Another View From Outside

Some comments excerpted from an early edition of “The Lonely Galaxy® Unofficial Guide to Working with the Empire’s People”:

General

  • Augmentation is a way of life in Imperial space, and there are probably millions of different augmentations on the market. Do not rely on knowing what one of them ought to be able to do; be sure about what that one is able to do before you throw out a challenge.
  • Death: they don’t. They find it very silly that you do. Do not get into this argument.
  • Death: do not lose, bury, or incinerate that little marble. That contains their most recent backup, and you will not be popular if you make them use a cold backup instead. Treating the restored backup as a different person will also not go over well, and these people treat philosophy as a combat discipline.
  • Don’t take them to the fixed-price all-you-can-eat buffet. All those augmentations take energy, and that comes from food, and you are definitely underestimating how much all they can eat is.

    This also applies to open bars.
  • Every Imperial has a high-powered quantum computational device optimized for an information-dense society in their head. Try not to be alarmed if they accidentally decrypt all your secure networks by accident. For them, this is the equivalent of accidentally reading a sign when looking at it. It’s very difficult not to do.
  • They will be armed, which they think is something all good neighbors do. Do not attempt to take their weapons away. At best this will be taken as a personal insult, and not a reason to hurt you.

    Don’t attempt to hint at them making you uncomfortable, either, or you might be inviting a race to see just how far the definition of “sidearm” can be stretched.

    Historical evidence suggests that it’s a long damn way.

Ciseflish

  • Don’t attempt anything tricky when writing a contract with a ciseflish. Trade is their life, and they’ve seen it all. They will walk right through your own carefully-hidden loophole, then celebrate over drinks you weren’t expecting to have paid for.
  • Never, ever gamble with a ciseflish unless you’re prepared to lose everything you bring to the table. The little guys are basically magic when it comes to memory, probability, and anything else involving numbers.

Dar-Bandal

  • Don’t confuse them with their non-uplifted ancestors, the bandal. This isn’t a particularly easy mistake to make, since they’re larger, wear accessories, and talk, but it’s worth mentioning anyway since it’s also a particularly stupid mistake to make when dealing with a highly successful apex predator’s smarter cousin.
  • If you’re not convinced yet of how stupid that mistake would be to make, these were highly successful apex predators who, post-uplift, are also one of the most socially adept species in the galaxy. Two words: social predators.

    Give them enough reason to be furious, and even hitherto uncontacted species in the Ancíël Clouds will giggle when they see you walk by.

Eldrae

  • All Imperials are prickly to one degree or another about trespasses on their person, property, or reputation, but the eldrae turn this up to thirteen. Avoid playful punches, don’t try a friendly insult, and for the love of sanity, ask before you touch their stuff.
  • They often travel with companion animals, called bandal. They will expect to be able to take them everywhere, and will not be happy if this is not permitted. The bandal themselves are usually friendly, and making friends with them is often a good way to make friends with their person. On the other hand, harming them, especially the young ones, is quite definitely a good way to bring down an entirely disproportionate reaction on your head. Be nice to the puppies.
  • If you are their manager, try to remember that you’re in charge. It may be hard to do in the face of unbounded self-assurance, but they will give you whatever is in the contract.

    Don’t micromanage. You contracted them to do a job, they believe, not to listen to your uninformed opinions about their profession. Basically, whatever they’re actually doing, imagine that you’re trying to teach your high-priced corporate lawyers how to lawyer, then don’t do it.
  • If you are their manager, remember that they don’t have to give you anything that isn’t in the contract. Requests outside its scope will be treated as “asking for a favor”, with reciprocation expected, and sticking your nose into their affairs outside the job will likely result in having it chopped off.

    (Metaphorically. For a first offense.)
  • They get bored quite easily. This boredom rapidly turns into either seeking new experiences, or tinkering with things. If you find yourself assigned as minder, escort, or guide to a visiting eldrae, make sure you have a lengthy list of approved activities lest they start making their own fun.

    If they are hired to work on equipment that belongs to you, make sure that it’s clear where the boundaries lie. The resulting improvements are usually beneficial, but it’s something of a surprise to take a day off and come back to find that your corporate network’s been completely redesigned just because your on-duty sysadmin had time to have a better idea.
  • What another species might turn into a sexual harassment case, they’ll turn into a knifing.

    Honestly, we can’t find it in ourselves to criticize this much.
  • Yes, they’re incredibly smug. It’s a racial trait. You aren’t going to be the one to change this.

Esseli

  • They will probably comment on various bits of your biology that could be improved, possibly while coming uncomfortably close to your personal space. They really can’t help it, but will usually back off after one or two reminders. If only because they find people who aren’t interested in their biological Art quite boring.
  • They are every bit as good at biotechnology as they think they are, and can probably deliver on whatever improvements they suggested. However, as their current form suggests, they have a great deal of trouble understanding why anyone might prefer retaining their current appearance instead of having the six awesome new organs they just dreamt up. Caveat emptor!

Galari

  • They absolutely are as serene as they look all the time, and simply will not seem as passionate, especially angry, as you think they ought to be about things. It probably comes from not having glands.

    This having been said: the galari love and hate as strongly as any other sophont – they just don’t become overly heated about it. Do not make the assumption that they aren’t wrathful just because they aren’t yelling at you about it, lest you find yourself on the wrong end of a calm, serene, and entirely cold-blooded destruction of everything that made itself sufficiently distasteful.

Kaeth

  • Don’t accept drinks from them, or get into a drinking contest with them, unless you know that your liver is rated for what you’re getting into and/or your incarnation coverage is paid up, preferably both. Kaeth booze hits the average liver like a toxin-carcinogen-acid cocktail garnished with ground glass, and on fire.
  • Don’t steal their lunch, obviously.

    But actually, don’t stand even next to their lunch. It is almost certainly poisonous. It is probably radioactive, and may be alive. All three is not off the table.
  • If a kaeth has a companion animal, it is quite likely to be an extremely dangerous large carnivore. Do not attempt to pet, feed, or stand close to Mister Snugglescales without checking first.

    If said companion animal appears to be small, cute, adorable, or harmless, the odds are good that it’s even worse than that.
  • The full-contact body-check is just how they say hello. They are doing their best to keep it turned down around all the squishies, and request your forgiveness for any accidents that may occur.

Summary

No, you can’t take ’em.

Trope-a-Day: Eldritch Starship

Eldritch Starship: Oh, there are a few.

Take esseli starships, for example. Unlike the link!n-Rechesh (who would be another fine example), they know better than to try to grow fully organic starships, so from outside the hulls and drives look relatively normal. Then you go through the airlock, and it’s all flesh, all the time, with heart-valve doors, neuron-cluster control interfaces, food-secreting glands, recycling intestines, and suspicious organic gurgles everywhere. Mining ships have refinery stomachs and tentacles.

Múrast starships are carved out of ice bodies, with the necessary technology fitted within, and then refrozen. Which is all very sensible when you consider their favored environment, but doesn’t explain why they always carve them into baroque cathedral-like structures rather than anything more utilitarian.

And then there are the seb!nt!at, who as creatures of nuclear forces that dwell deep within stars, do not build their starships out of matter in any conventional sense.

Starfish Aliens build Starfish Starships, basically, just as far as physics will allow.

The tortured structures built by rogue mining drones and other wild mechanicals are about as Gigeresque as it gets, though.

 

 

Trope-a-Day: Bizarre Alien Reproduction

Bizarre Alien Reproduction: …are you sure you really want to know?

Well, first, if it’s done on Earth, by anyone, it’s probably used somewhere. Mere external fertilization, et. al., is relatively mundane. The temísi, say, are quite straightforwardly parthenogenic. For exotic – well, then we’re getting into how the vlcefc reproduce by having their motiles spin a new brain-web, something that any number from one up can do together. Or the esseli literally building the next generation in their gene-labs. Or the codramaju simply coming together as X individuals and coming apart as X+n individuals, any of whom may contain various different bits of the minds of the original X. Or…

And that’s before people come up with clever ideas like bigenetic organisms, in which – say, a plant and insect are mutually engineered so that the plant can grow insect eggs and the insect lay plant seeds, thus enabling them to mutually spread each other in early-stage ecopoesis, and contribute to a more stable ecological web overall.

Trope-a-Day: Bizarre Alien Locomotion

Bizarre Alien Locomotion: In many variants on the standard walking, flying, and swimming, certainly. Eliéra’s bluelife includes its tubefish, for example, which move via peristaltic pumping of water, not swimming as we know it.

Among sophont races, the chfssssc swim through solid rock thanks to what one might call an active metabolism, the ciamél turn into vapor in order to move, the codramaju ooze along on pseudopodia, the d!grith brachiate along artificial vines, the esseli use whatever locomotive organs they happen to have today, the galari have built in maglev functionality, the kaliatar can coil themselves up and roll like a mythological hoopsnake, the seb!nt!at may well be there already, the vlcefc are webs carried by their motile castes, and that’s just scratching the surface…

Trope-a-Day: Biodata

Biodata: Something common among the esseli, the eldrae who colonized Kythera (Thirteen Colonies), the mezuar, and other wearers of the masters-of-biotechnology hat, with particular note to the Kytherans’ cortextures, immense computers grown from cultured neural tissue, and the Genetic Memory of the esseli, which both is and has been turned into a general-purpose technology for encoding arbitrary data onto DNA plasmids.

Plus, of course, the identifying, copyright, and GRM information encoded into virtually any product of biotechnology…

Trope-a-Day: Drink Order

Drink Order: It’s always hard to give solid answers when it comes to these things, but maybe we can have some generalities.

The most common (non-alcoholic) drink on Eliéra is esklav, from the bean of Esklavea sendaren, a shrub with no exact Terran analog. It’s close to coffee but not quite so harshly bitter, with hints of cinnamon and chocolate in its flavor. Served traditionally in small cups (or diluted in large mugs) with brown sugar, cacao chocolate, and cream. And contains both caffeine and theobromine, along with a number of other alkaloids of similar chemical structure. People drink a lot of this. It’s what keeps the world working.

Also popular in various regions:

On the Cestian continent, cider (of a variety of varieties) is most popular, followed up by mead and beer, the latter especially in the Alatian port-towns. Selenaria started out mostly wine-drinking and has excellent vineyards to the south and along the foothills of the volcanic Makerforges, but beer made rapid inroads during the Era of Steam and Steel, as more compatible with operating heavy machinery after lunch. Currently they’re big beer producers because they’re also big grain producers.

North of there, in Veranthyr, cider is the day-to-day drink, but they make a variety of liquors from fruits of all sorts which are classically deceptive. Taste sweet, and harmless, and delicious, and moreish. And then you fall over.

Up in the Silver Crescent, they drink strong black beers, mead in the lowlands, and whisky, varying from whisky smooth as golden nectar to rough firewhisky best drunk with a dollop of the local honey mixed in unless you enjoy having the lining stripped off your throat and sinuses.

The beer tends to come from microbreweries. It’s not that there aren’t large breweries, but those tend to be microbreweries-in-spirit, the sort of places that we might call minibreweries, because (a) it is hard to scale beer production without losing experimentalism, quirkiness, and the attention to detail that stops it from turning into rat piss, and (b) it is even harder to convince people that you can brew non-rat-piss beer on a large scale.

Taking a brief look at some other species, dar-bandal favor beer almost universally, typically heavy stouts and porters with the yeast unfiltered – and don’t forget to lap it up, it improves the bouquet. Anything kaeth particularly enjoy drinking is certainly flammable and probably radioactive, so use caution. And ciseflish drinks are served around 80 K, so warm-blooded oxygen-breathers need not apply.

Esseli drinks are always innovative and delicious, but unless you’re accustomed to and comfortable with biotechnology, do not ask what they were secreted by.

 

Trope-a-Day: The Unpronounceable

(Sorry for the delays in the next part of Darkness Within, folks – having some trouble getting it to gel in my head.)

The Unpronounceable: Quite a few, due to all those species that don’t use spoken language the way we understand it: as mentioned previously, esseli names are DNS strands, myneni names are made of sounds only a synthesizer could love, galari names are modulated EM radiation, and then there are the sonar pings, electrical waveforms, patterns of bioluminescence, complex aromatic chemicals, neural-gestalt-expressed qualia which are very, very hard to parse for anyone of different brain design, etc.  All of that is before you get to the really simple problems like different larynx designs.

It is somewhat averted due to the Eldraeic language being designed as a lingua franca, and thus possessing multiple different phonologies for its alphabet, including several designed for different ways of speaking, including sonar, bioluminescence, EM codes and DNA encoding, so in theory it should be possible to transliterate names encoded in those ways into something pronounceable and adequately unique, even if it doesn’t resemble the original all that much to the ear or other organ.

In practice, not so much, or not without your speech organ hurting, or not in a manner that’s agreeable to the person named.  But you can try, at least.

Appearances Matter

Gabriel Fonseca asks if there’s anywhere that contains detailed physical descriptions of the various species of the Eldraeverse. Well, sadly, there isn’t right now, but for your visualizing pleasure, here’s some descriptions of most of the ones I’ve mentioned recently, anyway:

Ciseflish

In their home environment, the ciseflish superficially resemble the Terran mole in shape (approximately), specifically the star-nosed mole; that said, they’re six-limbed amphibians, who switch between hexapedal and bipedal locomotion at will (the former for speed, the latter for sociability), with breathing vents/gills (they work either way) located at the base of the throat, large sensitive eyes to handle low light levels, auditory tympana rather than ears, and tentacle-like chemosensory “nasal” protrusions that also serve as tasting organs. They’re about 4′ tall, and covered in short, downy fur, ranging in color from pale cream to dark, earthy brown. Oh, and they’re trisexual; the dominant ‘matriarch’ sex is somewhat larger than the other two.

But none of this is visible for the majority of people who meet them elsewhere, because the ciseflish are from Ólish (High Verge), a cold world with more in common with our outer-system moons than with Earth. They’re amphibians in oceans of liquid propane and other hydrocarbons, breathe a thick, cold, high-pressure atmosphere that’s heavy in ammonia – and as such that fur has a lot more in common with hydrocarbon polymer plastics than keratin – find free oxygen acutely toxic, oxygen-breather temperatures furnace-like, and as such are generally only seen off Ólish or their colonies through heavy, pressurized, refrigerated environment suits.

Despite the inconvenience, though, there’re quite a lot of them offworld, because they really, really love money and trade.

Codramaju

The codramaju are weird as hell.

The closest thing we have for comparison is the slime mold. Only a codramaju is a 6′ long (typical adult not multitasking right now), bright ocher, motile slime mold with various pseudopodia and temporary organelles attached. And the best part is, that’s not even the weirdest thing about them: that would be that personal identity is extremely fluid among the codramaju, who happily divide and recombine (including with bits of other codramaju), changing identity along the way. They can form temporary group minds by joining together, which they use for high-grade computation. That’s also how codramaju reproduction works; the combining of lots of bits contributed by many codramaju. And their speech is entirely chemical – either by direct merging close up, or by releasing spores at a distance (hope you bought that option for your translator).

They make a great example of exactly how little “warm-‘blooded’ oxygen-breather” means in practice, in terms of commonality.

D!grith

The d!grith, by contrast, are relatively conventional warm-blooded oxygen-breathers: they look something like small tailless apes with canine muzzles and cat ears, with all four arms having essentially identical “hands”. Dark-skinned, they have fur in winter or perpetually cold environments, but not the rest of the time. Natural brachiators, they found the microgravity environment quite congenial, which contributed to their painless interstellar expansion and large merchant marine.

Dar-bandal

Uplifted bandal, which is to say dogs. Bearing in mind that the bandal is already larger (due to some dire wolf ancestry as well as regular canis lupus) and higher-foreheaded (due to consistent breeding for smart) than the Earth dog, their uplifted cousins are even more so: imagine a human-sized Aussie, and you’re in the ballpark. Their forepaws are modified for greater manipulatory ability, but unlike, say, Traveller’s Vargr, they’re still quadrupeds. The uplift engineers at Family of Species, ICC, have no interest in turning every species they get their hands on into imitation monkeys.

(Not that they’d put it that way, since there aren’t actually any members of the ecology Terrageneae, order Primates anywhere in the Associated Worlds, with one heavily-engineered exception, but it comes to the same thing.)

Dar-célmek

The dar-célmek are uplifted rats, descended at a few removes from the local cousins of the brown rat (rattus norvegicus) – or, to be more precise, they’re rat kings, because rats are already remarkably smart for their size, and while they were able to engineer them to be partially-uplifted smart rats, there just wasn’t enough mass/volume available to push them all the way to sophoncy.

Not to be thwarted, then, the uplift engineers cyborged them using nanocyte technology (i.e., grows naturally, and is hereditary); a dar-célmek is a gestalt sophont composed of one mind spread across 12 to 48 rats. The individual members look like thin rats with opposable thumbs on their paws, metallic threads running along their tails (the antenna for their wireless gestalt link), and infrared lenses next to their eyes. They can’t speak naturally, but can communicate over the network, and in any case, most of them have a few members wearing a modified ring imager as a collar of sorts to let them project sound and image when they need to.

Eldrae

The eldrae, being that aforementioned heavily-engineered exception (and that’s the baseline species, I mean, not counting any of the engineering they’ve done to themselves since), are hominins. Or to put it the other way around, humans to such extent as they are known (from a few very old fragmented fossils recovered from Precursor uplift facility waste dumps) are Pseudoeldrae archaea on their taxonomic charts.

Granted, they’re hominins engineered to the point where they use amino acids we don’t and bleed indigo, but the gross physical morphology is close. They’re just very tall (6′ 8″ to 7′ 8″ average, both sexes), thin (160-240 lbs., with narrow hips, long limbs, and long fingers and toes), pale (copper to pale blue due to an immune system that basically obviates eumelanin), with pointy ears, angular facial features, a selection of psychological differences, and, oh yes, a remarkable tendency not to age and die.

Of course, the big problem for us is that they’ve been optimizing themselves for literally millennia at this point, so from a human point of view, its only those eldritch differences that stand between us and being punched hard in the superstimulus. Which would be problematic.

Esseli

No-one remembers what natural esseli used to look like, or at least if the esseli genetic memory still has it stored somewhere, no-one’s talking.

What they look like now, on the other hand…

Well, nominally, they look like big fleshy blobs with eyes and tentacles, which is the brain, a protective wrapping around the brain, and its sensors/manipulators. But, you see, they got that way by being master biotechnologists, and over the course of centuries have both stripped their physical form down to a minimum, and also then built it back up again by inventing whole suites of modular plug-in organs and symbiotic bodies they can put on and take off like other people change their pants. An esseli can look like anything, depending on what it’s doing at the time and how its personal taste runs – even more so than the people who have to rely on mere mindcasting to swap bodies.

The esseli are also notable in that the form of genetic storage and the form of memetic storage they use are identical: it’s all DNA. Thus, while esseli are entirely capable of conventional speech (in any number of modes, depending on which organs they have installed right now), when they want to convey lots of information, they just pass appropriate plasmids around.

In the esseli educational system, you literally drink knowledge.

Galari

It came as something as a surprise to (exo-)biologists that the first species they met was about as silicon-based as it could be, being a race of living crystals.

It turns out, of course, that that’s not exactly true. They’re carbon-silicon hybrids: the galari crystals live in symbiosis with wet carbon-based pseudonanoviruses which reshape the crystals. Over time, this mutually evolved to the point where the crystals, with their silicon-based intelligence, directed the viruses and the viruses reshaped the crystals.

So, the actual sophont galari are, at least the ones who travel, rounded roughly-tetrahedral crystal spindles, somewhere between 2′ and 6′ along their long axis, and come in a variety of gem-like colors; looking carefully at them, one can often see faint pulses of light as a byproduct of their cognitive processes. They don’t require much in the way of nutrition for material replenishment, as a rule; rather, they’re ergovores, soaking up and storing charge derived from the light of their homeworld’s hot, bright sun, or from a convenient broad-spectrum EM lamp. They communicate using bioradio.

In their natural state, they were sessile, leading to their immensely patient, philosophical, contemplative culture. The technological galari, however, invented vector control-based “effector belts”, enabling the smaller members of the species to move around and participate in galactic culture.

Kaeth

The kaeth are draconiform, or pseudosaurian if you prefer, 6-7′ tall bipeds. You could think of them as looking something like 4th ed. AD&D’s dragonborn, except the back is more humped, the eyes more widely set, and the legs digitigrade. Kaeth blood gleams like mercury, and their skin, or rather scale, tones are dietary-dependent variants on a dark gray-silver, both of which have to do with just how rich Paltraeth (their homeworld) is in various heavy metals, which their biology makes good use of – kaeth bones are strong as girders, and kaeth skin is basically naturally-grown double-lapped composite scale mail. (A typical kaeth masses something upwards of 400 lbs.) On top of all of that, kaeth evolution has provided them with natural weapons in the form of fang and claw, redundant, highly distributed organ systems, fast healing, and strong immunities, which should tell you something about just what a happy fun place Paltraeth was to evolve.

At least before the asteroid strike.

Kalatri

See previous post.

Lanect

The lanect are a warm-blooded, fleshy (i.e., so not classically insectoid) race whose bodies are nonetheless contained within a bony (not chitinous) segmented exoskeleton; they’re bilaterally symmetrical bipeds with four manipulating arms, with four-clawed hands, and recessed multifaceted eyes. The exoskeleton of worker-caste lanect is smooth, scars aside; those who claim the status of a Warmark in lanect society carve designs into their skull to signify this.

Of course, that’s the baseline lanect – given the vicious meritocracy that comprises lanect society, they do not hesitate to apply genetic, surgical, and (especially) cybernetic modifications to themselves using any technology they can buy or steal in the interest of greater personal success.

Linobir

Imagine a bear.

Now imagine it hexapedal, hermaphroditic, furless – with grayish, leathery skin – and bulging with the kind of muscles befitting a species that evolved on a planet with three times Earth’s gravity.

Now imagine it being possessed of a baseline temperament that makes an actual grizzly bear seem the sweetest, politest, calmest, most peaceful person you know.

That’s a linobir.

(There’s a reason their racial stereotype is “brute squad”. This hurtful stereotyping is often protested, exclusively by people who’ve never actually met one.)

Mezuar

The mezuar are purplish-blue trees, wood and leaf, and entirely sessile. Specifically, an individual mezuar is a grove of said trees, due to the requirements of sophoncy on a relatively low-energy plant metabolism (their roots grow together and intermesh their “nervous systems”). They thrive very well on their homeworld, the mezuar forests having successfully domesticated virtually the entire animal ecology of the planet to attend to their requirements.

Myneni

The myneni are a blob of nanomachines in a bag.

Well, yes, so is just about everything living. Unlike most species, however, the myneni are a blob of undifferentiated, general purpose nanomachines inside their integument, with no dedicated organs (if they need some sort of specialized organ or sensor, they whip one up on demand and dissolve it when they’re done). Not having any skeleton, their natural shape is a spheroidal blob with a slightly flattened base, but they can manipulate their internal plasm to take on any variant shape from a puddle to a tree, and generate limbs at will. They come in a wide variety of colors, but these don’t appear to have any particular significance, biological or cultural.

Nsang

The nsang are bullet-bodied and headless (their “eyes”, actually light-sensitive skin cells, cover all sides of their upper body), trilaterally symmetrical with long, folding arms and legs, the former tipped with three-fingered hands. A beak-like mouth is to be found between each arm-leg pair.

…this actually makes them pretty average by warm-blooded oxygen-breather standards.

Seforn

The seforn are quadrupeds, with gleaming, jewel-like skin (contains no actual jewels, much to the disappointment of people who have obtained seforn moltings), who possess a mouth and trinocular eyes in a partially-merged head at one body terminus, while.respiring through slit-like openings along the sides of their body. A ridge crest runs down the seforn back, thought to be an evolutionary leftover originally intended for thermoregulation. Monosexual and parthenogenic, they depend on an in-built process of gene-shuffling to produce genetic variation.

Even the poorest seforn will always be well-dressed. Denying a seforn access to the seforn equivalent of a quality business suit invariably causes them intense psychological distress, much to the puzzlement of sophontologists everywhere.

Skrandar

Well, no-one’s exactly sure quite what the skrandar looked like, since they weren’t exactly communicative even before they blew up their sun, and there wasn’t a whole lot of evidence left afterwards. From what there is, it is generally believed that they looked something like a cross between an alligator and a migraine.

Trope-a-Day: Proud Scholar Race Guy

Proud Scholar Race Guy: The eldrae might well wear this hat among the Imperials – after all, they do love knowledge – had they not run into the galari, who, in the closest thing to a hat that I intend to appear, are entirely qualified as Proud Scholar Race… ah, Crystals.  Subverted a little inasmuch as they aren’t the typical strict enlightened pacifists, but just rather more inclined to abstraction and academic debate over action than was strictly good for them.  (One reason why they eventually joined up with Imperial society “for the dynamism” was that the creole society that had grown up around the misdirected colony expedition that found Galáré was proving both energetic and appealing… and would save arguing the issue for another century or two.)  Once again, same disclaimer: lots of non-scholars around to make society complete.

Other examples might include the esseli, who play it straight with regard to their biological tinkering, if nothing else, and the mezuar, who being sessile get to spend a lot of time thinking…

Trope-a-Day: Meat Moss

Meat Moss: A characteristic of the esseli homeworld, and more specifically their cities, starships, and other facilities.

Kind of similar to the way Star Control portrays it, actually.

Kind of similar to the way Star Control portrays it, actually.

See, the esseli are biotech wizards and use it for just about everything they can – although there are many things for which it doesn’t work so well, which is why their ships are cyborgs – a rich, meaty center inside a nice, solid neosteel hull and regular mechanical fusion torch. As such, most of their machinery, their buildings, etc., are essentially organs of one kind or another. (Or several kinds. Check out the heart-valve door in the pic, for example.)

The meat moss, unlike the trope suggests for most of it, does have a purpose, though. It’s the large-scale biotech equivalent of utility tunnels, taking care of distributing raw and processed materials to organs that need them, removing waste, and passing command-and-control signals around – which is to say, it’s a giant plug-in circulatory system and nervous system – complete with interface nodes both sensory and plug-your-exposed-nerve-organ-in-here – laid out on the ground and wrapped in skin.

(As for how it sustains itself? The volatile-digestion organs for ice asteroids and the odd carbonaceous chondrite are over there , the photosynthetic layers are over here, and that odd-looking wind tower yonder is a lung the size of the Empire State building.)

Trope-a-Day: Human Subspecies

Human Subspecies: Okay, no, since there are no humans.  (Or, at least, none worth speaking of.)  However, once the genetic engineers really got working, there are literally thousands of eldrae subspecies, galari subspecies, myneni subspecies, kaeth subspecies, esseli subspecies – although, with the esseli, it’s proceeded almost to the point that each individual is his very own species – and so on and so forth.  People adapted to space, to alien planets, to some social ideal, to live underwater, to stand up under high gravity, to photosynthesize, to reproduce parthenogenically, to fly with their own set of wings, to breathe different atmospheres, to dwell in solar coronas, to… well, it’s a really long list.

Trope-a-Day: Genetic Memory

Genetic Memory: Exists naturally in a few places, of course. That terrestrial biology, et. al., happens to use different storage mechanisms for genetic and memetic information is purely a local quirk, not a law of nature.

But better known is that those wacky bioengineers, the esseli (remember them?) have invented ways of encoding memory information into plasmids, and organs to produce and read them.  So, have those built in or, um, retrofitted, and you too can pass your genetic memories around – and, indeed, to your offspring if you think to have them equipped with the same organs.

But they haven’t made it naturally heritable, yet.

Trope-a-Day: Five Races

Five Races: Not terribly true for the Eldraeverse; for one thing, there’s a lot more than five species out there.  A lot more.  But let’s look at some archetypes, here:

Stout (Dwarf): One of the few that does have an obvious candidate, the pseudosaurian kaeth, whose physical strength and resilience, militaristic philosophies, and rather, um, kinesthetic way of life fit the bill to a T.  (The deeply spiritual and artistic aspects of their culture don’t, so much, but never mind those.)  They also wear the Proud Warrior Race hat, or one of them – it’s not like there’s a galactic shortage of Proud Warrior Races, after all.

Fairy (The Fair Folk): The most likely candidates for this hat are the various elder races (i.e., the Precursors that are still, to some degree, around), which by and large are alien and incomprehensible and to be kept out of the way of at all times.

It could also be argued that the Imperials wear this hat, but honestly, I think they’re more High Men.  But if not, the galari (ancient – even by the standards of the Empire – and immortal sophont rocks) are actually a much better fit than the eldrae in terms of being ancient, wise and benevolent, and – as Imperials – Sufficiently Advanced by many standards.

Mundane (Human): Everyone wears this hat, or, at least, something within delta of everyone. After all, even if it doesn’t look that way from the news, or the plots, the majority of species within the Associated Worlds are, by and large, regular folks just trying to get along, earn a living, make a little difference and have a little fun.  The ones actively engaging in war (or other, ahem, dynamic ideological praxis), galactopolitics, galaxy-spanning plots and schemes, uplifting programs, radical transsophontism, even madder science, personal apotheosis, computational theogeny, or applied theological engineering are the distinct minority, even if they do get more press.

High Men (Taller Elf or Human): This is where I would put the eldrae on the grounds of (a) transsophontism, and (b) literary inevitability.

Cute: Possible candidates here include the myneni – silicate-based shapechanging blobs, who can invent new organs on the fly, directly interface with computers, and construct all manner of useful things with their own secretions.

The esseli, who despite an extensive history of bioengineering themselves to the point that no-one, even themselves, actually remembers what they originally looked like (they’re currently brain-filled fleshy ovoids with short manipulating tentacles – for the most part) nonetheless manage to appear as cute.  Treating them as just cute would be a really bad idea, given that they’re an entire species of mad biologists, who are even as you speak contemplating how to better engineer your organs, but hey, it’s a mistake you’re only likely to make once.

And the dar-bandal, who are canine uplifts, who inherit this just because we’re prone to think of the furry as the cute, right?  Some people find out the hard way that condescending to someone descended from wolves by way of bred-for-brains dog-pluses is a good way to get said condescension bitten right off.  The rest have found one who’s more than willing to give you a big goofy grin and the winsome puppy eyes while taking you for everything you’ve got. Truly, their social-fu is strong.

Trope-a-Day: Evilutionary Biologist

Evilutionary Biologist: It might seem, at first, that there a whole lot of these (and, indeed, that the esseli are an entire species of Evilutionary Biologists).  Unfortunately for those who fancy this sort of thing, the average bioengineer is of the opinion that evolution is a hopelessly inefficient optimization process that, while it often throws up interesting traits, very often does not optimize for what the customer wants.  As such, in a world of sophont beings who can, with a little prompting, put some decent parameters around what they want, a competent designer can beat evolution quite substantially more than nine times out of ten.

Now, the bioengineers may have the attitude and some of the more scientifically valid methods down pat, but while they may not match 21st-century Earth notions of bioethics – and the Monument to the Martyrs of Science is quite large – local ethical standards are firmly in place.  (See the relevant sections of Blue and Orange Morality.)

Trope-a-Day: Starfish Language

Starfish Language: Oh, plenty of them.  Esseli native language, for example, is encoded on RNA strands (although fortunately they can and are more than willing to add extra speech organs as required).  Mirilasté language is also notable for using sequences of musical notes as its “phonemes”, and volume and tempo are as linguistically significant as pitch.  Seb!nt!at and various other solar clades, along with the galari‘s techlepathy, tend to use dialects designed to be transmitted electromagnetically and which translate very poorly into audio.  The qucequql and thegas-giant dwelling sssc!haaaouú use bioluminescence and chromatophores to display changing bands and patterns of color as a form of “speech”.  The mezuar communicate chemically, but primarily communicate through direct neural linkage where their roots and branches grow together.  Myneni communication has both a chemical dialect and one based on a very flexible chime-and-whistle audio generation that most more conventional larynxes can’t manage.  (And the uplifted dogs, of course, retain a certain facility for scent-based communication.)  The nsang communicate principally by writing with spinneret material, in two-dimensional ideograms, augmented by gestures for simple or immediate concepts.

Of course, that’s just the first layer.  Once we get into the difficulties of coping with higher-level grammatical quirks of the language: galari is structured like hypertext; digisapience communication is often discrete heavily-internally structured concept formats designed for packet transmission as high-speed data pulses (“here, have a wiki-database of my communication”); the múrast and embatil, as collegiate intelligences, throw out the tree-structure of most languages in exchange for matrix-hashes – and the mirilasté, curiously enough, use something more like a stack – seb!nt!at is a quantum language, in which it’s possible to tell three stories at once and then collapse the meaning at the end of the sentence; native whale, although fortunately not standard dar-ííche, doesn’t have sentences, but rather indefinitely long songs – whose individual phrases are even more long-winded than Entish – in which everyone can talk at once (their audio-processing brain finds resolving the threads of conversation trivial) and, indeed, modify each others’ sentences on the fly…

…and the difficulties of relatively simple issues like non-gender genders, attitudinals (very important, since They Do Not Speak Nonverbal), evidentials, context-dependent or referential concepts, alien metaphors, different methods of categorization or metaphysical perspectives on time, space, and reality – things get very weird very quickly.

Even Eldraeic, which was designed as a lingua franca for a polyspecific polity, suffers from this – since due to its ecumenical nature, it includes a very, very large set of optional grammatical features designed to cover as many of the quirks of the above languages as possible, a mode-switching grammar, three alphabets, an ideographic representation, and multiple isomorphic dialects to be spoken in different environments and with different apparatus, including underwater, over digital communications channels, by color, and even with nothing except pause and interval.  Speaking pidgin Eldraeic (which is to say, Trade) is easy – but speaking many of the more complex forms is very much not, and its capacity for willful obscurantism is generally acknowledged to be unparalleled.

A Penny for How

“Thus it is said that an eldrae thinks pacing; a dar-bandal, sniffing; a galari, hovering; a kaeth, fighting; a dar-ííche, floating; a sssc!haaaouú, blowing; a mezuar, standing; an esseli, twitching; a codramaju, merging; a kalatri, sitting; a járaph, of itself; a selyéva, basking; a vlcefc, hanging; a spinbright, watching; an embatil, arguing; a múrast, many times; a seb!nt!at, already; a digisapience, continuously; an azayf, afterwards; and a ulijen, too late.”

– Stereotypes of the Worlds, Imperial University of Almeä Press

Trope-a-Day: Starfish Aliens

Starfish Aliens: Most of them.  Digisapiences, of course, have no bodies at all.  The galari are sophont crystal-virus hybrids with inbuilt techlepathy and mechanical psychokinesis.  The codramaju are pseudo-fungoids which can merge, exchange, and separate bodies and minds at will.  The kaeth are vaguely draconic pseudosaurians with a metal-rich biology.  The hydrogen-breathing sssc!haaaouú are fragile collections of membranes that dwell in the upper layers of gas giants.  The myneni are crystal-based carbohydrosilicate amoeboids with built-in chemosynthetic talents.  The mezuar are a network of collectively sophont purplish-blue trees.  (Yes, as sessile as that implies, although the selyéva are green-blue plantimals – non-sessile photosynthetics – who probably most closely resemble walking broccoli.)  The esseli have engineered themselves into brains with manipulating tentacles and customized personal auxiliary organs, and don’t even remember what they used to look like.  (And the link!n-Rechesh are heading that way.)  The qucequql are ammonia-metabolising octopi from a world of nitrogenous oceans.  The múrast would be simple multiheaded snakes, except that they breathe methane, live in oceans of hydrocarbons, and their primary body structures are constructed of ice.  The ulakha are metal-plated, fast-moving lizardoids who think Venerian conditions are just about right for a planet.  The linobir resemble furless, leathery-skinned, hexapedal, hermaphrodite bears.  The shan kari resemble larger versions of Terran mustelids fairly closely, actually, except they prefer to breathe warm methane.  The mirilasté are legged-serpents with skin we would recognize as essentially plastic, who breathe the most astonishingly noxious fluorine-hydrocarbon soup.  The ktelaki are furry arachnids with trilateral symmetry and multi-branched legs.  The seb!nt!at are star-dwelling creatures of plasma and electromagnetic force.  The celsesh are quadrilaterally-symmetric with a fused-barrel body plan, and sensory organs on stalks in lieu of a head.  The embatil are worm/tentacle creatures whose life cycle begins with individuals, but which merge into single creatures as they mature – while transforming a ganglionic into a collegiate intelligence.  The tennoa are chlorine-breathing radial-crabs blessed/cursed with obligate utilitarianism…

And that’s all before we get to uplifts, neogens, and exotic neomorphic bioshells.

Trope-a-Day: Organic Technology

Organic Technology: It does exist in the universe (see, for example, the Gardeners of Rechesh we mentioned back in Flesh Versus Steel and the qucequql, who went an organic-technology route due to their underwater origin, or for Imperial examples, the bioengineering esseli, and the colonists of the planet Kythera (Imperial Core)).

However, while there exist organic fundamentalists (the aforementioned Gardeners of Rechesh), they are crippled by the disadvantages of their technology.  Organic structures just plain aren’t that good at a great many tasks, including handling high energies, radiation, etc., etc., and very often, the things that they are good at are different from their inorganic equivalents.  A cortexture is a perfectly good organic neural-net computer built out of actual neurons, but it would be wasted performing the same tasks as a regular inorganic processor, or quantum processor less efficiently when it can do the jobs suited for neural-net processing more efficiently.  The right tool for the right job, say sensible users…

…such as the esseli and the Kytherans – and the qucequql – who are a more logical lot, and are more than happy to use organic technology where it makes sense, and wrap it up in a nice neosteel hull with a perfectly inorganic fusion reactor the rest of the time.  Or engage in bionanotech games with materials and devices that couldn’t strictly be said to be one thing or t’other.

Trope-a-Day: Alien Blood

Alien Blood: Played straight, in many varieties.  For example, eldrae blood is close to indigo in color, due to the not-hemoglobin it uses (borrowed from Elieran bluelife, which is indeed mostly blue; and it would lead to noticeably different skin tones if they weren’t all so damn pale anyway).  Kaeth blood is silvery-white, and notably conductive.  Myneni “blood”, really crystalplasm, is whitish and feels sandy.  Esseli blood is red-orange, and mirilasté blood is a fluorescent magenta.

Trope-a-Day: Living Starship

Living Starship: The genesplicing esseli and the residents of Kythera – the Empire’s masters of biotech – are the chief users of this sort of technology in the Imperial context, although they’re by no means the only ones in the Associated Worlds to go for this sort of thing.  Although, in deference to certain realities about the capabilities of carbon-based organics vis-à-vis metal and ceramic, the hulls (mostly, although some specially-engineered and composite-laced wood-analogues are an exception), engines, and other high-energy components tend to be not living in anything resembling the conventional sense; i.e., the ships are only semi-organic.  (See also, for example, the note under Flesh Versus Steel about the Gardeners of Rechesh; while they do manage to construct entirely biotech spacecraft, their hulls are vulnerable and engines slow compared to virtually anything else anyone’s ever put into space.)