Rough draft, excerpt 10: "The Long Watch, volume I," part 2

2.

Hurry up and wait:  this is the order of the day for military personnel across the known universe.  Over just the past few days, he’d found himself rushed into service, standing in line, reporting for duty, skipping instantaneously across the galaxy, and studying volumes of galactic history.  None of it was physically taxing, but all of it was tedious, and therefore exhausting.  He had weeks and weeks of travel time to endure now, and no chance of finding any entertainment or other diversion along the way.  There were no media stations out here other than the commercial channels targeting the miners, and those were pretty drab:  lowbrow comedy shows, bland news programs and commercials.  Sobek could guess why, on the basis of the two moderately derogatory epithets Ibliss had used for the miner population inhabiting the asteroid field and Aten V’s moons.

Free will was something highly prized by the Orrkuttssh.  They certainly loved their military discipline and regimentation, and they were formal and rigid about traditions, but they nonetheless regarded themselves as individuals with individual will, with a chaotic, imaginative aggression that served them well in battle, and with a devotion to spirituality and creativity that distinguished them from most other sentient races.  To be a proper warrior, at least among the Orrk, one had to also be a monk and a poet.  The Orrkuttssh spoken language, for all its variety in dialect, was unlovely and without nuance, but its written form was a model for other races, in terms of expressivity and abstraction, and its character set, composed of representations of claw marks in various orientations and combinations, was—or had been, in ages past—a standard, in simplicity and elegance,  for communication throughout the Empire.  

But there were many other races without poetry, without dance, without even a martial culture.  It was generally true that to become a spacefaring race, or at least of noteworthy enough intelligence to be recruited into the citizenry of the empire, a species had to live atop the food chain of its own planet.  Intelligence and aggression go hand in hand; every member race in the empire, so far as he knew, was a top predator on its homeworld.  But intelligence and imagination don’t always go hand in hand, and many highly-intelligent species are utterly without music, without art, without entertainment of any kind other than the ritualized behaviors dictated to them by their own instincts.  And these races, by virtue of their unimaginative demands on existence, make ideal producers, consumers and cannon fodder for empires.  They just don’t make ideal captains of industry, inventors or military leaders.

“Brutes” were a kind of slave race, or more euphemistically, a work force, used throughout the empire for manual labor.  Their origin was unknown, but they were of a similar stature—and, reportedly, texture—to the mushroom men, and were widely assumed to have arisen on the same homeworld from a common ancestor.  They were Primate-like in shape, but quite stocky and evidently much stronger than the Greys, and tended toward a greenish or dark blue coloration.  They had little concern for recreation or enjoyment and were happy to work for as long as they were given food, shelter and instruction.  “Leggers” were another kind of beast altogether.  Whereas Brutes were essentially automatons in the employ of the empire, they at least had intelligence enough to receive complex instructions and act on their own in the absence of management.  Leggers were mindless arthropods, each bred to one of many differently-shaped castes, each optimized for work in a different environment.  Some had six legs; some eight; some ten or twenty.  Some had body armor that enabled them to work in extremely rarefied atmospheres; some could withstand temperatures that would melt the flesh of other animals.  They were useful in establishing terraforming or robotics plants in environments without organic infrastructure.  They usually formed the first wave of cheap labor in any new deep-space venture, to be gradually augmented and replaced by Brutes, then by the more genteel classes.  Like robots, they could be (and in fact had to be) programmed to perform their specified tasks; unlike most robots, they could reproduce and pass that programming on to their progeny.

Ibliss had implied that there were relatively few Orrkuttssh yet in the system, other than his own crew, and that the bulk of the labor force had as yet few needs other than sustenance, shelter and electrical power.  He’d further implied that he expected this to change in the future, but on the order of years or decades.  This didn’t jibe with what Sobek was reading while studying up on Aten III.  Although the planet was essentially a wildlife preserve, there were half a dozen minor population centers scattered over two continents, and a fairly sophisticated research center set up on one of the semi-detached landmasses scattered around the eastern rim of a shallow northern sea.  It seemed reasonable that mining revenue could support such populations, but not if the miners were mostly Brutes and Leggers.  If the cities down there were in fact resorts, they had to be catering to some rather moneyed interests.  Since there was no other life-friendly planet in this system, Sobek suspected that the cities weren’t resorts per se, but complete urban centers, supported not by sparse mining colonies half a system away, but by some kind of local industry.  If this were in fact the case, then the encyclopedias would have to be revised.  It would mean that Aten III, not Aten V and its moons, was the major population center of this system, and that the system was far more peopled and economically active than was currently suggested by the official press. 

The more he read about the planet, the more intrigued he became.  It was startlingly similar to his memories of homeworld, at least those memories that had been recently reinforced by printed documentation, and also to the adopted home occupied by his family in the centuries since.  He knew it to be larger than Erkhott had been, but both were in a similar temperature regime, similarly deluged with salty water, and similarly green and fertile.  Even better, Aten III was populated by reptiles.

It was a common conceit among the galaxy’s denizens that large brains could only evolve in a large carnivorous species, and then only in a warm-blooded one.  Sobek, as a landed scion of the original Orrkuttssh civilization, was a Keeper of Secrets from those days, and he knew much about that civilization that Ibliss had probably never heard.  He knew their civilization had not been built from the ground up, as had been those of many other races.  He knew that the sea-roamers had come ashore en masse, encountering the short-faced land-dwellers, already established there in the ruins of a much older civilization whose original members had long ago died out.  Little was known about this race, as few pictoral or audiovisual media had survived to depict their shape and sound and movements.  But their science and medicine had been recorded in long-lasting digital media, and over time, as the short-faces took up residence in their homes and began attempting to manipulate their rusting, decaying machines, some of it had been recovered, enough to reveal that they were large, terrestrial, bipedal, and warm-blooded. 

Once they’d achieved long-range space travel, it became clear to the Orrkuttssh that life could take many forms under many different sets of environmental conditions, and that their own world was but one island in a vast sea of organic diversity.  But on most worlds, life’s evolution didn’t seem to proceed much further than a fairly standard mix of sessile photosynthetic producers and motile, oxygen-breathing consumers; indeed, on the vast majority, it only got as far as thermosynthetic slime.  True intelligent life was exceedingly uncommon, and civilization was vanishingly rare, existing only when intelligent life had existed long enough to self-domesticate and discover certain scientific and engineering fundamentals, and not long enough to destroy itself or fall prey to natural global catastrophe.  As was the case with a hundred spacefaring civilizations before them, the Orrkuttssh were simultaneously humbled and conceited by their experience.  Conquest had never been in their nature before their own Great Land War; for millions of years, the long-faced and short-faced varieties lived a life of geographic and phylogenetic separation, each content in its own distinct environment.  But a series of geographic and climatic upheavals had forced the issue, first by compelling a vast population surge in the ocean-dwelling population, and then by closing their migration routes through the continents’ various straits.  For the first time in an eon, they were driven to migrate over land, and in so doing, came into increasingly frequent and violent conflict with those who’d taken up residence in the ancient stone cities there.

It wasn’t a war, at first; it was the attempted extermination of an invasive species.  The sea-dwellers had partially webbed digits on their four limbs, and were at a physical disadvantage in terms of developing and using manual technologies.  But they were at least as intelligent as the land-dwellers whose clever claws had learned to manufacture projectile weapons, traps, nets and poisons.  The mariners died in heaps along shores, in lagoons and on the trails, fighting back only with teeth and claws, with unbridled aggression, and with sheer numbers.  Eventually they captured enough weapons, and learned to teach enough others in their use, to be able to establish toeholds around the coasts and up into river deltas.  After that, a long siege set in, and war began in earnest, each side establishing a military culture, tactics, strategies, and diplomacy.  It was centuries before a balance was struck between the two competing populations, and longer still before a unified nation emerged, but by that time the wartime origin of both nascent cultures had cemented itself into their collective consciousness.  The unified dragon-culture of Erkhott was ultimately no more violent or expansionist than any other had ever been at various times—it was simply more disciplined and duty-oriented than most—but it took on a more fearsome reputation because of the rapidity with which that culture arose, and the vicious physical appearance they still maintained.  Most global top predators had arisen to that post via a slow evolutionary process that had de-emphasized natural armament in favor of expanding brain size; they were formidable not because of strength or claws or teeth but because of intelligence and fingers and fire.  The land-dragons and sea-dragons of his homeworld had found a shortcut to global ascendancy in the abandoned cities and technologies of the long-lost bipeds, and had not to undergo the kinds of gracilizations that their cosmic competitors did.  Unlike most of the so-called people with whom they’d come into contact in the following centuries—the soft-bodied beings collectively termed “lippers,” who modulated their speech with labile mouthparts, and “bugs,” comprising various other odd forms that relied on stridulation rather than a moving column of air to make speech—the People were still growlers:  still unmistakably animals, still unmistakably predatory, and still unmistakably lethal even without any tools whatsoever in hand.

Intelligence took many forms, in the seas, on land, in the trees, in the swamps and even drifting on the winds of the planets on which it could be found.  It was shaped like lizards, like primates, like cephalopods, and like insects.  It could be found with fingers, claws, tentacles, and flippers.

But civilizations, unvaryingly, were built by beings with hands.  The prevailing physical model for sentient beings was tetrapodal, warm-blooded, almost always bipedal, and always with an armored head containing a single large brain.  Those beings which developed science and technology sufficient to become spacefarers were unfailingly of this basic body plan.  The Slurghh and the Kasmani were definite exceptions to the warm-blooded-bipedal-tetrapod rule, but then, neither of those races had achieved space flight on their own.  Aside from the Orrkuttssh, almost all spacefarers were of the type (often derogatorily) referred to as “primates”:  physically unspecialized, bipedal, two-handed, hot-blooded, furry, large-brained, and lipped.  Even the mushroom men, who could supposedly adopt any shape they wanted, took this general form when appearing among other races, although they, being natural stridulators, weren’t as naturally lippy.  Ironic, Sobek thought, in that the Orrkuttssh word for “primate” implies “primitive.”  To be a primate is to be spectacularly undifferentiated, to lack the claws, jumping legs, whip tail, fins, wings and tentacles that other body plans find so essential.  To be a primate is to lack biophysical armament, to rely on technology for survival.  But at the same time, it is to sport a pair of lips and an air-column noisemaking apparatus that make for excellent modulated speech, and that seems to be the decisive advantage for those kinds of animals.  Indeed, there are few animals as naturally loud as a primate.

The Dragons of Erkhott, once a flourishing phylogenetic tree, now are represented only by the two surviving species of an old reptilian lineage which had all but gone extinct prior to the Great Land War.  Their science, once past its fitful and fragmented start, would eventually discover that their world had once been populated by warm-blooded bipeds, animals with a higher sustained body temperature and perhaps larger brains than they had, and this would in turn inform their mysticism, producing a concept of an ideal form toward which evolution tended.  Dragons have warmer blood than any other surviving reptiles on their planet, and were, at the time of their flight from terrestrial bondage, the most intelligent animals of any kind still living there.  To them, at least in Sobek’s day, the relationship between blood temperature and brain size was ironclad.  But they knew that the universe harbored warmer-blooded animals than them, and larger-brained.  This realization had fueled a collective inferiority complex and had helped propel them into another expansive phase, in which their reputation as conquerors was made.  They experienced conquest not as an expression of greed or hatred, but as an instinctive need to expand the old hunting and breeding grounds and to assert themselves among their cosmic peers.  It was the territorial imperative writ large, with civilized weaponry and domesticated numbers changing the game.  Psychologically, it was simply a migratory urge; they bore no ill-will to the worlds they occupied, or even to the occupants they ate.  Later, once their expansion had been brought to a halt by the collective efforts of the galaxy’s other civilizations, they accepted that they were just one of many intelligent species, that their incursions were traumatic and troublesome to various other long-established societies, and that they would have to curb their violence if they were to be accepted into an ongoing role as a member society of an emerging galactic civilization.  This fact was impressed on them with a minimum of recrimination; even having defeated them, or at least held them to stalemate, the galaxy’s primate population’s highest priority remained appeasement.  Some political urge, long-imposed by their collective governmental system, compelled them to eschew violence, even for punishment.  Still, in fighting the Dragons to a stalemate, they denied them resources demanded for further expansion, effectively containing and isolating them.

It was a hard situation for many to accept, but the Orrkuttssh are nothing if not adaptable.  Their demand for living space could be met by any of a thousand unpopulated swamp worlds; their hunger could be fed by livestock-culture and interstellar trade.  Some renegade units gathered their forces and headed out of known space, presumably to colonize and conquer elsewhere, and were never heard from again.  Some remained bound to the homeworld, defensive and xenophobic, their eventual descendants to witness the total loss of that world.  And some continued to fight, and were eventually hounded out of the vicinity or wiped out by the combined forces of the Lippers, who, while reticent and soft most of the time, could eventually be provoked to a truly hellish degree of destruction.  That was the only example they needed to set, the only war-crime punishment the situation merited.  The rest of the People adopted a less expansionist posture and began drawing down their reproductive rate, self-pacifying in response to constant exposure to other cultures.  As that first galactic Republic advanced, receded, and advanced again, they took on an important, even central role in its organization, and by the time their Age of Legends drew to a close, they formed the backbone of its military, police and peacekeeping forces.

This planet’s global ecosystem bore a striking resemblance to what Sobek remembered, and understood, of that of his homeworld Duat, itself a distant, smaller echo of the ancestral planet Erkhott.  There was one major difference:  on this planet, warm-blooded life was abundant, if not exactly dominant. 

The most widespread and numerous animals on Aten III, as it happened, were dragons.  Dragons of all shapes, all sizes, all walks of life.  Quadripedal, bipedal, long-necked, short-necked, finned, frilled, sailbacked, aquatic and terrestrial.  They scurried, scampered, climbed, ran, jumped, swam, crawled, lumbered and flew.  A rather astounding diversity, actually, compared to what was left on his homeworld.  But for all that, the dragons of this world were stupid.  There wasn’t a trace of civilization beyond the resort cities.  None of the natives could talk, build weapons or control fire.  They were dumb animals, as Sobek’s distant ancestors had been.  They were possibly tens of millions of years behind in their evolutionary process; or so said the encyclopedia.

But the warm-bloods were what got Sobek’s interest; on this planet, many families of animal, even the reptiles—or a substantial portion of them—had achieved warm-bloodedness of a kind that surpassed even the Dragons’ half-warmth.  There had been a religious mania, long ago in Sobek’s youth, over warm-bloodedness.  Many of his people had believed that they could hasten their population’s evolution toward an “ideal” state of intelligence by consuming warmer-blooded prey; they would take on the characteristics of that prey and expand on their potential for brain growth.  Sobek had never fallen for such spiritual fads.  Most of the warm-blooded prey animals he’d encountered, for all their crunch and juiciness, had smaller brains (as a ratio to body mass) than Orrkuttssh did, and no one seemed to be taking on that particular characteristic from their food.  Clearly there was more to brain size than mere blood temperature.  He didn’t disagree that metabolism might be a limiting factor in the size and degree of sophistication a brain could achieve; fast metabolism engendered fast growth, and if ontogeny could adapt to that growth in such a way as to favor brain growth at the expense of less-essential structures, then neonates could in theory be made to develop larger brains than their parents.  And there was paleontological evidence to the effect that once the ancestral population had achieved a modicum of warm-bloodedness, the mass and length of their fat-storing, oxygen-storing tails had become reduced, presumably as a tradeoff for brain growth.  However, the fact that Orrkuttssh gestated in eggs of a fixed size and shape meant that any accelerated growth could take place only in the context of the cytologic material deposited in those eggs before the shells formed, much prior to their being laid; there were physiological limits to how far that process could be pushed.  Either way, it wasn’t a question he had been very concerned with; it was one for the scientists and the philosophers.  But now, with a virtual smorgasbord of varmints of all colors and flavors before him, he found himself wondering about it.

It was true that therians tended to gestate their young in the absence of constricting shelled eggs, and this may have been the reason why some were able to grow such spectacular brains.  But as he understood it, a placental kind of embryogenesis was an effect, not a cause, of the hot-blooded metabolism.  The crucial physiological differences between a cold-blood and a warm-blood, on most of the planets where such a distinction had arisen, always came down to the skin and to the heart.  On Sobek’s homeworld, most reptiles had a two-chambered heart.  Modern Dragons, and their species’ presumed common ancestor, had two three-chambered hearts, but retained the plated, thick hide of the socket-toothed family of reptiles from which they’d descended.  Warm-blooded animals tended to have three- or four-chambered hearts, but they also had skins that were complex, multi-layered, hairy or feathery, and pocked with various kinds of glands.  On some worlds—such as Aten III, but not so far as he knew, on Erkhott—some of those glands were developed into feeding tubes for the young, a fact which explained their lips (an adaptation for creating suction against those tubes).  This was rather a revolting concept to Sobek, among most other carnivorous reptiles, but the biology was unmistakable:  most of the galaxy’s large-brained species were warm-blooded, and most of the civilized, space-capable species were skin-feeders or “mammals.”  It was remarkable how many times, and in how many varieties, a similar phylogenetic process had played out, world after world.  Life begins in oceans as single cells, develops multicellularity and sex, differentiates into wormlike, arthropodic, fishlike, and amphibian forms, along with vascular light-converting plants and scavenging fungi; and these collectively assault the land masses until dry-skinned reptiles with shelled eggs, air-breathing arthropods, and trees arise, at which point the diversification truly begins.  Across the galaxy, one can find cold-blooded reptiles, warm-blooded reptiles, furry reptiles, feathered reptiles, swimming reptiles, even flying reptiles.  Warm-blooded furry reptiles is usually as far as the process ever gets on any one planet before a comet or a supernova knocks the whole process back to the evolutionary (or worse, abiogenetic) stone age.  Some twenty percent of the galaxy’s civilized population was currently composed of species of this kind.  Much less common were those species who’d taken warm-bloodedness to the logical extreme and gestated their young in internal incubators, and less common still were those who provided liquid nourishment to their young, after birth, from their own bodies.  But those species’ populations had a way of becoming disproportionately intelligent, so on a per-capita basis, there were more of these mammalians currently residing as full citizens in the empire than there were reptiles.

Aside from these fairly standard morphotypes, the galaxy had a few exotics to exhibit, notably the arthropodic Kasmani and the cephalopodic Slurghh.  There were less-describable forms such as the Ashi, which resembled massive, mobile plant thorns (a large cone-shaped, pointed body with flexible stomach-foot, beneath a thin shell with apertures for pseudopods to be extended through), and the Rengali (flat, broad worms with four prehensile tentacles and a large central stalk, with sensory organs and a sucking mouth, rising from the back).  And then of course there were the weird, mushy beings of the Capstone civilization, whose God Machine currently ruled the empire.  There was nothing else even remotely like them, anywhere.  Their origin was still a mystery, although those who came into physical contact with them reported a distinctly spongy, or sometimes plant-like, texture and consistency.  No one had ever secured a sample of their genetic material…or if they had, they hadn’t managed to go public with it.  Whatever they were made of, it wasn’t meat.  You couldn’t even eat the bastards.

But there was only one non-furry reptilian species, still retaining ancestral amphibian traits including the basic lacertine body plan, residing in the galaxy, as full citizens, in a fully-industrialized condition.  And while their numbers had expanded enormously since discovering interstellar travel, they were now in decline, and greatly outnumbered by those warm-blooded tit-feeders, who seemed to grow and reproduce as fast as insects, quickly dominating food chains wherever they happened to arise.  For some Orrkuttssh, their participation in the galactic community was a source of pride in the exceptional nature of their achievement as a race:  the only “primitive” reptiles ever to master space travel.  To others, the rapid expansion of therian populations, and the degree to which their species dominated planetary systems, was a source of metabolism envy.

Cults arose over the concept of developing a mammalian metabolism.  Mammals were raised, studied, sacrificed, eaten.  Mammal skins were consumed, collected, decorated, revered.  Some individuals (members of non-warrior castes, those who weren’t prohibited from making unsanctioned cosmetic, anatomic or physiologic upgrades)  engaged in medical augmentation:  implants of skin glands, of hair, of metabolic accelerators.  Some had bones broken and reset to resemble the kinds of hip and shoulder girdle structures regarded as typically mammalian.  Some had modifications to the visible portions of the eyeball, to the musculature of the skull, to the face.  Some had lip implants, in mimicry of the facial apparatus that enabled therians to suck from skin-borne feeding glands.

Lips!  What had the universe come to when the youngsters were wearing lips!  It was the first time the Orrkuttssh had encountered counterculture, and Sobek wasn’t the only one at a loss.  Many adults of his generation believed that the cultural revolution was the first step in the unfortunate sequence of events that had led to the planet’s loss.  It couldn’t be doubted that the generational divide had weakened their civilization considerably, at least temporarily, but he had never found an objective and thorough enough history of that time to explain it in detail.  And the Capstone owned all history now.

He didn’t have a problem with the general idea of personal evolution, but he was proud to be a Dragon.  He didn’t think that personal improvement should require evolving into something else.  His identity—his genetic makeup, his shape, his size, his temperament—meant a lot to him, and he believed everybody else should feel the same way.  The Orrkuttssh civilization was singularly two-faced in some regards; the pillars and eaves of the Great Buildings of their government were adorned with gargoyles each exhibiting one long head and one short head.  To outsiders, they were Dragons; but among themselves, they were The People.  Three times in that history, their society had been torn by internal conflict or division, each a new national shame; they regarded the youth movement as no less a paroxysm than the Land War or the deadly schisms of the Primate Wars.

He pondered.  He read.  Weeks passed.  Sobek studied, got in shape, and sketched plans for his “inspection.”  He watched the stars pass his windows as the Talon slowly rotated in its solar heat-shedding roll.  They were pretty here, not as crowded and busy as the sky was closer to the galactic center, and with only a few visible nebulosities to break up the pattern.  The sky was almost uniformly black and glittery, except for the zodiacal band of the galaxy’s cross-section, which stood out magnificently.

The Talon had used chemical rockets to begin its journey at a reasonably high acceleration, but after an hour at full thrust had cut them and switched to ion drive, which would continue to accelerate the craft at a slow, sustainable and heat-manageable rate, letting Aten’s gravity do more of the work as the ship fell toward the center of the solar system.  Shortly before the halfway point in the transfer orbit, the ion drive’s thrust-vectoring nozzles reversed their direction, and the craft began subtly to slow.  The slowing was not initially perceptible, as the ion drive was also working against the acceleration of Aten itself.  Toward the end of the journey, Constrictor would be essentially stationary with respect to the star, letting the planet’s approaching orbital path cross his, at which point he’d fire the main thrusters to catch it and park in a new orbit.  The orbital insertion could all be done automatically, but that wasn’t Sobek’s style.  He was rather thrilled that he’d be meeting the planet head-on, as that would make for a bracing rush of deceleration when the time came, and another opportunity to sneer at danger face to face.  Subadults, bureaucrats and therians timed their orbital insertions for ease, for fuel economy, for safety.  Grown Dragons of the military culture fired their rockets manually, enduring bone-crushing g-forces with gritted, clacking teeth.

There had been artificial gravity aboard the Talon while it accelerated, but this would eventually lessen for several weeks, before the deceleration became palpable, at which point “up” would become “down” within the ship, gravity having effectively reversed itself.  Larger craft used rotating modules to implement artificial gravity, and the Greys were reported to be able to manufacture real gravity on demand, but smaller Orrkuttssh ships like the Talon had to make their own g-forces using old-fashioned engines, and to rely on adhesives, magnets and harnesses to make movement convenient.  Sobek would enjoy the relative novelty of weightlessness for a time, but soon would become impatient for the feel of the ground beneath his feet.

Deep space travel was boring and predictable.  There were hardly ever any good emergencies in deep space.  All the real fun took place in and around orbit.  Those who didn’t like piloting—or weren’t competent to pilot anything but a fully-automated transport—often spent those interminable weeks and months in suspended animation, via whatever technological counterparts to Sleep that their people used, in order to avoid the tedium and conserve life support resources.  Lazy flying was not something the Orrkuttssh did, as a matter of course and of cultural bias.  Unlike the chemically-induced forms of hibernation other races employed, true Sleep took days to properly enter and a day or more to properly emerge from, and was quite simply too big a pain in the tail to deal with for a short hop.