Beneath the Rings of Rabba on the Curated Worlds

A short story

From altitude, the juggat appeared to be a weathered, worn stump. Some ancient tree, a sapling planted at the beginning of time, had stretched to touch the sky, whereupon a god had cut it down, the stump of the slaughtered giant petrifying over eons.

Great colonies of fungiform fanned out on the northern side, some of the fans huge enough to hollow out for a barracks pod. It was everything Ironsoula wanted. Caressing it with her eyes, she told the lift to hover low for a wet landing where the slow and winding Tiamat cut closest to it. Perhaps the current was strong, or perhaps toothsome predators waited in the muck, but so much the better. After all, was longwalk in your own skin even worthawhile if Death did not walkaside, your companion?

“It is your funeral,” the lift replied. The machine swooped low to make a fast stop, rotorjets blowing the brown water white.

“Get a new joke,” Ironsoula responded, completing the traditional ritual. “Altitude ten meters, hold position. Open the door.”

The lift hovered at ten meters and dutifully opened the release door.

“Return to post after jump.” Ironsoula took the swing bar in her hands and swung out from the opened craft, diving with a whoop, for she was a happy war child with half a hope to meet danger in the water.

Receding at speed, the lift had already reported her arrival, forgotten her, was already forgotten by Ironsoula before she struck the surface of the Tiamat.

Ironsoula dove neatly into the middle of the channel. Upon contact with the water, the distributed nervous system in her skin coordinated a metamorphosis, so that she was already powering through the water with great flippers on her feet and webbed hands as she returned to shallower depth.

Scanning the deep, her sensor net discerned a healthy amount of muddy bottom, riverbank grasses, and swimming fauna, all of it scattering away from the great noise that the lift, and then her splash, had made in the water. Anything that might have been attracted to any other swimmer would be repelled by the scent that her skin left in the water and the poisonous glow that shifted over the surface of her skin. Wrestling with fangsnappers was all fun and games until they swallowed you whole.

Swimming with the current and using a bit of reserve oxygen, she reached the river shore without breaching the surface and stepped out onto dry land, the skin on her feet hardening, resuming a shape that was more conducive to walking upright.

Upright walking was her birthright as a daughter of the humanitinuum. Ironsoula was descended from a primate species that had evolved to stand upright millions of years ago. That world, now lost, had been mostly like Wustvergen, the sphere on which she now strode and where she had adapted to maturity. To walk upright was to see farther, traverse greater distances, and find new resources. Surviving, thriving, and evolving on the Protosphere had produced a species now lost to the universe from which the entire humanitinuum had spread across the galaxy.

Ironsoula removed the hatchet from the thigh holster of her skin and set straight to work collecting firebush. She cut and gathered the dead wood, half-conscious of her network counting the landsbeasterie, for a full four percent of the daylong, clearing a campsite and ringing it with a protective thorny bramblewall.

After ten minues, a large runnermom bellowed warning at Ironsoula. A grandmother. The beastie kept a respectful distance as her cortege passed behind in strings, each led and followed by females, with dominant males in pecking order, each leading their children close behind in the same sequence. Nature’s hierarchy on a world of ovipositors: this was very different from the Protosphere, where small gametes had played the dominant selection role in evolution.

Of the six Curated Worlds under Rabba, Wustvergen was the only living planet when the humanitinuum had arrived. It was also unique in the galaxy for precisely this reason, that large, immobile gametes could store more energy for the first growth stage of any life-cycle. Smaller gametes could flail to death, use up all their energy by the millions, to find and fuse with their larger, slower, less numerous opposites, transmitting genes. On Wustvergen, however, chance and unique galactic geography had conspired to assign the gestation of those large, fertilized gametes to the hosts of the smaller gametes. The males.

Evolution was therefore very slow on Wustvergen, and the planetary ecology replete with species that had direct ancestors in very distant time. Preventing the usual devastation of impact when the biomes of the humanitinuum arrived on strange worlds had been a key achievement of the First Mothers, therefore the adaptation to this world had also been very slow, 33,000 standard years according to tradition.

Ironsoula opened her visor hood and kept eye contact with the runnermom. They were not aggressive, preferring flight to fight. Rammers, on the other hand, were prone to butt heads with intruders until their faces were red with blood. (Not for nothing was the Legion called “Red Rammers.”) Ironsoula’s network had picked out a half-dozen pairs of rammers, here and there in the sea of runnermoms, but none came close to her. Everything alive on the open range avoided her.

The grandmother runnermom moved on with a final low warning to stay away from her family.

When the work was finished, Ironsoula opened her visor to let the Wustvergen air touch her face at last. The network in her skin blinked yellow, then red as she pulled her mask down. Encounter protocols were a habit of her training on other curated worlds, whereas this world was her natal home. Wustvergen’s atmosphere was a little thicker than the Protosphere’s, but not poisonously different. Ironsoula drew in a big breath of familiar, fresh air and let it out, enjoyed the sensation of wind on her face so much that she pulled the entire hood back to let the breeze blow across her entire head.

Being a mammal, she had hair. The “skin” of her natal flesh grew much of it, including substantial head hair, in the absence of an encounter skin like the one she wore. Thus the hairs on her head were soft, short, downy, and pale, the aesthetic of the Legionary, as she retracted the hood to enjoy the sensation of air and sunlight contacting her face again.

Her face was ruddy, a shade lighter than the muddy riverbank clay. Her jaw was squarish and strong, her eyes an emerald green, her nasal prominence broad. Any member of the ancient, lost tribe that evolved on the Protosphere would have recognized Ironsoula as both humanitinuous and female, though some measure of the uncanny would perhaps cause them a bit of fright; fanciful tales of Protospherians rediscovered, to terrify their descendants or be terrified by them, was a common story trope across the galaxy. Faceflesh encounters between near-star cousins had sometimes gone badly in the history of the humanitinuum when aesthetics clashed, so that one world’s angels looked like another world’s demons.

Ironsoula waded into the river, dumping the excess heat from her labors. She caught a great fish with her kit using a a vorworm for bait. The hapless swimmer she caught was an edible species. A sample.

Slicing the fish open with her knife, Ironsoula bit into the flesh, tasting a life of cool, muddy darkness. Her machinery detected no poisons, allergens, or contaminants. Setting fire to her bundled brush, she cooked the fish and gathered another bundle of kindling. When the fish was quite done, Ironsoula carved each bit of flesh from the fish-skin with her knife, consuming the whole except the head, throwing the skin and head into the water with traditional thanks to the Tiamat. It would be gone in moments, consumed by snapping things.

She resumed making bundles of brush, weaving cord from dry grass to tie them.

Her survey had catalogued hundreds of species in those hours, for the land was bustling with late summer life. A gossamer-winged insect flew close by; the sensors in her skin recorded it, identified the species, and informed her brain of the results. Ironsoula watched the rainbow-winged creature inject her eggs into a hapless male with one tiny flick of an ovipositor. She was the size of Ironsoula’s hand, while the newly-pregnant male was no bigger than a thumb. He lit away with an angry buzz, zipping right past Ironsoula’s ear, complaining of the violation. In two days he would burrow into the fecund soil and then die. His corpse would be the first meal for his ravenous children.

The juggat loomed all day as she worked. Ironsoula tried not to stare at it, patient in her preparation.

You were supposed to bring just what you had made yourself, or what had been gifted to you: that was the first rule of walkalong. She had crafted both axe and knife from titanium, bound the handles in cord that she wove by hand. The encounter skin was printed, of course, but wearing one for just an hour made it uniquely one’s own. Her back pouch held one hundred and fifty meters of handmade cord that she had woven from soft winter fungfiber stalks and a bag of salt. (She had not made the salt herself on the Midbight, sure, but no one considered that cheating.)

The planet’s days were forty-seven point-seven standard hours, one orbit of Wustvergen around Rabba. Ironsoula had timed her arrival in mid-afternoon. It took until sundown to clear a circle and set up her camp and her fire. The fish passed through her hungry gut quickly. Before darkness fell, she killed and slaughtered an elder rammer, smoked the shoulders before a zillion little flying things could take them, stretched the hide onto a frame she had made and scraped it clean. This, she let the little winged things have, for they would clean the last little bits of bloody flesh off within hours, and then the pelt would cure in the morning sun.

The duel was glorious.

Summoning her last aggressive force, the great elder rammer hoofed the ground in response to Ironsoula’s grunted challenges.

Sealed inside her skin, Ironsoula extended the shaft of the knife into a spear with a cold snick and repeated the challenge.

Most rammers would only feint a charge, but the very young and very old were the most aggressive. This one had seen her share of battles, by the look of her horn.

“Welcome friend. Tired of life yet?” Ironsoula wondered. “Your last walkabout, maybe. I have what you want.”

Confused, the poor thing was likely smellsick and left behind by her family string. But the animal was still patient in its approach, wary of being goaded into a false move. A young one would have already charged.

Ironsoula checked her shadow, stepped to her right, grunted again from the vocalizers in her encounter skin. She circled the rammer to have her shadow on her left, closing the distance until the creature was between three and four strides away from her. Stepping to her right had the desired effect of causing the animal to turn its head to follow her.

Now her skin pulsed with colorful light.

When the rammer finally charged, it saw only her shadow. Ironsoula sidestepped the charge and drove the spear through its heart with both hands. The great mother beast struggled once to stay on her feet and then collapsed, mercifully dying after just one long, snorting exhalation.

Trembling, Ironsoula remembered to apply its blood to the cheeks of her encounter skin so that the gods of the hunt would recognize the victory and accept the animal’s soul.

There was only time to cook the shoulders. Once she had flayed the pelt off, Ironsoula took the remaining corpse of the animal and gave it to the Tiamat. Electromotors and skeletal support in the encounter skin assisted her in lifting the carcasse and throwing it into the channel, so that it would carry away swiftly.

She made this traditional offering knee-deep, of course. Pausing to wash her arms off in the river water, she was almost surprised by the approach of a curious snapper. Almost, for she had warning from her sensor net. It was a juvenile, and seemed to sense her awareness of it, for it chose to sniff after the floating carcasse instead. Still: the day had been long enough, already.

Ironsoula ate the salted and cooked meat before sunset, savoring the flavor of a life on the Sea of Grass and Thunder. The air was filled with insects, but her skin made itself chemically uninteresting to the ones that might want to bite her. Bugbats filled the night sky with soft whispers and the river creatures skrawked with joy for the buzzing jubilee all around her. A finnix lurked outside the enclosure, curious but cautious in the tall grass, probably drawn by the smell of cooking meat. She watched the scavenging trickster in low-light mode. It vanished after a while, turning away with a silent swish of its broad, brown tail. Landsbeesterie lowed all over the plain, chewing their cud, huddled against the darkness. Ironsoula lay upon the bundled fiber bed and watched the cloudless sky.

Rabba was in his glory. Feet to the east, Ironsoula was ‘falling’ as the planet turned beneath her. Wustvergen was tidally locked to Rabba in the southeastern sky. His rings were tilted to their shiniest. Directly above her was the galactic plane. Locally, at this time of year, she could stick her left arm straight upwards, perpendicular to her body, and almost point right at the galactic center. Orbiters fanned the darkening horizon, catching the last light of Vol, the setting sun. Had she been uplinked, she could have identified them.

The trick in the wild was to get off the ground, if you could, or at least to put something between yourself and the ground. Thus the bed of grass bundles and the pelt. The enclosure kept out wildlife, including adult fangsnappers. Being near the water was safer than being near the juggat, she knew.

Ironsoula picked out forty-seven of the Hundred Brothers, objects orbiting Rabba with Wustvergen, before she tired of it, and slept.

Doublehead arrived at the edge of sleep, a phantom. Surely he was watching her this very moment, under the naked sky, for the Legion had countless eyes in orbit and in the air. “You have a ground leave to use up,” he had said, handing her the pilot key.

It was already programmed.

“Take walkabout, maybe climb about. You like to climb.” The charity and gentleness of his voice were a strong-arm suggestion being made to an unhappy protegé. Ironsoula wanted her own mission command and Doublehead was the Chief of the Company. “Ground leave” was an offer she could not refuse. A setting-aside.

Despite these misgivings, she did sleep.

Like walking, sleep was an inheritance of her evolution. Altogether, descendants of the Protosphere spent an average of one-third of their lifespans sleeping.

Her metabolism slowed. Her eyes began flicking around under her eyelids, creating sensations that her occipital lobes interpreted as dreams.

The hours passed in peaceful slumber until the millidragon roared, triggering her audio sensors. Ironsoula stood up to resume her waking duty as a Ranger, her sleeping dream already forgotten. By the time she made her feet, she knew why Doublehead had sent her here.