Murasaki, page 35
Efforts to communicate with the carpet whales have not yet gotten far, perhaps because most of their thinking involves concepts for which no Ihrdizuan language has any words—or perhaps because the carpet whales aren’t inter-ested, or perhaps because as they grow old they actually do sink, into intellectual sluggishness.
The Starside Sapients
As said, the starside of Genji is essentially oceanic. There are many islands besides the small continent Farland, but they are proportionately fewer than in our Pacific basin, because tides flood the lower ones and wear them down to reefs—geologically speaking, about as fast as tectonics can push new ones up. Thus isolated, whole kingdoms and su-perphyla have been free to develop without being overrun by others perhaps more efficient. The most interesting an-imals among them are the himatids.
The basic form is neither the cylinder nor the starfish but the ribbon or plate, an organism just a few cells thick, taking in nourishment and oxygen on the lower (ventral) side and excreting on the upper (dorsal) side. Most such creatures live in the water, which supports their weight, but forms somewhat analogous to slugs exist on land, and there are many kinds of airborne “flying wings.” (The most beautifully colored of these are apt to be extremely venomous.) The largest are the “carpet whales,—which grow—to enormous sizes, grazing on the equivalent of plankton and—krill. They concentrate toward polar waters, where currents bring up the most minerals, but certain kinds migrate and thus may be seen throughout the hemisphere. Several dis-tinct orders of these exist, the result of convergent evolu-tion. The following is the sapient.
Like others, it has a rudimentary homeothermic ca-pacity, burning food energy fast at need to keep warm, but usually it gets along well enough; the upper layers of sea on Genji never do grow as— cold as on Earth. The sketch shows the basic shape, a smooth, glistening black ribbon, bluntly pointed at the ends, with fifteen “arms” on either side, each slightly more than half as long as the body is wide. The fore and aft pairs are specialized for communi-cation. Between each set of two arms is a simple
“pinhole-camera” eye. (It is lidless and subject to damage or loss but, being simple, can readily be regenerated. Though a single eye gives a poor image, the ensemble supplies plenty of information for the neurons to process) Wastes come out of exudant cells on the back or top side, in the form of gases and liquids that air and waves bear away; the manner of this provides important sensory input. The belly is cov-ered with “mouths,” which are actually more like the sto-mata of Terrestrial plants, each supplied with a “tooth.” More on this later. Here it is worth observing that, in a way, the himatid perceives the world through its entire body to a degree and in a fashion not really imaginable by humans.
One could call the creature hermaphroditic, since there is only one sex, but it takes two to reproduce, by a process somewhat analogous to bacterial conjugation. Both partners then bud off their young.
Mating takes place in arctic wa-ters (for the sapient species), after which a herd migrates south and buds near the shores of Farland and neighboring islands. (Farland has evidently sat on its plate for an enor-mous time, with shield volcanoes replacing what erosion washes away.) A reproductive cycle takes several Mura-sakian years, the actual length depending on how favorable conditions are: a carpet whale mates and buds when it has accumulated enough reserve tissue.
The young come off a parent by the scores, tiny wrig-glers that swim ashore by the same undulations as their—elders but then crawl up on, land and adopt a sluglike ex-istence, feeding on vegetable matter, small entomoids, car-rion, and whatever else they can get. They hook themselves along by the
“scales—at their “mouths,” which will grow much less in proportion and eventually function entirely as teeth. A himatid can wrap its ventral side around, or against, anything—a small patch of itself for a small object, a larger patch or the entire body for a larger object. Tubules among the dorsal cells then grow rigid by turgor, which change in osmotic pressure controls, to give a strong grip. The sapient kind and its near relatives can also clutch with “hands,” to be described later. The teeth tear as the belly ripples, and the mouths exude acid and enzymes to dissolve food, which is then blotted up. Also, “arms” and “hands”
can press food against “mouths.”
English speakers refer to this stage of the organism as the “tad.” Naturally, it is a prey for other animals, and the great majority perishes. Meanwhile, though, the survivors are growing, and as they do, they develop better organs and a whole new layer of cells in the middle of their leaf-thin bodies, which will eventually combine the functions of our brain, spinal cord, and higher nervous system. The tough-est, most alert, and luckiest live until they have grown too big to get around readily on land. They then make their way to the tidewater regions. There chemical cues, com-parable to those that call a salmon back to its spawning grounds, bring them to the older juveniles already living in the water. English speakers call these the “calves.”
They are of every size, depending on age, from the newly arrived recent tads—perhaps 40 cm long and 10 cm wide—to the preadults, 4 or 5 meters in length and corre-spondingly wide. At first the new tads grow fast, acquiring MI intelligence, then the rate of growth slows down, and it takes some thirty Earth years to reach the next stage. The calf can move through the water remarkably fast when it wants to. It can dive and it can climb onto rocks, clinging by some of the arms, lifting the upper part of the body into the air. It can clamber around in the “floating forests,” which are also found on this side of the planet.
It can go briefly ashore, and can function out of the water indefinitely if at least half the body remains Submerged.
Except for the two pairs fore and aft, each flexible arm ends in a circular “palm” surrounded by eight boneless “fingers” with “pads” on the ends. A palm is covered with hairlike processes making a surface akin to fuzzy Vel-cro, while a pad is covered with others that can be stiffened by turgor to make a surface like hook Velcro. Thus the himafid can grasp fingers-to-fingers or, more strongly, fin-gers-to-palm, in a variety of combinations. The clasp is harder to break than one might expect—weaker, of course, than that of a human hand or an Ihrdizuan tentacle, but then as many as twenty-eight can be brought to bear. It should also be remembered that, on the whole, himatids have evolved in competition only with other him-atids. The prehensile body, with its rasps and solvents, is a formidable supplement.
The two front and two rear arms have basically similar ‘hands– that can be used to grasp at need, but
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less effec-tively, because they have specialized to produce sounds. The calf snaps fingers, scratches them together, rubs them across palms or across arms; etc.; hardening or softening the ciliate hooks as desired. The resulting language(s) is (are) in principle not altogether unlike the “talking drums of old Africa. Water carries the sounds well, and the him-atid hears, in effect, with its whole body. It can also hear, less well, through the dense air.
In general, besides the eyes, sensory information comes in through the entire “skin,” tactilely and chemi-cally. There is no brain as such, but the neural cell layer, and more rudimentary cells elsewhere, do the job of one, as well as handling other nervous functions. The himatid probably thinks more slowly than a human, but perhaps more profoundly, with more nuances.
The tidewater regions are a changeable, often violent, always challenging environment. In the present case, nat-ural selection has led to actual intelligence—by way of “manual” dexterity, the coordination and the wits to, make good use of it, linguistic ability to warn others of danger and cooperate with them. The sapients obviously have nei-ther fire nor metal, but they make use of animal tissue, wood, stone fragments, shell, etc.
Obviously, too, the “selfish gene” doesn’t work here. No concept of kinship exists. Tads arrive anonymously and are received by the calves, who raise them in a sort of extended family. Small and agile, the young can go where older, larger individuals cannot, to flush out small game, harvest sea plants, and so on. In return, the older calves protect them from perils and educate them. The more a young calf has learned, the better it can in its turn help provide and protect. Predation is a constant menace, not only by locally evolved beasts like the “carpet shark” but also by tetroptic and astromorphic swimmers whose ances-tors came from moonside.
Calves habitually live in bands, each occupying its own territory, such as a given fjord or the waters around a given island. In many cases, a band has pretty well suc-ceeded in clearing its territory of dangerous animals, though of course from time to time new ones swim in from outside. They have developed arts and ceremonies, about which hu-mans so far know virtually nothing. Likewise mysterious are laws, customs, religions, etc. Trading goes on between communities; there is probably no single organization trade ing far, but sometimes goods pass “hand to hand” from end to end of Farland or throughout an archipelago.
Growing all its life, eventually a himatid gets too big for the rough, reef-choked tidal waters. It moves out to sea and becomes a carpet whale, growing larger yet, apparently indefinitely. When it has reached sexual maturity, the life cycle begins anew.
As huge as they are, and traveling in herds, the carpet whales have essentially no natural enemies other than par-asites and disease. They no longer hunt but graze, and have no further use for tools or weapons. It is not known to humans or Ihrdizu just how they do spend most of their time. They do not
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seem to interact with the calves in any way. Yet probably they don’t drift off into animal otium, unless perhaps at great ages. After all, it is they that do the reproducing, and sexual selection has probably been a stronger factor making for intelligence, as well as the sur-vival pressures on tads and calves. Could the carpet whales be a species of philosopher?
When the Ihrdizu arrived from moonside,, it was a ca-tastrophe for the himatids. They were killed wholesale, driven from their home grounds, sometimes enslaved if they were sapients. Eventually there began to be some con-cern for them, practical rather than sentimental—as dis-cussed earlier.
Technological civilization is utterly alien to them, and aside, from the occasional working partnerships they have assimilated no important part of it, just such tools and gadgets as they can use in otherwise unchanged lives. This leads many Ihrdizu to maintain that the himatids are, after all, merely clever animals.
Other Ihrdizu, though, be-lieve the carpet whales possess mystical insights.
Chujo
Life
Although in general there is much less life on Chujo than there was in the warm, moist part of its cycle, it is, after all, an entire world, with enormous variations between regions. Moreover, here on Earth life is actually more abun-dant in some areas than it appears to the superficial ob-server—for example, in the Arctic or in the deserts of the southwestern United States. Chujoan ecologies have under-gone a terrible winnowing, with many forms becoming ex-tinct; but others have survived, and some are actually doing better now than before—those suited to cold, aridity, briny water, etc. The transition was apparently quite rapid and happened not so long ago, perhaps ten thousand Earth years, so evolution has not had time to make radical adap-tive changes. However, a number of distinct new species have already developed out of older ones as modifications of size, color, diet in the case of animals, and so on.
Macroscopic animal life does not have the diversity of basic types found on Genji, and indeed exhibits the same fundamental structure as that on Earth: cylindroidal, with a head containing a brain, two eyes, two ears, a mouth; the limbs are four and the sexes two; tails are usual though not universal. The most striking difference is in the air intake. Rather than possessing a nose, the ordinary animal has two slits on either side of the neck. Protected by flaps of muscle like opercula, they somewhat resemble gills, but except on the aquatic types they are not. Among land animals, usually the tongue, partly covered with ciliate chemosensors, de-tects odors as well as tastes.
At present the herpetoids and other poikilothermic sorts are not doing so well, their survivors being found mostly in the tropics, but many theroids are widespread. These are not actually mammals, the differences in anatomy and chemistry being manifold, but are in effect rather sim-ilar. Homeothermic, they give live birth and the female lac-tates. Hair has not evolved, and quite a few species have scales, which in some cases are so delicate and intricately barbed as to suggest feathers. Temperature regulation is as-sisted by a vascular network just below the skin analogous to the rete mirabile in the feet of our birds; and a furry covering is not needed against the feeble ultraviolet of Murasaki.
Like mammals on Earth, the theroids have proliferated into a variety of herbivores and carnivores of all sizes, shapes, and functions; they include the flyers. A human gets an overall impression of a tendency toward gracile build, emphasis on speed and agility, but this is only a tendency and graviportals do occur, some larger than on Earth (as the lower gravity allows).
Some animal names: highjumper, hellbat, tricorn, dune tiger, gigantothere, ripper, snakehound, burrowbunny, ko-bold, peri.
Only one society of the sapient Chujoans appears to remain, numbering perhaps a million individuals though it is impossible for humans to conduct a census. Thus we have just a single race of them to describe.
At first glance the being looks humanoid. It (he or she) when adult stands quite tall, averaging two meters or a little more, though much of this is in the long, thin-spanked but strong-calved legs. The chest is broad and deep, padded out by adipose tissue in both sexes; at the center is a single nipple, nonfunctional in the male but of similar appearance. The soles of the feet have thickened and the three remaining toes grown short and stubby so that the foot, almost always kept bare, somewhat resembles a hoof. The hands each have four digits; controlled by a muscular pad in the palm, either of the two outer ones can serve as a thumb; the blue “nails” are actually the last of the ancestral scales. Oth-erwise the skin is smooth, of a dark golden-brown hue that varies with blood flow just underneath. All excretion is through the same tube. The male genitals are retracted when not in use. Above the neck and its air slits, the head is ovoidal, with two large, scalloped, movable ears, two large eyes that seem to be all iris (of assorted colors) and have a nictitating third membrane, a mouth with lips, and with teeth mainly designed for meat although the being is an omnivore (cf. our bears).
Obviously, the voice sounds nothing like ours. We hu-mans hear the language—seemingly the only remaining language—as a set of trills, twitters, and occasional growls; but it is quite as complex as any of ours, phonetically and perhaps also semantically. Almost as striking to the human is the relative lack of sexual dimorphism. Male and female look almost identical except during mating. Yet no signs of homosexual behavior have been noticed. It appears that the Chujoan is not permanently rutty like a human, but desire in the male is aroused by certain odors given off by the female—who also does most of the courting, which involves singing and dancing suggestive of Terrestrial birds. What arouses the female is uncertain; it seems to happen fairly often, more than reproduction requires. Prob-ably she has some kind of internal cycle, which may be regulated by nutrition, state of health, etc., and probably, as among us, sex is as important for its pair-bonding effects as for producing offspring. Chujoans seem to mate for life and stay pretty monogamous. The sexes seem to be equal socially, with perhaps a slight female dominance; however, they do have various rites (and celebrations?) that they carry out separately.
The species was once found all over the planet, like mankind on earth, and has left countless relics, small and large. Shortly before the global climate began to change, the most advanced societies had reached a technological state more or less equivalent to our Hellenistic era and/or its Chinese contemporary. There was one very important difference. The society that dominated northern starside had developed clear glass, which led to optical instruments, and, probably aided by this, a remarkable practical knowledge of genetics, which it put to intensive use.
Its abandoned cities still stand, some of them in rec-ognizable condition. Not much metal was used in construc-tion, given the low gravity, so the successor society has not plundered them for this, nor has it any need to quarry the stone. Wind, frost, drifting sand, invading desert brush and animals have not yet leveled all these wonderful buildings. They include low, colonnaded structures with high-pitched roofs and soaring towers, in a style suggesting some blend of our classical, Oriental, and Gothic motifs. (Not gro-tesque, however it may sound. In the Oakland Hills is a Greek Orthodox church whose architecture is equally eclec-tic—one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen anywhere.) Agriculture had replaced much industry. Plants were bred to produce great varieties of food, plus fibers either strong or elastic, ready-made textiles and writing materials, pharmaceuticals almost anything; some actually extracted metals from lodes of ore or natural aqueous solutions.
Cor-respondingly specialized animals existed. Then there were the plants, animals, and microbes to meet various needs of these, maintaining an ecological balance. (For example, ground cover kept out weeds, fungoids made otherwise de-fenseless leaves distasteful or poisonous to browsers, small burrowers loosened the soil for roots ... and, of course, all these required their own nourishment.) The most spectac-ular “caretakers” were the “trolls,” as humans have called them. These were bred from the Chujoan equivalent of great apes. They occupied territories in the vast agroforests, living in bands like chimpanzees, eating fruits and leaves and small creatures; but plants valued by the Chujoans were not, to their liking, and disease was set to break out when-ever their numbers grew too great. Their function was to attack and drive off any large animals that appeared before much damage could be done; they were more xenophobic than pit bulls, and a lot smarter.
