Science Behind “Until The Stars Themselves End”
My first story involving an actual alien, “Until The Stars Themselves End,” comes from “The Baylah Run” story collection. Written from the alien perspective, the main character Ax’thana is similar enough to humans that the reader can relate to her, but as part of a predatory, single-gendered species that communicates through both scent and sound, she is different enough to be alien.
This story was first inspired by a concept I came across called the Interplanetary Transport Network, which is a network of gravitational pathways throughout the solar system. While it may seem counter-intuitive (welcome to the wonderful, mysterious world of science!) objects can move from one end of the solar system to the other with little or even no expenditure of energy, albeit a great expenditure of time. I found this concept so fascinating, that I just had to write a story that incorporated it.
So, the story opens with Ax’thana at a Lagrange point in her solar system, looking for interplanetary comet and asteroid flotsam that the currents of space have carried there.
As mentioned, Ax’thana comes from a single-gendered species, but it’s not quite that simple. One of the great drivers of evolution, if not THE driver, is sexual reproduction in which life reproduces through the exchange of genetic material. The fossil record of life can be divided into two fundamental stages, before sex and after sex (no jokes, now). The first organisms reproduced by simply splitting and creating clones of themselves, and many very simple life-forms still use that method. But when life started exchanging genetic material, it resulted in an explosion of diversity.
The advantage of this innovation is so clear, that I could not ignore it in Ax’thana’s species. While sex may be a necessary mechanism, it does not demand that there be two different genders. So while her species may have one gender, it is hermaphroditic in the sense that reproduction still requires two individuals to join together.
And, in any ecological system on another world, I envision that predators and prey will still emerge. Ax’thana’s species are consummate predators and that drives both their thinking and their senses, which reflects in their communication. But as different as they are from us, love is a universal language, as is the pain it can cause.
