"The Genya" by Frances Monro

The Genya

A far future scenario

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years in the future the Earth is at the centre of a vast space trading civilization, where huge faster than light ships travel between the stars on voyages that take decades because of the vast distances involved. Passengers and crew travel in cryogenic suspension as the enormous vessels - never intended to land on the ground - crawl between inhabited star systems at unimaginable speeds over unimaginable distances. Relativistic effects make the journeys even longer from the point of view of the planet dwellers.

Over centuries the Earth's resources and eco-systems are depleted and run-down. Changing cultural and trading patterns mean the ships come less frequently and have less to trade. Eventually the economy crashes and wars and famines occur, the human population crashes as the technological civilization fails and a new dark age begins.

After this the interstellar ships visit even less frequently, with centuries between vessels which now have more interesting and profitable destinations.

However, the dark age is not universal, with some technological enclaves holding out, linked by electronic communications and protected by walls and advanced weapons these redoubts provide a high-tech lifestyle for the privileged few, maintained by scavenging resources and technology from the ruins to feed their robot machine shops.

It is in one of these redoubts that a group of genetic engineers work on a project to upgrade the human genome with advances that have been made over the centuries. Their creation is a new species of human - infertile with old style humans – dubbed "Genies".

Genies are small, slight and feminine looking compared with old humans. There metabolism is fast, they are hot to the touch and eat a lot, but their metabolic rate can be controlled, they can slow down when no food is available, hibernate in winter, and even enter a form of natural cryogenic suspension when their body temperature drops below freezing, reviving years or centuries later without ill effect.

In their natural state Genies run at a faster "metabolic clock" rate than old humans. They seem to flitter and dance around, finding us intolerably slow and stupid. A group of genies would seem to us a bit like a swarm of bees or a flock of finches, moving almost too rapidly to follow.

They also benefit from other advances in the biosciences, being highly intelligent, considerably stronger than old humans, able to digest more things than we can, being more difficult to poison and able to drink salt water. All Genie look beautiful, in a slightly feminine way. They heal quickly without scarring, and can regrow severed limbs. They have large eyes and pointed ears. By some quirk of aesthetics or genetics they are all fair complexioned and platinum blonde, although their eyes have a range of striking colours. They have natural pigmentation around the eyes and lips and face which resembles the effect of makeup.

Most significant of all they live for a very long time, and appear to never age, giving rise to the story that they live forever - although they can be killed by violence or misadventure. Perhaps in compensation for this they don't have children very often and their children take a long, long while to grow up - centuries.

Because of this slow growth rate the Genies were still in their adolescence when their designers died off. Their successors and other old humans on Earth were suspicious and jealous of the Genie and instituted a somewhat disorganized program of hunting them down and killing them, in an attempted genocide. The Genie fled, first to the tribes of primitive humans outside the enclaves - who regarded them as supernatural beings.

While in this primitive environment, fleeing for their lives, the Genie discovered the art or science of manipulating the universe's life force. Occasionally using technology, but more usually just their minds, the Genie were able to tap into these forces using their "talent", a kind of psychic power. Whether this was something that their creators intended but never spoken about, or a spontaneous new development, is not known.

The Genie found ways to use their talent as a weapon against the Old Humans, intensifying the conflict and damaging both sides. However, with the Genie's slow reproduction rate it was a conflict which they were bound to lose, since the Old Humans could withstand greater losses, while Genie losses could not be replaced.

The Genie fled again, using their psychic talent to "teleport" between the stars. For hundreds of years they wandered the galaxy, virtually naked, using their talent to shield themselves from hostile environments, as weapons against those who would attack them, and to communicate across the gulf of space.

They visited worlds teeming with old human civilizations ranging from mud huts to interstellar empires. They visited worlds where humans had become strange and alien, and worlds where aliens had become human. They went to dead worlds and comets where no sun has ever shone, and stranger places, inhabited by stranger beings and not-beings and never-beings. They laughed and cried and danced under strange skies beside strange seas.

The basic social structure of the Genie is the work group or “gang”. Each gang is a circle of up to twenty or so Genie, normally with both sexes represented, although not always. The group comes together to peruse a shared interest or project, and also through romantic liaisons. Each member of the group choses a different role depending on their talents, interests, and character. Although group members are theoretically equal, each group has a single acknowledged leader who’s word is final. When several groups must work together on a project the leaders form a separate oversight group, with it’s own overall leader. Individual Genie often belong to several different groups, taking different roles in each different project. This social structure evolved when the Genie were engaged in guerrilla conflict with the Old Humans on Earth, and it was strengthened through centuries of co-operative and competitive exploration in hostile environments.

Yet all the while the Genies numbers continued to decline, partly from violence and misadventure and partly because each psychic "jump" between the stars was not without risk, and on some disastrous “black” routes as many as half the genie who set out on a "jaunt" might not arrive. Finally there were as few as a couple of hundred genie left.

A group called a meeting on a deserted world, inviting all Genie to attend. They announced a plan to create and rule their own world, a place where the Genie species could flourish and grow. They asked all Genie to participate in the creation of this world and a new generation of Genie.

After several meetings and years of planning and discussion most Genie joined the project. They settled Coran's Landing at the far edge of human space, a primitive place where they could build whatever they chose without fear of interference from other star farers.

Coran's Landing was settled late in the first old human expansion, with a space station to service the starships and to act as a base for asteroid mining and terraforming the world. It was far from other human systems and only marginally suitable for settlement. Coran's Landing was rather like Mars, but with a higher gravity.
As human civilization contracted at the end of the first diaspora the starship visits slowed and stopped, eventually the station economy and biosystems ran down and the station had to be abandoned, the population moving to domed cities on the world below.

This ensured that any ship which did entered the system in later centuries had nowhere to stop and refuel, and no supplies or trade to attract return visits, meaning that Coran's Landing was bypassed by newer, emerging old human civilization.

When the Genie arrived it's sparse grey green seas were rimed with blue-green pond scum, and lichens and mosses had began to painstakingly colonize it's rocky plains and deserts while the grey sky took on a faint blue tinge. But the old human cities had fallen into disrepair and disorder, with rover gangs in electric buggies raiding and destroying the weaker small settlements while the larger settlements starved even as they were forced to spend more and more of their resource budget on defence.

It was a zero sum game as the old human population spiralled down to extinction, and the only advantage possible was short term, relative advantage, over others who were equally desperate.

The Genie moved into the cities and took over, using their talent to eliminate those who resisted, ending the conflict and re-establishing farms and supply lines. They decided that technological civilization was too fragile for the long term on such hostile world. The Genie planned to remould the human species, rather in their own image, to survive on Coran’s Landing without the need of fragile high technology

They used their talent along with the genetic engineering skills of their own creators, to mould the old humans over generations and create a new race - the Indis - originally "indiginous old human population". They used talent to bring in and modify other suitable species from a dozen worlds.

As centuries passed life spread out across the surface of Coran in greater profusion and diversity and conditions slowly became more hospitable life fell into an established pattern. Eventually all of the remaining Genie moved to live in their crystal towers and domes on Coran – or disappeared into the outer depths of space.

Language drifts over the light years and the centuries, in the language of the Indis the Genie were called the Genya.

The Genya planned the terraforming of Coran over centuries, using the Indis as dumb labor when required. They set down rules on what land and resources the Indis may use, and what they may not. These rules are designed to keep the delicate ecosystems growing, ultimately, to support more Genya and Indis, but in the short term they often bring hunger to the over-breeding Indis.

The Indis live in pressurized warrens dug into the soil of Coran for insulation. They work farms around their warrens and serve the Genya tending forests and other ecosystem projects.

The modifications which the Genya made to the Indis were modest compared with their own divergence from the original Old Human stock, but these are still enough to constitute a new human species, not interfertile with Genya or Old Human. The most obvious difference is the large lung capacity to breathe the sparse air of Coran. Large mobile ears enable hearing in the thin atmosphere – most Genya are almost deaf while on the surface and rely on their talent to know what is going on.

Cold tolerence, hibernation and cryogenic sleep made perfect sense on a world where the carbon dioxide sublimes out of the atmosphere in winter. But the Indis are not immortal, in fact they have shorter lives than Old Humans, reproducing young. They are stronger than Old Humans, and have the same improvements to their digestion and salt tolerance, but Indis are not fast, if anything they tend to live slow in order to cope with cold, lack of food and limited resources. Thus they find the Genya's flittering speed even more bewildering than the Old Humans did, but they quickly learned that rebellion against their rule - however confusing or arbitrary it might seem - was punishable by death.

The Indis still pressurise and heat their warrens, but this is a matter of comfort rather than the necessity it was for the original Old Human population. Slowly, over the centuries Coran has begun to bloom, with forests and grasslands inching across the moss-plains year by year as the pressure climbs and the oxygen content of the thin air grows, while painstakingly adapted animal populations begin to increase, tended by the often puzzled, short lived, short sighted Indis - Why aren't we allowed to eat these deer? We are starving and they eat our crops.

Whether as a result of the genetic manipulation, or through some natural force of evolution – or as a long term secret plot of a dissident Genya group,  some Indis have been discovered using talent - a thing the Genya had long thought impossible. Since the Indis are capable of breeding so much faster then the Genya this is intolerable and Talent-weilding Indis are mercilessly hunted down and killed.

A new generation of Genya slowly mature on Coran. More numerous and sure of themselves than their ancient parents, some of them sporting huge bat-ears – a controversial fashion among Genya parents and genetic designers, they tire of the frustrating millennia long rule of their ancient parents and long stretch their legs and try their own fledgling powers.

Meanwhile, as the centuries roll by Old Human ships have silently flown through the system on their distant errands and made note of the greening surface of the world with it's ancient, abandoned station. Somewhere, far away, minds wonder at the results of the long terraforming and whether the world might be of interest  or profit sufficient to justify a visit…