by Bob Kite
The entire Red family completed their task earlier than projected and planned to celebrate accordingly. They would reach their twentieth birthday in two weeks, and had permission from the Elders to participate in their first potential breeding season as a reward. Only a small percentage of families contributed enough to society to gain that honor so early in life. The average age was thirty while everyone made the journey by age forty.
Burgundy and Rose presented their machine to their supervisor, who swam outside the work boundary to put it through its paces. She came back half an hour later and flashed her approval. All of the other working families within sight flashed their congratulations, which made the Reds blush in pleased embarrassment. They entwined tentacles and swam off to wrap up private affairs and say their final good-byes to friends and acquaintances.
The Red family dismantled the repelling fence that protected the small grotto they called home, packed the last remaining items, mainly small intricate amusements, and gave them to their oldest friends the Blue family. Sapphire and Turquoise were out of town but made sure they participated via the telechromatograph. Dozens of families showed up for the party, some with up to twenty spouses, so the event spilled out into the common area. It was a farewell they all remembered for years.
~o0o~
The procreation staging area remained fairly dim considering the excitement since few intra-family conversations took place out of respect for privacy. There were officially one hundred and forty-two families, but most averaged only three to five members. Vissou typically chose others of similar intellect and character for their life partners, but an exceptionally ambitious individual could rise above her station if she showed true commitment. There were even a solo Grey participating, but then, there usually was.
The Elders made sure to equip each family with the tools they would need on land, including maps to the breeding grounds. Once there, it was up to each family to stake out the best territories. With over five thousand traditional sites, no one expected a problem. The Chief Elder solemnly flashed a countdown, and the race commenced.
The line of Vissou breeders remained fairly even until they hit the surf zone. A mild storm crashed ten-foot waves into the rocks on either side of the Bay and created an unexpected undertow. The Red family managed to stay together and offered a helping tentacle to Lime and Mint, separated from their family, the Greens. The Grey dashed upon the rocks, left to fend for herself and ignored by polite society as she had been her entire life.
Thankfully, the beach was clear of major debris and consisted of damp compacted sand that made the foray onto land only difficult rather than impossible for the boneless, soft cephalopods. They dragged each other and their tool bags across the quarter mile wide beach and rested under the shade of wide frond trees. The Reds immediately saw half a dozen potential birth spots, but only lazy parents chose to build so close to the shore and deny their offspring the opportunity to prove themselves and gain confidence at the earliest opportunity.
They chose to follow a creek, and then branched off to climb a small hill. They found a meadow at the edge of an ancient lava flow where the rocks and nearby trees provided excellent building material. Their only modern tool was a melting rod, which they immediately put to use and constructed a waterproof basin at the center of the birthing site. Each Visou remained lost in a private reverie of joy as every young female planned and dreamed of this moment from the time they made their first permanent family attachments.
The remaining tools were simple saws, hammers, picks, and planers. The only other item was wrapped protein discs sufficient in number to see them through the end of their task. Construction took a full month, but they felt it well worth the effort.
They built the first floor around the birthing tub and continued layer upon layer in a spiral. Each successive room presented a unique and more difficult challenge or puzzle to overcome. Their goal was to prevent all but the cleverest, strongest, most cooperative, and most driven from reaching the exit without creating so much difficulty that no one survived.
Exhausted but fulfilled, the Red family helped each other onto the roof and slid down a central shaft and sealed it behind them. They engaged in a final orgy of love and commitment to the future. They caressed and made love until every bioluminescent cell along their communication band flashed in unison during their first and final orgasm. Visou bodies consisted of ninety-eight percent seawater. When they lost continuity and melted they filled the tub with liquid, thousands of eggs and sperm and enough sustenance for their progeny to begin their journey in life.
A week later, the fluid in the tub pulsated in waves of color as microscopic Vissou learned to control their tentacles and photo transceivers. Life at first was simple and easy; eat, move, babble, and eat again. They quickly grew fat on the remains of their parents, but food soon became scarce. The first winnowing happened as the weak failed to grapple food away from stronger siblings. When the food was gone, the weakest starved to death.
The smartest discovered they could access the central mouth of the deceased by inverting the head sack and feasting on the organs. This created a small island of healthy Vissou around those first geniuses as others learned by example. Those unlucky enough to be located in the intellectual wilderness grew weak and starved. Unfortunately, the remaining thousands of now grape-size younglings again knew hunger as this new food source literally died out.
It did not take long for the smartest and strongest to invent murder. This evolutionary pressure soon necessitated the invention of cooperation, as some smart but weaker groups discovered they could conquer even the strongest individual.Then again, strength did not always mean stupidity, and soon a constant flux of alliances and betrayals evolved into tactics and simple societies. When the younglings numbered a few hundred grapefruit size individuals, they grew wise to the advantages of group gestalt and realized they needed a new strategy or all would eventually die.
The birth tub was all they knew of the world. They organized into exploratory teams that defined the length, width, and depth of their world, but the effort revealed no solutions. The sides of the tub were smooth and frictionless; a purposeful effect of the melting rod, and tall enough that the weak light from their communications organ faded midway to the top.
They might not know what lay beyond the upper darkness, but it offered the only viable option. At this point, they invented structural architecture and used their own bodies as scaffolding. There were many initial failures as stacked groups of Vissou collapsed in disarray and disappointment, but perseverance led some to success. The victors formed intricate ladders of their bodies and reached the top, then the lowest climbed from the bottom up. They discovered piles of food and a seemingly endless two-hundred-foot diameter room.
As their parents planned, the younglings soon depleted this stockpile also. Their growing intellect intuited that the closely packed boulder barricade along one wall was the only anomaly in an otherwise smooth, featureless room. They broke through with the help of two pick axes thoughtfully left behind and entered the next challenge. Every success rewarded them with nourishment and additional tools necessary for the increasingly complex puzzles.
Not everyone made it through the last doorway as mortal hidden traps lay towards the end, but six of the best finally stretched in the sunshine and heard the call of the sea. The Red progeny were not the first siblings to emerge from a birthing chamber, but they were near the top, and waiting Elders warmly greeted them as they entered the water for the first time
.
The Elders escorted the new generation to their residence and school, a large bubble that floated halfway between the ocean floor and the surface. Their teachers filled the next five years with wonder, love, and tenderness while they carefully evaluated each one for both talent and inclination.
Due perhaps to a more physically intimate liquid environment than that of air breathers, their technology developed along concise, eco-friendly paths
. Rather than limiting their science, this produced tools and a way of thinking that coaxed nature rather than bashing her into submission.
At the end of their school years, the students enjoyed a season-long vacation in a sheltered cove where they were expected to play, enjoy life, and eventually join a family. Most experimented with every combination of affection from simple pairing to ridiculous groupings of a hundred. The intimacy of a family group went far beyond physical and emotional. The constant information exchange through their chromatic band formed a synergistic bond and created a holistic mind that grew in intensity the longer a potential family stayed together. This also required extremely compatible, though not necessarily similar, personalities.
Three individuals, through no fault of their own, found they did best on their own. There was nothing deficient about them; in fact, they were among the most intelligent. The Elders eventually removed the soloists and placed them in advanced training in specific fields of study. These special few found fulfillment in ways other than social and contributed to society on their own terms.
The bestowed familial name Grey was simply an observation. Without a family group, they were often silent and dark while those within a family flashed colorful communication continuously. Most Greys joined the procreation activities at the same rate as the other families, but a select elite were chosen for a far different life.
At the end of their holiday, everyone besides the Greys had joined in a family. Elders evaluated each member of every family for their interests and skills, and placed the family group in apprenticeships that allowed them the best chance to reach their potential in life as well as contribute the most to society. Within this near idyllic system, no one ever wondered where Elders came from, except perhaps the occasional Grey, who likely questioned everything.
The secret of the Elders, each a former Grey, was that Vissou, which never procreated nor met an accidental death lived virtually forever. There were no physical differences between a Grey and the others in their biochemistry or in their DNA, so Elders simply saw themselves as slightly superior, at the very least in their moral fortitude. They also grew over time so that Elders were recognizable, in addition to their air of authority, by their generally greater size.
~o0o~
Slate was her generation’s star Grey, or as the Elders affectionately called her, their youngest Elder. She excelled at her studies and showed great respect for her teachers. She settled in quickly at Elders Island, the separate facilities carved into an island in a series of caves where they studied advanced science and headquartered social administration.
Each Elder felt a personal responsibility to learn as much about the physical world as possible and apply only those advances that had a positive effect on the Vissou as a whole. Slate was still starry-eyed at the technology at her disposal but had yet to learn and fully accept the reasons for slow, steady applications into society.
Her self-esteem and sense of place in the world were a little too inflated, but her teachers knew the final revelation of the Elder’s largest secret would take care of that as it had for each of them. Her favorite mentor, Mist, escorted her into the heart of a quiet, isolated chamber. Mist approached a control panel and operated the various knobs, switches, and slides in quiet concentration for several minutes.
Finally satisfied, she pulled a cover back from a small energy dome and tuned it to her satisfaction. The dome crackled and revealed itself as a four-dimensional holographic display that showed every detail of the room they swam in with a top down view in real time. Slate was fascinated. The scene pulled up and out, swept across the entire Vissou-inhabited ocean, then moved again into the air to a point on the shoreline. This was the limits of geography which Elder’s taught to all.
Mist turned a dial, and the scene slid the color values towards the ultraviolet and revealed a domed barrier that span the world. Slate flashed inquisitiveness but otherwise remained dark. Mist moved the observation point once more until they saw the curvature of the planet. The barrier that surrounded Vissou was but one section of a divided-fruit layout. Slate learned that Visou shared the planet with other alien races, kept separate by an unknown force and for unknown reasons.
The only blind spot focused on an island from which the barrier radiated and Vissou’s most advanced techniques could not penetrate past it. Slate also learned that one of the aliens races, the humans, had been their allies. Human technology was as advanced as Vissou’s, but a radically different approach and world view made collaboration difficult if productive. The humans claimed they had discovered a way to neutralize the barrier, but the lead Vissou scientists were convinced the calculations contained a flaw.
The humans had created an inverted waveform of the complicated barrier energy signature, theorizing that the barrier would simply tune to a neutral frequency and quietly fade away. They had no way of knowing that those responsible for the barrier had immensely further advanced science than they could even imagine and powered the barrier with energies siphoned from the ninth dimension.
Had they access to equal power, the humans may have succeeded. As it was, their interference created a harmonic feedback which nearly broke the world and destroyed Vissou society. The revelations also broke Slate, who’s ego could not accept a world with powers so much greater than Visou, or herself for that matter.
~Part 2~
Scout stood on a promontory thirty feet above the boulder-strewn headland. Through the heliobees, he knew about the ocean, but second-hand recordings were a pale comparison with the experience. A slight onshore breeze brought the tang of salt, iodine, and a sickly sweet pinch of rot. Seabirds wheeled and argued over the abundant tidbits of marine life, which added an organic liveliness to the rhythm of the waves. To his left, he saw a half-mile curved beach that faded into a distant warm-weather fog bank.
In his travels so far, he had experienced endlessly empty deserts, mountain vistas that repeated to the horizon, and plains of waist-high grass so flat he could see to the convex curve of the planet. None of that brought him as much joy and peace as the ever-moving waves that sparkled with glints of sunlight. Or it would have, if not for the tens of thousands of Vissou that lined the beach and spilled into the forest.
He might have ignored the sound of tentacles as they dragged sagging bodies across the sands, but the psychedelic waves of intricate colors from so many bioluminescent flashes gave him a headache. He had anticipated encountering the Vissou, so had already dipped into his overstuffed memory and gave himself time to recover, but nothing hinted at the chaos he now saw.
Individuals constantly formed, dissolved and re-formed into temporary families without pattern or reason. Random groups found shallow tide pools, slight depressions, or even settled on whatever patch of ground on which they happened to be and fervently mated until they puddled in procreation. Nowhere did he see tools of any kind in use, nor even an elementary birthing maze.
Scout sighed and made his way down the beach, determined to investigate whether the mystery of such chaos continued below the waves. Not one Vissou showed the slightest interest in him enough to move out of his way as he walked among them. Even the content of their flashings seemed like the babbling of toddlers who had yet to master syntax.
Scout never needed artificial protection from the elements, nor had he ever lived in a culture with body taboos. He entered the surf naked and trusted his designer body would adapt rapidly in whatever environment presented itself.
He walked steadily until his head dropped underwater and fell forward to float just above the sandy bottom. He exhaled and mentally prepared for the slight uncomfortableness of adaptation. As his body realized no more air was forthcoming, slits opened across his ribs to form gills while webbing grew between his fingers and toes. As he swam with leisurely strokes, his skin oozed a thin film that reduced drag as well as provided thermal insulation. Internally, an air bladder activated for automated buoyancy, and a line of sensitive pressure divots appeared along
his spine.
The density of the Vissou population thinned slightly, but then maintained at a steady rate as he swam away from shore. At first, Scout saw no sign of the vast underwater cities in his heliobee memories. All he found were forests of coral between empty areas of muddy bottom. There were also fewer species of fish than he expected, although that did exist were composed of vast schools. The Vissou fed off the edges of these schools at leisure and acted like grazing ruminants rather than Masters of organized husbandry and technical science.
He maintained a level depth of twenty feet while the ocean floor began to slope into the murk below. With the perspective change, he noticed unnatural patterns to the way the coral lay. He finally found missing remnants of the city after he broke off a few pieces. The area was quieter than in the shallow water and nearly deserted, but further out he found more activity near an isolated but dormant volcanic island.
As he swam closer, he finally came across groups of Vissou that worked together to herd schools of fish and larger single predators towards a large outcropping at the base of the volcano. Twice, individual Vissou came towards him, swam around, and returned to the mountain. Shortly thereafter, a group of thirty surrounded him while one stopped in his path and flashed.
“Come. God hungry. God always hungry.”
After this cryptic comment, the surrounding Vissou tightened their circle and encouraged him forward with gentle pushing. Scout had no method to return communication so simply complied. They headed for the three-hundred-foot-tall gumdrop-shaped underwater mountain, but as they approached, Scout froze in astonishment and allowing his escorts to push him along without his help.
The mountain resolved into a gargantuan Vissou. She spread out in rings, each lower successive layer spread further apart and grown to a larger scale, including a chromatic band with four tentacles per level. She reminded Scout of a monstrous fir tree that waved in a stiff breeze. Whichever tentacle was closest grabbed at proffered fish and handed them down to the massive cavernous maw at the bottom. Most of the oversize speech organs flashed variations of “FEED ME!” Or “HUNGRY!” but as they took Scout to the top, she flashed words at him specifically.