Did something of the sort happen to the legendary Taraplins?
Paradoxically, it is known that in the not too distant past (which on a Galactic Community scale usually means a couple million years ago or more), the Qhigarians held Alien slaves. Not just one enslaved Alien species, either, but several dozen races. They protest that it wasn’t exactly like that; the slaves were merely clones, inspired by Alien DNA (or the equivalent, depending on the species), and they gave up this awkward practice as soon as they learned to control their own genome by following the teachings of (who else?) the Taraplin Wise Creators.
It could be pointed out, though, that they took their own sweet time—a few thousand years, that’s all—in interpreting those teachings. So I don’t put much faith in their story. Or is it that I find it hard to imagine how a nonviolent race could practice slavery?
In any case, it’s a good thing Quim Molá gave them a dictionary and a cat, and not his DNA, for those first twenty-five engines!
And what luck we also have our Countdowns. I wouldn’t like imagining a race of cloned mes surreptitiously created and enslaved by the Unworthy Pupils. Nobody’d better meddle with my DNA in particular, or human DNA in general.
But it isn’t their thriving fleet, their antiquity, their trading prowess, their pacifism, or their commitment to living as galactic nomads that makes the Qhigarians unique as a species, but rather two other considerably stranger characteristics.
The first is that each and every one of their gigantic, densely populated, chaotic worldships—veritable hyperengine-powered archologies that can measure dozens of kilometers in length and shelter several million individuals—is essentially a world apart. Onboard temperature, internal design, air composition, humidity, and even gravity vary considerably from one ship to the next. I should know, having visited several of them.
Exobiologists hypothesize that their diversity is the accumulated result of millions upon millions of years of separate evolution. Whatever. The fact is, the Qhigarians on any given ship are unlike those on any other. Unlike in culture, unlike in language, quite unlike in anatomy.
Many condomnauts doubt that evolutionary isolation has much to do with this. Perhaps because the Alien Drifters sometimes adopt morphologies that look fairly… well, whimsical would be the nice way of putting it.
The anatomical differences between the crews of any two Qhigarian worldships can be greater than those between us humans and the Kigran leviathans. And any two of their languages can have less in common than Chinese and Catalan. This makes Contact with each of their worldships a real guessing game, basically like making another First Contact.
Of the roughly twenty thousand known worldships, we humans have had dealings with no more than six hundred or so.
Some Contact Specialists are convinced that the thing Qhigarians find the greatest pleasure in (apart from cheating their trading partners, I mean) is messing with the minds of condomnauts from other races when they make Contact.
The second unique characteristic of the Alien Drifters is closely related to the former. It’s what makes them a species. In fact, if it weren’t for this, nobody would ever consider creatures with such highly divergent morphologies to be members of a single race. Though some recent theories refuse to accept them as such, insisting that they must instead be a conglomeration or coalition of species with different origins linked by shared interests.
Which would automatically raise the number of known Alien species in the galaxy by several thousand.
The deal is that, despite their Babel of varied languages—which some linguists think are just a hobby, while others deny their existence or consider them a pointless joke—all Qhigarians are intraspecies telepaths, able to maintain telepathic contact with one another at all times, yet without coming to form a single mental entity. Nothing too unusual about that for an Alien race, to tell the truth: nearly a thousand species have been found to have this fantastic ability so far.
This, of course, is the reason they need no leaders. If all are one and one is all, what for?
It’s curious, by the way, that while all pacifist species belong to their class of telepaths, it doesn’t work both ways: the great majority of species endowed with telepathy are not pacifists. A fact that incidentally negates the ancient notions some human science fiction writers had in the twentieth century, that knowing what your enemy is thinking will prevent you from considering him your enemy.
Interspecies telepathy, for example, which allows for mental contact with members of other species, turns out to be much more exotic. Kigrans have it, as does the Evita Entity with which I just made Contact. We know of barely thirty members of the Galactic Community blessed with this extremely useful gift, which saves so much time and, more important, avoids the bothersome misunderstandings constantly generated by our translation software, which is good but not magic.
And, while we’re on the subject: none of these species (well, we still don’t know enough about Evita to be absolutely certain, but I wouldn’t bet my life on the possibility) is what you might call exactly pacifist.
But while the telepathic abilities (intra- or interspecies) of all other races in the galaxy cease to function at a certain distance, usually no more than a couple of kilometers, the fact is that, through some mechanism that no human or Alien science has yet managed to explain, it seems that all Qhigarians on all the worldships in the galaxy, no matter how distinct their populations, no matter how far apart their worldships (and by far apart, I mean lightyears apart; the Milky Way is a massively huge galaxy) keep in constant mental contact with one another, in real time, thus forming a sort of single telepathic colonial supermind—and making an utter mockery of Einsteinian relativity.
They themselves explain it as an ability inherited from the Taraplins. Which is like not explaining anything.
An old condomnaut joke says that “ansible” may secretly be the Qhigarians’ real name, or perhaps the name of their planet of origin.
If any two Qhigarian individuals could establish that sort of faster-than-light telepathic link between themselves, the other races in the Galactic Community probably would have forgotten all their scruples and gotten together many thousands of years ago to fall eagerly on the Alien Drifters, pacifists or not, Unworthy Pupils or not, even if their ships were the fastest in the universe.
A communication method that can erase relativistic distances just like that would be too valuable to allow a single species to monopolize it in such an egotistical fashion.
Fortunately for the Qhigarians, one of the few things that is well known about their telepathic colonial supermind is that the faster-than-light link only works when large populations are involved. That is probably why, exobiologist speculate, so many millions of them travel on each of their worldships. In order to maintain their unity as a race or supermind even at interstellar distances, they must need to have dense concentrations of individuals join their telepathic powers.
What’s paradoxical and positive about this whole business is that if there’s any Alien species that shouldn’t be particularly interested in having a hyperjump engine capable of intergalactic leaps, it’s the Qhigarians. Why would they want to travel beyond the Milky Way, at the risk of losing the integrity of their telepathic colonial supermind, if that is what already allows them to be, in a sense, present everywhere in this galaxy at the same time? Not to mention that, if they suddenly had to deal with competitors for Taraplin hyperjump technology, over which they hold a de facto monopoly, their business model could collapse. No matter how cheap they tried selling their inherited jump engines.