by Yoss
“I do entiendo.” Gardf-Mhaly gives me another one of those stone-cold looks. “Though in el pasado that hasn’t stopped otros hombres from at least trying to consumar their amor imposible… Anyway, ella también entiende that you’d never have been able to join completamente, hablando físicamente. But el amor—don’t we know it bien!—goes beyond lo físico, even lo químico. Far beyond.” Her ears fold back, a sign of barely controlled rage. “Doctor Sangan, conoce usted the terrestrial myth of the mermaids? Surely que sí. Half-mujer, half-pez, they attracted hombres and then los frustraron porque they were anatómicamente incapable of mating, being fish that fertilized externamente. Debió have been hard en los hombres, I guess. But did los hombres ever wonder cómo se sentían las mermaids? Yo creo que An-Mhaly could explain it perfectamente well…”
When they go for it, Cetians can shock even extreme feminists, making them look moderate and wishy-washy by contrast. Though there’s no consummation, of course, one might suppose, or rather deduce, that within their clans they practice a certain very light and sublimated version of homoerotic sex—an idea that many XY humans, easily carried away by their imaginations, find attractive, even fascinating.
I guess the guys who only know a little about the species must imagine something like hundreds of beautiful, exotic girls caressing each other for hours and hours, gently and absent-mindedly, all of them piled up all over each other…
Maybe that’s how it really is. Or not. They don’t divulge any details, of course. And that’s their right, despite all the grumbling among interspecies medical experts that without more information, they’ll never be able to treat their traumas…
But I wonder if this Cetian (An’s occasional lover? her casual caresser?) isn’t simply dying of jealousy to think I aroused feelings in her unlucky milk cousin, feelings better saved for members of her own race—such as herself.
Or am I perhaps acting out the worst form of narcissistic machismo… Sangan Dongo, the irresistible supermacho of the Milky Way?
I hold my tongue for a couple of seconds, then repeat with sincere contrition, “De verdad que I am sorry. Yo nunca thought she’d take it tan badly.”
“Doctor Sangan, no tenemos doctores of the mind, lo que usted llama psychologists,” Gardf-Mhaly went on, looking down on me as the haughtiest queen might look upon the least tadpole in her pond. “We’ve never needed them… Pero with An we ahora believe we probablemente have to resort to uno for la primera vez. There have been a few… situaciones… en el pasado, of course, but su caso caused us to cuestionar whether the Arnrch-Morp-Gulch entailment isn’t a curse for nuestra raza rather than para el progreso. Perhaps no estamos and never will be listos to deal with una comunidad of intelligent species que all display algo we lack: intercourse heterosexual. Muchos de nosotros find it… perverso. I believe you may be familiar con la sensación. But there are siempre those such as the unlucky An que look upon such… uniones with wonder y envidia, leading to the tristes consequences of which estamos both aware.” She sighs, then unfurls her ears again in an obvious effort to appear friendly. “Pero I did not venir aquí looking for a debate sobre interspecies sexual relations, Doctor Sangan, solamente para your asistencia urgente. This is su chance to correct past errores. An-Mhaly needs you—as does otros former employee of yours, Enti Kmusa. Both have been perdidos in a small exploration vessel…”
“No way, esos dos together again?” I interrupt her, astonished. “Quién would have thought! It’s a cosmos pequeño, o no? I understand por qué I’ve been contacted, since both of them used to trabajar para mí. But if it’s sobre un shipwreck, that’s de verdad something for the local Galactic Community Coordinating Committee patrols, no para mí to take care…”
“No, Doctor Sangan,” Gardf-Mhaly peremptorily insisted. “There is no one major que you. Ellos están indeed shipwrecked. And ellos necesitan be rescued as rápido as possible, porque they nunca should have crashed—or rather, their crash is such a secreto que nadie can even be allowed to sospechar que it took place. Pero the fact es, the ship on which An-Mhaly and Enti Kmusa were viajando has fallen in Brobdingnag…”
*
Quite the coincidence.
With or without permission from Jonathan Swift and his Gulliver, Brobdingnag is the world where laketons live.
I first heard about the creatures when I was eight.
I was with my father on one of his typical expeditions, this time to study the peculiar hypnopedic teaching system used by a religious sect on Beta Sextantis.
The deluded people there had concocted an intricate theology rooted in the worst aspects of New Age ecomysticism; they worshiped living beings, the bigger the better, as organic expressions of the Great Cosmic Principle.
More recently I’ve worked for them, on several occasions, actually. Their faith may be ridiculous, but they pay well and on time.
Even back then, their temple-zoo, which cost I don’t even want to know how many millions of solaria to build, held a grendel, two juggernauts, and, in a tank big enough for a squadron of battleships to perform maneuvers in, a middling-sized tsunami… They were also building an enormous high-pressure enclosure with the idea of keeping a laketon, no less! An idea that made Dr. Matsumoto Sangan and his entire team laugh till they cried.
When I asked my father what a laketon was, he gave me an unforgettable mini lecture on biology that might well have been titled “Las características del Planet Brobdingnag y de sus Inhabitants los Laketons, the Largest Life Form en el Known Universe, Explaneado para Children,” and he got me to understand why he had laughed at the pretensions of those environmentalist mystics.
Brobdingnag is the only planet orbiting its primary star, a red dwarf. The star can’t be seen from Earth, being hidden precisely behind the supergiant Antares. Therefore ancient human astronomers never gave it a name. Even today many know it only as Swift-3.
Swift-3 is located in a zone rich in cosmic dust, comet formations, and protoplanets. Head towards the Juhungan domain until you figure out you can’t breathe the hydrogen there, then zoom past the Amphorians, where you can check to see if methane works any better for you, and at last you’ll reach the edge of the Cetian sector, where you can enjoy the oxygen you needed all along.
The primary star is small, but the planet is enormous, just a tad smaller than Neptune in humanity’s original solar system. As big as a planet can get before being categorized as a true gas giant. It even looks quite a bit like the gas giants: though it’s completely solid, it has four or five dozen satellites and several tenuous rings, like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.
Since the planet lacks a dense metallic core and is composed of fairly porous material, the gravity at its surface is “only” six times that on Earth—not past the limits of human resistance. We’re forced to withstand many more g’s than that on plenty of shuttle launches and descents from orbit… But it’s a very uncomfortable place to stay for any length of time. That’s why almost everyone prefers to use space elevators to enter or leave a planet, except when they are truly pressed for time—as I was when Governor Tarkon called me to search for his careless spouse’s damned wedding band…
The massive gravitational force of Brobdingnag, plus the fact that it’s the only planet orbiting a small primary in a sector full of dust, comets, and other space trash, means that its surface is constantly pounded by heavy meteor showers. The meteoroids that reach its surface usually weigh a few kilos, but more than a few have masses ranging from hundreds of kilograms to a ton or more.
The crew of the Fancy Appaloosa, the human exploratory ship out of New Plymouth that discovered Swift-3 and mapped Brobdingnag right under the Cetians’ noses, the system being much closer to the Cetian sphere of influence than to ours, named the planet less for its own size (much larger planets exist) than for the vast dimensions of its principle inhabitants: the laketons, for which this rain of cosmic debris is a sort of manna from heaven.
The astronauts got a real shock when they realized, gazing
through their telescopes from orbit, that what they initially thought were large chemical lakes scattered across the giant planet’s desolate surface were… slowly moving.
Laketons are unicellular amoeboid creatures. Since their form constantly changes, it isn’t easy to determine their exact dimensions.
But they’re big.
In fact, all adjectives seem miserably small and inadequate to describe them.
One fact should be enough to convey their vastness: The largest laketon ever recorded, which the veterinarian biologists who study them sarcastically and affectionately named Tiny, rarely measures less than 250 kilometers (!) in diameter by 10 kilometers thick.
If its cytoplasm were the density of water, it would weigh approximately 250 trillion tons. On Earth, that is. Given the gravity on Brobdingnag, you have to multiply that by six.
But actually, the protoplasm of a laketon is even denser than liquid mercury, which already weighs more than thirteen times as much as water.
I think that adds up to some twenty quadrillion tons. There are moons that weigh less.
Living lakes weighing trillions of tons. Laketons.
Just trying to imagine them is overwhelming.
And sort of humbling, too.
There’s no ship, no building, no artificial structure of any sort built by humans or any of the other “happy seven” intelligent races in the Milky Way that come close to their dimensions. Experts even think that the individual movements of a single laketon can cause minor fluctuations in the gravity of Brobdingnag and explain some curious irregularities in its orbit around Swift-3 that would have disconcerted Kepler.
And no one knows the upper limit on a laketon’s growth, if it has one. As living matter, it keeps growing larger and larger, slowly but surely. Tiny has grown a bit and put on some weight over the thirty-four years since the species was discovered. Today it’s about two hundred meters wider and half a trillion tons heavier than before.
Since its smallest fellow laketons, Gargantua and Pantagruel, are “merely” sixty kilometers in diameter and grow at a proportionately slower rate, experts have concluded that Tiny has been the largest cell and living creature in the galaxy since long before humans discovered fire.
A peevish Parimazo once calculated that at its current rate of growth, in about six billion years Tiny would outweigh all of Brobdingnag and might even be larger than its primary star, Swift-3. And in three and a half billion years, it could outweigh the combined mass of the Milky Way.
It’s good to know we won’t be around by then. Just in case.
Naturally, not even a planet as huge as Brobdingnag can harbor many creatures as immense as laketons. Only 611 of them have been counted moving across its surface.
The “small” laketons, Gargantua and Pantagruel, are assumed to be mere cubs. As weird as it seems to use the word “cubs” for those monstrosities, which must have been born around the time Columbus was discovering America, at the latest.
The speculation is that laketons reproduce by simple binary fission, like many well-known protozoa, but to date the process has never been witnessed. Given their longevity, whole centuries might pass before one decides to start dividing. The event might depend on some planetary alignment, or a cellular clock set by an unusually long biological time scale… or who knows what else. So much is still unknown about laketons.
The titanic amoeba of Brobdingnag has a feeding method as spectacular as its size. It has no eyes or ears, and it wouldn’t even need them to capture its “prey”: the meteoroids continuously falling from space. Its cellular membrane, several meters thick in some areas, is highly resistant to cosmic and ultraviolet rays but also extremely sensitive to changes in the intensity of light, air pressure, and, above all, gravity.
No gravimeter made by humans or any of the other “lucky seven” races could compete. A laketon has been shown to have the ability to detect a fragment with a mass of only ten kilos falling through the planet’s atmosphere at a distance unimaginable for any artificial instrument. By some unknown means, which must be entirely instinctive given that it has nothing remotely resembling a brain, it instantly completes the complex ballistic calculations that reveal the meteoroid’s velocity and trajectory, telling it to a very close approximation where its delicious “snack” will fall—and allowing it to capture the meteor in flight.
A laketon can also determine—by spectrography, long-distance taste, smell, or some other poorly understood sense—whether the meteoroid is an indigestible fragment of purely inorganic rock with metallic ore (best avoided) or a succulent cometary agglomeration of ice water or carbonaceous chondrites (not to be missed).
It also has a sense of its own reach and abilities that would make it the envy of many baseball players. If the impact site is too far off, it doesn’t even budge, but if the zone lies instead at a reasonable distance, it will stretch trillions of tons of cytoplasm in that direction at the speed of an express train, forming a pseudopod dozens of kilometers long by a few hundred meters wide, which it uses to capture the meteoroid before it touches the ground.
Fly ball! Yer out.
How it absorbs the tremendous kinetic energy of the impact, dissipating it throughout its gigantic body without the heat generated by the blow vaporizing its cytoplasm or causing any other damage, is an enigma that has fascinated engineers and biologists alike. But so far, in vain.
A pity, because you could perform miracles with a thermal conduction system as efficient as that.
Engineers also dream of constructing similar gravitational wave detectors and/or controls for spaceships. Biologists, for their part, fantasize about synthesizing materials to keep astronauts equally comfortable in weightlessness or under dozens of g’s of acceleration.
While they’re at it, they’d love to discover the genetic mechanisms behind these creatures’ unmatched longevity.
It is a law of biology that the more massive an animal is, the longer it lives. Tsunamis and other giants tend to be quite long-lived. But even titans die.
So far, no laketon has ever been known to die. Some biologists even doubt they can. It’s hard to imagine the sort of planetary cataclysm it would take to wipe out so much living matter.
In short, they’re fascinating bugs. Given their huge size and the powerful gravity on their home world, they are studied from the comfort of orbit, using telescopes. Floating in weightlessness while observing such magnificent beings can be an absorbing occupation—but also monotonous and boring; no observer can take it for more than a week.
But of course there’s never any shortage of enthusiastic volunteers to take their place. The crew of the Fancy Appaloosa would have been surprised to learn that four fully crewed biological observation ships are now in permanent orbit around the planet that they somewhat rashly described as being “of no interest whatsoever.” Each ship holds four observers… and the waitlist holds the names of more than fifteen thousand applicants, with representatives from each of the “lucky seven” races.
Mine is one of them. I checked my place on the loooong list a few days before Governor Tarkon called me to Nerea, and there were still three thousand applicants ahead of me, so I’d have to wait “only” another three and a half years…
They’re popular critters, no doubt about it. At least among veterinarian biologists like me.
My never having been within fifty light-years of a laketon was a painful, unpardonable gap in my résumé. What sort of a “Veterinarian to the Giants” was I, if I hadn’t been able to study the largest of all known living beings?
Aside from two or three parasites, which some even doubt count as distinct and independent species, there seem to be no life forms on Brobdingnag other than laketons. So it wasn’t strange at all for me to volunteer, without a moment’s hesitation, the second I deduced from what Gardf-Mhaly was saying that the affair would involve the titans I had yearned to see for so long.
There’s an old Cuban saying: “If he doesn’t want soup, give him three bow
lfuls.”
But what if he does want soup? What then? Pelt him with bouillon cubes?
*
To lend a little stylistic variety to my still-pending autobiography (and who knows how much longer it will pend), I could narrate my face-to-face meeting with Gardf-Mhaly and the other top brass in the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee in the form of a play.
Might be interesting.
It would go something like this:
SCENE: Inside a Juhungan mother ship. Probably a hangar for faster, smaller attack craft, judging from its size and the honeycombed walls.
In this room, the volutes of germanium polymerase foam that characterize the hydrogen breathers’ organic constructs are lined with a neutral boron nitride coating, allowing the beings engaged in heated debate around a giant holoprojection to breathe oxygen freely without danger of compromising the vehicle’s internal structure.
There are two Cetians, two humans, and one Juhungan. The last, barely a meter tall, is apparently the host; he only watches, takes no part. Decked out in an organic spacesuit typical of his species, he looks like a gigantic, transparent sea urchin.
The members of the two oxygen-breathing races, wearing a variety of uniforms all tinted the distinctive silver of the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee, argue among themselves in Spanglish.
GARDF-MHALY, CETIAN COORDINATOR: Este ship acaba de docked; he’ll be aquí in a few minutos. Insisto que we must tell him toda la verdad. The fact que sus two former employees happened to coincide en estos… discussions may be a signo. The Goddess esta trying to tell us algo…
ADMIRAL WILLIAM HURTADO, HUMAN COORDINATOR: Yes, que we’ve got a ticking bomba de tiempo en our hands! Goddess o no Goddess, if young Kmusa no regresa a home within las próximas seventy-two horas, the gang of Olduvailan fanatics que follow her como they used to follow a su padre will pensar que she fell into a Cetian trap. They’ll atacar, y luego you can kiss adiós a nuestro ceasefire y to any hopes of settling nuestras interspecies differences pacíficamente.
