OU The Helians...

[Johnny1A.2]

All right, for those who have expressed an interest in seeing some of my Orichalcum Universe stuff reposted, I'm doing it. I had someone express an interest in the 'Helians', and that in turn is convenient because it lets me go more-or-less in orer of events, which I didn't do the first time.

References for some terminology, and a list of the various threads I've been using to repost this stuff, can be found here: Orichalcum Universe The Basics

So here is the reposted (and updated and cleaned up a bit) information about the Helians.
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The time: about four hundred ninety megayears before present (BP).

The place: a star on the outskirts of the Greater Cloud of Magellan.
We shall call it Heliustar, which is the name given to by Terrans geological
ages later. Heliustar was (and is) a fairly typical red dwarf, save for being
a bit on the high side in terms of metallically, especially for the Greater
Cloud of Magellan. With a mass of about .25 solar masses, it was already
old and had an immense lifespan ahead of it.

In the early chaos of the formation of the Heliustar System, there had been
some changes in the orbits, planets that had formed in one part of the volume
around the star no longer necessarily orbited in that zone. One such body
had formed close in, early on, rich in silicates and heavy elements (or at
least, it was rich in such by the standards of that part of the Universe and
that time). It had since moved outward, until it was, by the standards of our
own kind of life, cryogenically cold.

As a result of its orbit, the planet was covered by a layer of icy volatiles
and an atmosphere of apparently contradictory nature, almost as thick as
that of Earth, though utterly unlike Earth in chemical composition. The
surface gravity was about .94 that of Earth, and the planet was covered
by oceans of a remarkable composition, specifically liquid helium.

At some times in the planet's orbit, it drew just enough closer to its primary
that helium boil off from the 'seas' filled the air with helium, but most of the
time the temperature of the oceans hovered just below the liquefaction point
of helium for those planetary conditions.

Any observer watching this cold planet would have been presented with a
mystery, because the air temperature of the planet was too warm to permit
large seas of liquid helium, the ocean temperatures averaged several degrees
cooler than the ‘air temperatures’ of this planet. The stellar insolation combined
with the heat flux from radioactives and residual formation heat in the silicate
planet should have made liquid helium oceans entirely impossible.

The observer would have been quite correct, in fact these strange conditions
were the product of a thriving local biosphere...a biosphere entirely alien, at
the most basic biochemical and biophysical level, to the life-forms derived
of Earth. These creatures included a sapient ‘species’ we will call ‘Helians’.

The life-forms of the planet were utterly alien by the standards of
Terra-derived CHON life. They were at home in almost inconceivably cold
temperatures, their metabolisms operated far more slowly than the most
sedate Terran animals and plants, and they were intensely psionic. Almost
every living thing of this life-order incorporated psionic phenomena into their
nature in one way or another, as routinely as CHON life makes use of ATP.
It was in part this psionic element of their biology that enabled them to exist
at all in the utterly frigid conditions of their homeworld.

The actual intelligent entities that Terrans would later call 'the Helians', due
to their liquid-helium biology, were asexual heterotrophs. They reproduced
by a process perhaps most similar to budding, and the reproductive process
was only partly under conscious control, under they began to develop
advanced technology. They were individually extremely variant, far more
so than most Human species would ever be, including H. sapiens.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the reproductive process of
the Helians was that Lamarck would have liked them: within limits,
acquired characteristics could be inherited by offspring. A Helian
could, over time, choose to grow additional limbs, or absorb present
ones, alter the structure of the internal organs (within limits!),
even grow and shrink itself over time, by ingesting additional food or
refraining from eating and 'converting' body mass into energy. A
Human can do the same, of course, by dieting or deliberately overeating,
but a Helian could do so on a far grander scale. The structural changes
would be automatically inherited by any offspring the Helian 'budded'
off during that period.

The Helians 'ate' (actually absorbed) another life-form vaguely
analogous to bacteria, in that they were individually microscopic and
filled something distantly like the niches held on Earth by bacteria.
The upper layers of the Helian 'seas' were thick with a layer of these
organisms, to a depth of several meters, forming the basis of the
entire energy/nutrient economy of the biosphere. They could be
cultured in smaller pools of liquid helium (with the proper other
trace substances), enabling the Helians to practice something a little
like agriculture, and permitting them to move onto the Helian
continents and away from the coasts of the 'seas'.

Unlike Terra, all the life-forms of the Helian homeworld were
either sea-based or lived near the ocean-margins, feeding one way
or another on the pseudobacteria layer of the oceans. While Helian
life might be distinguished into groupings very loosely analogous to
‘kingdoms’ or ‘phyla’, there was no division matching the Terran
divide between animal and plant. Some creatures were mobile
throughout life, some sessile for life, some alternated, but a sessile
creature might be first cousin to a highly mobile one, their evolutionary
history was quite different from that of Terra.

Thus, in Terran terminology, all life forms on the planet Helius were
'amphibious', right up until the dawn of sapience. It was the sapient
Helians who were the first life forms to colonize the continental
highlands. It was their realization that the food-organisms could be
cultured away from the oceans that permitted this, and opened the door
to their version of civilization.

The original ‘species’ of Helians was highly various, because of their
self-control over bodily structure, and because they could partially
inherit acquired traits, with matters further complicated by the fact
that two or more Helians could exchange genetic material when creating
offspring-buds (they didn't have to, but they could, and any Helian
could do so with any other, they had no sexual divisions whatever),
thus producing a tremendous range of body forms and adult sizes.

Further, the sapient Helians could also exchange hereditary material
with some of the non-sapient 'subsapientt' life of the planet, thus
adding still other traits. The biological defintition of 'species' was very
blurry on this planet.
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A 'typical' Helian:


IQ: 11 DX: 7-15 ST: 5-30 HT: 8-50 Size: 1 hex to 10 hexes

DR: Highly variable, but low by Terran standards. By the
rough-and-tumble high-energy standards of a Terra or Terra-derived
biosphere, the Helians and their ilk are delicate entities. A
ferocious predator (by Helian standards) would be little match for a
Terran animal of half its size, even a gentle herbivore, even assuming
they could both live in the same environment. (There _are_ a few
interesting exceptions to that rule, let the explorer beware...)

NOTE 1: Speed does not derive normally, these creatures are by CHON
standards _very_ slow in 1G.

NOTE 2: Though the Helians _averaged_ one level more intelligent than
most Human species, the curve was far flatter. There are more Human
geniuses (IQ 15 or higher) than there were Helian geniuses. This is a side
effect of the nature of their reproductive mechanisms.

NOTE 3: Because of the slow metabolism and life-rate of the Helians,
even their most intelligent individuals thought and reacted very
slowly by Human standards, about five times slower for a given thought
or action than a typical Human in the same situation.

[Johnny1A.2]

The Helians homeworld (usually called Helius by later Terrans) had a
very peculiar biosphere. On Earth, the primary energy source for the
biosphere is sunlight, driving photosynthesis. This was totally
useless on Helius, because the planeted orbited well out from a dim
class-M star. At high noon, the 'sun' of Helius was little more than
a brilliant pinpoint.

The biosphere of Helius drew its needed energy from geothermal heat,
and from chemosynthesis, as their primary sources. Being basically
silicate, Helius had a fraction of its mass in the form of such
elements as uranium-285/8, thorium-232, and potassium-40, which heated
the interior of the planet just as they do on Terra. In fact, because
the local region had been enriched by a couple of supernovae not long
before Helius' star was born, it was gifted with more of these
materials than most worlds of its time and place.

Also, the early stages of the formation of the planet were marked by
an 'iron catastrophe', in which the formation of an iron-rich
planetary core released considerable heat. This, along with
radioactive heating, gave Helius a lively internal heat budget.
Volcanoes were not rare on Helius, nor groundquakes.

(And when they happened, the effects could be spectacular, as the
enormous energy release impacted the cryogenic environment.)

Thus, in the liquid-helium seas, around undersea volcanoes and other
heat sources, there was energy to be had, if hazardous energy. Every
volcanic eruption released enough heat to cause huge volumes of helium
to flash into a gaseous state, followed by helium 'rains' over much of
the planet.

Along with geothermal heat, and somewhat related to it, was
chemosynthesis. The floors of the helium-sea were covered to a depth
of some meters by microorganisms 'feeding' on various chemical
reactions, and on each other's waste products and each other, to some
degree. A tremendous complex micro-scale ecology operated on the sea
floors.

Likewise, the tops of the seas were also filled with microorganisms,
which also tended to be chemosynthetic. Their source of nutrients was
twofold: some lived near the coasts, and drew their nutrients from
the shallows and the shores. All around the rim of the seas, the
layers of bottom-feeders and top-dwellers overlapped each other and
reached up a short distance onto the shore.

The other nutrient source was a 'conveyor' effect. In a symbiotic
relationship, many of the microorganisms drew additional nutrients and
spread them out into the seas, where they would feed other strains.
In return, nutrients that the shore-strains couldn't digest were
converted into forms they could, or locally rare minerals and
nutrients were 'exchanged' across intervening open 'water'.

In shallow areas of the open ocean, the 'seafloor' layer of organisms
also exchanged minerals and nutrients with the 'seatop' layer, which
had access to the atmosphere and its useful gases. The details of the
ecosystems of the Helian seas would have been sufficient to keep an
army of biologists, chemists, and ecologists occupied for centuries.

Psionics played a significant role in these processes. For ex,
telekinesis was used to drive nutrients up through shallow areas of
the seas to the upper layer of organisms (along with currents in other
places, or areas of volcanic upwelling (which had the added benefit of
often being nutrient-rich)). A more significant psionic aspect of the
ecology was the fact that the organisms of the upper level of the seas
collectively generated pyrokinetic heat to keep the atmosphere warmer
than it would otherwise have been. That was why the seas could be
liquid helium (one of the lowest liquifaction-point substances known)
while the atmosphere could remain gaseous at such low temps.

Thus, the atmosphere of Helius, in a different way than that of Earth,
was still the product of life.

There were countless different strains of microorganism in both layers
of the Helian oceanic ecology. Some were predatory on others, some
symbiotic. Some were parts of interlocked food-networks of staggering
complexity, others relative 'loners'.

One thing life on Helius had in common with life on Earth was that the
larger entities, when they appeared, were actually collections of
microorganisms. Though they weren't really 'cells' in the Terran
sense, these creatures did form 'multicellular' collectives and
eventually large organisms. Appearing in the especially complex
'shallows' along the shorelines, these creatures evolved and
differentiated into a huge variety of forms, many of them partly
interfertile with each other, all capable of lone reproduction.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Macroscale life on Helius emerged early in the biological history of
the planet, compared to Earth. Once it did emerge, it
advanced steadily, if slowly. The standard means of reproduction for
macrolife on Helius was 'budding'. Since every individual could (and
had to) reproduce by this process, populations could rise rapidly.
Since most large life-forms on Helius could exchange 'genetic' material
in creating their 'offspring', variation did occur.

The definition of 'species' was soft on Helius, because traits could
reshuffle separately, due to the nature of their genetic
mechanisms. Not all 'big' life on Helius could exchange genetic
data with all other creatures, but many could, and there was overlap.
Thus, 'species' A might be able to exchange genetic data regarding
such things as limbs and body-frame with Species B, but not for
chemosynthetic processes. Species A might be able to exchange
chemosynthetic 'genes' with Species C, but not with Species B,
which being unable to exchange body-structure data with C.

Thus, instead of 'species', large life-forms on Helius formed great 'pools'
of semi-cross-fertile life. They developed instincts for which mixes
were viable and which were not, though errors did happen. These
errors were usually disastrous, but occasionally acted to produce
improved forms, and they were a primary evolutionary driver on Helius.

The drivers of selection on Helius were not entirely the same as
those of Earth. For most life-forms on Helius, finding food was
not a major difficulty. The 'seas' of Helius were rich in food for the
amphibious macroforms, and their numbers were not so great as
to overstrain the supplies of the two great metabolic layers of the
seas. Finding specific nutrients might be another matter,
though, and many life-forms and pools of life-forms were selected
for the ability to find certain nutrients efficiently, or to use rare nutrients
efficiently.

Of course, though food was plentiful in the seas, it was diffuse food,
and required time to consume sufficiently to fuel a large organism.
Naturally, predation emerged as a tactic to deal with this, enabling
large quantities of useful nutrients and energy to be obtained at a
stroke. Thus, the large life-forms of Helius had their equivalent of
'herbivores', who fed directly on the microorganisms and their
by-products at the top and bottom of the seas, and who were preyed
upon by the equivalent of 'carnivores'. Of course, there were also
'omnivores' who did both.

From one such omnivore breed emerged the sapient Helians.

The drivers for the emergence of sentience on Helius were not utterly
unlike those of Earth. There was competition for rare nutrients, the
need to evade threats such as predators, and over time, the need for
more and more effective ways to dealing with steadily more intelligent
fellow Helians. By the time the relatively stable sentient Helian
'breed' had emerged, the minds of those beings had been adapted and
selected for operation in a form of society.

It was a form of society or set of societies, however, rather unlike
anything Homosapients (the collective name for the various sapient
species of Genus Homo that would emerge hundreds of megayears
later) would ever create. These were quite alien beings, and their society
was alien to match. Their 'world history' was unlike anything
Homosapients would recognize as well. They lacked what we would call
nations. Indeed, in a way they were a unified planetary society
from the beginning of their 'species'.

This was made possible by their natural mode of communications. Just
as with Homosentients, they communicated by a combination of means,
including gestures, vocalizations (though not spoken words), and by
changing their physical appearance, especially the color patterns in
their semi-transparent 'skins'.

But their primary means of communication was telepathy.

All Helians had Telepathy as a racial psionic ability, usually at
about Power 14, but with Extended Range: Global. Any Helian could
communicate at will with any other Helian it knew about, anywhere on
Helius. This required no technology, it was as basic to these
entities as speech is to H. sapiens. Though they could communicate
more subtly if they were close enough to also use gesture, color, etc,
they could engage in basic communication world-wide. The difference
might be something like the difference between e-mail, stripped of
nuances such as facial expression and voice tone, and verbal
conversation.

(Ironically, for a race in which psionic phenomena formed the basis of
their life-processes, this Telepathy was the limit of their active
Powers. There were no Helian Psychokinetics, ESPers, etc. None.
They came, in time, to grasp the physics of psi, but the psi
potential that in other species might have gone into active Powers in
the Helians was occupied simply maintaining their existence.)

Thus, a planet-wide culture emerged from the beginning of Helian
awareness, with a history going back in a nearly uninterrupted line
back to the beginning.

That did not mean Helius was a peaceful place. A world-wide
society did not imply a world-wide government. Indeed,
the Helians had no institutions quite equivalent to what
Homosentients would call 'government'. Rather, the Helian
equivalent of politics was spread across all activities of life
in a way alien to the thinking of most humans.

Helians had no childhoods. When one Helian budded off a new entity,
as soon as its internal organization reached a sufficient level, that
mind of that offspring 'awakened', even while it remained physically
attached to its singular 'parent'. The 'brain' of the offspring was
itself 'budded' from the 'nervous system' of the parent, and it
carried much of the same information and life experience that
its parent possessed.

A Helian 'parent' needed to spend little or no time and effort in
educating its offspring, since all such matters were dealt with during
the budding process, in which the mind, much as the body, was budded
off. By default, much of the basic knowledge of the parent was
incorporated into the offspring, though the exact details could be
predetermined by the parental entity during the formative stages.

Thus, by the time a new individual was budded off from the parent, it
was already an adult. It even (usually) had access to a considerable
amount of practical experience 'inherited' from its parent. Thus, the
very concept of childhood was profoundly alien to the Helians.

This was profoundly important. Beginning life as fully adult, if
miniature, versions of their parent, knowing no universal period of
intellectual or emotional dependence such as childhood, the Helians
were the very epitome of individualism, in a way simply impossible for
and all but incomprehensible to Homosentients.

The absence of childhood had a profound effect on their culture. One
of the basic purposes of Homosentient social organizations is the
protection and education of the young. Homosentient societies that
don't incorporate this function into their basic nature simply don't
endure. This motivator was totally absent from the Helian worldview.

Likewise, since Helian faculties did not, for most practical purposes,
decrease with age, the motivation of caring for the aged was also
lacking. Helians were by no means immortal, but their ending modes
were very different than those of Homosentients. Thus, one more limit
which might otherwise create societies more familiar to us was absent.

The Helians as a breed were thus almost (by Homosentient standards)
insanely individualistic. Individual 'cities', regions, continents,
had no true governments since no Helian would consider itself bound,
ever, by the decision or promise of another, unless it was in the
self-interest of that Helian (which would include avoiding
punishment).

If all these motives for the formation of societies are lacking, what
did drive the creation of the Helian culture? Some motivations common
to Homosentients did exist among the Helians.

For one, just as with Homosentient societies, collections of organized
Helians could do more than a lone Helian could hope to manage. Also,
organization provided protection against predators, disasters, and hostile
fellow Helians.

Also, there were motivators among the Helians that are no more
comprehensible to Homosentient observers than our own motivations
would be to a Helian.

Other Helian social motivators were derived from the nature of
their defining personal sovereignty. The interaction between the
Helians was, by the standards of most Homosentient societies,
deeply amoral. To slay a rival or take the possessions of those
weaker than oneself was so ingrained to their psyches that
it carried no moral valuation of any sort. OTOH, the one
universal motivator that linked Helian and Homosentient was
self-preservation.

The conflict between these drives was mediated by the Helian
culture, which operated in practice somewhat like the theoretical
models of Homosentient society created by the Terran Western
Enlightenment 'social contract' theorists.

Thus, the Helian society was one in which a stronger Helian might
steal from or murder a weaker Helian to get something the weaker one
had that the stronger wanted, and it would be considered 'normal',
and nothing personal. Mutual 'defense pacts' moderated this.
Indeed, the concept of 'mutual assured destruction' permeated
every level of Helian society and thought. It was the
basis of their worldview.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

No Homosentient species could ever have functioned in such a society,
but the Helians were aliens, it it worked for them. It worked well
enough, in fact, that they were able to spread out and away from
the seas, once they discovered their version of agriculture
(helium-pool based), gaining access to the resources of the highlands.
It enabled them to developed a slowly advancing technology base.

It did not, however, prevent all violence. Violence, under the
peculiar rules of Helian society, ranged from interpersonal levels up
to the highest levels made possible by their technology. Two Helians
who had spend years trying to kill each other could set aside their
personal war if faced by a larger-level war, work together
efficiently, and then go back to trying to kill each other. It was,
after all, 'nothing personal'. Though they fought to survive with
ferocity, they held no grudges. They couldn't even really
comprehend what a grudge was.

The Helians climbed the technological ladder slowly but steadily,
overcoming challenges set by their bizarre environment (raise
temperatures high enough to melt metals on Helius, and they risked
vaporizing solid volatiles with spectacularly disastrous results, for
ex), and yet gaining from its odd properties as well (room-temp
superconductors were easy for the Helians, for ex!) They had
reached TL6 when a history-changing event occurred: the Helians
were discovered by the Eldren.

This discovery happened partly by accident, partly by natural course
of events. The TL6 Helians were beginning to generate large
amounts of electromagnetic radiation, especially in the microwave and
radio regions of the spectrum, both from deliberate signalling and
'noise' from their electrical machines. This made Helius something of
a beacon in those bands.

The accidental part came from the fact that an Eldren happened to be
in that region of the universe, at the right time. This entity
detected the radio noise, recognizing it as odd (there should
have been no process generating such energy emission in such a cold
region), and out of curiousity, investigated the matter, tracing the
emission back to the source.

The Eldren are free-space creatures, fully at home in the vacuum of
interstellar or even intergalactic space. Up until this point, this
particular Eldren, a relatively young one as its race measured time,
had never even thought about the possibility of life-forms confined
to a planetary surface. In fact, the very idea of non-Eldren life was
something it had never considered. It was only a few million years old
at that point, after all.

(What the gigayears-old elders of its people knew or had considered,
who can say?)

This Eldren youth approached Helius, and found itself fascinated by
what it discovered as it observed them from space. With the senses at
the disposal of an Eldren, doing so was not difficult, and after
spending a mere 1000 Terran years or so quietly and secretly orbiting
Helius, it had learned a great deal about what were (to it) an
utterly new and unexpected discovery.

In that time, the Helians advanced from TL6 to TL7, in their slow,
steady manner, and entered into TL8. Space flight became possible for
the Helians, but they found themselves with a dearth of destinations,
due to the particular 'layout' of their star system.

The planet Helius orbited an M class 'dwarf' star, considerably
smaller and cooler than Sol (thus making it a typical star, Sol is
exceptional). Helius was the outermost of three planets.

The second planet was a huge gas giant, about 70% more massive than
Jupiter, with a smattering of small satellary bodies, the size of
large asteroids. The moonlets were none of them larger than 300 miles
in diameter, and by Helian standards they were searingly hot, with
temperatures reaching up to -135 degrees F in places. Though the
radiation belt of the gas giant was feeble compared to that of Jupiter
or even Saturn, it was present, and to the radiation-sensitive
Helians, it was strong enough to be a nuisance.

The innermost world of the system was a rockball, orbiting so close to
the red dwarf that it was tide-locked to it, and it was actually warm
even by Homosentient standards, making it hellish to Helians. The
dayside temperatures of the innermost planet reached as high as +140
degrees F, the star filling a huge swath of the sky of the airless
rockball. OTOH, the nightside was forever turned away from the star,
and its temperatures were cold enough for Helians to tolerate, leaving
only the lack of atmosphere and helium as problems.

Helius itself had two tiny moonlets, one about 40 miles in diameter
and the outer one about 20. The inner one was similar to Helius in
composition, having originated with the planet itself, with
significant metal and rock; the outer was a captured 'KBO' from the
spare edges of the system, rich in volatiles and ices.

Except for the three planets and their satellites, the star system was
very sparse. It did have a certain amount of detritus, the equivalent
of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Shell, but they were very thin and very
far-flung. Most of the mass that might have gone into planets and
moons had been 'vacuumed up' by the gas giant in the formation stages
of the system.

As their unknown Eldren watcher (whom we will call simply the Watcher)
observed them, the Eldren developed the technology to reach their
moonlets, and then later to explore the rest of their star system.
They sent unmanned probes to the moons of the gas giant, and into its
atmosphere, but they found little of immediate use there. They sent
probes, and later manned ships, to the innermost world, and established
bases on the cold side of the innermost world, for research purposes,
and later for some limited mining.

But with a limited range of destinations, space flight technology
languished, even as the Helians were well into TL8. Meanwhile, the
Watcher had informed some of its fellows, and by about 1500 years
after the first discovery, quite a few young Eldren were secretly in
the star system watching the Helians, like a group of human children
studying an ant hill.

Fascinated by their discovery, these Eldren were dismayed to realize
that their new interest faced a problem in the near-future, as Eldren
saw time. For when the Watcher and its fellows looked at the larger
picture, peering into surrounding space and into the future via
calculation and ESP, what they saw was that the Helians were very
likely doomed.

The problem lay in the astrography of the region. Heliustar was
located on the edges of the Greater Cloud of Magellan, and its
neighbor stars were dozens of light-years away, with one exception: a
massive red giant only a few light-years from Helius. It had been
there in the sky throughout the remembered and recorded history of the
Helians, a brilliant red spark rivaling their own dim sun in
brightness when it was in the sky.

It was far younger than Heliustar, but tremendously more massive,
and as such it was spendthrift, rushing through its fuel supply in a
fraction of the time its tiny sibling would have done. Large stars
age much faster than samll ones, and this star was a monster. It
had burned through its supply of hydrogen, then fused the helium up to
carbon, and on, and on. Now iron was accumulating in the core of the
star, a stellar death sentence. Iron is useless as nuclear 'fuel'.
Both fission and fusion of iron nuclei are endothermic processes,
draining energy out of the system. Once the core was sufficiently
enriched in iron, the reaction that drove the star would cease, and
gravity would take over. The star would begin to collapse,
gravitational potential energy would convert to heat, and a supernova
would ensue.

The Helians had more than sufficient comprehension of astronomy and
physics by this time to realize that the red giant in their skies was on its
last legs, of course. But what cosmically speaking is 'last legs' is a
very long time for either Helian or Homosentient. The red giant
had been on its 'last legs' throughout Helian history, and they didn't
give any more worry to the possibility of near-future (as mortals view
time) changes than a typical Terran would to the chance of a major
meteoric impact. They knew it was possible, but what were the odds?

What the Watcher and his fellow Eldren hobbyists knew, though, was
that this was a gamble the Helians would lose. The red giant was less
than a thousand Terran years from its death in a major supernova. At
such close distance, the entire Heliustar System would be bathed in
deadly levels of radiation, radiation to which the macroforms of
Helius were particularly vulnerable. The microorganisms would be
devastated, but the overall biosphere might survive the largest
extinction event Helius had ever known. The macroforms, including the
sentient Helians, could not possibly do so.

The Helians had no way to realize how close to the edge the
red giant was, but to the senses, psionic and other, of the Eldren, it
was a clear as crystal. Indeed, they could compute within a few
minutes the exact time that the supernova would begin.

The Watcher and his fellows, by this point numbering a few hundred,
found themselves in a quandary. The Helians were the most fascinating
thing they had encountered in ages. But in a few hundred
orbits of Helius around its star, they would gone. What they should
do, if anything, occupied their debates for Terran decades.

What they decided to do would change the course of Helian and
Homosentient history.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Eldren searched the Greater and Lesser Clouds of Magellan
initially, then, finding little in the way of suitable planetary
bodies, they searched the nearby Milky Way Galaxy and the immense
spiral of the Andromeda Galaxy as well.

Some worlds they found that were of a kinship with Helius. But for
the most part, those planets that circled their primary stars at a
distance great enough for the needs of the Helians were 'iceballs',
masses of frozen volatiles with rocky cores. Only a handful of
icy-silicate worlds were to be found, for indeed the process of
formation for Helius-like worlds required a rocky world to form near
its star, and be moved outward to a distant orbit of frozen cold.

There were silicate worlds of the appropriate distance to be found, to
be sure. Perhaps one star in a thousand had such a world, and given
that the red dwarf stars are much the most numerous of all sorts, that
meant that there were such worlds in abundance.

But few such worlds were right in the details for the use of the
lifeforms of Helius. They lacked helium oceans, or the appropriate
atmosphere, or they were too massive or not massive enough, or they
were tide-locked to other worlds or they lacked necessary chemicals,
or any of a thousand other details might make such a world of no use.

The Eldren debated, and decided to attempt to change some suitable
worlds for use as habitats after the supernova rendered Helius itself
largely uninhabitable by its macroforms. They had only a few
centuries with which to work, but even these relatively junior Eldren
could command awesome energies and resources by Homosentient or
Helian standards, and they had plenty of worlds that might be made
more-or-less habitable with effort.

Since they had never done anything quite like what they were
attempting before, and they were facing time limits, they decided to
make multiple attempts in parallel. Instead of trying to 'heliuform'
one world, they attempted it with dozens at once. Out of their
initial 144 attempts, only seven were enough like Helius to be called
'marginally habitable', and only two were close enough to be really
hospitable to the Helian macroforms.

This was none too soon, either. By this point the supernova was less
than a Terran century away. While the Eldren had been going about
trying to produce a Helius-like world, the Helians themselves had
continued in blissful ignorance of both the impending supernova and
the existence of their Eldren observers. Over several centuries, they
had advanced to high TL9 in most areas, and had made the intriguing
discovery that it was possible after all to create and receive FTL
signals, though terribly difficult in practice.

They still had no notion of whether or not it was possible for matter
to travel faster than light, but they had some intriguing ideas.
Still, there was no way they would have developed FTL travel before
the supernova, even had they known that the time for that event was
near.

As soon as the Eldren felt the time was right and the recipient
environments were ready, they began the resettlement of the Helians to
their new homes. Up until now, the Helians had never suspected even
the existence of the Eldren, now that existence was made quite clear.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Eldren now faced the task of transporting the Helian macroforms to
their new homes. They decided to go the simple (for them) route:
mass bulk transport. Thus, at the selected time, the Watcher and his
fellow Eldren hobbyists arrived on Helius, and proceeded to 'wrap'
entire Helian population centers (calling them 'cities' might not be
quite right) in protective bubbles of energy and discontinuous
spacetime, and essentially placing the contents of those bubbles in a
form of stasis. Along with large populations, various facilities were
'lifted' as well, taken directly into space within their protective
bubbles of stasis. The Eldren made sure to scoop up plentiful samples
of the 'interfertile' other subsentient macroforms as well.

All this occurred over the course of a few hours. Within 24 hours (as
modern Terrans measure time), every major population center of Helius
was gone, along with a vast (and slightly random) selection of their
industrial facilities, storehouses, research instruments, etc. Where
once population centers humming with the life and activity of tens of
millions of Helians had sat, now were only vast shallow craters, left
as 'cities' and a thin layer of underlying bedrock or bedice were
'scooped' up.

The Eldren wasted little time, since even their vast powers had some
ultimate limits, they could suspend and protect the contents of the
'bubbles' only for so long, in outside time. Across the Greater Cloud
of Magellan, and even across the void to the Lesser Cloud and the
Milky Way, the encapsulated 'cities' were carried, their unwilling and
indeed unwitting passengers unaware of the passage of time or change.
At quantum transit-levels so high that light-millennia could be
covered in days or weeks, even through hyperspatial shortcuts
eliminating light-millennia in moments, the Eldren moved their
'cargo'.

Eventually, each group of Eldren arrived at one of the 'heliuformed'
worlds. On most such worlds, one of the great population centers was
deposited in what looked to the Eldren like a workable location, and
the protective stasis fields were allowed to collapse, freeing the
inhabitants. On some especially well-heliuformed worlds, two or even
three population centers were deposited, usually at large local
distances, often on different continents entirely.

The first the inhabitants of these 'cities' new of the change was when
the stasis fields collapsed. From their point of view, one instant
they were at home, all things normal, the next, they suddenly found
their entire 'city' to be in a different location! The sky would be
different, the stars different, even the local gravity slightly
different. The transition, from their vantage point, was
instantaneous!

For another shock, recall that throughout their sentient history, all
Helians had been in telepathic contact with the rest of their race.
Their range was sufficient that any Helian could contact any other on
their homeworld pretty much at will. The only Helians out of touch
with the rest of their race had been a few space explorers in their
home system, and they had been prepared for this. Now, from the point
of view of the involuntary colonists, it was as if all the rest of
their race had simply vanished out of ken, since no Helian had even a
tiny fraction of the telepathic range necessary for interstellar
linkage.

Had such a thing happened to a Terran (or any Homosentient) city, the
immediate result would have been panic and chaos. The Helians, in the
cool and detached way, came as close to that state as they were
capable of doing, as well. But no Helian was actually capable of true
panic, and over the course of weeks and months, they restored some
order in their suddenly isolated societies. In the meantime, it
didn't take long for the Helian scientific communities in most of the
population centers to figure out approximately what had happened,
even though they were utterly in the dark as to how and why.

They were able to discern (TL 9 societies to start with) that they had
somehow been transported to new worlds, orbiting other stars. That
much could be learned by simple observation. They had no idea HOW
such a thing could occur, however. They didn't have much time to
spend wondering, either, since the immediate needs of survival took
precedence.

Even with whole 'cities' transported, this was difficult. Helius had
been interconnected into a single civilization, and now the
industrial, transportation, resource-allocation, and organizational
networks were broken and rent beyond repair. Each new colony had to
create a new support structure to sustain themselves. At the same
time, Helian nature was such that power struggles erupted, as the
former balances were disrupted. Helians who had been held in
subordination to other Helians outside their 'city' were suddenly free
agents, Helians with extensive power bases external to their 'city'
were suddenly weaker.

Violence inevitably erupted, the oddly restrained, impersonal violence
the Helians were so prone to. Where a human community in their
situation would have been riven and torn by fear and panic, the Helian
colonies were riven by struggles for power and freedom from external
power, in the same individuals.

The population of Helius prior to the Helian Diaspora had been 9
billion. Being inclined toward clustering in population centers (in
spite of the apparent contradiction with the Helian urge for personal
sovereignty, another alien combination), they had formed huge
'megalopoli' that had housed most of the population. Only a few
percent had been more 'rural'.

The Eldren had lifted about 95% of all Helians into space during the
Helian Diaspora. The planetary population went from ~9 billion to
~400 million over the course of 24 Terran hours or so. About 500 of
these megalopoli were lifted, and spread out over about 350 new
worlds, ranging from planets that were nearly perfectly heliuformed to
worlds only just barely, marginally classifiable as 'habitable' at
all.

Naturally, even equipped with large resource bases of tools and
equipment and knowledge (whole cities), the majority of the
involuntary colonists died within 5 years of the moment of arrival.
In many cases, the entire population of involuntary settlers perished
to the last Helian. In others, even though a viable population was
established, technological civilization could not be sustained.

After all, the Eldren didn't really understand the requirements of
of a mortal technological civilization. They could half-grasp what it
must be like to be mortal and tool-dependent, but only that much.
Thus, even on well-heliuformed worlds, often they would deposit what
could otherwise have been a viable colonial city in some horribly
unsuitable specific location. Or they might place them too far from
critical resources, or they might have overlooked some apparently
trivial detail in the heliuforming process.

Even in the most successful cases, technological skills were lost and
the general level of society fell several tech levels. Even the few
most successful of the involuntary colonies dropped to the Helian
equivalent of TL6 before beginning to regain lost ground, many
surviving colonies dropped back to TL3 or TL4 from their starting base
at TL9!

But the species did survive. Their incredible physical adaptivity
helped, and indeed the 'Helians' of one colony might end up with an
average morphology totally unlike the average morphology of another,
though all remained fully 'interfertile'. Populations began to rise
on many of the colony worlds, and after a couple of centuries, new
cities were rising.

But they never forgot their sudden transition to their new worlds, and
the psychological shock of that unexplained event became THE most
important turning point in their historical consciousness and
world-view. To the end of their existence as a race, the effect of
their mysterious transition never ceased to resonate among them
culturally and psychologically.

This was amplified because, in the colonies, they STILL did not know
why or how this transition had occurred. Even as the more
successful Helian colony-worlds were again regaining lost TLs and
their populations were burgeoning anew, the mystery remained, as well
as the cool fear that such an unexplained event might occur anew.
Within 10 Terran centuries after the Diaspora, some Helian worlds had
regained TL9 technology and resources, and were beginning to explore
their new star systems and again to experiment with FTL physics, but
always the need to solve the puzzle of their involuntary exodus
remained a burning, driving cultural need.

Of course, there was still the matter of what had been happening back
'home'.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Out of all the billions of sentient Helians, after the Diaspora only
~400 million were left, spread more or less randomly around the
planet. The largest single population center that did not get
transported away to another world had a population of less than
100,000 Helians, on a world where a few days before there had been
populations of over 20 million.

Most of the industrial, technical, and academic resources of Helius
had been 'taken'. Those missed by the Eldren actually had a better
idea of what was occurring than the transportees, since they were
not held in stasis and could observe what was occurring.

From the point of view of those Helians close enough to see it but far
enough away to be missed, the departure of their population centers
was quite a sight. It is hard to describe what they perceived through
their alien senses. Let us instead consider what a Homosentient in
the right place and with the right perspective would have seen.

Such a Homosentient observer would have seen the population center in
question suddenly surrounded by a shimmering sphere of haze, emitting
a soft glow of light in constantly shifting colors, through which the
structures and other elements of the population center could still be
dimly made out. The sphere would appear to have its lower fifth or so
below ground level, as was indeed the case. All motion within the
hazy sphere would have ceased, however. Even objects in the process
of falling would appear to have stopped in mid-fall.

Then, the light emitted from the hazy surface of the sphere would have
brightened over the course of an hour or so, until the entire sphere
suddenly began to rise, along with its contents. The contents would
be nearly invisible through the blazing glare, but with the right
instruments a Homosentient observer would be able to see that there
was still no sign of any motion within the sphere, even the individual
Helians in the 'streets' of the population center would be frozen
motionless, as if time had stopped.

The spheres would rise slowly at first, but accelerating steadily as
they did. It would take perhaps two hours for the bottom of the
sphere to clear the pit out of which it rose, carrying a chunk of
underlying bedrock as it did, another hour for the sphere to dwindle
to a point of light. After that, though, the point of light would
dwindle rapidly until invisible to the naked eye, even in the nearly
total darkness of Helius.

With a good optical telescope, our hypothetical Homosentient observer
would be able to watch the sphere accelerate away from Helius, along
with similar spheres encapsulating other population centers, all
accelerating away from Helius along different vectors, save for a
handful that moved in groups of two or three on one vector.

But soon, even the telescope would lose all utility, as the Eldren
'upshifted' their encapsulated population centers to higher
hyper-states, where translight velocities would be possible. Our
hypothetical observer with his telescope would see a last flash of
brilliant light along the appropriate vectors, coming after the
spheres had dwindled to invisibility, then nothing.

The Helians watching their fellows' sudden and unwitting departure
perceived it with other senses, using other forms of mental imagery,
but the effect was much the the same.

Helians are incapable of panic, but as with their fellows' reactions
later when the stasis fields opened, the reaction of those left behind
came as close to panic as Helians could come. Also, like their
fellows, the Helians immediately turned more violent, as new balances
of power worked themselves out. Then came the aftermath.

On the one tentacle, there were still more Helians on Helius than
there would be on any one of the new involuntary colonies, more by at
least an order of magnitude. Further, the planet Helius was still the
best world in existence for Helian life, better than the best of the
heliuformed worlds the Eldren were transplanting colonists too.

On the other tentacle, the vast majority of the technological and
industrial resources of their civilization were gone, scattered to the
stars and beyond recovery. By all objective rights, the Helians left
on Helius should have collapsed back to stone age, or at best TL2 or
TL3 level, existence. They should then have stayed there for a long,
long time, or at least until the supernova made the whole matter moot.

Yes, that's what any objective observer would have calculated the most
likely outcome to be. But the objective observer would have lost any
money he/she/it placed in a bet about the outcome based on that.

What made the difference was something the Eldren themselves had
overlooked. Had they realized it existed, they would probably have
scooped it up as well, as just one more facility to be transported to
some randomly selected new Helian world. But it was well hidden, and
the Eldren were simply not wired to think that way, not yet.

The facility in question was a robofactory, or rather, it was an
uber-robofactory. Created by a 'consortium' of junior-level Helians
as part of their plan to overthrow the senior members of their power
structure, it was buried deep in the bedrock of Helius, having been
constructed over the course of many years and designed in every
element for secrecy, it was so well hidden that it was concealed not
only from its creators' Helian rivals but from the Eldren Watchers as
well.

Of the conspirators, all but one were swept away to the new worlds.
The one left behind now found himself in control of the single most
valuable resource on Helius. Being a Helian, it promptly set out to
take advantage of that fact to serve its own self-interest. Perfectly
natural and respectable behavior, as the Helians saw such things.

Let us pass over the small details of the plots and schemes of the
time, they are of little concern to us, and indeed only somewhat
comprehensible across the void between the Helian and Homosentient
mentalities. Suffice it to say that the master of the superfactory
failed it its attempt to seize total power, and the superfactory
itself passed from tentacle to pseudopod to mandible before the new
power structure finally stabilized, a few years after the Departure.

But once the new power structure did come to a moderately stable
state, the enormous resources of the superfactory were turned to the
tasks of rebuilding some kind of advanced society on Helius. The
superfactory was almost totally automated and was in fact over the
line into the lower reaches of TL10.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

With a new society growing around the nucleus of the superfactory, it
was possible to examine old records made by surviving automatic
sensors and other devices, and to correlate sense-witness accounts, of
the great Departure. A society based on mutual surveillance and
balances of power at all levels naturally had extensive sensors and
observation devices in place, and many of those records had survived
the Departure and the aftermath and were available for close up study
by the recovering society.

Close up, minute observation and analysis of the recordings revealed
that around each of the immense spheres of stasis that had taken the
majority of Helius' population, were dozens or hundreds of tiny
but very intense energy sources, moving around the great globes of stasis
in a clearly intelligent way. These tiny sources of energy emission were
usually no more than 10-100 feet in diameter, mere specks on the scale
of the event, but they were unquestionably there.

The energy radiated by these objects was not great, but the pattern
of it was very, very complex, and as they studied the records, the
Helian scientists began to grasp a bit of the physics involved. They
became the first Helians to have direct sensor evidence of the Eldren.

Once they found this information, they began to correlate it with old
reports of those few Helians who spent much time alone out in the vast
continental highlands. There had been the occasional report of globes
of light, 10 to 100 feet in diameter, seen out there, but there had
never been any evidence, and the reports had never received much
credence from the practical-minded Helians.

Gradually, the remaining Helians pieced together a more-or-less
accurate idea of what had happened on the day of Departure. They still
had no real idea of why, and no real understanding of the Eldren,
but they now knew that the Eldren existed, and that for reasons
unknown, they had spirited away 95% of the population of Helius,
displaying nearly god-like power in the process.

Lacking any knowledge of why the Eldren had done what they
had done, and with only the faintest theoretical glimmerings of
how, the Helians resolved to do what they could to make any
repeat of it much harder.

Correctly surmising that the superfactory had been spared simply
because the aliens had missed detecting it, the Eldren rebuilt their
society with secrecy as watchword. Where the former population
centers had been on the open surface, the new and vastly smaller
cities were located almost entirely underground. Vast galleries were
cut into the continental bedrock, duplicates of the superfactory were
constructed, the remaining resources of the surface were taken below
the surface. Enormous underground lakes and tanks of liquid helium
were created, to form the basis of an underground 'agricultural' system.
Instead of nuclear fission, the primary power source for the new
cities and superfactories was geothermal, to minimize the tell-tale
neutrino emissions. Deeper and deeper they dug, until most of
their cities were buried beneath at least half a mile of rock and ice.

All this proved vitally important, not long afterward. Though the
Helians had burrowed underground for the sake of secrecy, it would
prove more useful as protection against a quite different threat.

For, as the Eldren had perceived a thousand years earlier, the nearby
red giant was close to its spectacular end. Now, just as the Eldren
had perceived/calculated, the supernova came, within minutes of the
most likely moment the Eldren had calculated.

The supernova occurred 14 years before the Helians learned of it. The
effects that mattered to the Helians propagated at the velocity of
light or slower. The FTL effects of the supernova were subtle. The
Helians were beginning to experiment with FTL phenomena, and a few
experiments they were doing were indeed affected by the supernova, but
the Helian experimenters had no way to know what the things they were
detecting meant.

Thus, when the brilliant red spark that had glimmered in the skies of
Helius throughout history suddenly flared up, the Helians had no real
warning. The red giant blazed with new energy, the brightest object
in the Greater Cloud of Magellan, for a little while.

The Heliustar System was flooded with hard radiation, gamma rays,
neutrons, plus forms of energy unfamiliar to TL7 physics. Those few
Helians in space at the time were killed.

These Helians on the surface were forced underground, as the radiation
levels on the surface of Helius rapidly rose to lethal levels whenever
the nova was above the horizon.

But because the remaining Helians had already moved most of their
society deep underground, and because they had created what amounted
to a self-sustaining (if simplified) underground ecology to support
themselves, the Helian society that had been restored after the
Departure was largely protected by thousands of meters of rock and
ice, a superb radiation shield.

The surface biosphere of Helius took an incredible hit from the
supernova radiation. Essentially all the macroform life of Helius was
killed, except for that in the Helians' underground warrens. The two
great layers of the oceanic ecosystem were disrupted, and the upper
surface layer was essentially destroyed. The deep-ocean layer along
the floor of the sea was destroyed a the coastal margins, but the
deep-sea portions survived in a greatly reduced form. Even many of
those deep-sea microorganisms that were safe from the surface
radiation died from lack of the other parts of the former ecosystem.

When the initial wave of radiation from the supernova peaked and
passed, the background level remained very high, because the supernova
remnant, with the new black hole at the center, continued to spray a
steady stream of dangerous particles and energy, though a gradually
declining one. It would be well over a Terran century before it would
be entirely safe to return to the surface of Helius when the nova was
above the horizon.

The effect on Helian psychology was complex. First 95% of the
population was spirited away without warning, then, after less than
100 Terran years of work to recover came the supernova, which reduced
the biosphere of Helius to shreds. Some Helians speculated that the
aliens had remove their fellow Helians to protect them from the nova
(which was more or less the truth), but this sort of thinking was
rather alien to Helians, and they had a hard time crediting it.

The other theory was that the aliens might well have been
responsible for the supernova. This, however, seemed unlikely as
well. Given the power the aliens had demonstrated on the day of
Departure, they would hardly have needed to create a supernova (even
if they could) to finish off the biosphere of Helius.

Still, the society on Helius had now survived both the forced sudden
removal of 95% of its population and a near-space supernova and the
collapse of the Helian biosphere, and it was still functional.

MORE LATER

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

With the surface biosphere of Helius basically ravaged, the remaining
Helians of Helius now had no choice but to continue with and expand
upon the underground existence they had already embarked upon. Over
the following Terran century or so, the underground galleries and
labyrinths were expanded and extended, both laterally away from the
coastlands where they began, and vertically, cutting ever-deeper into
the crust of Helius. Their technology began to grow again, especially
those aspects of it that touched on artificial biosystems and
life-support systems and mining and underground architecture. By the
time the Helians reached early TL10 in most fields, they were well
into TL11 in those areas.

The Helians had allowed their space flight technology to languish in
comparison, for lack of any immediate place to go, and out of the
necessities of secrecy and survival. But their theoretical physicists
had been on the track of new developments, which were now beginning to
bear fruit.

A growing understanding of the underlying nature of reality, of the
interactions and events that occur at the Planck scale, had already
led them to the experimental verification that faster than light
information transfer was indeed possible. Now their studies led them
to calculate the existence of 'parallel' forms of matter, bearing a
partial relationship to the periodic table, but with very different
properties as well.

Their theories indicated that such parallel matter should be
vanishingly rare in the parts of the Universe familiar to Helians,
with one exception: one of the parallel analogues of copper should be
relatively common in normal space.

The theoretical properties this material should possess were wild
enough to stir excitement even in the natively calm Helian soul, but
the phrase 'relatively common' was indeed relative. In practical
terms, their theoretical understanding said that the stuff should be
incredibly rare by practical mining and processing standards.
Further, their best theoretical understanding suggested that when it
did occur, it ought to tend to end up deep within large bodies such as
planets.

(The material in question, of course, is what the Atlanteans would,
half a billion years later, call orichalcum.)

The Helians began a search for the material, since even modest amounts
would have vast theoretical applications. But they knew that the bulk
of whatever orichalcum their star system had been endowed with could
be expected to be within the star itself. Further, since Heliustar
was a red dwarf, the low initial mass of the star system meant a low
likelihood of large amounts of orichalcum.

What orichalcum existed outside the star would most likely tend to end
up deep within the major worlds, especially the innermost planet,
sine it was closest to the star, or so their theoretical models
suggested. All in all, finding orichalcum was a daunting challenge.

It took them 50 Terran years or so of careful searching and tremendous
effort to find enough orichalcum to make a one gram pellet. As they
had expected, most of that had come from the innermost world, obtained
by processing millions of tons of copper-bearing rock.

The surface conditions of Heliustar I were hellish by Helians
standards. The remaining radiation from the supernova required an
inconvenient amount of shielding for their spacecraft, and the yield
was low enough to make the work frustrating even by Helian standards.

Robots did most of the mining and processing work, since they were
physically tough and endlessly patient.

The advanced mining tech of the Helians enabled the robots to
gradually cut their way down and down, further and further into the
crust of innermost planet, until they finally began to find orichalcum
in tiny 'veins' and masses of orichalcum, and the annual output rose
first to grams, then to decagrams.

Finally, they had enough orichalcum to begin putting it to practical
use, and one of the first theoretical applications actually
implemented was to use a decagram of the precious stuff to build an
orichalcum-detector.

That device enabled the process of prospecting and mining to become
orders of magnitude more efficient and effective. Less than 20 Terran
years after the first orichalcum detector was built, the Helians had
amassed several tons of the substance, the product of a century of
effort and 2 centuries of thought.

Now, at last, the Helians could actually build the faster-than-light
propulsion systems they had theoretically grasped for over a century.
The work began immediately, but it would be yet another half a century
or so, by Terran reckoning, before the theory could be converted into
practical engineering, and the first true Helian starship launched.


MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The starship the Helians constructed would have looked strange indeed
to Homosentient eyes. The outer hull was composed of a type of
'living plastic' the Helians had developed, much of the interior
structure was composed of some very odd ultra-low-temperature forms of
water-ice.

This ship was the first to launch, followed every 20 years or so by
another. They were slow, compared to the ships the Helians would
later build, limited in practical terms to velocities of about 50
times the speed of light. They could be launched no more regularly
than every 20 Terran years or so, because it took that long to
assemble enough orichalcum to spare a few hundred kilograms for a new
starship.

The starships had various missions, all combined. They were to
explore nearby star systems, while all the time looking for some sign
of those Helians suddenly taken nearly 4 centuries before, on
Departure day. They were to watch for signs of the aliens
responsible, and learn whatever they could about them. Additionally,
of course, they were on the lookout for new sources of orichalcum.

It would be some time before the first objective was fulfilled:
though the Helians of Helius had no way to know it, the nearest world
on which their long-lost cousins still lived was over 1000 light-years
away. The large majority of those worlds where the involuntary
colonists had successfully thrived were in the Milky Way Galaxy,
across an intergalactic void from Helius.

In the search for orichalcum, they were slightly more successful in
the short term. Armed with their o-detectors, they tracked down small
accessible deposits that eventually enabled the Helians to build
faster, more capable starships.

In the meantime, some star systems proved to have sites sufficiently
hospitable for voluntary colonization, and so a second wave of Helian
settlement began to spread outward from Helius.

None of the new voluntary colonies were anything like as clement as
Helius had once been, since none had been heliuformed, but some were
nearly as good as Helius now was, in the aftermath of the supernova.

Already used to living underground and surviving using artificial
life-support systems and artificial ecologies, settlement on barren
alien worlds was not that large a mental shift for the Helians by this
time.

Over the course of the next 500 Terran years or so, the Helians
continued to expand outward from Helius, their ships and other
technologies improving slowly but steadily. Colony worlds rose, on
planets as different from Helius as Mars is from Earth, save only that
the temperature was always cold, and liquid helium had to be present.

Asteroids were settled, moonlets converted, and free-space habitats
built. Ironically, as technology advanced, the free-space habitats
became the environment most like what Helius had once been, the only
places where Helians could experience an existence something like what
their ancestors had known on Helius itself (not counting the
heliuformed worlds which they had not yet regained contact with).

By about 1000 Terran years after the start of star flight, the Helians
had reached early TL11 and their technological advancement had reached
a plateau of slower development. They were spreading steadily
outward, and they finally made a physics discovery that revolutionized
interstellar travel. They learned how to construct enormous
trans-light teleportation systems, which could bridge thousands of
light-years in an instant, though gateway apparatus on each end was
necessary. Once this technology was developed, the Core Helians
(meaning the descendents of those left behind by the Eldren on Helius)
began to expand at a tremendous rate.

Culturally, too, the Core Helians were changing. Up until the
Departure Day, all Helians had been in telepathic contact, so one
group could not change much culturally separately from the rest. The
Departure changed that.

With ever-faster ships and teleportation machines to throw those ships
from star to star in the blink of a perceptor, it was inevitable that
sooner or later, the Core Helians would come back into contact with
their sundered kin.

When it happened, though, it surprised everyone.

MORE LATER.