Despite my physical weakness my mind was still active. In fact, I had little else to do except try to fathom as much as I could glean about my captor and his world. It helped me to forget my constant hunger and the pain of that remorseless lashing wind. My body was under Set’s control, but my mind was not. I probed whenever I could. I watched and studied. I learned.
The beginning point, of course, was that they are reptiles. Or the Shaydanian equivalent of terrestrial reptiles. They do not actively control their body temperature as mammals do, although they maintain their body heat rather well and can be active and alert even during the chill of night.
They reproduced by laying eggs, originally. Like the reptiles of Earth, virtually all of the species of Shaydan left their nests once the eggs were laid and never returned to see their young.
What came out of those eggs were miniature versions of adult reptiles, fully equipped with teeth and claws and all the instincts of their parents. The hatchlings possessed everything their parents had except size. Successful offspring who made it into adulthood grew to great size, and the older the individual, the larger he grew and the deeper the color of his scales. The only limitations imposed on a Shaydanian’s size were the ultimate physical limits of bone and muscle’s ability to support increasing weight.
This meant that Set and the other patriarchs that we met at each city must have been considerably older than the others around them. How old was Set? I began to wonder. Centuries, at least. Perhaps millennia.
Newly hatched Shaydanians inherited all the physical characteristics of their parents—including not merely brain structure, but the ability to communicate telepathically. Eons earlier, this trait must have arisen as a mutation, and then was passed on to the following generations. Telepathic individuals lived longer and produced more offspring, who were also telepathic. As the generations went by, the telepaths drove their less-talented brethren into extinction. Perhaps they did it by violence, just as the Creators once drove the Neanderthals into oblivion, almost.
Telepathic communication led the way to intelligence. While laying her eggs, a Shaydanian mother imprinted her unformed offspring with all the experiences of her life. Each generation of telepathic reptile imparted all the knowledge of every previous generation to its young. Once a new hatchling could learn, in the egg, all the experiences that every generation of its ancestors had lived through, it was armed mentally as well as physically to deal with the world around it.
The civilization that these intelligent reptilians built on Shaydan had existed for millions of terrestrial years. Each community was led by its eldest member. Their ages ran to thousands of years. To creatures who could open their minds completely to one another, distrust was unknown. Disagreements between individuals were decided by the patriarch—indeed, that seemed to be his main reason for existence.
Each community worked with the tireless self-effacing efficiency of an ant’s nest or a beehive. There were no wars because each community lived within the bounds of its environment. The children of Shaydan lived in harmony.
Until they realized that their star, Sheol, would one day destroy them.
The patriarchs consulted among themselves about how to face this dreadful certainty. Most of them felt that doom was inevitable and the only thing that could be done was to accept the fact. A few even recommended suicide, insisting it was better to die with dignity at one’s own choosing rather than wait for the cataclysm to strike them down.
Yet the urge to live was strong among them. They began to dig in, to extend their cities and dwellings underground in the hope that the bulk of their planet would help to protect them from the worst of the radiation that Sheol would one day rain upon the surface of Shaydan. Even so, they knew that the lethal radiation would be merely the first stage of Sheol’s death throes. Ultimately the star would explode and destroy their world along with itself.
Of all the patriarchs of Shaydan, only Set stood against the counsels of passivity and acceptance. He alone searched for a path to avert the doom that faced Shaydan. He alone determined to find a way to save himself, his people, his entire race. The other patriarchs thought him mad, at first, or supremely foolish to spend his remaining centuries trying to escape the inevitable. Set ignored them all.