by Anthology
It will not last forever. It is battered daily by photons from NGC 7007 the sun of N’Yu-Atlanchi. Radiation from more distant luminaries pushes it down into the unyielding rock of the lesser satellite of N’Yu-Atlanchi.
It is, really, a race, were a sufficiently patient observer present to appreciate the competition. Perhaps God watches. Perhaps he has placed an ill-legal bet at the corner bookie shop.
Consider: radiation batters relentlessly at the functionless machine, the relic. Will it pulverize the metal, powder the glass, crush the crystal, demolish the circuits, cause implosion, dismemberment of molecules, disorganization of atoms? Or will the lesser moon of N’Yu-Atlanchi interrupt the slow, relentless process; will the airless satellite draw close to its primary, closer and yet more close until it disintegrates, hurling its dead burden into the sea of N’Yu-Atlanchi, or, perhaps, into orbit?
More competitors in the race. Will meteoroid arrive, make smithereens of the machine before nature removes it from independent being? Will new intelligence arrive, driven by agonized matter, to retrieve the prize? Will NGC 7007 spoil the sport by flaring all to a crisp?
God had best place his wager carefully. It is a perilous race. Think about that. Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn does not. It is debatable that she thinks at all. She senses.
Touch, odor, flavor, these senses are now one. She has no distinguishable nose. Long ago her ancestors discarded nostrils, lungs; their bodies learned to terminate ontogeny at that point which features gill-slits. Long ago, this was even before the All-Mother came to her fruitful rest in the centermost grotto. Given enough time, perhaps between cocktails and dinner on some non-N’Yu-Atlanchian scale, these too were abandoned. The omnipresent sea of saline warmth could provide oxygen as well as protein. Some distant ancestor of Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn had learned to draw total sustenance directly from the enveloping wet.
With that went the mouth also.
Only remained the eyes of the S’tscha, the large, flat eyes placed proportionately far apart on what was once, ancestrally, a face, eyes that, too, were slowly becoming undifferentiated from the surrounding tissue, their photosensitivity becoming distributed, rods and cones appearing now here and there among the crowding nerve-endings that made up the skin of each S’tscha, and ears, the sensitivity remaining still to an extent in vaguely distinguishable spots to either side of the head, but this function too becoming spread, increasingly with each generation, across the surface of the skin of the S’tscha.
Thus the All-Mother, refining her product, or, perhaps, the opposite of refining.
Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn drifts slowly beneath NGC 7007, sensing visually upward. The star visible above her is green, blazing strongly through a sky of yellow. This Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn has seen many times. There are many clouds, yes; the rich sea of N’Yu-Atlanchi is not exempt from the law. God has decreed that water, bathed in strong sunlight, shall vaporize and ascend sunward. Humbly the waters of N’Yu-Atlanchi obey.
They vaporize, they rise, they recondense, accumulate into clouds. Clouds are not everyday occurrences on N’Yu-Atlanchi, but Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn has seen them many times. She has seen the major satellite die thrice. She has seen, heard, felt/tasted/smelled rain. That is even more unusual on N’Yu-Atlanchi. It is not wholly unknown.
The rain on N’Yu-Atlanchi is fresh. The salts, the proteins, the free amino acids that characterize the sea of N’Yu-Atlanchi do not vaporize with the water; the clouds are pure, the rain is clear. To any S’tscha, rain is life’s major peril. Cold it is, vapid, without the warm salinity to which the S’tschai are accustomed from the moment of quickening, without the nourishing impurities which are for the S’tscha life.
Once has Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn known rain thusly. Drifting, caught in the lifelong surrender of her kind to her kindly environ, caught this day beneath a concatenation of clouds, the glare of NGC 7007 obscured, the warming rays interrupted, refracted, diffused, lost, suddenly cold despite the kindly warmth about her, Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn knew something that might have been fear had her nervous system, surely thoroughly developed but so narrowly experienced, held any encoding identifiable as that emotion, or any other than a mindless content.
Then the drops had begun to fall. The water close above the eyes of the S’tscha was altered, its visual function revised from that of a faithfully planar semi-reflector through which the S’tscha viewed equably the calm sky and luminary of her accustomed day. Now the surface flickered, pulsed, broke into innumerable constantly shifting forms.
Concavities appeared, spread, overlapped, flattened; drops of rain created sudden moments of impact; the sound of individual strikings of raindrops as they violated the plane of juncture between sea and atmosphere impinged upon Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn her ears, discrete explosions yielding to a patter, then a roar as the number of drops per surface unit per time unit grew from the discernible to the indeterminable.
Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn her eyes lost their appearance of calm contemplation of the sky as their view was shattered and confused by the close-falling drops. She felt cold, the withdrawal of nurturing comfort at one with the new absence of nourishment in the sea water about her; in a state conceivably identifiable as desperation the S’tscha flailed about the vestigial centimeter-long limbs left her by distant inheritance.
Unthinkingly flitting through the unfamiliarly cold and characterless fluid she spun one hundred eighty degrees about her unrecognized longitudinal axis, her sight whirling away from the darkened and broken sea surface, distant images spinning too rapidly for identification past her widened flat eyes, her attention arrested at last by the refractile crystalline sea bed she now faced.
Light from NGC 7007 the sun of N’Yu-Atlanchi, green, returned sky color from the dome of N’Yu-Atlanchi, yellow, cloud tone, gray, menacing, sea coloration, aquamarine tint, rich, brilliant, darkened now by cloud and rain, reflected still and refracted also from the multiple surfaces of partially transparent crystal. Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn, accustomed to the sight of light dancing from the crystals of the sea bottom, now, despite the vastly increased multiplicity of apparent sources caused by the increased diffraction of the rain-broken sea surface, grew more calm amidst the shifting shafts and glares of turquoise, aquamarine, blue, blue-green, yellow, gray; the movements of the limbs of the S’tscha desisted from their frantic quality, subsided to the calm, stabilizing sway more usually their characteristic motion.
Still, Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn was imperiled by the growing concentration of chill and flavorless water produced by the continuing downpour of rain. That she thought is a dubious proposition at best; she was only vaguely self-aware, hardly distinguishing her body from her surroundings, her identity from her environment, her sensations from their sources.
That she determined, as the end product of logical process, to flee the menacing new element that altered her bath, that already was dimming her senses and sapping her vitality, is unlikely. Yet, flight was her course. Fluttering her weak and rigid legs to propel herself forward through the hostile environment, turning the tips of her forelimbs, once ancestrally hands, now soft, paddlelike, unmarred by differentiated digits, holding her gaze on the multiplanar refractive sea bottom she moved, seeking a break in the crystalline surface that would yield escape from the rainwater, entry to a lower grotto of the honeycomb crystal that formed the multiple shells and shorings of N’Yu-Atlanchi, that held the warmer, familiar, comforting fluid of Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn her accustomed medium.
This way and that swam the S’tscha Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn, the roar of falling rain assaulting her ears with its manacing fullness, the cold and deprivation of its waters stiffening the weak musculature of her limbs, slowly inhibiting the function of her countless nerve-endings as it replaced the usual warm fluid interpenetrating epidermal tissue, numbing sensors, shorting out neural synapses as messages to the proportionately large central nerve cluster of Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn grew fewer and fewer.
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Ahead at last the S’tscha detected the small nonrefractive patch, the dull absence of reverberating crystal light that must indicate an opening through the sea bottom. Energies flagging, senses growing dim, she struggled forward, drew near, drew at last over the small opening. She turned the paddlelike flexible spatulates that tipped her forelimbs to brake her thin forward momentum, hovered momentarily over the small opening, roughly circular, in the crystal floor of the sea.
Beneath she could see more dimly, her eyes adjusted to the light of the uppermost surface of the planet, relatively brilliant as compared to the secondary grotto despite the dimming influence of cloud and falling drops. Hesitating only briefly as if to grasp needed resolution, she reached downward with forelimbs, down toward the sea-bottom opening, reaching as if to embrace the very fluid core of the sphere, then drew back, upward, simultaneously scissoring her legs, pushing against the coldly invading water as against a brace or truss, forcing her body into a position perpendicular to the concave surface of the planet, her head downward, and moving, now, with strokes of her forelimbs pulling downward, of her legs, pushing, moving down from the new cold world of grayness, of hostile unnourishing fresh water, downward toward the relative darkness, the warm and nourishing salinity of the inner grottoes, like a breach delivery reversed, the neonate longing to return to the protective interior darkness, to become unborn, a foetus, clutching itself, globular, inward turned, safe, unaware, untouched, unknowing, unquickened.
She did not lose consciousness. It is debatable that she was conscious at all. She sensed and reacted. As Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn plunged through the bung in the outermost crystalline crust of N’Yu-Atlanchi in flight from the pursuing chill and deprivation of the fresh water her senses were dimming; as she penetrated to deeper levels the warmth and nourishing ingredients of N’Yu-Atlanchi its sea replaced the rainwater, pressing against the S’tscha, shallowly interpenetrating her tissues, restoring, repairing, comforting; the child of the All-Mother grew calm, her sensors returned to full receptivity and acuteness, her musculature to its usual vigor and strength.
Here in the uppermost refractive grotto of the world, soothed by warming moisture, Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn floated, passive, the final kinetic residue of her escape converted now to a gentle horizontal rotation that yielded a slow twirling movement to her body, the images of crystal above and crystal below alternating with broad corridors, sea-filled, crystal floored and crystal roofed, wall-less, infinitely lengthy, stretching in all directions. From the sky descended daylight, filtered first by rare N’Yu-Atlanchian rain clouds, further tinted and diffused by sea-water, then broken, scattered, thrown in violently varying directions by the uppermost crystal layer of the planet, beneath which floated the S’tscha, turning slowly, escaped from the rain.
Through other orifices in the crystal other S’tschai had escaped downward. Those caught by the rare downfall far from bung-holes, those whose reflexive responses to menace had failed them, they now were already returning their chemistry, in dissolution, to the waters, whence it would nourish other children of the All-Mother. Conceivably, borne by the vagaries of currents, blocked or guided as chance might have by the topology of the ptolemaicly layered globe, some salt, some acid, some slowly decomposing organic molecule might reach the deeply buried All-Mother herself, might become absorbed into her fecund protoplasm, might, in course, be born again, a S’tscha renewed, resurrected, reincarnated, immortal.
And the S’tschai of the uppermost grotto, those uncounted neoaquatics accustomed to the glittering lights of sky-refracted crystalline glare above, faceted radiant below, and new S’tschai arriving, nearing the end of their long, leisure-paced migration upward from the grotto of the All-Mother, reaching this last warm ice-cave, short so little of that dumb and uncomprehending flat-visioned sight of the day-star and the night-stars, the major moon and the lesser moons, the home and the graves of unknown collaterals, and the quick refugees Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn she and her fellows, these shared this liquid shell.
Recollection stirred. The grotto, recognized by Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn, she had been here before, an unknown time ago, but long enough for her to see the greater moon die thrice. That had been as she neared the surface of N’Yu-Atlanchi, had neared the end of her own journey to the top of the sea, of the world.
Drifting, sensing, slowly revolving, the lights above and below endlessly alternating before her large eyes, Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn is the unappreciating beneficiary of random occurrence. Floating, her gaze distracted by crystalline flashes, she encounters a small floating creature: longer than it is wide, vaguely cylindrical, quadrapoidal, soft, carrying a head at one end, flat-eyed, almost earless, densely nerved, floating, emblissed, unaware, it is a S’tscha.
The two observe each other. Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn wavers gently her limbs, propels herself unurgently and without positive intent toward her sister. Likewise the other, easing through sea-water, propelled by cartilagenous spatulates, flows vaguely forward. The two approach each other, align themselves to congruence, drift slowly each toward the other, sense softly epidermal contact, the cylindrical torsoes pressing together with a pressure almost inconceivably slight, the legs pressing, gently twining, the forelimbs, first maintaining the positions of the two, then, as body contact becomes increasingly firm, as legs hold to legs, the forelimbs are lowered, unaccustomedly, slowly working themselves into the semblance of mutual embrace, holding closer each S’tscha to the other.
Slowly there follows a mitosislike process; the neural cells of each S’tscha divide, polarize, but, meiotically, producing no diploid chromosomes, spreading themselves, developing spiremes, threads piercing cell walls, crossing, sharing, passing coded memories each to the other, two S’tschai share experiences. Clutched in neural union, bathed in nutrient moisture, twin sister S’tschai renew identical heredity, add now identical lives.
To her sister gives Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn her pilgrimage from All-Mother to the sky, her sensations of day-star, night-stars, moons, her quiet days and nights, the coming of clouds, of rain, its results visual, aural, tactile/aromatic/sapid, her return through the bung-hole, her recovery.
To Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn her sister gives her own life, similar, yet adding a sight uncomprehended: a figure, vaguely, vaguely S’tschaoid, resting upright, the ends of its legs planted seemingly on the upperside of the uppermost crusting of N’Yu-Atlanchi, seemingly made neither of such stuff as are S’tschai nor of crystals nor of liquid, perhaps of the stuff of the satellites of N’Yu-Atlanchi, distorted by the sea, twirling, casting about a thing strange, large, flat, of close-placed lines, into the sea, then retrieving it, again, again, now plucking at it, removing, placing in a protuberance upon its trunk, casting again the thing of close-placed lines, then moving off, not swimming as swim S’tschai but upright, balancing somehow on its legs, and beyond the senses of the child of the All-Mother, the sister of Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn.
The spiremes retract, the cell walls are restored, the neural union of the S’tschai ends; forelimbs unbend, legs untwine, slowly the two drift side by side until a stray movement of water pulls one away, they sense each the other still, drift, make small random movements of the limbs, become separated by greater and greater distances, are lost to each the other.
Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn drifts supine beneath the uppermost crystalline crust of N’Yu-Atlanchi, her eyes absorbing sensory data, new memory now stored in her neural center but not analyzed. She neither wonders nor fears nor is pleased. She senses.
She does not seek a bung-hole above or below her but in time she arrives beneath one. Dimly through rich sea-water she sees lights above: night-stars and moons. Vaguely she arches her form closer to the perpendicular, strokes languidly upward, levels again and drifts.
In time rises NGC 7007 the sun of N’Yu-Atlanchi, brightening the sky, reflecting and refracting off sea and crystal. In time, floating supine, Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn senses almost with startlement the
strike all about her of the thing of lines, feels herself drawn, lifted, carried for a moment beyond the waters of N’Yu-Atlanchi. She is flooded for a moment by new and unprecedented data, as of being removed totally from her world. Her senses flash confused messages to her neural center. She hears sounds she has never before heard, sees visions unknown and ununderstood, feels/smells/tastes as never before she has.
All briefly.
She is plunged, uncomprehending, into yet another environment: close, warm, salt-moist, yes, but dark, totally for the first time in the life of Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn dark, and yet with a tang of a new ingredient, a new sensation, and the feeling of other S’tschai about, more S’tschai than she has ever before encountered, but all quiet, and Ch’en-Tch’aa-Zch’uwn her own senses become less acute, less vivid, and she becomes less aware and she ceases to sense and to react.
4. Aboard the Starship Theodore Bilbo
‘Namorning, Alquane up, gyrenes up, N’Alabama redinwhite “colors” up the ole pole, sarge up, shine up, fix up, dress up, twenty-thirty push-up, goodnup, oak-hay, time to break the (reasonably) fast. Gyrenes line up, shape up, count off, march off, couterments off, bow down, chow down:
:grits, lard, corn bread, dawntime lightning (a mere drap), little little talk—passamuffins—mm—jug—mm—mm. Cadre here only, hung a many a man over this dawn this mawn and a bleary eye here or there, one enda bencha rutha seems distracted would you say, or ab-etc., thinking mayhap of a Miss MM or maybe futha nutha bench some gyrene shifting his sore ass thinks of Piggy’s. Maybe?
Well get it down sarge, get it down, make a plite little belch and grab another something to swag or swig, it’s the whole batch down the hatch act and a sniggery smirk at thought of old John Darn last at Piggy’s well sloppies is better as none at all old John, none at all, but then why when better stuff is at hand (if you catch).