. But eventually, curiousity and
their thorough nature led them to pay it a visit.

The reason for their curiousity was that they had found, when their
ships approached Colossus, that the Static was constant near the
megagiant. The reason it came and went cyclically was that when
Colossus and Ophiria XVIII were on the same side of the star, and the
two worlds were more or less lined up, the Static flooded outward to
engulf the new Helian world. As the faster-moving inner world moved
on in its orbit, the Static would pass. It only reached out to
Ophiria XVIII when the star, Colossus, and the Helian world were in a
line within a few degrees of each other.

But any Helian ship that got close to Colossus encountered the same
telepathic Static, flooding the ether near the gas giant. (Near
meaning about 2 or 3 AU.)

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Eventually, they traced the Static down to its source: the modest
little moonlet orbiting close in to the gas giant, in the deadly
depths of the radiation belts. When they finally landed, they
discovered dozens of other weird effects. Machinery behaved oddly.
Magnetic sensors went mad, and telepathic transmission (Telesend) was
impossible even at physical-contact distances. On the other hand,
once they actually landed, at times receptivity was so high that the
Helian astronauts could listen in on conversations back on the new
homeworld, which normally have been out of range by orders of
magnitude.

The reason for this was that the tiny body on which they landed
contained the single richest lode of orichalcum that would ever be
discovered in the Milky Way Galaxy, the largest supply of the
miracle-material to be found outside a star or a major gas giant.
Most star systems might have 1 to 5 teratons for an entire system,
this one tiny body contained more than that. Much, much more. It was
so rich in the extradimensional material that it sprayed a constant
cone of telepathic noise outward away from the star, generated by the
interaction of all that orichalcum, the magnetic and radiation fields
of Colossus, and the energy pouring from the star. When that cone of
telepathic radiation swept over Ophiria XVIII ever so often, it
produced 'the Static'.

Almost half a billion years later, Terrans would name this moonlet 'Ophir',
after the legendary source of King Solomon's gold. This moonlet would
provide the name for the star as well. The moonlet was rich beyond
belief in orichalcum, the miracle-substance making up no less than
.008% of the moonlet's mass! Where the Core Helians had needed 50
Terran years to assemble one gram of orichalcum, scouring their star
system to do it, Ophir contained thousands of teratons of the
material. Even the outer surface crust of the body contained readily
available gigatons of the rarest technologically useful substance
known!

The Ophiran Helians, of course, had no idea of just what they had, not
yet.

The Ophirian Helians began to experiment with their peculiar
discovery, and it didn't take them long to discovery many of its weird
properties. Unlike most peoples after their discovery of orichalcum's
existence, they had tons of sample to work with, not micrograms, and
as a result, they were able to 'shortcut' through much of the
development process their Core Helians cousins were experiencing. The
Ophirian Helians developed faster-than-light travel and
communications, and the TL 11-12 'force' physics, far sooner than the
Core Helians did, though their application was necessarily cruder,
given that their engineering implementation was two tech levels lower.

Just as the Core Helians would later do, the Ophirian Helians began to
expand outward from their new homeworld, seeking both an explanation
for what had brought their ancestors from Helius to Ophiria XVIII, and
new resources and new lands for settlement. Ironically, the expanding
new empire of the Ophirian Helians was, culturally and
physiologically, much more like the pre-nova Helians that the Helians
left behind on Helius maintained.

With the broad stable biosphere and immense resources of their
heliuformed new homeworld, the Ophirian Helians had no need to retreat
underground, and thus no reason to adopt a single, one-hex physical
structure species-wide. With enormous supplies of food and other
natural resources, they could afford to be more profligate. This was
a two-edged sword, of course. Though it made their lives on Ophiria
XVIII far easier than life on post-nova Helius, they also weren't
driven to develop the life-support technologies and other techniques
that their Core Helians cousins found so useful in space exploration.

The starships of the Ophirian Helians were peculiar, in a sense.
Their enormous reserves of easily accessible orichalcum enabled them
to build starships capable of enormous trans-light velocities. They
were very inefficient, compared to the Core Helians ships, because of
their lower tech level, but the Ophirian Helians had plenty of
orichalcum and plenty of fissionables for fuel, to make up the
difference. The odd result was the TL9 starships of the Ophirian
Helians were considerable faster than the more advanced TL11
starships of the Core Helians.

With their faster ships and large fuel supplies, they were limited (at
first) only by their poorer life-support, computer, sensor, and
protective technologies. As those improved, the Ophirian Helians
spread like wildfire, exploring as many star systems in their first 10
years of star flight as their Core Helians cousins would explore in
50.

About 30 years after they developed star flight, the Ophirian Helians
came across the first of their cousin-worlds, orbiting a star some 300
light-years from Ophiria. Soon after that, they encountered another,
470 light-years from Ophiria in another direction. As was always the
case with Helians, these encounters resulted in complex, multifaceted,
subtly ruthless power struggles, on every level from the individual to
the full-scale culture. Of course, given their immense resources, the
Ophirian Helians always won.

These encounters brought something to the Helians that the species had
never known before in all its sapient history: cultural conflict.
Always before, throughout their history, their planetary-range
telepathic abilities had meant that there was a single, unified
world-wide culture, even at TL0. Struggles existed between
individuals, tribes, cities, 'nations', 'religions', and many other
categories half-comprehensible or utterly incomprehensible to a
Homosentient, but always they'd known a common background, a common
language, a common set of basic assumptions.

Separated by the Eldren Diaspora, for the first time in all their
history, different groups of Helians began to develop in different
directions. By the time they began to meet again, they had been apart
long enough, and changed enough, to know really different cultures.
Among Homosentients, contact between really different cultures often
would lead to violence. Among Helians, with their almost absolute
self-focus and delicately balanced stress between personal sovereignty
and a balance of power, it pretty much always resulted in violence.

A new unified culture began to emerge, almost entirely derived from
and controlled by the Ophirian Helians. As their ships expanded
outward, they discovered other Helian-settled worlds every so often,
and in each case the new world was ruthlessly absorbed into the
growing empire, its people and resources directed to the task of
further expansion. No practical resistance was possible, since the
Ophirians had a technology edge over most of the other involuntary
colonists, and they had the overwhelming advantage of the
orichalcum reserves of Ophir itself, a military/economic edge against
which their conquered territories and peoples could make no meaningful
response.

The Ophiria System was in the Milky Way Galaxy, on the side facing the
Clouds of Magellan. The Ophirian Helians were quite able to compute
where Helius was, in the far-off Greater Cloud, but it was as yet
beyond their technology to send ships across intergalactic space, even
with their huge orichalcum supply. But they began to spread around
their own region of the Milky Way, and ~1000 Terran years after they
achieved FTL starflight, the Ophirian Helians had subordinated fully
20 other Helian colony-worlds, and had established hundreds of
'secondary' colonies on worlds not technically habitable to Helians,
but useful for one reason or another. Their populations had grown
enormously, to the point that Ophiria XVIII itself was becoming a
city-girded planet.

It was at about this time that the questing ships from their Core
Helian cousins in the Greater Cloud of Magellan finally regained
contact with the Ophirian Helians of the Milky Way Galaxy.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Contact between the Core Helians and the Ophirian Helians came about
when the Core Helians developed a new generation of their stargate
technology, one advanced enough to bridge the gap between the Greater
Cloud of Magellan and the Milky Way.

The instantaneous-transport technology of the Core Helians required
apparatus at both ends, so before the ships could be teleported to the
Milky Way Galaxy, the Core Helians had to send an ships across the
intergalactic void by conventional means, using 'ordinary' FTL tech.

This was a daunting task, even for the high TL11 technology of the
Core Helians in the Greater Cloud. Such an expedition would have to
fly free of support, tens of thousands of light-years from any
possible source of supply or assistance. Their various mechanisms
would have to remain operational for a period of decades, and their
supplies would have to be recycled with sufficient perfection to
sustain a crew for decades.

At first, in the face of the enormous obstacles, the Core Helians
attempted to send automated ships. They made dozens of such attempts,
in fact, but in every case, the limited abilities of the cybernetic
intellects the Core Helians could construct proved unequal to the
unexpected challenges of such a tremendous journey. The Core Helian
computer technology was not deficient, but true artificial
consciousness was a tremendously difficult project even at TL11.

After dozens of failed automated attempts, the Core Helians decided
that they would have to resort to sending a 'manned' expedition to the
Milky Way to set up the other end of the teleportal system.

Even with their technology, there was no way to reduce the travel time
below roughly 60 Terran years. Sixty years of flight time, without
support or resupply, far beyond communications range, far beyond any
possible assistance. The ships would have to be stripped down for
reliability and efficiency, meaning that the enormous trip time (over
half of a Helian lifetime) would be neither particularly pleasant nor
very interesting, barring emergencies. Altogether, it promised to be
a difficult and dangerous matter.

Among Homosentients, such a crew would be selected either by offering
enormous potential rewards for themselves or their families, or by
appealing to intangibles such as patriotism, religious fervor, or
concern for community, or by drafting unwilling crew. The later would
in fact be unlikely for such a mission, since an unwilling crew would
be inclined to sabotage the mission.

Among Helians, concepts like 'willing' or 'unwilling' would be hard to
even express meaningfully. Naturally, no Helian wanted to be on this
mission, it was a low-personal-reward matter by its very nature.
While the Core Helian culture was quite capable of offering rewards
for desired choices, but they were still Helians, and psychologically
unable to offer more of a reward than the bare minimum necessary.

Thus, in the end, the ships were crewed by Helians from the bottom of
the various ladders of authority and status, who couldn't get out of
it. With Homosentients, that would have been a recipe for disaster,
with Helians, it was just 'normal'. The crew were incapable of being
angry about it, it was 'just life'.

The expeditionary fleet (fully 72 ships) made the difficult and
dangerous journey, and out of the 72 ships that left the Greater Cloud
of Magellan, four ships finally reached the Milky Way Galaxy, all of
them with their various onboard systems near failure and none of them
with their full crew complement still alive. But they did make it,
just barely, where the robot ships had not.

The only way the survivors could return home, of course, was to
activate the teleportal linkage. There wasn't a ghost of a chance
that the nearly exhausted starships could make the intergalactic
journey again through open space. This was part of the plan, of
course, and arose both from the limits of Core Helian technology and
the characteristic ruthlessness of the Helian mentality.

The survivors of the journey selected a suitable star system, with
suitable sources of the necessary raw materials. It was also
necessary that the selected location be relatively close to a 'neutron
star', since one of the necessary resources to build a stargate could
be found only near such a body.

The later requirement forced the ragged survivors to spend another
couple of years of searching, but at last they had what they needed,
close enough: a red dwarf system with several planets within 30
light-years of a neutron-star remnant from a long-previous supernova.
Having found that, construction began.

The tiny handful of survivors couldn't do much construction on their
own, but they could and did deploy robots, which duplicated themselves
several times over, and then began construction on the immense
mechanisms necessary to create a teleportal. This required about 7
Terran years, but in the end, they succeeded in activating the
gateway, enabling the survivors to teleport home in a split-instant.

With the initial connection open, it was simple to open additional
links, and a wave of Core Helian starships poured through from the
Greater Cloud to the Milky Way. Less than 20 years later, the Core
Helians encountered the edges of the steadily expanding Ophirian
Helian empire.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The first encounters came as something of a shock, or would have if
Helians were psychologically capable of shock. Even for the staid
Helians, the encounters were interesting, beause the Core Helians were
greatly changed from what their ancestors had been a few thousand
years before, while the Ophirian Helians were more-or-less similar to
that earlier cultural/physionomic form.

Given Helian nature, it was perhaps inevitable that the initial
contact between these long-lost kin would rapidly blossom into
full-blown warfare. It was peculiar warfare even by Helian standards,
however, being both incredibly ferocious and also oddly restrained in
sme ways.

Each side of the power struggle had some major advantages. The Core
Helians had a TL11 tech base, a culture well adapted to making
effective use of limited resources, and above all else, a nearly
unassailable home base. Helius itself, and its associated worlds and
habitats, were in the Greater Cloud of Magellan, accessible only via
the teleportal gates the Core Helians controlled.

The Ophirian Helians, on the other hand, had a much larger resource
base, a larger population base, shorter supply lines, more practical
experience in spatial warfare, both strategic and tactical, and above
all else, access to nearly unlimited supplies of orichalcum, the
extradimensional substance that was the indispensable base of the FTL
travel/communications and much of their other tech used by both sides.

The war raged on for over 1000 Terran years. In the course of it,
entire heliuformed biospheres were wrecked, worlds that had been
living and habitable for only a few centuries reduced to barely living
echoes of themselves. Other worlds endured, but heavily damaged.
Entire fleets of starships were vaporized, shredded, entrapped,
destroyed, as each side struggled to establish dominance as their
instinct demanded. Each side would periodically be rent as a major
shift in internal power balances (sometimes caused by enemy action)
broke down the internal peace and ignited local power struggles.

The initial advantages eroded as the war went on. The Core Helians
discovered some other sources of orichalcum, nothing remotely as rich
as Ophir itself, but enough to keep their war machine rolling along.
The Ophirian Helians eventually learned how to build their own
teleportal systems, or captured Core Helians gate stations.

Neither side was able to gain a permanent advantage, but neither was
able to let go, either, their instincts were too strong. The war went
on, and on, and on, until at last, it began to appear that there was a
real danger that the Helians would wipe themselves out, taking their
worlds' biospheres with them.

Through all this, the Watcher and his fellow Eldren observed in
fascination, confusion, and sometimes dismay. They did not
particularly like watching their heliuformed worlds reduced to
lifelessness again, after their hard work, and they hated seeing their
fascinating 'pets' risk annihiliating each other entirely, thus
depriving the Watcher and his fellows of their hobby. After some
debate, the Watcher decided that intervention would be necessary.

The Core Helians and the Ophirian Helians had waged war for over 1000
Terran years, and had gotten very very good at it. They had TL11
technology, enormous resource bases, gigantic fleets of warships, and
literally hundreds of billions of warriors. It took the hundred or so
Eldren who 'intervened' less than 24 Terran hours to suppress the war,
across both galaxies.

This exercise of raw power reminded the Helians on both sides of the
fact that the Eldren, though they might directly intervene in Helian
affairs only on the rarest of occasions, could do so at will and
with terrifying effectiveness. In the coure of about a day, the war
ended, and the Helians were compelled to begin working out an enforced
peace. What resistance was attempted was crushed with ruthless
efficiency, albeit more or less humanely.

The Eldren compelled the Ophirian Helians to grant the Core Helians
full access to the orichalcum reserves of Ophir. The Core Helians
were constrained to permit the Ophirian Helians to make full use of
their hyper-teleportation machines. Gradually, a single Helian power
structure emerged, and a new Helian society began to spread across the
still unexplored regions of the Milky Way and the Greater and lesser
Clouds of Magellan.

Though it began inauspiciously, with an imposed peace, this was in
fact to be the beginning of what passed for the Helians for their
golden age.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Under the imposed peace laid upon them by their Eldren
observers/benefactors, the Helians were forced to establish a new
combined power structure without their usual technique of large-scale
violence, though individual violence remained in use as they always
had. Had the Helians been Homosentients, tremendous resentment would
have accompanied the enforced peace, but Helians just could not think
that way.

What the Helians did experience was a fear-based recognition of just
how overwhelming the power gap between the Eldren and themselves
really was. One emotion that Helians experienced that Homosentients
would fully comprehend was sheer, basic fear. They were now all too
aware that their continued existence hinged on the sufferance of a
handful of alien beings older than the Helian species.

The Helians had known that the Eldren existed since the Day of the
Diaspora, and the Core Helians had learned a little after that, but
direct contact did not occur until the Eldren intervened to stop the
Helians' war. After that, some direct communication began, and the
Helians learned a little. However, what they learned only tended to
reinforce the Helians' correct impression that the Eldren possessed
overwhelming power.

The shared fear of Eldren power helped drive the Helians to establish
their common power structure. A great deal of assassination,
intimidation, theft, extortion, and other means Homosentients usually
consider unsavory were joined by persuasion, and other means, and over
the course of a hundred Terran years or so a stable new power
structure emerged.

With the distraction of the large-scale power struggles removed, the
Helians began to divert the energy they had spent in striving for
power within their societies to gaining power and possession by
expanding into new worlds and new regions of space.

What followed was a period of steady expansion unmatched in previous
Helian history. Populations swelled, and world after world was
explored and settled. Every so often a new Helian world, settled by
the involuntary diaspora centuries earlier, would be encountered and
absorbed into the growing joint power-structure, usually by
intimidation or other low-key means, sometimes by force. A thousand
Terran years after the Eldren ended their great war, the Helians had
spread across 5000 worlds.

The Eldren, for their own reasons, lent occasional aid to the Helians.
Among other things, they continued to 'heliuform' suitbable worlds,
thus giving the Helians not merely useful worlds, but comfortable,
easily settled living worlds.

Ten thousand years after the end of the Helian War, they had expanded
to a million worlds. Another 5000 years was sufficient for the
Helians to expand up to 100 million worlds spread across the Milky Way
Galaxy, the Clouds of Magellan, and some other 'satellite' galaxies of
the Milky Way, similar to the Clouds but not visible from Sol.

The majority of the Helian worlds, either heliuformed or otherwise
settled, were in orbit around cool spectral class M dwarf stars. Most
of the worlds that did orbit hotter stars orbited far out, on the
fringes of their respective star systems. But some Helians settled in
space-borne habitats, usually in the outer reaches of a star system,
and some settled on comet-like bodies, in Kuiper Regions and Oort
Shell zones.

But the expanding Helian society finally began to reach a period of
stability. Having spread all over the Milky Way and its satellite
mini-galaxies, and with a technology that had stabilized at the high
end of TL11, the Helians now settled into a long period of relative
stability. A very long period, in fact, a period on the order of a
million Terran years.

This was the greatest age of the Helian civilization. After their
expansion in space ended, their populations continued to grow, until
some worlds were covered in immense cities that reached from ocean to
ocean. Fleets of starships ranged from world to world, eventually
numbering into the hundreds of millions of ships.

The Watcher and his fellow Eldren watched in interest as the Helian
society settled into a stable state, and even after it did, the
details remained interesting. However, toward the end of this period,
the Eldren discovered something that they found both quite surprising
and also fascinating, but which the Helians found to be rather
disturbing.


MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The discovery of intelligent life on Helius a bit over a million years
previously had startled the Watcher and his fellows. It was something
they had never even imagined, self-replicating beings of the Helian
sort, living on planetary surfaces, etc.

They discovered the Helians by detecting the electromagnetic emissions
of the Helian civilization on Helius. The Watcher and his fellows
kept their senses attuned after that for the tell-tale signs of
intelligent EM signals, but they never found any not of Eldren or
Helian origin.

However, a little over a million years after the discovery of the
Helians, one of the Watcher's compatriots happened to be crossing the
Milky Way, on its own incomprehensible business, when it happened to
detect a pulse of telepathic activity that was clearly neither of
Helian nor Eldren origin.

The detection showed little or no trace of thought, per se. It was
more of a simple pulse of activity, life's dial tone, for want of any
better phrase. To even call it 'telepathic' was not really accurate,
it was more basic, more primitive than that, more of a simple but
steady psionic radiation.

Intrigued, it traced the faint emission, following it across the
light-years toward a star the Eldren (or the Watcher's group, anyway)
had never visited previously. As it approached, it perceived and
analyzed the star and its environs with senses both physical and
psionic, as well as senses totally unrecognizable to Homosentients.

What it found as she approached the source of the odd psionic 'tone'
she had sensed was a spectral class 'G' star, a bit heavy on
metallicty, but otherwise more or less typical of its type.

Orbiting it was a family of worlds, asteroids, and icy debris, again
fairly typical. But there was something very atypical to be found
on the third planet of this star.

To its stunned surprise and amazed shock, the third planet of this
star boasted something that until that moment it and its fellows had
known of only on Helius: a native biosphere.

It was unquestionably a living world, but the biosphere on this planet
was utterly unlike that of Helius. Helius had been a world of
liquid-helium oceans and temperatures barely above absolute zero.
This world was marked by oceans of liquid water and temperature ranges
hundreds of Kelvin degrees above absolute zero. The ferocious yellow
star poured such copious amounts of energy onto the planet that the
biosphere was energized by light, not the geothermal and chemical
energy that had powered life on Helius.

On Helius, life had been confined to the oceans and the coasts. Here,
life forms had spread across the continental highlands without
technology or sapience. Life forms had spread from the depths of the
oceans to the highest peaks, and as she probed, she kept discovering
new niches into which the local life forms had moved.

It summoned the Watcher and its fellow observer/experimenters, and
the awed Eldren assembled to examine this incredible discovery. The
more they probed and studied, the more surprises they found.

The immense energy budget available from the hot stellar primary made
for a biosphere that was far more complex and energetic than Helius
had ever come close to boasting. The bulk of the living matter was
comprised of microscopic organisms, but there were multicellular
creatures, some photosynthetic autotrophs, some heterotrophs feeding
on the autotrophs or other heterotrophs.

As the Eldren probed, their amazement at the vitality of this new form
of planetary life kept growing. They discovered microscopic life
forms in essentially every possible niche on the planet, in the
oceans, the soil, the atmosphere, the poles, the tropics, the
underground depths miles below the surface, and other even more
obscure places. [1]

As the Watcher and the others studied this new kind of life, they kept
finding new surprises. They had been observing for over a local
century before they found a major new shock: this new kind of life
had managed to cross from one planet to another unaided![2]

The third planet was by far the most clement and rich in life, but the
fourth world had a thinning atmosphere and some liquid water. The
Eldren discovered that life-forms clearly related to those of the
third planet were also to be found on the fourth world. [3]

The biosphere on the fourth planet was mostly microscopic, but in a
few oceans and seas larger forms were appearing. In the colder
environs of the fourth world, the life forms were less diverse and
successful, and the Eldren realized that their presence was something
of an accident. They were able to deduce that microorganisms from the
third world had been brought to the fourth by meteoritic matter
exchange, and a few had survived the journey and managed to eke out a
new existence on the fourth planet.

Amazed to discover that planetary life forms could survive such a
trip, the Eldren began to search the rest of the local system, and
they did indeed find other places in the local star system where the
life of the third world had taken precarious root. But by far the
richest and most complex ecosphere was that of the home world itself,
the third planet.

The fourth world, the Eldren saw, was too small and too cold to
sustain its biosphere long, on a cosmic scale. Already, its local
atmosphere was thinning, the water freezing or photodisassociating,
the radiation levels rising. The Watcher calculated that the fourth
world would 'freeze out' in only another few tens of millions of
years, already it had declined from its living height.

But to the fascination of the Watcher and his fellows, this new type
of life had managed to bring forth multicellular life forms on both
the third and fourth worlds. The ones on the fourth world appeared to
be rather older, but also less complex and interesting. They were
also almost surely doomed as the fourth world's decline continued.

On the third, they made up a symphony of living shapes and forms the
like of which the Eldren had never conceived. Then, to the Eldren's
further delighted surprise, they found yet another set of macroforms,
derived again from the third planet, on still another world of that
star system. [4]

The star system, of course, was Sol, and the third planet was none
other than our own Earth. The time was the late Cambrian/early
Ordovician period, and the Watcher and the other Eldren were looking
down upon the last stages of that biological megaburst that would
someday be called the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

MORE LATER.

Note [1]: I mention that Earth's lands and air abounded with plants
and animals at a time before most of the current occupants of those
niches evolved. I didn't say that the flying and land-moving
creatures of that period were anything familiar to us. The first true
fish were only just appearing at this point in time. In my story
background, there was a lot going on 500 million years ago on Earth
that hasn't yet been found in the fossil record. The first land
plants _of our sort_ appeared later, during the Silurian Period. The
plants before them were different.

Note [2]: It's been speculated that microorganisms could survive an
interplanetary journey as 'passengers' on planetary material ejected
by impacts, and thus move from world to world. Samples of Martian
rock have made their way to Earth after being kicked free of Mars by
big impacts. It's harder for the process to work in reverse, but not
impossible in theory. I assume that microbial life appeared on Terra
early, in the last stages of the intense early bombardment, and that
enough of it was thrown free of Earth and reached Mars to seed a
biosphere in the then-receptive environment of the someday-to-be-Red
Planet. Mars became the main 'secondary' biosphere of Sol System, but
no the only one.

Note [3]: The 'fourth planet' is of course Mars. I assume for my
purposes that it's 'warm and wet' period extended further forward than
most real-world estimates currently suspect. For the Mars of 500
megayears ago, picture the ancient living Mars of THS from "In The
Well", with a slightly more clement environment and more biodiversity.

Note [4]: Where else in the Sol System did Terran microorganisms get
carried during earlier ages, and did any survive into later ages?
That remains to be revealed.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

In their amazement at their discovery, the Watcher and his
followers/fellow hobbyists did little for some time. The discovery of
Helius and the Helians had revealed to them the possibility of
planetary life, and thus the possibility of additional examples, but
in their theorizing they had been generalizing from one example, which
tends to lead to erroneous conclusions, even when the 'gods' do it.

For several thousand Terran years, they studied the intricacies of the
primary biosphere on Earth, and the secondary biosphere on Mars. The
third main Earth-derived Solarian biosphere was in such a surprising
place that it took even the Eldren did not find it until they had been
present in the Solar System for some centuries.

One of the things that the Watcher and his followers rapidly came to
realize, as they studied their new lifeforms, was that the potential
variations on this theme were orders of magnitude greater than the
variation potential of Helian life. As they studied the hereditary
mechanisms of DNA and RNA and the related epigenetic mechanisms, the
were awed by the potential for successful variation.

Already, they observed an amazing variety of niches on Earth itself,
with the potential for many more, but Earth was still only one world.
Mars, likewise, was a single planet, and it had fewer 'niches' than
Earth did by its very nature. It was probably inevitable that one of
the Eldren would wonder what would happen if more possibilities were
made available.

This was certainly within their power. Already, they had transformed
barren worlds into more-or-less functional biospheres derived from
pre-nova Helius. In those cases, they had been facing a time limit
and forced to hurry their work. For this project, they could afford
to take their time and do the work carefully and properly, since it
was not overshadowed by any particular time limit.

Once they reached the decision to go forward, a few thousand years
after their discovered the Solar System and its native life-forms,
they began work immediately on the largest project the Watcher's
Eldren had ever attempted. It was a major effort, even by Eldren
standards.

They began to scout the Milky Way Galaxy and its satellite galaxies
for suitable worlds, places to establish new biospheres into which
Terran life-forms could be introduced, to provide more potential
niches, more chances for the fascinating possibilities of this new
kind of life to manifest. The great search would go on for ages, and
in a sense it never entirely ended.

Even the ability of the Eldren has limits. They might as well have
been gods by most mortal standards, but they were gods with a small
'g'. They had to have stars and planets sufficiently like Sol and
Earth as a starting resource before they could begin terraforming.
Though such were the exception, they did exist, and the Eldren built
up a list of several thousand candidates on their initial survey, a
list that would grow longer with time and further exploration.

Then came the actual terraformation processes. On planet after
planet, the Eldren began to change such things as atmospheric
composition, planetary temperature, even rotation rates. Some worlds
had thick reducing atmospheres stripped away, others had oceans of
water brought in from outside. Frigid worlds were heated, broiling
hot planets cooled. In a few cases, worlds were altered by especially
intrusive means (the 'rings of light' the Eosians would someday
discover, for ex).

In all this, they exercised much greater care and took more time and
precautions than they had for their work in 'heliuforming', since
there was no particular hurry. Some efforts went disastrously wrong,
some just didn't quite work right, but they could afford to experiment
and learn from their errrors.

By ~20,000 years after the Eldrens' discovery of the Solar System, the
Watchers had transformed about a million worlds into more-or-less
similar versions of Earth, complete with functional, self-sustaining
biospheres based on the life of Earth, with species imported from
Earth or Mars or both. Some of these worlds were so like Earth that
they were near-duplicates in terms of surface conditions. Others were
more exotic, though all could be considered generally 'Earth-like' in
a broad sense.

Of course, they were 'Earth-like' for an Earth on the
Cambrian-Ordovician border, not Earth-like in the sense of modern
Earth. But now evolution, which had been working with a life-type on
only 3 worlds, had a million, and the expanded possibilities began to
work themselves out.

The Eldren did not stop with that first million or so, of course.
They continued to tweak and refine those worlds, as well as continuing
to terraform more elsewhere. After that first million worlds was
established, the Eldren had plenty of action zones to watch, and they
could cease worrying about some major extinction event taking away
their fascinating new entertainment, but the great project continued
at a slower pace even so. The first million worlds were mostly in the
Milky Way, with some spread out over the satellite bodies such as the
Clouds of Magellen (and others). Later, the Eldren would expand the
scale until they were spreading life derived from Earth across the
entire Greater Milky Way, but that would take time.

One rule the Watcher laid down at the very beginning, though, was to
minimize direct interference with Earth or Mars. As they were the
source of the new kind of life, it was decided that it was best to
avoid more than minimal tampering. Even with the Eldren skill in
terraformation, Earth still remained the most complex and vital
biosphere they knew of, and they didn't wish to risk disrupting it
when it could still produce such fascinating results.

Meanwhile, the Helian civilization was not unaware of all this
activity on the part of the Eldren. Indeed, they could hardly help
but be aware of it, since the Eldren were unleashing energies on a
fantastic scale in the process of transforming entire worlds. The
power necessary to seriously alter planetary rotations and axial
tilts, to strip away Venus-type atmospheres, and warm frozen iceballs
to clement CHON temperatures could hardly be hidden from a TL11
civilization such as that of the Helians.

Further, the Eldren made no particular secret of their activities.
They were in communication with the Helians all through this, and had
been throughout the million-year plus time that the Helian
civilization had existed after the Nova. The Helians could simply ask
them what was happening, and they got a fairly accurate answer, since
it never occurred to the Eldren that the Helians might not approve of
this activity, or that they would even care.

The Helians, however, saw matters rather differently.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Helian civilization had grown, in the megayear or more since the
Eldren forced an end to their internecine warfare, into a gargantuan
entity. Spread across the disk and halo of the Milky Way Galaxy and
its satellite galaxies (the 'Greater Milky Way'), it was composed of
quintillions of individual Helians spread across tens of millions of
worlds and myriad artificial habitats. These later were immense and
elaborate structures, distant cryogenic cousins of the habitats which
a Homosentient named Gerald O'Neill would propose, half a billion
years later.

Helian starships ranged all over the Greater Milky Way, by means of
refined drives and their instantaneous stargate machines. A few
expeditions had even made the epic crossing to the Triangulum and the
Great Spiral in Andromeda, but the enormous travel times involved made
even simple exploration something of a problematic proposition.

However, for all their size and age, technological advancement among
the Helians had slowed to a crawl. In a million years, they had not
passed TL11. In part, this was because of a natural 'plateau' between
TL11 and the higher levels, but much more so it was the result of the
alien psychology of the Helians, and the very stability that made
their civilization possible.

The Helians, as has already been revealed, had a 'political' structure
that was simpler in essence than any Homosentient one, though
ferociously complex in practice. Basically, all Helian politics was
about the creation of a power structure, without the other elements
that usually figure into Homosentient politics.

The massive, Galaxy-wide power structure that made the Helian society
work, indeed, that was their society in many ways, had developed a
tremendous number of features that served to maintain stability.
Stability was, indeed, the 'core value' of the Helian power structure.
So perfectly balanced had the power structure become that a
near-stasis has settled across the Helian civilization.

Earth's civilized history would, in fact, have a few examples of
similar societies, with stability as the core element, but no
Homosentient society would ever be so perfectly stable as the Helian
society became in its long golden age. We're just not wired for that
level of flawless stasis.

Individual Helians, of course, came and went. But the overall power
structure was self-sustaining and self-maintaining. Within the
framework of that power structure, the ancient power struggles of the
Helians continued as always.

When they learned of the existence of the CHON life that the Eldren
had discovered in the Sol System, the reaction of the Helians varied.
The vast majority were mildly interested, but their own affairs and
their own interests kept most of their attention. Some of the
Helians, in high places within the power structure, were more
interested, some scientifically and some 'politically'.

One common concern of these later Helians was that the Eldren,
occupied with their new interest, might lose interest in the Helians
and begin doing things not in Helian interest in the course of their
new experiments.

This fear was almost entirely unfounded. The Eldren were still
interested in the Helians, and the worlds and star systems in which
the Eldren were establishing their new biospheres were rarely star
systems Helians would have any use for. Indeed, the red dwarf stars
that Helians favored were and are much the most common of all stars,
while most of the new CHON biospheres were being established in K, G,
and F star systems.

This realization came to most of the powerful Helians early on.
Indeed, Helian scientists were in their own way as fascinated by the
'Solarigen' life as the Eldren. Helian starships watched from a safe
distance as the Eldren transformed worlds into new earths, and with
Eldren permission, even entered the Sol System to study Solarigen life
'at the source'.

There were a few Helians who were not reassured, however. Their
motives varied, but they remained convinced that the existence of
Solarigen life was a threat to either the Helian society as a whole,
or at least to their own interests. This group was never more than a
tiny fraction of the total Helian decision-making class, but they were
spread all over the Helian empire, and they kept in touch. A quiet,
secretive subset of the great power structure had now formed, a subset
with many goals, but united and defined by a hostility to the
existence of 'Solarigen' life.

This group was not all of one mind about goals. Some merely opposed
the Eldren's plans to spread Solarigen life beyond the Sol System.
Others believed that the danger was not ended until the new kind of
life was gone entirely. Still others merely wanted some way to
control where the new forms of life were established.

In later years, considerable puzzlement would exist over the source of
the fear that generated this subgroup, and united it. It was almost
totally irrational, and the Helians were always a very 'rational'
people, by their own standards of rationality.

Historians studying the records of this time, first Helian historians
and ages later Homosentient historians as well, would puzzle over the
fact that the ideas driving this odd sort 'conspiracy' seemed to
emerge on hundreds or thousands of Helian worlds independently of each
other, but with similar ideas, similar forms of expression, even
similar means of organization.

This puzzled the Helian rulers, because the substructure seemed to
erupt on worlds and in habitats separated by light-millennia,
operating along similar lines with similar means and goals, all
apparently independent of each other. The separate movements merged,
becoming an ongoing part of what passed for 'politics' in the ancient
Helian Galactic empire.[1]

Some of the Helians in this group had an altogether irrational fear of
the implications of the existence of Solarigen life. Others were more
rational about Solarigen life, but saw a rare and possibly unique
political opportunity in the division among the Helian ruling class.

The power structure of the Helian empire had been more-or-less stable
for over a million years. Individuals came and went within the power
structure, but changes to the structure itself was more-or-less
impossible.

Now, some Helians with no real chance to getting to the top slots saw
a possible way to dethrone the top tier and rework the power pyramid
in their own favor.

Their plan was complicated, and elegant in theory. Observing that the
Eldren was fascinated by the new kind of life and involved in
elaborate experiments with it. If they could encourage their more
paranoid fellows to inflict some damage to those experiments, the
Eldren would inevitably react. If the trail of evidence could be so
arranged that the blame could be thrown onto the current rulers of the
Helians (who had nothing to do with it), the Eldren revenge could be
directed there.

The goal was to arrange for the Eldren to slice off the top of the
Eldren power structure, leaving the upper levels open for the
conspirators to step in. If they handled it all right, the Eldren
could be tricked into taking out their more gullible coconspirators as
well, neat and clean.

In theory, the plan was elegant and neat. In practice, of course, it
was full of moving parts. The million-year stasis had left the
Helians a little out-of-practice at this sort of machiavellian
plotting. But the plan was put into action, setting into motion a
sequence of events that would culminate in catastrophe.

The conspirators debated carefully on the best way to implement their
scheme. The key element of the plot was how to inflict sufficient
damage to the Solarigen life-forms to anger the Eldren, without
driving them into a full bore fury.

The care was necessary because of the power differential. The
conspirators hoped to 'con' the Eldren into blaming the upper tier of
the Helian empire, and into taking action against them. They wanted
to produce a measured response, because the risk of provoking too
large a response.

If the Eldren were angered sufficiently to strike out at the Helians
generally, instead of just at the leadership, that could
be...unfortunate, and the conspirators knew it well. For all the size
and power and numbers of the Helians, any direct confrontation between
them and the Familiar Eldren would have had a distinct 'Bambi Meets
Godzilla' flavor, with the Helians cast in the role of Bambi.

Thus, they had to figure out a way to inflict damage on the Solarigen
life, but not so much damage as to produce berserk fury. They also
had to set up a fake chain of evidence to 'frame' their targets in the
Helian leadership, while making arrangements for their gullible pawns
to indulge their paranoid fears. All this took some time, on the
order of several hundred Terran years.

By this time, their advanced tech had extended Helian lifespans to
about 2500 Terran years on average, so they had time. When all was
ready, the conspirators actually set their complicated plan into
motion.

MORE LATER.


[1]This was not a coincidence. There was something going on deep
beneath the surface that connected the different groups.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The plan began with a Helian starship of special design travelling to
the Sol System. Helians had been there before, scientific expeditions
present with Eldren consent, but this ship had to enter the Solar
System in secret. Given the psionic and physical senses of the Eldren
present in the Sol System, that was not a simple matter.

The ship the conspirators prepared was very unusual for the Helians.
Because it had to approach much closer to a hot star than most Helian
ships ever would, it had to have a high-temperature hull. Instead of
ice and cryogenic 'plastics', this ship's hull was of iron and
aluminum and other high-temperature refractory metals.

In order to enter the Solar System in secret, the starship was
embedded within a chunk of nickel-iron detritus, which dropped into
the Sol System on a long-orbit trajectory, engines off and active
sensors and communications carefully shut down.

Even the crew was in a drugged daze, to minimize the faint risk that
an Eldren would sense their active minds in what was supposed to
appear to be just another chunk of asteroidal junk.

The trajectory of the ship/rock was carefully calculated to bring it
close enough to Jupiter for that giant world's gravity field to
deflect its path, throwing it onto a collision course with one of the
objects that would someday be called the Galilean satellites. This
was hardly the first time such a thing had happened, asteroids and
comets had impacted on the moons of Jupiter countless times over the
ages since the birth of the Solar System.

The 'rock' was not very big, about 100 meters in diameter. The impact
was not so large as to be a global event, even on the scale of a
satellite. Buried within the 100 meter chunk of rock was a 35 meters
sphere that was the actual Helian spacecraft. It was carefully
designed to survive even the enormous shock of the impact. The
Helians within the ship were suspended within liquid baths, sheathed
in shock-absorption devices, and otherwise carefully protected.

When the impact was over, the ship had been driven into the surface,
under the crater created by the impact. Automatic systems activated
and the ship was rapidly buried under a layer of detritus and junk
from the impact, just in case an Eldren looked to see what had just
impacted on one of Jupiter's large satellites.

The Helians within now began the next stage of their plan. These were
not the conspiratorial leaders, these were the Helians who sincerely
saw the Solarigen life-forms as a threat, and who were ideal pawns for
their more pragmatic leaders.

Patience was a key element of the plan. Waiting a while after the
apparent asteroid impact, for the sake of further secrecy, the crew
used tools and equipment to mine raw material from the satellite on
which they had crashed, to quietly construct a fleet of small
automatic drone spacecraft, no more than a few meters across each.
They were little more than a small engine, a cargo unit, and a simple
control module.

The crew spent several years on this project, building literally
thousands of these devices, and preparing them for use. When they
finished, they had over ten thousand of the devices.

The crew knew there was no realistic way to conceal the nature of the
attack once it actually began, but they hoped to conceal the location
from which it came. Though these Helians sincerely saw their effort
as removing a threat to their species, and they were prepared to take
a great risk to do so [1], they still hoped to survive.

When the time for the attack came, they began to loft their tiny
missiles into space, using simple rocket power instead of anything
more elegant, launching only a few at a time with the absolute minimum
signature, taking advantage of natural phenomena in the Jupiter
subsystem to help cover the evidence of the launches. When they had
lofted their entire stock of weapons, they waited, as the selected
orbits around the Sun carried the power-down devices into various
parts of the inner Solar System.

The weapons had their engines off, their power plants barely ticking
over, everything set up to be as 'quiet' as they could manage. It's
very hard, verging on impossible, to hide active energy sources in
space, from someone looking for them. But powered-down,
background-temp small objects are another matter, especially if they
aren't being actively watched for.

The patient attackers waited for over five Terran years for their
weapons to orbit into the appropriate positions. Still mindful of the
need for secrecy, the crew triggered their weapons by using a single
tight-beam laser pulse to one device, which then sent pulses to other
weapons. In a testimony to the Helian technical and planning skill,
the weapons were in the right places to receive the microsecond pulses
of laser-light, thousands of times over.

Shortly afterward, the engines of the weapons came to life, and the
ones nearest Earth and Mars dropped into the atmospheres of their
target worlds. In a testimony to the effort at secrecy on the part of
the attackers, the Eldren were caught totally by surprise by the
advent of the attack.

The first the Eldren really knew of what was happening was that
objects began to drop onto Earth and Mars, releasing various
destructive cargoes. Some released microbot attack swarms, others
released high-potency chemical toxins, still others massive doses of
cobalt-60. The results were quiet effective, whenever these
death-packages arrived in the middle of a flourishing living
community. Entire local niches were cleansed of life.

But the attackers were pawns, as noted above. They expected far
greater results than their weapons were actually designed or able to
produce, because their leaders had planned from the get-go to leave
them hung out to dry.

Thus, the attack did not produce anything like the massive extinction
event the attackers had expected. Indeed, they had expected the
entire biospheres of Earth and Mars to be wiped out. Instead, the
results were relatively minor on the grand scale. Some species were
extinguished, some genera wiped out. Few or no families or orders or
classes were eliminated. As extinction events went, it was trivial.

But on a more detailed scale, it was carnage enough. The Eldren who
had been watching over and studying Earth and Mars suddenly found
death raining from the skies in a clearly intentional attack. They
had no idea of who or why or what was causing it, but before their
horrified senses, in the course of a few days, vast damage was
inflicted onto their pristine biospheres. Radioactive dust was dumped
into the oceanic circulation system, microbots tore up sea-floor
communities, stable toxins rendered entire regions uninhabitable, at
least on a time scale of centuries.

When the realized more-or-less what was happening (though they still
had no idea of who was doing it or why), the Eldren reacted. Not all
the missiles reached their targets, over half of them were destroyed
in space by outraged Eldren. Still, considerable damage had been
inflicted to the life-forms of Earth and Mars, and it looked worse in
the short term than it would later turn out to be.

Hidden on one of Jupiter's moons, the actual attackers celebrated.
They did not immediately realize how far short of their goals the
attack had actually gone. As far as they knew, they had just
inflicted irreversible damage to a potential danger to their species,
and they had managed it in secrecy!

In fact, their plan had already gone totally wrong, from a flaw they
had overlooked at their initial arrival in the Solar System. Before
long, they would pay a steep price for this error.

MORE LATER.


[1]That might seem contradictory with the utter self-absorption of the
Helian psyche, but recall that these beings were very very alien.
They combined a nearly total self-focus with a strong impetus for
species survival, producing an alien pattern of behavior.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The first sign the celebrating Helian attackers had that something had
gone awry was that their long-range sensor scans showed tremendous
temperatures around the areas where their missiles had reached the
surface of Earth and Mars. Temperatures reaching stellar levels in
very localized, contained zones. It was clear that the Eldren were
heating the impact sites to staggering temperatures, but not why,
since the damage was already done.

Within a matter of hours, their puzzlement turned to fear, as the
sensors detected the signature of Eldren teleportation psi-fields
forming up around the Jovian satellite on which their ship was hidden.
They had counted on staying hidden for weeks or more, as the Eldren
searched the Solar System. Instead, the Eldren had tracked them to
the specific world on which they hid in less than one Terran day.

It took only a few more fear-soaked hours for the Eldren to find the
specific hiding place of the Eldren ship. There was no way to escape,
no hope to summon that was close enough to arrive, or powerful enough
to matter if they could. Some ten hours after the Eldren arrived on
the specific moon, the Helian attackers and their ship were wrenched
from its underground shelter by a Psychokinetic field stronger than
any starship's engines. What followed for the attackers was
terrifying, but mercifully brief.

Several dozen Eldren peeled open the starship like a piece of rotten
fruit. Before the crew died, their minds were invaded by means of
Telereceive, none too gently, and what they knew became known to the
Eldren. The Eldren interrogators were not cruel. They didn't have to
be. It took only moments for them to learn what they wanted. A few
moments later the attackers were painlessly dead.

The conspiratorial leader had always intended their pawns to be found
out, but they had counted on it taking months or longer, not hours.
They had no way to know that the attackers had managed, by accident,
to have their location given away by the existence of Sol's third
biosphere.

As already mentioned, the life that originated on Earth had been
spread by natural phenomena, primarily meteoric impacts, to other
sites in the Solar System. This overall type of life, called
Solarigen life by biologists half a billion years later, formed three
main biospheres in the Solar System. The main one was of course on
Earth. Here was the origin, and here was the most complex and
intricate ecology.

Another existed on doomed and dying Mars, facing eventual doom as that
planet, too small to retain its atmosphere and maintain its heat,
faced frozen death, but at this time it remained somewhat vibrant,
with its own metazoans.

To call the remaining biosphere the 'third' is a misnomer, in a way.
This biosphere was older than the one on Mars by a considerable
margin. It was almost as old as life on Earth itself. Its origin lay
far deeper in time than the day of the Helians and the arrival of the
Eldren in the Solar System.

To find the source of the third biosphere, we must go further back,
not the mere 500 megayears back to the Helian Empire, but further
back, across almost incomprehensible vistas of time, back to the time
when life was first born on Earth, in the last stages of the rain of
planetesimals that went into the formation of the worlds. The time
was ~4 billion years ago.

For my story, life was born during the last stages of the impact
rain. It wasn't yet so advanced that it could be called anything
recognizable as a modern domain, much less a kingdom. The cells were
as simple as they could be and still be called living things. It
began to differentiate, of course, from the very beginning. Some
forms lived in those times that would not endure past the end of the
formation of the Earth, microorganisms adapted to the conditions made
possible by the relatively rapid major impacts. Others survived
(barely) the impacts, to become the ancestral forms of all later
Terran and Martian life.

It was an alien Earth in those days. No free oxygen existed in the
atmosphere, the air was a soup of methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide
and sulfides. The Sun was far cooler then than it would later be,
giving Earth only 3/4 or so of the energy Earth receives today. There
was little dry land, little sign of anything we would call familiar
today.

It so happens that during the last stages of the impact phase, a
period between 4.0 and 3.8 billion years ago, a few particularly big
impacts struck Earth, hurling large masses of crustal rock and ice and
into space. With that particularly heavy impact went a cargo of
microorganisms, since even in those days, Earth was already seeing
unicellular life spreading all over the oceans and into the crust.

Eternity has been laughingly defined as the time it takes for
everything possible, no matter how improbable, to happen at least
once. A series of unlikely events led to the formation of the third
biosphere. The impact that hurled the microorganisms into space was
large, even by the standards of that period, and the orbital pathway
of the impactor had been altered by close encounters with Jupiter and
other major objects to give it an unusual approach angle. The orbit
onto which the escaped material was thrown was steeper, more so than
would have been normal.

The planet Jupiter happened to be in the right place for what happened
next: some of that debris was thrown into an orbit that carried it
back around the Sun a few times, until eventually the track again
approached Jupiter. Eventually, some of it splattered across the face
of the four growing moons that would eventually be the Galilean
Satellites. Like Earth itself, they were still the last stages of
their formation at this time.

On three of the four moons, nothing came of it. One one of them,
though, the microorganisms that had survived the trip from Earth found
an interesting welcome. Those organisms had traveled in a state
something like stasis, or suspended animation. Not all of them had
survived their years in space, but some of them, sheltered within the
chunks of debris from heat and cold and radiation, did. Some of those
survived their spectacular landing.

The world they now found themselves on was nothing like Earth, even
the Earth of that day. But it was more like Earth then than it would
be later. There was water. Not a lot, but enough. There was heat,
not conveniently located or of a convenient degree, but it was
present, so there was energy. There was carbon and thus organic
molecules. Not much, but enough.

These life-forms, far simpler than Archaea, had relatively simpler
needs. They were chemosynthesizers even before they left Earth.
Here, they found sulfur compounds and carbon dioxide, and even a
little nitrogen, though none too much.

Most of the involuntary immigrants died immediately or shortly after
they began to revive, but a few, a very few, survived and reproduced,
and began to adapt.

The moons of Jupiter were very young, as was the entire Solar System.
Conditions were changing relatively fast. But these microorganisms,
once established, could reproduce at tremendous speed whenever the raw
materials and energy were available. Evolution moved fast here, just
as it was on Earth during this period. Here, it had to move fast,
because conditions were worsening steadily. The supply of water was
diminishing fast, as the remaining water was driven away into space.
The temperature conditions were becoming steadily more extreme.
Radiation levels rose and fell, ranging from about background-normal
for the Solar System to nearly incredible levels.

It was perhaps inevitable that life was driven underground here.
Seeking safety from the extremes of temperature and radiation, the new
biosphere sank into the crust of the moon. But the breakthrough that
enabled life to survive in this bizarre locality was the development
of multicellular cooperatives, ages earlier than it would occur on
Earth.

It took a different form here. Instead of localized multicellular
clusters such as animals and plants, cells formed larger aggregations,
interacting communities that hoarded and rationed the precious,
desperately scarce necessities for life.

Here, life learned to form hollow spaces underground, and to line them
with membranes of cells that held the precious water inside. As the
water supply fell, the efficiency of these storage processes improved,
until they were better than the best TL8 technological equivalents.
The communities formed specialized macrostructures that conserved and
recycled nitrogen, carbon, and water far more efficiently than
anything Earth-residing life would ever produce.

The radiation, initially a hazard, became a resource, as other strains
of life learned to create enormous mineralized structures that acted
as natural coils, cutting into Jupiter's magnetic field to create
currents. These weak currents became useful resources for chemical
processing.

Volcanic vents became centers of biological activity, providing
precious heat and vital compounds for a planet-wide network of
ecological exchange. Almost all aspects of this system were
underground, nearly invisible from space. Different kinds of organism
specialized for tasks as diverse as maintaining underground connecting
tubes against pressure and heat, for transporting iron and copper for
the use of the electrical organisms, for pumping heat from volcanic
centers to more remote biological communities in the relative
stability but energy-poverty of the open plains.

MORE LATER.