“I don’t mean just in physical construction. All the sentient peoples have either bipedal or centaurine bodies, hands, stereoscopic vision, and so forth. They were intelligent but had no consciousness of self, no concept of the I.”
“We speculated on that!” Frigate said. “But…”
“You must interrupt as little as possible. I’m telling the truth when I say that all sentient beings throughout the universe were without self-awareness. As far as we know, anyway. I know it’s very difficult for you to believe. You can’t conceive of such a state. But it was and is true—with exceptions now.
“The people who differed did not differ in their lack of self-awareness in the beginning of their history. They were like the others in this respect. However, they did have science, though they didn’t go about dealing with it as self-aware sentients do.
“Nor did they have a concept of religion, of gods or of a God. That comes only with an advanced stage of self-awareness.
“Luckily for these people, called by those who followed them The Firsts, one of their scientists had accidentally formed a wathan during an experiment.
“It was the first indication The Firsts had that there was such a force as extraphysical energy. I use the term extra-physical to avoid any confusion with paraphysical, with such evidently existing but usually uncontrollable and elusive forces as telepathy, telekinesis, and other extrasensory perception phenomena.”
Burton forebore saying that it \vas he who’d coined the term ESP on Earth, though he’d called it extra-sensuous perception.
“The wathan may be a form of this, but, if so, it’s the only one that’s controllable. This nameless scientist who accidentally generated a wathan from the extraphysical forces did not know what it was. He or she continued to experiment and generated more. I say generated because the equipment he was using formed the wathan from the extraphysical energy. Shaped it or perhaps plucked it from the field that exists in the same space as matter but usually doesn’t interact with it.
“The first wathans probably attached themselves to the living beings in their proximity.”
“All living creatures?” Nur murmured.
“All living individuals. Insects, trees, starfishes, all. After millions of years of experiments, we still don’t know why the wathans are attracted to life energy. One of the hundreds of theories is that life itself may be a form of extraphysical energy. An interface, rather.”
The effect of the attachments was not immediately noted. The wathan was the source and genesis of self-awareness. But it could not develop this except through living entities, and these had to have highly developed nervous systems if the potentiality for self-awareness was to be realized.
“But that also can’t be realized if the wathan attaches itself to a human entity beyond the initial zygote stage. Beyond the fusion of spermatozoon and ovum. Don’t ask me why. Just believe me when I say that it’s true. Apparently, there is a hardening in the entity, a resistance to the interface.”
The machine spat out billions of wathans during the experiments. Millions attached themselves to the zygotes of the sentients. And, for the first time in the universe, as far as anybody knew, self-awareness was born. Infants grew up with this, and neither the older nor the younger generation could understand that this was unique and new. Self-aware children and youths have always had difficulty understanding the adults, but never before had there been such an empathy gap, such lack of comprehension.
“Eventually, the unself-conscious people died out. It wasn’t until twenty-five or so years after the first wathan was formed that the reason for self-awareness was discovered. Then it became a matter of necessity to keep producing wathans.”
Centuries passed. Space flight via rockets came. After several centuries, a new form of propulsion was discovered. Interstellar flight became possible at speeds unheard of before when a method of sidepassing matter was invented. Even so, it took seven days of Earth-time to go a lightyear.
“The old science-fiction concept of going through other dimensions was realized?” Frigate said.
“No. But we don’t have the time for the necessarily lengthy explanation of it.”
By then The Firsts thought it was their ethical duty to bring immortality and self-awareness via the wathan to all other sentient people. Many expeditions set out to do this. When one found a planet with people whose brains were capable of developing self-awareness, waf/iaw-generating machines were buried so deep in the earth that it was unlikely that they would be discovered by the aborigines.