by user
Without the augmented metabolisms or the gravitational advantages of their siblings on
distant planets, they had no choice but to give up their power of flight in order to develop
further.
The Hand Flappers were one such species. Their wings, once used for butterfly-like
flutters in the unearthly gardens of Qu, had shrunken and reverted back into their
manual condition. Their legs were likewise re-adapted, but they bore a splayed
awkwardness from their perching ancestry.
Only a singular, and an almost sadistically simple flaw held them back from
developing civilization. In the course of their secondary atrophy, the wings of the Hand
Flappers had become useless as hands as well. Their flag like appendages were very
useful in signaling and mating dances, but they couldn’t hurl missiles, construct shelter
or even manufacture basic stone tools. All that they could do with their useless hands
was to display each others’ sexual availability, so the Hand Flappers did just that;
flashing and dancing their way to oblivion.
40
A Hand Flapper on the edge of his mating territory. During their almost comical
exaggeration of sexual display, his kind has begun to lose their edge at adaptation.
Theirs will be a boisterous, ecstatic but ultimately ephemeral existence.
41
Blind Folk
When the Qu came they dug in, and dug in deep. Inside several continent-sized
shelters under their besieged world, they waited for the invaders to pass them by. It was
a futile gamble. The Qu located the shelter-caves and remade their inhabitants without
effort.
The shelters became home to an entirely different ecology, a realm of perpetual
darkness, fueled by the trickle of water and nutrients from the world outside. A
surprisingly complex ecology developed on this scant resource; gigantic pale insects; the
descendants of common household pests, competed with Dali-esque birds and rodents
over fields of overgrown fungi. Predators were not uncommon; almost crocodilian fish
patrolled the underground streams and vast blind bats, echolocating with unnerving
precision, took their toll on the residents of the cave floor. The kilometer-high ceilings of
the shelters glowed in the dark with protean constellations of bioluminescent fungi, and
in some cases, animals.
People were present here as well, albeit in unfamiliar forms. They were more often
heard than seen, as they tried to find their way in the dark with banshee-like screams.
These albino troglodytes lived in a realm where sound and touch, not sight, was the
gateway of perception. They had developed long, tactile fingers, enormous whiskers and
mobile ears to live in the dark. Where their eyes should have been, there was nothing but
a patch of haunting, flawlessly smooth skin. Their perfect adaptation to the world of
darkness had erased the most basic feature of human recognition.
As adapted as they were, they were doomed. Before the Blind Folk could develop
any kind of intelligence to crawl out of their geographical graves, the glacial constriction
of their World’s continental plates snuffed out the shelters one by one.
42
A startled Blind father with his year-old daughter. Although he knows better to sit still in
order to confuse sonar-equipped predators, the youngster screams and soils herself in
terror. Their attenuated fingers are hallmarks of a lifetime spent in darkness.
43
Lopsiders
The Qu were grotesquely creative in their redesign of the human worlds. One
group of misfortunate souls they transported to a planet with thirty-six times the amount
of “normal” gravity, and made them over for life in this bizarrely inhospitable realm.
The results of these experiments resembled nightmare sketchings of Bosch, Dali or
Picasso. They looked like cripples squashed between sheets of glass. Three out of their
four limbs had become paddle-like organs for crawling; only one of their arms remained
as spindly tool of manipulation. This singular, wizened limb also doubled as an extra
sensor, like the antennae of an insect.
Their faces were different horrors altogether. All pretensions of symmetry; the
hallmark of terrestrial animals from jawless fish onwards, were completely and utterly
done away with. One bulging eye stared directly upward while the other scanned ahead,
in the direction of the creature’s vertically-opening jaws. The ears were likewise
distorted.
Monstrous as they looked, these ex-men thrived in their heavy-gravity
environment. Once again there was the usual explosion of species into every available
niche, and the Lopsiders consolidated their chances for a renewed sentience.
44
A Lopsider feeds some indigenous pets native to his high-gravity world. The
domestication of native fauna is the Lopsiders’ first step on the long way towards
civilization.
45
Striders
While the Lopsiders were redesigned to live under extreme gravity, another
species had been adapted for life under the exact opposite conditions; on a Jovian moon
with one fifth of Earth’s gravity.
It was a world of wonders, where even the grass grew almost ten meters tall and
the trees were beyond belief, towering to sizes attained only by the skyscrapers of
antiquity. In these surreal forests lived equally spectacular fauna; the descendants of
pets, pests and livestock of humans, who in turn had been reduced to animosity as well.
One could see them in the league-tall forests, almost dancing among the trees as
they reared higher and higher to browse. Their arms, legs, and necks had been stretched
impossibly thin, great flaps of skin blossomed throughout their bodies to dispense waste
heat. Sometimes they would even change their color in order to reflect light and keep
cool. Overheating was a great problem for their grotesquely tall, thin bodies.
Although imposing, these Giacomettian wraiths were over-developed as to be
sickeningly fragile. Even on their gravitationally forgiving world, a fall could shatter their
bones, and slipping down from a branch would prove to be fatal. Sometimes, on the open
plains, even a strong wind could bring them down like the toppling masts. They survived
entirely due to the merciful conditions of their garden world, which were about to change
drastically.
About two million years after the Qu left their towering works of human art, a
lineage of fearsome predators evolved from the terrestrial poultry that had gone feral on
the planet. Resembling attenuated versions of their dinosaur ancestors, the predators
swept through the garden world like wildfires, extinguishing any species too fragile to
escape, or resist. The peaceful, delicate striders were among the first to go.
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47
Parasites
Humanity had diverged into two separate lineages on their world. On one hand
there were several races of almost Australopithecine cripples, degraded by the Qu for
managing to turn back their initial wave of invasion. Yet simple atavism was too light a
punishment for them. Their twisted relatives, the parasites, made up the second part of
their sentence.
There were actually several kinds of parasitic ex-people, r
anging from tortoise-
sized ambulatory vampires to the more common fist-sized variety that lived attached to
their hosts. There was even a tiny, endoparasitic kind that infested the wombs of their
female victims like ghastly, living abortions.
All of these evolutionary tortures were played out under the careful scrutiny of the
Qu for forty million years. The punishment was so baroque, so elaborate that most of the
artificial parasite-host relationships died out when the Qu left. Some sub-men learnt to
cleanse their tick-like relatives by drowning, burning or even eating them. Others, like
the vaginal parasites, died out as their aggressive method of parasitism effectively
sterilized their hosts.
Yet one or two varieties did manage to cling on to their hosts with abdominal
suckers, muscular, gripping limbs and sterile, pain-soothing saliva. But their success did
not lie entirely in the strength of their parasitical advantages. They also learnt to regulate
their dumb hosts, not killing them by over-infestation and thus ensuring their own long-
term survival as well.
In any case, totally single-sided relations were rare in any ecology, natural or
artificial. In millennial cycles, the cousin species’ vicious parasitism began to give way
into something more beneficial for both sides.
48
A parasitic person, shown real size. Although their fate seems inhumane in every aspect
to an observer of today, their very survival shows that such subjective values are
ineffectual in matters of long-term survival.
49
Finger Fishers
Their ancestors were trapped on an archipelago world; a planet sprinkled with
many small continents and countless islands over interconnected networks of calm,
swallow seas. Like a magnified Aegean, this place was a terrestrial paradise in many
respects. Except that after the Qu, no minds were left to enjoy it.
On this vacant biosphere, evolution was quick to begin her blind, unpredictable
dance. Once feral, the descendants of degenerate humans adapted themselves to every
available niche, no matter how exotic, how outlandish. One group learnt to pluck fish
from the lazy shores. Millennia passed and they settled more into their piscatorial
lifestyle. Elongated fingers became ambulatory fish-hooks, teeth modified for a
generalized diet became needle-like affairs, lined up neatly in a long, thin muzzle. In less
than a few million years, the Finger Fishers established themselves as a prominent
lineage. There was scarcely a beach, an island or an estuary that was devoid of their
pale, lanky forms.
As prolific as they were, the Fishers were still no better than animals. Their
“humanity” would come only after another spasm of outlandish adaptations.
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51
Hedonists
Even the blissful existence of the Finger Fishers would have seemed bothersome
to the Hedonists; for their kind was not evolved, but designed for a life of pleasure. The
Qu had kept them as pampered pets; set loose in a tropical island-world of succulent
fruits, bountiful trees and calm, lapping lakes full of sweet, bacterial manna.
Furthermore, the Hedonists were left as the only animal life on this place. They had no
choice but to enjoy it to the fullest.
In normal conditions, any given species would quickly crowd out such an utopian
environment. But normal conditions had never been the point of the Qu redesign. They
had altered their subjects so that they could conceive only after mating an enormous
number of potential suitors, continually over a period of decades. While this took care of
the population problem, it also made the species less adaptable. Without any point in
sexual competition, natural selection would progress only at a glacial pace. Fortunately,
their stable microcosm remained free of environmental catastrophes even after the Qu
left.
All these changes had also made the Hedonists’ day. Their lives were juxtaposed
routines of browsing, sleeping and mind-blowing sex; troubled neither by the concerns of
disease or pregnancy. Aloof and carefree, they enjoyed the most pleasurable times of all
mankinds, albeit with the intellectual capabilities of three-year-olds.
It didn’t really matter, though. Who needed to think when having such a nice
time, after all?
52
The favorites of the Qu. A female Hedonist lies alone on a beach, contemplating
absolutely nothing. Without any pressure from the world, their days make themselves as
they go along.
53
Insectophagi
Nondescript, quaint human species abounded in the post-Qu galaxy. Hundreds of
them lived out simple, unnoticed lives, never developing to become sentient, never
learning their true heritage as star-born human beings. Most of them went extinct, not to
be missed or even remembered. Those that lingered on managed to survive in shady,
quiet niches, never again making any impact on the celestial scheme of things.
One such species was the Insectophagi. They had quietly adapted themselves for
a diet of colonial insects and small animals; they had faces covered with leathery plates,
claw-like hands to dig out prey and worm-like tongues to scoop them up.
All in all, they weren’t special in any particular way. But a combination of galactic
invasions, coincidence and pure luck would later make them the longest-enduring of all
ur-starmen.
The meek would inherit the cosmos, though not just yet. For now, the
Insectophagi were concerned only with the location of insect colonies, and the onset of
the mating season.
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55
Spacers
It must be remembered that the Star People did not succumb entirely to the Qu
invasions. While their worlds fell away one by one, some Star People took refuge in the
void of space. One after another, entire communities scrambled into generation ships and
cast themselves off into the darkness, hoping to go unnoticed by the beings that had
overrun their galaxy.
Desperate times made for desperate measures. As the Star Men had observed
during their initial colonization of the galaxy, life in generation ships inevitably lead to
mass insanity and anarchy. This time however, humans had to adapt themselves -or face
extinction.
Entire asteroid fields were confiscated and hollowed out to make space-ships of
unseen size. These hollow shells cradled bubbles of precious air and water, but no
artificial gravity of any kind. It was discovedred that a purely ethereal existence would
ease the stress of interstellar exhile, provided that its inhabitants were adapted for life
inside such an environment.
Furthermore, people were forced to change themselves. In an atmospherically
sealed, gravity-free environment, their bones were left free to grow longer, thinner,
spindlier. The circulatory and digestive systems were pressurized to avoid heart problems
and congestion. The latter change had another advantageous side effect; humans could
navigate through the void with jets of air -expelled from modified anuses.
Such experiments were numerous, and usually plagued with failure. Yet they did
succeed in creating a future. Sealed tight in their moon sized,
air filled, weightless
havens, the descendants of the Star People managed to evade the scourge of Qu.
It was an endless diaspora. Even after the Qu left, they would find themselves too
divergent to have anything to do with their ancestral lifestyles. The survivors of the initial
hurdle would never set foot on a planet again.
56
Forty million years from today, Spacers like this individual are the only truly sentient
human beings that survive. They are so comfortable in their weightless refuges that the
fates of their bestial cousins elsewhere do not concern them. They are also painfully rare;
their entire population in the Milky Way Galaxy does not exceed a few dozen arks and a
hundred billion souls.
57
Ruin Haunters
A particular human species, singled out by its lucky access to the heritage of its
stellar ancestors, would eventually get to play a leading role in the shape of things to
come.
They had gotten through the Qu invasion with relatively little degradation; yes,
they had been reduced to the level of apes, but their recovery had been quick.
Apparently, the Qu had not worked as hard at suppressing their intelligence. Nor had
they made a comparable effort to wipe away the material traces of the Star Men. Even
after millions of years, enormous ruins of the global urban spaces littered the continents
of their world. Thus did the Ruin Haunters earn their names.
With developed minds and unrestricted access to the wisdom of the ancient cities,
the exponential pace of their development was only natural. One by one they deciphered
and built upon the secrets of the bygone Star People, until they almost equaled their
galactic ancestors in wisdom and skill.
