The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [82]
They had called their world Yla, and themselves Ylans. They had been a peaceful people, given to gentle, benevolent pastimes and amusements. Their vocabulary contained no word equivalents for war or fighting. The closest they could come was disagreement. Art had been their abiding passion, and almost all of their populace practiced some form of it, no matter what they did as an actual career. Not all Ylans were skilled artists; it was recognized that talent varied from one to the other. But all efforts were truly valued.
The Ylans had existed as a unified, civilized society, in harmony with each other, for at least fifteen thousand years when their fate came upon them, in the form of a deadly burst of solar radiation from their previously benevolent sun. The radiation had killed nearly a quarter of their population outright, a tragedy terrible enough to envision. But over the years, it became clear that the radiation had had an even more deadly effect. The males—all the males—were rendered sterile.
It was a death sentence for their race, of course, and they soon realized it. They were a long-lived people, so many of them set out to try and solve their problem scientifically. Their history chronicled their efforts, which had all failed.
Centuries before their sun’s betrayal, the Ylans had developed space travel—more as a curiosity than as a means to any end. They were not possessed of humanity’s driving need to explore, and trade had not been a motivation, for they had never discovered any other intelligent species than themselves in their remote sector of the galaxy. They had never had or needed colonies. Population control had been one of the earliest problems they had mastered as a civilized people.
As the older Ylans began dying off, unreplaced, their younger population also plummeted. Suicide rates soared because the people could have no children, and they felt that they had no more reason to live.
It was at this juncture that several of the Ylan leaders had conceived the idea of the artifact. Its design and construction gave the remaining people a reason to go on, the chance to make one final, creative effort. The artifact had been a planetwide project, and to build it had meant that the Ylans had to revive half-forgotten technologies and engineering abilities. Slowly, over the remaining lifetime of their people, they had built, in space, a structure to house their planet’s art treasures.
They had built the artifact as a memorial to themselves and as a gesture of galactic goodwill to any intelligent species that would come after them. They had built it and set it moving on a trajectory designed to take it slowly through the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.
As near as Data could figure, the artifact had been drifting for at least a half a million years.
Drifting … and trapping. And killing.
Data was very glad that the gentle Ylans would never know what they had unwittingly unleashed on the cosmos, or how many hideous deaths they had caused.
After a moment to digest what he had learned, Data tapped the “all’s well” signal on his tricorder again and began scanning more of the records. Interesting … most interesting. The Ylans had possessed, as Wesley had surmised, most original ways of looking at the universe. Much of their scientific knowledge was completely different from anything Data had seen before. For example, stored aboard the artifact were seeds that, when planted in fertile soil according to the instructions left, would grow into living art forms. Data knew that many horticulturalists on Earth regarded gardening as a type of art, but this was something different—genetically engineered plants that were designed to grow into living sculptures, somewhat like a preprogrammed bonsai, the android thought.
Would the seeds still be fertile after more than five hundred thousand years? It hardly seemed possible, but Data found himself considering taking some of them over to the Enterprise and experimenting