Credit: NASA / Gurra943 on DeviantArt

The Juggernaut — Chapter 9

Deep Space

To an outside observer, had one existed, the warpship’s passing was visible as a distortion of space totally unlike anything depicted in human science-fiction movies that featured ‘warp drive’. To a close observer, at first, as the ship and its pocket of space-time approached, space seemed to pinch in to a point, then as it passed, space seemed to bubble, the bubble proceeding along with the ship to its destination, while the pinched-in point travelled back towards its origin. To an observer a bit more distant, there was an initial pinched-in distortion of space that was more a line than a point, that travelled toward the point where the ship was level with the observer, after which it seemed to pass through a small space and emerged on the other side as a bubble of distortion that travelled onwards from there.
From the bridge, the space ahead also appeared distorted, with objects that the ship was passing appearing to be almost in front of the ship, though unlike a drive that would allow near-light-speed travel, there was no blue-shifting of the stars. However, the bridge was almost empty, with only two individuals on watch, leaving the other five crew stations empty. Even then, the crew were merely a backup for the ship’s automation, the failure of which had not occurred in the fifty or so years since the perfection of general-purpose nanites, but old habits died hard.
As they sat, bored with the seemingly never-ending tedium of overseeing nanites that never failed, on a bridge that only existed as a backup and primarily as a formal space in which to instruct the nanites that really flew the ship, the two crew members talked almost incessantly. The older, Commandthree, was truly ancient, even for their long-lived species, yet still mentally flexible, and spent much of the time relating engrossing stories of times long past, before nanites or even widespread industrialisation. It was old enough to remember the near-disastrous era of consumerism, though fortunately their species was long-lived, with lifespans around a dozen times that of the recently discovered humans, and when it had become apparent that the consequence of unrestrained industrialisation was global climate change, on a timescale that would directly affect those currently alive, rather than over several lifespans as was the case for Humans, the relative immediacy of the problem led to a number of changes, emphasising sustainability, minimising individuals’ ecological footprints, and limiting population growth.
The advent of clean fusion power had allowed a somewhat increased sustainable level of industrialisation, which had in turn led to the advent of a number of other technologies leading up to independent, self-replicating general-purpose nanites. Nanites had led to some years of societal disruption, where people no longer had to make things, save for the pleasure of it, and society became more intellectual. Nanites didn’t put an end to the wars that had been a frequent occurrence throughout history, but they did eventually make things more civilised. Where armed soldiers once fought, ravaging the battlefields upon which they fought more and more as the technology of war improved, within a few years it had become the case that a war was merely inconvenient to the civilians who lived in the area of the conflict. When no living soldier could expect to enter the field of battle and survive, let alone prevail, there were soon no more living soldiers, only war machines. War machines so capable that a civilian could amble idly across the heart of an active battlefield with every confidence of being entirely unharmed while the battle raged around them. Some nations had thought that they didn’t need to set rules of engagement for the nanite-built and controlled weapons that designated civilians as off-limits, and quickly found that this put them beyond the pale, with those nations’ living leaders quickly becoming deceased, until one of their successors realised the stupidity of authorising rules of engagement that put their own lives at risk, and negotiated a change of the terms of the engagement to exclude living things once more.
National governments could afford to expend resources upon the research and development of military nanites, and these nanites became effectively a second, superior, class of nanite, still capable of all the things their general-purpose brethren were, yet equipped with optimised secure communications, higher energy efficiency, and chock-full of military strategies and the blueprints for the latest pieces of macroscopic military equipment.
When the advance of technology had led to the advent of practical reactionless drives and then practical warp drives, these new ships were sent to explore space, primarily out of curiosity, but also with a view to establishing a few new colonies which would serve to reduce the pressure of their planetary population. When warfare began to break out occasionally on the first colony world, a new and disturbing precedent in warfare was noticed. When a couple of militarily more advanced nations on ColonyOne began quietly taking over the territories of their smaller neighbours, one of the smaller neighbours that looked to be inevitably in the line of fire some time in the next ten years, a small mining outpost, really little more than a small family group, set their nanites to building the first example of a class of object that would come to be called ‘Hermit’s Juggernauts’ in anticipation of the coming conflict. The object that their general-purpose nanites built wasn’t the most technologically advanced war machine ever built for the most part, but had the advantage of vastly out-massing its opponents, weighing in at six billion tons of heavily armoured war machine, its spherical body lifted into the air by an incredible five-billion-ton array of diametrical drives more efficient than any previously built, even by military nanites, actually capable of lifting their own mass in a planetary gravity well plus a little more, and bristling with more weapons than was thought possible. The stupendous array of diametrical drives proved to be the machine’s undoing, however. Had it dedicated all that mass to weapons, armour, power supply and ground-based mobility, it might have prevailed, but even as it was, it took days of fighting for its smaller enemies to bring it down. It had to use atomic batteries too, since a fusion plant doesn’t have a sufficiently high energy density — more endurance yes, but less power per unit mass. The atomic batteries kept it going for days, but they ran out, and that was the end of it.
<I was there, you know,> the old crew-member said to the younger. <I was a merchant at the time, and I was bringing a truck-load of supplies to trade for refined ore when the [Broad Peninsula Conglomerate] combat automata overtook me from behind. They ignored me, of course, since neither my truck nor I were one of their objectives. Then I saw the Juggernaut emerge. The [Fifth Range Ninth Mountain Mining Camp] had built it inside [Sixth Mountain]’s peak, and it blasted its way out, the whole mountain peak just exploding away from it. That really made me pull my eye in, I can tell you.
<Well, there it was, this huge black… spot, I suppose you’d call it,> Commandthree said. <It was covered in phase-conjugation mirrors, and you know that they reverse any incoming light, not reflect it like a normal mirror. If you look at a phase-conjugation mirror, all you see is the inside of your own eyes, you know, so of course it looked blacker than black, like a disk rather than a sphere, since you don’t see any reflections of other light to give the shape definition.
<Anyway, with that one innovation, they made the lasers that so many of the [Broad Peninsula Conglomerate] combat automata used worse than worthless. I suppose they couldn’t tell at first whether that black shape was covered with a femtosecond-laser-pulse-stippled stealth coating or covered in phase-conjugation mirrors, and they probably calculated that the former was more likely than the latter, since they opened up on it with their lasers. Of course, the PCMs reversed the incoming beams, negated most of the atmospheric distortion, and, since combat automata almost never stop moving, that resulted in the destruction of their laser mounts at best, and their total destruction at worst.
<It was lucky that I was still far enough away, otherwise I’d have been hit by fragments from SixthMountain, though no doubt my position was part of its calculations. SixthMountain was also on the opposite side of NinthMountain to the camp, and so the mountain protected them from the worst of the debris too.>
<What did you do then?> the younger crew member asked.
<Well, I know they say that unless civilians are on the target list, you can take a leisurely stroll across a battlefield and have every expectation of reaching the other side entirely unharmed, but while you tell yourself that, there are all those near-misses that zip past you at a range almost close enough to cause injury — automata tend to treat civilians as bits of moving off-limits cover, and try to hide behind you and shoot around you, so they’re not just ignoring you other than to avoid hitting you, they’re using you as a defensive position, and you tend to attract lots of near-misses, and I have heard of accidents, where an automaton is hit just as it fires, and the impact is sufficient to throw its aim off sufficiently to kill the civilian it was trying to fire around. They say they’ve developed safeguards against such things, but I wouldn’t want to risk my life on a say-so. Besides, no-one assigns infinite value to each citizen, not if they want any chance of winning. That means that if the value of an individual is less than the value of winning, there may come a point at which the loss of a few civilians as collateral damage is an acceptable price in order to achieve the goals — and I have never wanted to be around when the combat automata make that sort of decision.>
<You didn’t answer the question, [Ancient one]> the younger being flashed, using Commandthree’s earned name.
<Haven’t you worked it out, [Child of Commandtwo]?> Commandthree replied. <I kept my heads pulled in and tried to stay clear of the battlefield while more and more automata came in from the [Broad Peninsula Conglomerate]. I had no desire to risk being collateral damage or a meat puppet if some automaton decided there was more to be gained by doing so than damage its nation’s reputation would suffer in consequence.>
<A meat puppet?> child of Commandtwo asked.
<Oh, that was a delightful tactic that military nanites used a lot for a while,> Commandthree said with a vast degree of sarcasm. <They’d infiltrate some hapless civilian’s body, destroy or co-opt any general purpose nanites in there that might object, and then take control of their motor functions and — if the person was lucky — their consciousness. Then they’d use the civilian as a living shield, and have it move around as if on its own business, but just incidentally providing cover for other allied automata.>
<What do you mean, ‘If the person was lucky’?>
<Well, sometimes there weren’t enough nanites available — or at least not enough survived infiltrating the person and destroying or hacking their own nanites — to completely take over their whole brain, so they’d take over just enough to let them take control of the body, and leave the rest of the brain aware of what was going on but unable to do anything about it. It’s a terrible thing to be infiltrated and to experience your body doing things that you know you’re not doing yourself. Far better that the nanites put your consciousness to sleep while they walk your body around. Take it from me, I know. I was infiltrated three times during that war. The first and last times, they put me to sleep, and I only knew what they’d done with me from recordings and others’ recollections, but the second time…> Commandthree reflexively began to pull both its heads in for a moment and breathed more quickly, visible signs of the trauma that the event had inflicted on its psyche.
<Yes? Are you all right, [Ancient one]?>
Commandthree slowed its breathing then popped its heads back out. <As well as can be expected, youngster. As I was saying, the second time, the nanites left me aware while they walked me around and used me as a living shield for their nation’s automata. I saw what they were doing, what my body was preventing my own nation’s nanites and automata from stopping them from doing, and no matter how I struggled to take control of my own body and pleaded with them to stop — I knew that it had to be nanites controlling me, even though they never communicated with me, and I never knew if they were aware of my wishes — they kept right on doing it until they were done and had no further need of me.>
<That’s… terrible!>
<Yes. So the court of public opinion decided afterwards. Any nation that permitted their nanites to do such things were considered further beyond the pale than if they had allowed or ordered the deaths of civilians. I think that it does still happen occasionally — where the benefit outweighs the potential cost — but the nanites are careful enough now to make sure that their puppets — and their associates — either don’t remember, or remember something entirely different and innocuous instead. I was a soldier myself for a while, before nanites were invented and made it all but impossible for any living soldier to enter the field of battle and expect to survive, let alone prevail, and being infiltrated while still aware was the worst experience of my life, worse even than seeing my comrades and lovers killed or crippled around me in battle, or being injured, or killing and crippling enemy soldiers for no other reason than that they were on the other side.>

Elsewhere in the ship, other debates took place. In the ship’s life sciences centre, a place that functioned as a hospital and research centre for the crew and all the other organisms the ship carried, Biomedone and Biomedtwo debated a disturbing trend that the computers had brought to their attention.
<It is entirely normal for there to be periods during which no seeds are produced,> Biomedtwo was saying. <As little as it costs the body to produce seeds, seeding still typically stops during times in which they would be unlikely to take root or survive if they did so anyway.>
<Certainly,> Biomedone agreed. <That is well documented. It is also documented that seeding can be interrupted by physiological and psychological trauma.>
<[Close Observer] of [Motherworld’s GreatestLakeside Largestnation] also wrote that there can be no reason, that sometimes seeding just stops for no reason,> Biomedtwo argued.
<I have come to believe that there is always a reason, even if it is not always apparent,” Biomedone disagreed. <[Close Observer] may have earned a name for itself for producing a great deal of writing on the subject of medicine, some of it still quite valid even now, half a lifetime after it died, but you must acknowledge that time has shown that [Close Observer] was not infallible, that some of its conclusions have been proven to be incorrect.>
<Well… yes,> Biomedtwo admitted with almost completely concealed reluctance.
Biomedone noticed its colleague’s reluctance. <[Biomedone], you shouldn’t hold any person in such respect that you fail to acknowledge that their work has been discredited,> it flashed reproachfully. <We can acknowledge that they contributed greatly to our collective knowledge, but there is no shame in having one’s conclusions disproved when those conclusions were the best that could have been made at the time they were made. No intellectually honest person would disagree.>
As Biomedtwo’s skin shimmered as it prepared its next statement, their species’ equivalent of an “Ummm… Well…,” Biomedone noticed and forestalled its comrade’s next communication, <Yes, I know that [Close Observer] itself disagreed with that sentiment while it was alive, and also wrote as much,> it said. <However, it was a product of its times, when dogmatism was the norm, and the beliefs that its writings ultimately replaced were blatantly wrong conjecture and superstition that any intellectually honest person of the age could see was wrong. That people back then were punished for daring to point out the wrongness of the things they were taught is explanation for [Close Observer]’s own rigidity, but it does not make it any less wrong now that we know better.>
Biomedtwo began to say something else, but before the words became clear on its skin, it stopped. <It would appear that I still have to work on my intellectual honesty,> it admitted to its senior colleague. <But that still doesn’t explain why, in all the time since we discovered the humans, that seven members of this ship’s complement have failed to produce a single seed when they could have produced at least a dozen.>
<Of course, [Biomedone],> Biomedtwo replied. <I meant that the explanation for the continued production of stress hormones in these individuals is lacking. The discovery of the humans was stressful to many of us, what with the inevitable misunderstandings as we began to interpret the data we were receiving, and you know as well as I that many of us — including both you and me — stopped seeding at the time. However, most of us are back to normal. What I don’t understand is why [Ancient one], who didn’t stop seeding when so many of the rest of us did, stopped seeding around the time that the rest of us resumed, and Captain [Prudence in Adversity], [child-of-Artist], [child-of-Sigintone], [child-of-Mechengone], [childtwo of ResourceManagerone] and [childtwo-of-Hullmonitorthree] all stopped seeding and have not resumed.>
<Have you spoken to any of them?> Biomedone asked.
<Not beyond the usual exchange of courtesies,> was the answer. <At least none of them have stopped copulating. Though had they ceased, we would have noticed something wrong much earlier, before we were nearly back at the home-world.> Biomedtwo paused while it cleaned its main eye with the ears that usually hung below it, lingering over the task in a manner indicative of thoughtfulness rather than a sudden urge for cleanliness.
<What is it?> Biomedone asked when its subordinate was done with its optical ablutions and its ears dangled in their normal position beneath the spherical eye once more.
<Now that I think about it, it did seem that whenever I’ve copulated with each of them since we discovered the humans, they’ve all tasted a bit worried,> Biomedtwo replied after a further moment, referring to an ability that was limited to healers for the most part — most members of their species tended to get lost in the sensations of copulation, and only with training that was sometimes quite unpleasant could a person learn to concentrate on something other than their own pleasure. Once the issue of concentration was overcome, the ability to taste a partner’s basic emotions was instinctive, but with training, it was possible to identify a number of other diseases and disorders before any other symptoms became apparent.
<Really?! How interesting,> Biomedone said. <Perhaps I should go and copulate with them myself, and put the skills that you taught me recently to use.>

For the most part, it turned out to be more difficult and time-consuming than Biomedone first thought to track down and copulate with each of the seven non-seeding crew members. Captain [Prudence in Adversity] and [Ancient one] were actually easier despite all expectations, showing up at the public mess for their meals on schedule. They both tasted worried when Biomedone copulated with each, but neither tasted unhealthy, as was to be expected given the personal nanites that had been in use for many years. However, Biomedone recalled that four of the remaining five were frequently in each-other’s company before the Humans had been discovered, but it seemed that they were never in each-other’s company any more, like they were deliberately avoiding one-another. Only [child-of-Artist] and [child-of-Mechengone] were found together with any regularity. Biomedone found [child-of-Artist] and [child-of-Mechengone] together in the ship’s garden. [child-of-Artist] had been allowed to plant a seed, as it was of an age where it was performing the duties of a shipboard artist, and needed only a little time and formal recognition of its role in order to be considered an adult and not a juvenile and to be named [Artisttwo], and its seed had grown into a Tree, its underground tuber swollen and protruding above the ground in the late stages of gravidity, hence it was only natural that at this stage, [child-of-Artist] would be present, waiting for its child to emerge. There were a couple of other Trees too, one mature but still slender-trunked, with its growing embryo or embryos in its tuber which was still deep below the ground, and the other still a growing sapling which was yet to produce a birthing tuber at all. Of course, there was a gardener present too, as there always was when there were enough people to spare to do the job. There would be another two nearby, off-duty until their respective shifts began, but always on-call in case of an emergency (which had never happened in space, the ship’s nanites and automata saw to that) but this tradition was followed regardless of the actual necessity, out of respect for the parents and their offspring.
Biomedone met — as if by chance while taking a moment to relax in the garden, as many people did frequently — and copulated with both [child-of-Artist] and [child-of-Mechengone]. Neither of the latter appeared to be aware that their intimacies with Biomedone had any significance beyond the usual greetings, or that Biomedone was able to concentrate upon its partners’ physical and emotional states rather than being absorbed solely in fucking their guts out and achieving a climax.
After that meeting, Biomedone went looking for the last three adolescents. It found them all eventually, since there wasn’t really any way of hiding in such a small community, each of the remaining adolescents closeted away, each one engrossed in its individual studies. It wasn’t really proper to intrude, but the adolescents had to emerge to get food, and Biomedone was able to cross each adolescent’s path from study area to mess hall as if by chance, and social convention required that Biomedone and each of the adolescents take the time to copulate. It was the waiting for each to emerge that had taken the most time.
Having achieved its mission, Biomedone returned to its work area the following shipboard day.
<You found them, didn’t you?> Biomedtwo asked after they had copulated at the start of their mutual shift. <I could taste your satisfaction.>
<Yes,> Biomedone replied. <You know I may not be as experienced at it as you, since it was you who taught me, but I could tell that all of them were worried. About what, I don’t know for all of them.>
<I couldn’t tell either. Tasting another’s emotions is never all that specific, my teacher always used it as a starting point for more traditional methods of diagnosis, not as an end in itself.>
<Yes…> Biomedone agreed. <[Prudence in Adversity] and [Ancient one] both told me that they were worried. You know that the Captain is going to recommend to the Assembly that we make formal contact with the humans, but both are worried about what effect they’ll have on us, and vice-versa. [Ancient one] doesn’t believe that they’re necessarily as advanced as everyone else thinks. It thinks that just because they’re so far ahead of us in the field of image generation and manipulation doesn’t mean that they’re even nearly as advanced in other ways. You know it keeps pointing out that their eyes are relatively simple and that means that generating a realistic image is always going to be easier for them than it is for us, and since that fact has led to easier advancement in those technologies, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re even nearly as advanced as us in other ways. It is concerned that their society might self-destruct.
<Their emotional states are quite reasonable, I suppose,> Biomedone continued. <I told them that they shouldn’t worry so much, but given what we now know — and don’t know — about the humans, there is justification for their concern.
<However, I don’t know why these adolescents are so worried that they aren’t seeding any more. Everyone on the ship has been involved in analysing the data from the Humans’ planet, and that includes all the other adolescents, as well as some of the children. There were a few adolescents who didn’t stop seeding at all, like [Child of Gardenerthree], [Child of Hullmonitorone] and [Child of Commandone], and you can hardly say that they weren’t as aware of what was going on as the others,> Biomedone concluded.
<There are times when it would be nice to be able to ignore the privacy laws and get the nanites to pick the adolescents’ brains,> Biomedtwo said. <Or just get the nanites to sort out their problems for them.>
<Yes…> Biomedone agreed. <But you know where that led before those laws were made. I’d rather not know than go there.>
<You’re right, of course,> Biomedtwo replied quickly. <I was just wishing that things were… easier, that’s all, not that we could go around breaching personal privacy.>

The four adolescents who had been involved in the launch of the nanite pod had agreed to never talk about what they had done, and to be sure that no-one else might overhear them discussing it amongst themselves, they had agreed to act as if they had had a falling-out, and were avoiding each-other. However, by the time that they had made this particular agreement, [Child of Mechengone] had already confided in its very good friend, [Child of Artist], who had promised not to reveal the secret before [Child of Mechengone] had told the secret to it.
[Child of Artist] had been horrified at the story it had been told by [Child of Mechengone], as much at the consequences to the humans as the consequences to the four adolescents should their actions be discovered. However, the friendship between the two was strong, and it would not betray its regretful friend. As an apprentice artist, it didn’t have the best technical education, its interests didn’t lie there, and it couldn’t think of any way that the disaster on the humans’ world could be minimised or averted any more than the four perpetrators of that disaster.
[Child of Mechengone] knew that it had stopped seeding. Ideally, it should put what it had done out of its mind and relax so that it would begin seeding once more, since its lack of seeding would be a sign of guilt that could easily be discerned once the rest of the crew became aware that a disaster originating from their ship had befallen the humans, but it couldn’t put what it had done out of its mind, and the stress that produced — and the stress produced by the knowledge that others would become aware of its stress — ensured that its non-seeding state was self-sustaining. Worse, it knew that [Child of Artist] had stopped seeding out of concern for its well-being. What it didn’t know was that many others had stopped seeding, if only temporarily, or that its three partners in crime had stopped and hadn’t resumed seeding themselves.

[Child of Artist] didn’t know that it wouldn’t have participated eagerly in the act of sending the nanite pod to the Humans’ world if it had been present when its friend and its three friends had seen the captured human broadcast. It had been just as appalled as [Child of Mechengone] and its friends, perhaps even more so, when it had seen the footage, and it was only the fact that Sigintone had warned the observers not to leap to any premature conclusions that had prevented [Child of Artist] from doing just that. The short documentary about the making of a longer (but for some reason not shown) psuedo-documentary had made it clear that the humans were not so much hyper-violent torturers and murderers of their own and other species, but consummate artists who had resorted to technological means in order to show things that were not — and must not become — real. It was a new thought to all of the members of the study group that humans would tell untrue stories, that untrue stories could even be told deliberately. Their own species’ media archives were filled with documentaries of all sorts, both true and false, but the common thread associated with those that were false was that the very falsehood of those documentaries was a cause of shame, that the makers of those documentaries had failed in their duty to record the truth, even if they had no way at the time of knowing that they were misrepresenting the truth, and even if the truth hadn’t been discovered during their own lifetimes.
When [Child of Artist] looked at the humans’… fictions once more with an eye newly-cleaned by its newfound knowledge, it began to notice themes and minutiae that had passed entirely unnoticed at first glance. While there was the predominant theme of conflict between the humans and others, there was also conflict between the humans themselves. They didn’t appear to agree between themselves upon the barbaric actions that now appeared to be taken because they were quick and expedient, not because they were the best solutions that could be found.
Real documentaries had been captured too, right alongside the fictional. It gradually became apparent to those studying them which were real and which were fictional, though for some works it was hard to tell which they were, truth or fiction or something in between. It seemed that the humans were interested in conflict, on a variety of levels ranging from mild, with only positive outcomes, to severe, with unbalanced or entirely negative outcomes for those involved. Of course, that was a trait that they shared with the humans. It became apparent that — for the most part — truth was less interesting than fiction.
It appeared that humans had their share of real, violent conflicts, but whether shown in psuedo- or real- documentaries, there seemed to be a common theme of the undesirableness of conflict, and that there may be violence, but that violence could be undertaken in order to end more egregious violence.
Another theme that humans seemed to dwell upon was that of sex and reproduction, but even that was treated… oddly. [Child of Artist], as the child of an artist and an artist-in-training itself, considered sexuality to be one of many areas in which its species practised art, and, like everyone else it knew, practised that art without shame. [Child of Artist] was a very attractive member of its species, and as a highly desired sexual partner as well as an artist, tried to bring its artistry into all aspects of its life, including the way it copulated with its shipmates. However, it seemed that humans were both fascinated and repulsed by their sexuality. To all appearances, it seemed that they sought to keep their own children ignorant of their sexuality while those same children sought to learn about it. Many documentaries detailed the biology of human reproduction from conception to birth, as well as the way that humans mature. The biology that the ship’s biomedical scientists saw in the reproductive documentaries apparently explained a lot about their sexuality; when a species has to expend that much energy in the act of reproduction, then the gender that must expend more energy must necessarily be the more selective. While the notion of gender was not unknown, [Child of Artist]’s species considered having multiple genders to be an unfortunate accident of evolution that had befallen certain minor groups of organisms, and that their biological success might have been greater had they been properly hermaphrodite.
However, despite all these documentaries about the biology of human reproduction, the act of copulation between humans was very rarely shown, and even more rarely shown in a way that demonstrated that copulation was occurring in fact, and could not possibly have been simulated. In so many psuedo-documentaries, it appeared that copulation was about to take place, yet when it was shown at all and not merely implied to have taken place, so often it was not shown completely, lacking any imagery of the necessary conjunction of the sexual organs… or at least that appeared to be the case until broadcast streams with an extra layer of encryption and certain point-to-point narrow-cast transmissions were intercepted and decrypted, that showed humans copulating in a wide variety of different ways, all apparently real even if the specific scenarios were possibly fictional, given the presence in some of the humans involved apparently talking calmly, possibly even happily if the analysis of the footage was correct, about scenarios that had appeared quite violent and unpleasant to some of those who had participated in them. The more the survey drones had investigated, the more such short documentaries emerged, including a few that were encrypted yet further, and even hidden within other unrelated data, that depicted human children engaging in sexuality. The fact that there were so few of these images, that they were more highly encrypted and sometimes hidden within other files, was suggestive that most humans disapproved of them, but that it appeared that many humans disapproved of expressions of sexuality, yet still seemed fascinated by them, was confusing.
To all appearances, human copulation wasn’t an activity that, once initiated, was driven mostly by instinct as was the case for most members of [Child of Artist]’s species. As an artist and the child of an artist, its parent had shown [Child of Artist] that consciousness could take its place in sexual activity, and that it was possible to rise above the mere mindless pleasure of fucking and consciously enhance one’s partner’s and one’s own pleasure to heights unachievable to those who merely fucked one-another without thought. [Child of Artist] had raised the possibility that the documentaries of human copulation where one of the participants was restrained and apparently tortured, yet afterwards appeared with an expression that analysis indicated most likely was one of pleasure, were in fact similarly conscious measures undertaken to enhance the pleasure of the one so restrained. Taken in this light, other formerly inexplicable aspects of human sexuality gained an explanation. Unlike their own species, where copulation could occur in only one basic way — mouth-to-mouth, typically proceeding uninterrupted from intromission to ejaculation and then withdrawal — it seemed that human sexual expression could take place in a number of ways. Human reproduction apparently required (barring technological intervention) that a male’s reproductive organ be placed within a female’s reproductive tract, yet once intromission had occurred, it seemed that the motions of copulation could be paused and the participants’ positions altered before motion resumed, as well as the sexual organs being stimulated by parts of the participants’ bodies other than the sexual organs of the other participants. This suggested that human copulation took place at a conscious level for the most part, rather than the sub-conscious level that was the case for their own species for the most part, though [Child of Artist] and its partner, [Child of Mechengone], with whom it had been practising, were able to demonstrate to the ship’s experts in non-biomedical disciplines that copulation in their own species could also take place at a conscious level, with greater levels of pleasure experienced by the participants than if instinct was allowed to take over.
It was unsurprising to [Child of Artist] that the majority, but not the sole, opinion of the experts was that gaining conscious control over copulation took too much time and effort to learn, and increased the time spent copulating, to the detriment of time that could be spent on one’s labours. It seemed to [Child of Artist] and a few others on the ship that humans, for all their greater selectivity in their choice of partners and lower frequency of copulation, gained more pleasure from copulation than most members of their own species. That, along with the vast catalogue of artistic expression that they had documented, fascinated [Child of Artist] immensely.

Space — Planetary Orbital insertion course

It had taken well over a year for the ship to return to its builders’ home world in non-stop flight, a seemingly interminable period of time to adolescents who had been born in space and had never seen their species’ home world save in documentaries, and who had been used to stopping in what seemed to be every other star system along the way, each stop-off interrupting the boredom of interstellar flight, though by the standards of the universe, that was an obscenely short period of time that effectively meant that the ship had travelled backwards in time even though, due to the paradoxical nature of warp travel, at no time had it ever actually exceeded the speed of light, in fact spending most of the time either not moving or travelling at a relative crawl with respect to light.
The nature of warp travel is such that the forward warp field accumulates stray particles and photons as it propels the ship’s pocket of space-time through the universe. These are typically not a problem to the ship itself, but dropping out of warp releases these particles and photons to continue on their way. A crash stop would release all the particles and photons at once to continue on down the ship’s flight path, and while not anywhere near as destructive as a laser, a warp footprint — which grows larger the longer the distance and time the ship has been in warp — is still capable of sterilising half of a populated planet. Gradually reducing the power of the warp field allows some of the trapped photons and particles to bleed away, but even a minimum power warp field still traps a lot of energy. Hence, any warp ship whose crew does not want to cause an ecological or sociological disaster on the world that is the ship’s destination must be careful not to approach that world too closely while in warp, and to drop out of warp on a vector that does not intersect its destination world, or preferably, its destination solar system. However, this means that a responsibly piloted warp ship must cover a lot of space without using warp drive while en route from its warp exit point to its destination.
Still, there is a bonus that comes from having a warp drive: being able to produce the negative virtual mass required for a warp drive means that the same equipment can also produce a functional diametrical drive with only a slight change in its configuration. However, while this diametrical drive is capable of producing a significant acceleration, in space, “significant” is still a pretty small number, typically not enough to lift a ship out of the gravity well of a habitable planet unless truly stupendous quantities of them are used.

The home world was itself a moon of a large, ringed gas giant that orbited the K0IV orange sub-giant primary star. A bright F6V white main-sequence star orbited the orange sub-giant and its planetary system at about 20 AU, but despite its brightness, didn’t contribute much illumination or warmth to the life-bearing world due to its distance.
[Child of Artist]’s Tree gave birth one shipboard evening while the ship was decelerating after passing its turnover point on the journey from its warp exit point to an orbit around its builders’ species’ home world. The Tree had been looking sicker by the day of late, its leaves withering and its smooth skin shrivelling as its trunk and branches grew thinner in a sure sign that the infant within had matured sufficiently to begin eating its way out of the tuber capsule in which it had grown. As the infant within ate, the Tree’s capacity to supply it with the oxygen it needed dwindled, and as the infant began to run out of oxygen, that triggered an instinctive need to burrow its way upwards and to the side as quickly as it could. Its feeding head tunnelled upwards as it ate a path toward the outside air through the spongy, nutritious wall of the tuber, and then it broke through the skin to the outside. The nostrils at the tips of its four mandibles flared as it took deep breaths of the outside air.
Ordinarily, a Tree would give birth to one to six infants, most often two or three, but on board the ship, the amount of soil was deliberately limited to effectively bonsai Trees to a degree, so that they would give birth to a single infant most of the time. While the ship was large, its resources were still limited, and the dangers its systems posed to infants were such that it was more reasonable to limit the numbers of infants born from any given Tree.
As the infant poked its head out and breathed for the first time, it scanned the area with its feeding head’s eyes and took in the scents in the air. It saw a larger shape that it instinctively recognised as one of its own kind, sensory head uppermost and feeding head extended toward the infant, sniffing carefully at it with closed jaws and flashing its skin with bright, solid colours that reassured the infant that all was safe. Had the adult showed a skin mottled with a camouflage pattern, the infant would have withdrawn until the adult indicated that danger had passed. The infant extended its three-forked tongue toward the adult.
[Child of Artist] extended its tongue toward the infant. The infant was far too small to be able to copulate yet, but it interlocked its tongue with [Child of Artist]’s as adult and infant tasted one-another.
As the infant continued to breathe, its umbilicus ceased functioning as its lungs took over the task of supplying oxygen to its body. This triggered a change in the Tree, which creaked a little for a few minutes before its woody flesh split with a creak-crackle, a split appearing vertically across the top of the infant’s capsule and through the hole it had gnawed, and fluid trickled out of the split and onto the ground. The infant put a pair of limbs through the split and pushed at its sides until the split gaped wide enough that it could squeeze its body through, the umbilicus that attached its body to the tree emerging from its sensory eye’s socket until it was far enough out of its capsule that the umbilicus became a tether. The infant jerked its body against the umbilicus, and it came free from its attachment point within its sensory eye’s socket.
[Child of Artist] gently picked up [Child of Artist’s Child] and began to stroke it, wiping the last of the capsular fluid from the infant’s skin.
[Gardenerthree] approached [Child of Artist] and [Child of Mechengone], who was watching from nearby as its friend bonded with its first child. <There’s another child emerging on the other side of the Tree,> it said to [Child of Artist]. <Did you want to adopt it too, or will you withdraw, and I’ll shoo the viessilids out of their den?> it asked.
On a planetary surface, Trees were allowed to grow unrestrained, and could bear up to six infants. However, their biological parent may not want to adopt all of the infants, and those that remained, usually those that emerged later, were left to fend for themselves if some other adult didn’t choose to adopt them. On a planet, Birthing Groves were typically safe places, kept so by their gardeners, and an infant that wasn’t adopted still had a chance to survive and reach adulthood even without the personal care of an adult, though much less chance than those that were adopted. However, on board a ship, the Garden — too small to be considered a proper birthing grove — was by necessity limited in size, and it was possible that any unadopted infant would find its way out of the garden and wander around the ship unsupervised, and in its curiosity and ignorance, it could cause severe damage to the ship and risk the lives of the crew. To prevent that, the ship kept a family of Viessilids, small, sleek furry black predators with four legs and a pair of grasping talons, and a head with powerful jaws bearing sharp teeth on a long, muscular neck, that lived in a small compartment adjacent to the Garden, and in the event that an unwanted infant was born, the viesselids would quickly make a meal of it. However, viesselids were far too small to threaten an adult person individually, and while social, weren’t sufficiently social to band together in groups large enough to threaten an adult person collectively. They tended to hide in their dens while adult people were around, given that in their home environment, any found near a birthing grove would be exterminated mercilessly. However, while these viessilids were permitted to live on the ship in order to perform an occasionally necessary disposal function, they were still shy around adult people, given that such behaviour had evolved as a good survival tactic for most of their kind.
<I could adopt it,> [Child of Mechengone] said to its friend.
[Child of Artist] looked up at [Child of Mechengone] with its feeding head that was currently extended below its body. <I don’t think you’re ready for that yet,> it said to its friend. <You are nearly an adult, but not nearly enough. I’ll adopt it too.>
While [Child of Artist]’s words were displayed on its skin quite plainly for all to see, [Child of Mechengone] noticed that [Child of Artist] directed a subtle, wordless disapproval toward it, not visible to [Gardenerthree], and after a moment, [Child of Mechengone] understood; it was hardly in a position to be a good parent given the undiscovered misdeeds that made its future uncertain at best. <All right,> it replied. <That’s probably best.>
After [Child of Artist] had adopted [Childtwo of Artist’s child], [Child of Artist] retired toward its quarters, carrying the two infants who clung to it like baby monkeys lest their parent let them go, followed by [Child of Mechengone]. <We’ll be back in the morning, of course,> [Child of Artist] informed [Gardenerthree]. <The infants will need to keep eating their tree.>
<Of course,> [Gardenerthree] reflected in agreement.
After [Child of Artist] and its infants and its companion had left, [Gardenerthree] went back to look at the tree. At the bottom of the first gaping crack, it could see another tiny feeding head emerge from a third tuber beneath and between the upper two. That was highly unusual; the Trees here were bonsaied, and shouldn’t have produced more than one or perhaps two infants at most, and all the capsules were normally on the same level, but it wasn’t unknown for capsules to grow beneath others. [Gardenerthree] contemplated summoning [Child of Artist] back, but [Child of Artist] was a first-time parent, and it knew from personal experience that twins were enough to handle for such without making it triplets, and while [Child of Mechengone] had volunteered to adopt one, [Gardenerthree] agreed with [Child of Artist] that [Child of Mechengone] was probably a bit young to be a good parent yet. [Gardenerthree] didn’t want another child, as it was already raising one, and didn’t feel like taking on the extra work, so it withdrew before the third emerging infant spotted it. It was a hard decision that it was making, but it knew from long experience that such decisions had to be made or else it would end up raising more children than it could handle or afford, a mistake that two of its fellow gardeners with more compassion than sense had made over the years, the second colleague doing so despite [Gardenerthree]’s warning, mistakes that had both ended in poverty and tragedy.

The Viesselids were not actually restrained or penned in, and despite [Gardenerthree]’s words, it wasn’t necessary for it to shoo them out of their den. They nested in a specially built compartment adjoining the garden, to which they fled and cowered within while adult people were present in the garden. They knew instinctively that adult People would kill them if they were noticed, that they would be tracked down and dug out of their den and then eaten, alive and screaming. While that was not the case here — unless their numbers grew too great, or one of their number was so incredibly unwary as to stray within reach of an adult — instinct was a hard thing to overcome. Now, once [Gardenerthree] had withdrawn and its scent diminished, the viesselids could smell the distinctive odour of the fluids spilled from a Tree that had just given birth. They knew from experience that quite often any infants born would be adopted by adult people, but occasionally one or more was left unprotected, and even one infant would feed the entire viesselid family for many days.
One of the younger males emerged from the den first, slinking out silently on all six limbs like a slender black shadow. It sniffed the air and peered around with the four large single-lensed eyes that adorned its narrow head, on the alert for danger. It was just smart enough to know that it was an offering to the people who guarded the garden as much as a scout, if there were any people hiding nearby, selected because it was young and inexperienced and its loss would impact its family less than if an older, more experienced male or any female was taken, yet old enough that it could be an effective scout despite its inexperience. When the area proved to be clear of threats, it ventured further and paused again. It flared out the hair-like structures around its neck just behind its head. These were not hair as Humans would have understood it, the ‘hairs’ were thicker and were alive, not dead, and served the viesselid as ears. The viesselid emitted a series of ultrasonic chirps, in much the same manner and for the same purpose as a Terran bat, mapping the area as reflected sound returned and was detected and analysed by its audio-sensitive neck fur. When it seemed that the area was safe, it chirped again at a different, lower, but still ultrasonic frequency to inform its family that the area was safe and that it was going to venture further.
Another two viesselids emerged from the den, two older males this time. They too began to scout around. The three viesselids crept below leaves and climbed trees, ensuring that the area was truly safe before they each called, summoning the rest of their family from the den. Had even one failed to report back in a timely manner, the other two scouts would have fled back to their den and the whole family would have stayed hidden until the next evening — or until the missing viesselid returned unharmed.
When all three scouts reported that the area was safe, the alpha male and female emerged cautiously, and only after they too reported that the area was safe did the junior females emerge. The junior females were protected above all other family members, as they had the greatest remaining reproductive capacity, and would be best able to rebuild the family should the other members be ambushed.
The viesselid family travelled through the garden roughly in the direction of the Trees, though they didn’t pass up the opportunity to pounce upon any insufficiently wary small creatures they happened across, sap-suckers, nectar-fliers, leaf-chewers and even the small aerial predators if they could be caught napping, or their nest-bound grubs if the aerial predators were foolish enough to leave them unguarded too long. However, while all these creatures were their usual food, and the viesselids would each consume many every night, they were after larger prey. The alpha male climbed a tree near the three Trees, and from its high vantage point, used its sonar to scan one of the split capsules which had spilt the fluid which emitted the scent that had attracted them. That capsule was empty, but on climbing down its tree and up another, it noticed that there was movement deep within the other split capsule. It knew instinctively that sometimes infants emerged not directly from a Tree’s swollen tuber, but from a capsule beneath another capsule already vacated by its previous occupant.. Of course, it might also have been a burrower that had fallen into the split capsule, but burrowers, while not nearly as big a meal as infants, were also tasty. The alpha male announced to the family that there was movement in that capsule, and the slender black creatures rippled across ground and branch toward the split Tree.

The third infant peered out of the hole it had gnawed in the upper side of its capsule. It saw little more than the inside of the capsule above it that had been vacated by its slightly older sibling. It wasn’t sure if it had seen an Adult earlier, through the crack above its breathing hole, but as there were no adults visible, either welcoming or warning, and it could neither see nor smell any threats, it ventilated its lungs until its umbilicus shut down and its capsule creaked and crackled open. It pushed and pulled its way out, dislodged its umbilicus, and found itself in another capsule. There it repeated its former actions, peering out and sniffing the air, looking for danger or adults who might protect it.

The viesselids were waiting not too far from the Tree. The alpha male and female were both very experienced hunters, and had placed themselves and their subordinate children and other relatives in positions where the breeze (from the ventilation systems, not any natural wind, not that the fact was of much interest to most of the viesselids) was blowing toward them, preventing the infant from catching their scent. Had it scented them, it would have withdrawn and blocked its breathing hole with its body and stayed put until the next evening if necessary. The viesselids were sufficiently small to fit down the breathing hole, but not strong enough to push the infant aside if it jammed its body against the hole with all six of its limbs, and while they could have eaten the flesh from its side, its mesoshell was too strong to penetrate that way, and the little flesh they could have reached would have been scanty enough a meal that it would have been more worthwhile to hunt elsewhere.

When the infant couldn’t see or smell any danger outside the upper, open capsule, or see any adults either, the infant climbed out of the split capsule. It instinctively knew that it had a better chance of survival if it was free to run or climb instead of being trapped in a dead-end hole. Once out, it turned itself over and extended its sensory head, looking and listening for danger while its feeding head began to take bites out of the nutritious, spongy flesh of its Tree.

The viesselids saw the infant, and the younger ones gathered themselves to dash out toward it, but the experienced alpha male and female both called ultrasonically to restrain them. As the infant began to eat the spongy, crunchy flesh of the Tree, the alphas timed its actions, and once they had gauged the rhythm of the infant’s bites and chewing, the alpha male gave some instructions, and then called ultrasonically, “At a crawl… Go!” just as the infant took a bite and began to chew, and as the alpha male judged from the sound and the infant’s past actions that it was about to swallow, it called “Stop!” While the younger males followed the alpha male’s instructions, the alpha female took command of the younger females, directing her group in a different direction to that of the males, but also timing her group’s movements to coincide with the infant’s noisy chewing.
Both groups of viesselids repeated this several times, using the sounds of the infant’s chewing to cover any sound that they might inadvertently make as they approached it.

The infant didn’t see the viesselids approaching as it ate, despite the full coverage of the surrounding area that its sensory head’s eye and ears gave it. Its sensory head eye had a lower overall resolution than its feeding head eyes, and the viesselids that had to break cover during their approach had the advantage that their black ‘fur’ made them look like little more than shadows amongst the Trees and other plants that moved gently in the light breeze, and the timing of their movements robbed the infant of any chance it may have had to hear them approach. While cooling down after a warm shipboard day, the garden was still quite warm, and while the infant was able to see in the infra-red part of the spectrum to some degree, the viesselids were currently only a little warmer than the background temperature, and the infant was not yet sufficiently experienced to be able to understand what it was seeing. If it survived the viesselids’ attack, it would be far more likely to recognise another at a later time.

As the viesselids approached, one of the young males that had been crawling over a twig found that its weight was too great for its perch to support, and the dry twig gave way with a crackle. Instinctively, all the viesselids froze, even the one that had broken the twig. That one fell from its broken perch, still clutching the twig that had failed it.

When a twig broke, the infant stopped chewing and whipped its feeding head around to peer in the direction of the sound. It saw movement with its sensory head eye, and its feeding head tracked the movement and clarified the image. The infant watched the twig fall to the ground and bounce a couple of times before it came to rest. The viesselids all remained motionless, even the one that had fallen. The infant was too inexperienced to realise that the twig’s “shadow” was in the wrong place and was the wrong shape and size, and after staring at the twig for some time, and noting that it did not move any more, hunger won out over caution, and it resumed biting pieces out of its parent Tree and chewing each tasty piece noisily before swallowing them.

The alpha female called to the males as it approached its position upwind of the infant, warning them that the time for stalking was nearly over and that the chase would soon begin. Then the female viesselids, bellowing in as low pitched voices as they could manage, this time low enough that the infant could hear them, broke cover and charged toward the infant.

The infant heard the blood-freezing shrieks of the viesselids and saw and smelled them approaching from upwind as they broke from their cover and charged towards it. Most of the half-dozen female viesselids weighed around a hundred to a hundred and fifty grams, while the infant weighed perhaps seven kilograms, roughly fifty times that of each of its attackers, however, despite its advantage in size, it used its feeding head’s sharper-sighted eyes to take one look at the rippling mass of tiny predators shrieking toward it before it fled across the garden and away from its attackers, its sensory head in front and above it as it ran, while its feeding head pointed directly behind it, jaws agape threateningly, watching the viesselids give chase. It clattered all three of its uppermost limbs’ hooves together in an instinctive pattern that announced its distress and called for help, while its skin flickered, glowed and flashed in incoherent alarm.

Whenever the infant deviated from the path that the male viesselids had hoped that the infant would follow, all was not lost — there were mid-ranking males to either side of the hunt area who erupted shrieking almost on top of the fleeing infant, frightening it back onto the course they wanted it to take. While the viesselids could accelerate much faster than the infant, the infant had a higher top speed due to its much longer limbs, and it began to open the range between itself and the viesselids that were chasing after it. However, it was too young and inexperienced to consider that this was exactly what the viesselids wanted it to do. Despite the infant’s larger lung capacity per unit mass, the viesselids’ Iron-based blood was a more efficient oxygen carrier than the infant’s Cobalt-based blood, and the viesselids had about the same endurance. As the infant ran, it used up its reserves of energy, and the attacks on its flanks whenever it tried to deviate from the course that had been chosen for it led to it running directly toward the male viesselids waiting in ambush. The males leaped out of their cover at the infant, their claws and talons fastening onto its skin whenever they landed as the infant tried frantically to check its flight. It flailed at the viesselids clinging to its body with its clattering upper hooves, and while some of the blows landed upon its enemies, other male viesselids swarmed up its flailing limbs and began to sever the infant’s ligaments with their razor-sharp teeth, stilling the distress-clatter of its hooves. The infant swung its feeding head around and snapped at a viesselid and missed, then snapped again as the lithe creature dodged, this time anticipating more by good luck than good judgement which way the tiny predator would dodge, and seizing it between one of its mandibles and its other three. It bit down as hard as it could, drawing a shrill, satisfying squeak of pain from its tormentor, and once it was sure it had a good grip, it shook its feeding head hard. However, while it was doing that, the male viesselids that had attached themselves to its skin swarmed down the limbs that it was using as legs, and began to sever its ligaments there too, and it fell as its injured extremities twisted uselessly out from beneath it, its spherical body rolling over the soft ground cover and over the less lucky of its assailants alike. The alpha male viesselid, a veteran of dozens of such hunts, leaped on top of the rolling, flailing infant and used its motion to carry him toward the infant’s feeding head’s recess. The alpha male thrust his head into it, between its protruding neck and the edge of its mesoshell, his sharp teeth cutting a channel into which he thrust his head ever deeper into the infant’s soft internal organs, until he reached the infant’s heart and his scissoring teeth severed the main blood vessel that carried the infant’s blood away from its heart and toward the rest of its body other than its lungs. The infant’s blood gushed directly into the alpha’s face, and he pulled out his head, released his hold on the infant’s skin and kicked away from it in order to avoid drowning in his victim’s blood, then rolled to his feet, ready to pounce again if necessary. However his sons and nephews had done their work well, and the infant’s crippled limbs pushed uselessly at the ground as it repeatedly tried to stand and failed, flailing and flopping around like a poisoned Terran housefly while its pale green blood flooded from the wound inside its feeding head’s recess. It pulled in its feeding head in a belated and futile attempt to stem its massive blood loss, without releasing the young male in its jaws, which continued to writhe and squeal in pain. The young male came to his senses after the surprise and pain of being bitten and savaged by the much larger infant, and reached around with his scissor-like incisors to snip loose the muscle that acted upon the one mandible that was holding him in the infant’s jaws’ grip. With the necessary muscle severed, he dropped free and lay still upon the ground., too badly injured even to crawl clear. The other viesselids, recognising that the infant had been dealt a fatal wound, also leaped away from the stricken creature, moving back to a safe distance so that its death struggles wouldn’t endanger them any further.
The infant’s drunken-seeming struggles slowed and weakened as its blood flowed from the terrible wound the alpha male viesselid had inflicted, until it finally died from loss of blood less than half an hour after it had been born, and only minutes after the viesselids had launched their attack.

As soon as the infant stopped moving, the assembled viesselids swarmed onto the carcasse. Scissor-like teeth nipped and chewed, dismembering limbs and severing necks, while other viesselids thrust their heads within the corpse and continued their butchery within the infant’s mesoshell. Within minutes, the viesselids had cut loose every scrap of edible flesh and they gulped down any smaller pieces before seizing the larger chunks, licking them until every trace of the infant’s pale-green and yellow-amber blood was gone so that they wouldn’t leave any more spoor than necessary leading back to the den, then they picked up the pieces and scurried away with them toward their den and the young and injured viesselids that were waiting for their return. Once back in their den, it would take the assembled viesselids mere minutes to gorge themselves upon the masses of flesh that they had brought back with them, and their slender abdomens would be distended hugely by the masses of food they would consume. There was very little fighting, as the returning viesselids shared out the meat in a manner that was quite equitable, and considering the quantity of meat the hunters had brought back and that there were about twenty viesselids including some kits and some that had been injured in previous hunts, there was enough meat that each viesselid would get a share of around twice its own body weight. Even then there would be much left over after the viesselids had gorged themselves, the remainder would keep for a few days until it could all be consumed. The viesselid that the infant had bitten had been quite severely injured, and had been carried back to the den by the others. However, it would quite likely survive its injury, and would heal in time.
Something happened then that no person could have expected. The alpha male and female had been on board the ship since its departure, and both had survived all four culls of their numbers by the ship’s crew. Despite that, the hunting had been good over the years, and the two viesselids were now significantly larger — and smarter — than any person would have thought possible, both weighing over two hundred and fifty grams, a hundred grams more than most viesselids that were considered adult. The artificial environment of the ship had triggered an epigenetic shift in the biology of some of the viesselids, the constant jarring differences between their typical environment and the shipboard environment resulting in a shift in the way certain genes were expressed, adding to the viesselids’ maximum size and enhancing their intelligence. The two alpha viesselids conferred using language that was also more advanced than the people thought possible to the viesselid species, a language that had been developed by the two viesselids that now used it.
“Another attack upon us by the people is coming,” the female said in its ultrasonic language. “Attacks have always come when the family’s numbers grow this great. The people notice the loss of their infants.”
“Yes,” the male agreed. “This den is a trap,” it said. “It feels safe, but it is not. The people can open it up from outside, and then we must flee or be eaten.”
“Is that what happened? I was always asleep for the day when the people came to eat us.”
“I saw it as a scout, before I became alpha, and now I remember,” the male said.
“We should find a new den,” the couple concluded in unison.
“We must be quick, they may come soon,” the male said.
“The family will want to eat and then sleep,” the female said.
“We must not eat too much now,” the male said. “The people will come while we sleep if we do. We must gather the meat and the young and the injured and find a new den immediately.”
“Should we split the family?” the female asked. “It is almost big enough even if the people were not coming. If we left the young and stupid ones here, they would distract the people and give the rest of us more time to escape.”
“Yes,” the male agreed.
“Where will we go?” The female asked.
The male paused for a while while it considered its mental map of the garden. The den was the only readily accessible place where viesselids would feel truly safe, but staying was no longer an option. There was the dying Tree that had just given birth, but people would bring the tree’s infants back to devour its dying flesh in the morning, and they might be discovered there. There were no burrowing species in the garden that were sufficiently large that might be made to give up their dens either, a state of affairs that the male instinctively knew was wrong, but since viesselids were only indifferent burrowers, there was nothing they could do about it, not on such short notice. The alpha male had been a particularly adventurous scout before it had won leadership from its uncle, and even after becoming alpha, it had continued scouting. Alpha males didn’t usually do that, but their situation on the ship was not quite right, and while the wrongness was not so great that the viesselids could not thrive, it had been enough to trigger an epigenetic change, activating a set of normally-dormant genes that better equipped viesselids to survive in times of change. The alpha had scouted areas that the normally shy, cautious viesselids would avoid. Even with its increased intelligence, curiosity and bravery, there were things it had dared not attempt. However, it did know of one place they could go, and it told the female.
“We can’t go there!” she protested. “It is too far, too dangerous, and there is nothing there for us to hunt.”
“I have been there, and returned safely, several times,” he disagreed. “Females should be cautious, but we must be bold or we will be eaten. Yes, it takes longer to reach our hunting grounds, but there may also be other opportunities once we are there.”
“You are the scout, we must trust you,” the female said. Their primitive language didn’t really have ways of expressing disapproval or reluctance, but that the female had mentioned her trust of the male was sufficient to convey her uncertainty.
“Shall we do it?” the male asked.
“Yes,” she concurred. “Everyone listen!” she squeaked more loudly. When the other feasting viesselids looked up from their meals and fluffed up their neck fur, indicating that they were listening, she continued. “We must split the family,” she said simply.
“There are not enough of us yet,” the next oldest — but not the next smartest — female disagreed.
“There are enough of us to split the family,” the alpha female reiterated.
“I am next oldest, I will lead a group,” the next oldest female said. “But I do not want to take my group away. I will fight you for the den,” she said belligerently and overconfidently, displaying her razor-sharp fangs.
The alpha female made a threat display too, then pretended to reluctantly back down. “You stay in the den, I will go with my followers,” she said.
The old den’s new alpha female addressed the alpha male, “You stay with me,” she ordered.
The second-oldest male, also not as smart at the alpha, added, “I challenge to be Alpha of this den.”
The new alpha female bared her fangs at the challenger, “He is mine!” she said. “Go or fight both of us.”
“I will go,” the alpha male said. “You are now alpha of this den,” he said to the challenger.
What followed was the selection of the individuals who would stay and those who would go. While the two groups ended up with roughly the same numbers of both males and females, the group that would leave ended up with the majority of the smarter viesselids, many of them from the younger generation. Once the distribution of individuals had been sorted out, the group that was to leave did so immediately, taking their share of the recent kill. The den’s new alpha female was left with the uncomfortable feeling that something had just happened that she hadn’t understood, but chose to put it out of her mind and resume the feast.

[Gardenerthree] had watched the infant’s death on the garden’s surveillance cameras. It had taken all of its self-discipline to avoid rushing out to pluck the infant away from danger and grab and eat as many of the tasty, nutritious viesselids as it could. Avoiding doing the latter was easier, since it knew that while viesselids were so nutritious, so full of iron, eating more than one or two on rare occasions would give it iron poisoning. The poor infant hadn’t had a chance. It might have survived a viesselid attack on the homeworld, where viesselids were kept under control and only a few might avoid any gardeners who sought to exterminate them for long enough that they might find and attack a stray infant, but the shipboard viesselids were both numerous and experienced, and had hunted down and dispatched many surplus infants over the years, and were positively terrifying in their efficiency. These viesselids would give a planet-bound gardener nightmares. All that was left of the unfortunate infant was a scraped-out and empty mesoshell and a severed and scraped-out sensory head eye that the viesselids didn’t want to bother lugging back to their den as neither had much nutritional value compared to the rest of the unfortunate infant’s flesh. [Gardenerthree] stared morosely at the surveillance feed for a little longer, but didn’t expect to see anything more of interest. When [Gardenerone] came to relieve it at their shift change, and after the two had copulated, [Gardenerthree] went to find [Biomedone]. The old doctor was still one of the most attractive people on the ship, and copulating with it was better than with any other person, and there was the advantage that it would understand what necessity had required that it do. [Artist] and [Child of Artist] were possibly even more attractive than [Biomedone] and similarly accomplished in the art of copulation, but as the grandparent and parent of the unfortunate deceased infant respectively, as well as two of the most excessively compassionate people on the ship, they most certainly couldn’t be expected to understand [Gardenerthree]’s situation.
On the way to the biomed lab, [Gardenerthree] happened to meet Captain [Prudence in Adversity]. After the two had copulated, which hadn’t been as satisfying as [Gardenerthree] had wanted, [Gardenerthree] spoke to the Captain as they both headed toward the biomed lab.
<[Child of Artist]’s Tree split last night,> it said with an undertone of sadness visible on its skin.
The captain looked closely at [Gardenerthree], extending its feeding head from beneath its body to examine it more closely than its sensory head eye alone was able. <There were too many infants?> it asked.
<Three,> [Gardenerthree] said. <One was below and between the upper two.>
<Unfortunate. I take it that [Child of Artist] didn’t notice, and you let the viesselids get it, yes?>
<Yes,> [Gardenerthree] replied regretfully. <I didn’t think [Child of Artist] would be able to handle a third, since it has never been a parent before, nor has it ever been involved with its parent’s parenting of another child.>
<I agree, and I think that any person who has been a parent would agree too,> the captain said.
<[Child of Mechengone] offered to adopt one of [Child of Artist]’s children, but it seems neither it nor I thought the youngster mature enough,> [Gardenerthree] added as they entered the biomed lab.
<I would concur,> the captain said. <Though perhaps [Child of Artist] felt as I do that there is something more wrong with [Child of Mechengone] than merely youth.>
<What’s wrong with [Child of Mechengone]?> [Biomedone] asked, before copulating with the two visitors to its domain. It noted with some interest that its copulation with [Gardenerthree] was rather less perfunctory and rather more pleasurable than its immediately previous copulation with the Captain. Perhaps [Gardenerthree] was also consciously attempting to enhance their mutual pleasure from the act.
<I believe that it is keeping some unpleasant secret that is galling it like a pellet of lye in its gizzard,> the captain opined.
<You do?> [Biomedone] asked thoughtfully. <That would fit its symptoms,> it agreed.
<I’ve asked it — I can’t help it unless I know what its problem is — but it wouldn’t even acknowledge that it had a problem,> the captain added.
<Well, we can’t keep interrogating it,> [Biomedone] said. <That would just make its problem worse.>
<I suppose not,> the captain said. <Well… I suppose we’ll find out eventually, unless its problem goes away on its own,> it didn’t seem too worried.
<Some adolescents do go through a neurotic phase,> [Biomedone] said. <Most of them get over it without any assistance.>
<You’re probably right,> the captain said. <I’ll keep my eye on it, though, just in case.
<So, there’s just the issue of [Childthree of Artist’s Child],> the captain continued. <While I think that we all agree that [Child of Artist] isn’t equipped to handle a third child, I believe that both [Child of Artist] and [Artist] are going to be quite distressed that the infant was taken by the viesselids — even if it was ultimately for the best reasons.>
<I agree,> [Biomedone] replied. <Especially given that we’re so close to the home-world.>
<Given that the other Trees will bear their infants while we’re in orbit — I can see the discussions over the Humans going on for quite a while — do we really need viesselids on board any more?> [Gardenerthree] asked.
<Probably not,> Biomedone replied. <Any unwanted infants could be set down on the homeworld in the places set aside for such.>
<No,> the captain replied. <Should we cull them again?> he asked [Biomedone].
<The last time I checked on them in their den, I noticed some physiological changes to quite a few,> [Biomedone] replied. <I don’t think that their time on board has been entirely without consequence, so yes, I think that we should cull them — completely. If we’re going to have viesselids on board at all when we depart again, we can pick up some replacements then, and I’d like to dissect a few to see just what has changed.”
<You won’t get to dissect too many,> the captain warned. <And you’ll have to catch them yourself, since I can’t see any other members of the crew passing up the opportunity to nibble on a few viesselids. You’ll also have to resist eating them yourself.>
[Biomedone] gave their species’ visual equivalent of a laugh. <I know, it won’t be easy since they’re just so tasty. Still, we’d be risking Iron toxicity if any of us ate more than a few.>
<I presume that there are remains?> the captain asked [Gardnerthree].
<Yes, just the poor thing’s mesoshell and its primary eye,> the gardener replied. <Should I remove them?>
<No,> the captain answered. <Let its parent be the one to discover its remains, and when it complains — I have no doubt that it will do so — we’ll conduct the cull immediately.>
<That should work,> [Biomedone] replied, approving. <Given the size of the meal that the horrible little things have just had, they’ll be den-bound and either eating the leftovers or sleeping off the feast for days. We should be able to make a clean sweep of them quite easily.>

The viesselid den’s new alphas were just as surprised as the rest of the remaining viesselid family when their den container was opened late-morning, after a greatly distressed [Child of Artist] had complained to [Gardenerone] that its unexpected third child had not even survived the night, let alone long enough for its parent to find it and adopt it. [Gardenerone] had logged the formal complaint, and the Captain had responded to it immediately, inviting every person on the ship not required to remain at their station to participate in the final cull of the tasty, but horrible, little creatures, and formally apologised for not having ordered them culled earlier, since their imminent arrival at the homeworld allowed the usual strictures concerning reproduction to be relaxed. The viesselids in their den had little time to reflect upon their misfortune as they were rudely awakened by dazzlingly bright lights and the huge limbs and feeding heads of the ship’s people descended into the wide-open den to snatch up and eat alive the viesselids within as they scurried about, stupefied and half-blinded by the sudden change in light levels. A few viesselids managed to reach the den’s entrance tunnel and fled down it, only to find that the people were waiting there too, hands and jaws ready to snatch up and devour any members of the viesselid family that tried to escape that way. For most, their last impression was of hands or jaws descending from the brightness, snatching them up, and the sensation of falling as they were tossed toward the mouths that would end their lives. A few were snatched up, but were not eaten, finding themselves in clear, impenetrable, inescapable containers.

The Alpha male and female viesselids and some of their family members were awake and aware of the cull as it took place, and watched and listened from their vantage point as their former den-mates were snatched up and thrown screaming in terror and pain into the people’s jaws, where their shrieks were silenced as their bodies were crushed and sliced into fragments before being swallowed. The irony of the situation escaped them. Despite their greater than usual intelligence, they were just as outraged by the deaths and devouring of their family members as the people were at the death and devouring of their infant.
“You were right,” the alpha female said to the alpha male. “We must be more cautious than ever, since I hear no survivors this time.”
“Yes,” the male agreed. “We must scout even further and see if there are any places where we can hunt where the people will not expect us to be.”
“This place is so barren and dangerous,” the alpha female said. “What can there be for us here?”
“There is nothing to hunt here, but there may be paths to other hunting places, if we are brave enough to look. We found the way here from our hunting grounds, so there may be other hunting grounds we can reach from here”

<We may have a problem,> [Biomedone] said to the captain after the cull, as the ship’s people left, licking their jaws and picking their teeth with their tongues after the unexpected tasty snack.
<What is it?> it asked.
<I think that some of the viesselids may have already left to set up a new den. There didn’t seem to be enough of them in the den to account for the numbers we saw on the monitors when they attacked the infant.>
<Are you sure?> the captain asked.
<Not entirely. We should keep a closer watch for them around here, just in case.>

Alien Homeworld

[Child-of-Sigintone] stood on the surface of the homeworld for the first time in its life, as did most of the other children of the Ship’s crew. Most of the crew had been shuttled down from the ship to the capitol of their species’ richest nation that morning, local time. Of course, even though the ship had been synchronised to the city’s local time when it had departed upon its interstellar mission of discovery, lack of contact and the vagaries of relativistic and warp travel meant that the ship’s local time had been late evening when the ship’s shuttle had departed.
Fortunately, someone with a brain had set the schedule of activities for the crew. A few days had been set aside for the crew to adjust their body clocks to local time and go sightseeing before the serious business of presenting their findings was to begin. There had been a parade for the returning crew as they travelled on a shuttle bus from their ship’s tender shuttle to the spaceport terminal; hundreds of people had lined either side of the roadway with their sensory heads stretched up as high as they would go, all of them weaving around in the characteristic movements of people who were trying to see past other people’s heads. So many hooves had clattered in the air that any message that any one person was trying to convey was lost amidst those of its fellows, even with the people’s good hearing, and the skins of the members of the crowd were a riot of light and colour. Some of the crowd’s visible speech was intelligible, at least if they were at the front.
<There they are!>
<Are they looking?>
<Do you think they have their names yet?>
<Look at me!>
<…[Ninth-farmer] was saying that the crops in the upper fields need to be irrigated more for optimal growth…>
<Who do you think you are to ask me…?>
<…so thin…>
<It looked at me! It’s looking at me now! Ohhh…>
<…couldn’t they have stayed out…?>
<Not a bit, youngster.>

[Child-of-Sigintone] was unused to being a celebrity, even if only for being present while others did all the real work, and was a bit puzzled by the crowd’s apparent reactions. It would have expected that any person who would go out of their way and assemble and wait just to see the celebrities in whom they were interested would appear more interested, but it seemed that some of the crowd at least had other things on their minds, and were barely paying attention at all, while to say that some of the others were enthusiastic was a bit of an understatement as they clattered, flashed, stomped and jumped in excitement.
[Child-of-Sigintone] found that it didn’t really like the attention all that much. It couldn’t keep the thought out of its mind that for all the excitement about their species’ first discovery of a sentient alien species, and the instant celebrity that gave to any person who had been involved, even if only peripherally as the children of the crew members had been, it would gain its own celebrity — or notoriety — if it was ever discovered that it had had a hand in sending that capsule-full of nanites to the humans’ world.

[Child-of-Mechengone] found that proximity to two newborn infants — even if they were officially being parented by its friend Child-of-Artist — was enough to drive most thoughts of the consequences of its earlier hasty and ill-considered actions out of its mind. Keeping two curious, hungry, energetic and completely ignorant individuals supplied with sufficient food while keeping them from causing damage to themselves or their surroundings was unexpectedly difficult, especially when those individuals had almost no ability to communicate anything beyond basic needs and emotions. Right now, it was trying to keep one of the infants from leaping out of the moving shuttle, and flashing — or even clattering — ‘No!’ was having little or no effect, requiring strong limbs to keep the energetic little thing from getting separated from its carers or injured by the fall from the shuttle or the stomping hooves of the crowd should it succeed in getting away and by chance not be injured in the process.
<Let me help you with that,> Artist flashed to Child-of-Mechengone, taking the infant from the younger person and tucking it expertly under one limb beside the other infant tucked beneath an adjacent limb. <I’ve had more practise at dealing with infants, both with my own child and with my younger siblings, and you and my child should both concentrate on being here, not on dealing with these two cute little pests,> it referred to the infants affectionately.
While Child-of-Mechengone appreciated the respite — and took note of how Artist was handling the infants — like Child-of-Sigintone, it too found that it began to dwell upon its uncertain future once more.

[Childtwo-of-Hullmonitorthree] and [childtwo-of-Resourcemanagerone] found themselves together for an extended period of time for the first time since leaving the Humans’ solar system. While the four adolescents had once been close, nearly inseparable, now, even when seated next to one-another on the spaceport shuttle bus, they hardly communicated at all aside from the usual greetings.
The captain was sitting nearby, having deliberately waited until the adolescents had boarded and then taking a seat not too far from them. It paid close attention to all five of the non-seeding adolescents with its sensory head’s eye — as far as was possible given its lower resolution — and while it was pointing its feeding head out toward the crowd, it wasn’t actually paying the crowd much attention, contrary to appearances.
As the shuttle bus arrived at the terminal and the crew disembarked the vehicle and entered the terminal building, stepping out of sight of the assembled crowd, the captain clattered a hoof quietly to get the pair’s attention. <The two of you, along with [Child-of-Sigintone] and [Child-of-Mechengone] all used to be so close,> it said. <Why is it that the four of you barely show a word to one-another any more?>
[Childtwo-of-Resourcemanagerone] responded with an answer that the four had planned long ago, <It’s quite simple… we all disagreed as to how we thought the humans should be dealt with, and we ended up arguing all the time whenever we got together. So… we decided not to talk at all.> It wasn’t actually all that far from the truth.
<I understand,> the captain said. <The four of you need to resolve your differences. Your estrangement is affecting the well-being of you all, and others too.> The captain paused, but before either youngster could respond, continued, <I think that the four of you should come to the conference when it begins in a few days. It would do you good to see some expert and leadership opinions.>

[child-of-Sigintone] ventured out of the luxurious parkland accommodation that the crew was using after a day of rest. It knew of cities only from recordings and books that had been brought on the voyage, and was finding the reality unexpectedly overwhelming. Even in the parkland, outside the gated accommodation, there were many more people visible than it had ever known on the whole ship. Contrary to its expectations, while it did see people meeting and copulating in the park, copulation didn’t seem as frequent somehow as had been the case on the ship. The people it saw were different to most of the ship’s crew too, aside from [Ancient One], with limbs much thicker and stronger than those of most of the ship’s crew and their children. Only [Ancient One], with its limbs so bulging with muscles that they were almost as thick as the limbs of a human, looked any stronger. [child-of-Sigintone] wondered why so many of the city folk were so muscular. It certainly had no difficulty moving around or lifting things, so it was not a difference in gravity between the surface and the ship that was the explanation.
[child-of-Sigintone] also found that — at least at first — the city people were more sexually selective than the ship’s crew had been. When it had approached strangers and made the initial signals to begin copulation, those strangers had peered at it critically with their feeding heads, and either made a casual gesture of dismissal, or — enlighteningly — commented that it should go to the gym before approaching anyone else, that the space-person look was no longer fashionable, and in bad taste given that there were real spacepersons newly arrived from their voyage of discovery.
When [child-of-Sigintone] had eventually remarked that it was a spaceperson, and had been born on the ship, the locals’ disinterest switched abruptly to extreme interest, and its prior involuntary celibacy changed almost immediately to being surrounded by locals who wanted to copulate, to the point where it felt overwhelmed by all the attention, and had to flee back to the gated accommodation where the gate attendants turned away those with no business there.