Cascade (Saturn's Legacy Book 2) by Joshua James

Author:Joshua James [James, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

In the beginning, even before the Spawnmother laid her first great clutch of eggs, there was another species who made their original home on a faraway planet, in a galaxy much closer to the center of the universe than either yours or mine. They began quite simply as single-celled organisms, floating in the primordial soup of amino acid chains without a care. Then these tiny cells became eukaryotic…they learned how to feed, and to grow, and to multiply. As time went on, individual cells banded together, at first in a loose cluster, and then gradually, into larger and larger aggregates, which eventually came to be possessed of a single mind.

For a long time, they made their home in the soil of their homeworld, seeking nothing but nourishment and moisture and light. Over millennia, these people—the Photosynthians—grew in complexity, and developed specialized behaviors that allowed them to become more and more independent. At length, they became as intelligent as your species, and then later as intelligent as mine. And then, as all self-aware species gradually do, they began to turn to the stars, and to wonder if there were other species like them, or if they were alone in the universe. They found ways to travel and explore, but over the course of unnumbered eons, they discovered the truth:

That first world was the only one of its kind.

At first, this was disheartening. But these people had never lost their connection to the lifecycles of their homeworld, so they put down vestigial roots—no longer life-giving since the olden days when they had first become epiphytes—and set their collective mind to pondering what made them special.

They found it eventually, deep within the core of their world: the spark. The thing that made their planet unique. They could not remove it without killing themselves off, of course, but they were advanced enough to understand how they could synthesize it. So they developed a reliable method of synthesis, built a fleet of experimental ships, and set out. They took an abundance of their single-celled progenitors with them, as they were still plentiful in that time, and set out on a voyage of discovery.

The Photosynthians were long-lived, but even so, their voyage lasted generations. They visited star after star, galaxy after galaxy, in search of habitable zones. When they found them, they constructed untold numbers of moons and planets, each with a bit of this synthesized, life-supporting energy at its core. They seeded each world with the earliest versions of themselves—and at the heart of each world, they built a kill switch, in case the experiment failed.

Time passed before their species returned to examine the fruits of their labor. Millions of years, to be exact. They discovered that the life they had seeded had developed in myriad ways, according to the bioavailability of that particular world, its relative placement in the habitable zone where it had been established, and other factors too numerous to name. On some worlds, reptiles flourished; on others, amphibians triumphed; there were worlds like Enceladus where the piscine species dominated, and those where invertebrates ruled.

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