Forever Thrilled, Part 11
Chapter 4: A Wall of Tentacles
The next morning, Na-Yeli’s day is brightened as she spots a pair, no a threesome of the spectacularly colored birds. Zebra-striped bellies, wings so blue they almost shine, and the cutest of a cherry-red head. They’re magnificent, she thinks, without needing to resort to the ostentatious display of a peacock. She needs to come up with a name, not because she has to, but because she can. Flashbird? On the one hand, it’s ironic because they don’t need to flash their wares like a horny peacock. On the other hand, it does relate to their incredible speed. So Flashbird it is.
Carefully, Na-Yeli keeps her distance as she doesn’t want to scare the alluring birds away. She watches them forage for seeds and nuts, which are plentiful, to say the least. Sometimes, they take to the sky for short flights to chase a particularly tasty-looking insect, which they—through their superior speed and swiftness—catch with self-confident ease. The three birds—Na-Yeli has no idea if they’re female, male, or if they have sexes at all—seem to like the area where Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien have made their temporary home.
It’s near a stream, meaning insects are abundant—Na-Yeli calls it a plague, as the one time she tried shedding some of her exoskin, after carefully checking for alien viruses, bacteria, and other micro-organisms, she got stung quite badly—and it’s on the edge of a forest, meaning bushes with fruits and all kinds of seeds, pods, and nuts are within easy reach. The Flashbirds eat like their lives depend on it.
At first, Na-Yeli can understand that. They’ve just come through an extremely traumatizing event, probably having spent all their energy, flying skills, and wits to get through alive and in one piece. So they’re probably hungry to the point of starvation.
But their voracious appetite does not lessen the next day or the days after. They keep eating like piranhas on acid, like starved triathlon athletes at the end of their run in an all-you-can-eat restaurant. And since food is abundant, they can keep it up almost indefinitely.
No good deed goes unpunished, and over time, the results of their overindulgence begin to show. At first, the Flashbirds were sleek, streamlined flying machines, moving at high speeds and performing aerial acrobatics that would make all of their Earth cousins green with envy. Now they’re becoming corpulent, thick bellies under skinny wings, bloated ghosts of their former selves.
Yet, even as they get fatter, the Flashbirds are no easy prey for the local predators. A Foxy the Cat tries to crawl upon a pair of Flashbirds who either didn’t notice or did but didn’t care. As they come within its reach, the catfox jumps for them, but they easily evade both its outstretched claws.
A few days later, Na-Yeli witnesses how a Jeffrey VanderBlues tries its luck. The meerkat analog with the wolfish head spies them from above, hiding in a thickly leafed tree branch. It’s hiding so well that Na-Yeli needed her infrared temperature sensors to locate it. Again, the now even more puffed-up Flashbirds don’t seem to have a care in the world. Slowly, silently moving until it’s just above them, it jumps down with all its might. Plenty fast for Na-Yeli’s like—she wouldn’t have gotten away in time, even if KillBitch might have—but the now very plump Flashbirds get out of the way without breaking a sweat. Uttering a mighty howl of frustration rich with soulful vibrato and despairing overtones—it’s definitely got the blues—the wolf-headed meerkat climbs back into the tree, preparing to prowl a less challenging prey, preferably a sleeping squabbit.
During these days of recuperation, there are other things Na-Yeli wants to study closer. After her short, almost deadly, skirmish with a single tentacle, a few loops of the very ends of these tentacles were still stuck around her non-functioning right wing. She takes a few samples from these for analysis. These deadly golden lashes are quite fascinating up close under her personal scrutiny.
Their skin—all the material appears organic—is both very tough and extremely flexible. It’s also transparent. She has to stretch it to three times its original length before it breaks. Otherwise, it just bounces back, undamaged. The material under the skin is just as flexible and is riddled with veins that transport liquids and—supposedly—nutrients. But purportedly that transport can go both ways.
Most interesting are the more rigid cells scattered beneath the skin. These don’t stretch—the skin and underlying matter stretch around them—and these ‘golden cells’ give the tentacles their flaxen sheen. Inside, though, they’re a highly intricate biological complex. They’re even such a tough puzzle to crack that Na-Yeli saves that for the evenings, as she can’t see the Flashbirds in the dark.
The Flashbirds themselves—at least the threesome that has made this neighborhood their home—have now become stupendously fat. Ballooned into ridiculous proportions, Na-Yeli thinks it’s a miracle they can still walk, let alone fly. Yet they still seem able to do both and avoid predators. Then, as Na-Yeli begins to wonder at which point they will explode—like a Monty Python sketch—a new Flashbird enters the scene.
This one is still small and sleek, and its belly has yellow-and-black stripes rather than the stretched-out black-and-white stripes of the massively fattened threesome. Tiger stripes rather than zebra stripes, Na-Yeli observes, Is this the other sex? She gets her answer immediately as the tiger-striped male descends next to one of the three zebra-striped females, strides around her in a circle seven times, and gently flaps and stretches his wings while singing to her. His song sounds beautiful to Na-Yeli, with vibrant tones rich in diversity and melody. An A for effort, she thinks, And top marks for execution, as well.
After the seventh round, it stops and watches the female intently. The female Flashbird looks back at him with a look—it seems to Na-Yeli—of intense disinterest, then starts grooming her wings as if her prospective partner doesn’t exist. Na-Yeli feels almost sorry for the hard-working male, but not for long.
The male Flashbird, seemingly unperturbed, now turns its attention to the next female. This one, Na-Yeli can’t help but notice, seems even fatter than her two companions. The male Flashbird also circles her seven times, with the same, almost majestic wing motions, singing its melodic, haunting song with even more allure. Then he looks, if possible even more expectantly, at the female Flashbird. This time, the female slowly flaps her wings seven times, as well, while answering his song with a call of her own. It’s almost as haunting as her male counterpart’s song, albeit an octave lower. Then she turns around and lifts her back in eager anticipation. The male Flashbird doesn’t doubt a millisecond and mounts her. A frantic pairing, all movement, wings, and cacophonous shrieks follows.
It lasts a few minutes and ends just as abruptly as it began. The zebra-striped Flashbird sits down as if to recover; the tiger-striped Flashbird grooms itself until it’s all flashy representability again and heads for the last remaining female. The ritual repeats itself with the third female Flashbird, who—like the first one—deems herself not quite ready or otherwise uninterested. Then, without any ado, the male Flashbird leaves, probably looking for better luck elsewhere.
Apart from studying the Flashbirds, Na-Yeli keeps observing the Wall of Tentacles, as well. They part for the mini-Sun like the Red Sea parting for Moses, and the relatively close passage of the intense heat-and-light source does not damage them. Actually, if Na-Yeli understands the strangely alternative form of photosynthesis, this is when they get most of their power boost.
The golden cells are the key to that. They use a mix of known and unknown types of pigments—the unknown ones look like they evolved from specialized cyanobacteria. The known ones are carotene (an orange pigment), xanthophyll (a yellow pigment), and phæophytin-b (a yellow-brown pigment). But then phæophytin-a and both the a and b versions of chlorophyll are missing. Instead, there are two violet pigments and a bright yellow—almost golden—pigment that seems to be a variant of xanthophyll. Na-Yeli baptizes it xanthophyll-b (where the original variant is xanthophyll-a).
The two violet pigments contain Cobalt, which leads Na-Yeli to call them cobaltophyll-a and cobaltophyll-b. After some extensive testing—she’s grounded for two months, at least—she’s found the following absorption spectra for the three new pigments:
• cobaltophyll-a — 590-760 nanometers (nm);
• cobaltophyll-b — 620-800 nm;
• xanthophyll-b — 450-570 nm;
Which, together with the known ones:
• xanthophyll-a — 400-530 nm;
• carotene — 300-495 nm;
• phæophytin-b — 380-460 nm;
Only leave the 570-590 nanometer wavelengths unabsorbed: exactly the golden-yellow reflection of the tentacles.
All the pigments reside in the cell’s plastids and perform an alternative type of photosynthesis. This explains the golden sheen of the wall of tentacles and how they create their own nutrition through their unique version of photosynthesis. Yet it leaves many open questions, like how do the golden tentacles get water? Rain? Morning dew? Somehow, she suspects that both of these are not quite enough.
Furthermore, how do the tentacles know when the Flashbirds—or, in a different case, Na-Yeli and the Moiety Alien—are coming? They must have a way to determine where their prey is—yes, in this Berserker Forest of the future, this crazy Wall around the World, this Tentacled Mountain of Madness, Na-Yeli, and the Moiety Alien are prey again. Plus ça change...
And that doesn’t even cover the all-common-sense-defying why? Why do plants have to catch birds? Yes, there are carnivorous plants, but these tentacles are definitely not carnivorous. They photosynthesize, for dog’s sake. Although reminiscing on their last time here, Na-Yeli gets a hunch. In a flash of foresight, she’s kept her makeshift telescope aimed at the tentacles while making a continuous recording. She could speed-search through that one. Well, maybe tomorrow, as she’s falling asleep right now. She suspects that this recovery stuff wreaks havoc with her normal energy levels, but what can she do but wait and get back to her old, hyperactive self?
The next morning, she continues the observation of the three female Flashbirds. For some reason, they stay together in threesomes—a few days ago, Na-Yeli asked the Moiety Alien to observe the fauna in the temperate and subtropical zones using one of Na-Yeli’s cameras, and these show the female Flashbirds permanently bonding in groups of three—as if that’s the best way to keep track of each other. While the other two are still eating—at some point, they surely must explode or, at the very least, get a heart attack—the fertilized one is digging and gathering twigs and leaves.
She prepares the right environment to breed her eggs and makes a nest halfway between a burrow and a mound. Soon after she’s started, though, she gets help from her two companions, who now help dig out the original mound to about three times its original size and then start gathering twigs and leaves, as well. At noon, they’re finished, and the fertilized one wastes no time as she immediately starts laying her eggs. It’s laying eggs a day after fertilization, Na-Yeli wonders, These Flashbirds seem to be fast at everything.
Not just one or two eggs, but more than a dozen. Hold that, she’s still not ready yet. Na-Yeli watches with a mix of awe and incredulity as the female bird keeps laying. Furthermore—at times like these, Na-Yeli has trouble believing the evidence before her eyes—the Flashbird visibly seems to shrink. Definitely more than a dozen, almost two dozen. No, make that three dozen. Or is it four dozen? That doesn’t seem possible. She checks her records: an ostrich nest can have up to sixty eggs, but it’s communal, meaning they’re from various birds—the average is ten to fifteen per bird.
The actual record holders are the bobwhite quails, who can lay up to twenty-eight eggs in one brood, and an overzealous wood duck, who produced twenty-four eggs. This Flashbird here easily beats them. In her astonishment, Na-Yeli lost count, so she checks the recording she’s made, slowing it down so she doesn’t miss a single one. Forty-nine. Mother of dogs, that’s four football teams plus substitutes.
The two unfertilized ones keep foraging and stuffing themselves, although—Na-Yeli carefully observes—one always stays near the communal nest. Now that she realizes this guardian function, Na-Yeli observes how the two non-fertilized Flashbirds carefully change guard duty. Then, at one such a change of guards—as if he smells it—a male Flashbird appears.
The courting ritual—exactly the same as the day before—takes place two times, and again, one of the unfertilized females approves of the male’s charms, with the ensuing frantic mating. That’ll be another forty-nine eggs for the communal nest, Na-Yeli thinks, tomorrow. She slowly begins to surmise how these Flashbirds get back from the edge of extinction.
After nightfall, she searches through the records made through the telescope of the Wall of Tentacles. Na-Yeli’s hunch is confirmed in the segments where the mini-Sun passes over, although she carefully had to adjust brightness levels and specific filters.
The tentacles do part as the mini-Sun approaches, although they keep a sickle-like shape as if to catch the maximum amount of sunshine. During her ongoing nightly experiments—which the equipment performs as she sleeps—Na-Yeli has tested the influence of different light exposure levels on the alternative photosynthesis. Typically, it seems both the most active and efficient if the amount of sunshine is intense and high—approximately equivalent to the mini-Sun’s output at close range. Below that, the photosynthesis still works, but to a much lesser extent. Above that, the pigments burn up, and the photosynthesizing cells die.
In short, they need that mini-Sun to keep burning, Na-Yeli thinks, Otherwise they’re toast. She pauses. Or severely undercooked. Whatever. As Na-Yeli knows from her previous passage through this layer, the mini-Sun must be fed, otherwise it simply burns up its fuel. The megafauna of old did this by sacrificing their dead and mortally wounded, and the odd unlucky alien trespasser, as Na-Yeli recalls but all too well (and not without a bit of relish). So, some other sacrificial meat must have taken that place.
It’s pretty hard to see in the tangled mass of tentacles, the messy conflagration of tendrils, but some do indeed throw something—something about the right size to be the dead body of a non-fattened Flashbird—into the oncoming mini-Sun.
It appears to be a gradual process—the tentacles aren’t throwing all their catch into the mini-Sun at once but seem to maintain a specific dosage. Possibly, there’s a feedback loop between the mini-Sun’s optimum spectrum—for the tentacle’s photosynthesis—and the amount of catch they feed it, Na-Yeli theorizes, A much more fine-tuned mechanism than that in the Berserker Forest days of yore. This implies that the Wall of Tentacles must have fresh catches at regular times, as this one—humongous though it seems—will eventually run out.
Author’s note: I’m getting back on track with both the Replicant serialisation and Forever Thrilled. Meaning that over the next week you might see a few gig reviews plus a bonus short story. Working on it!
Many thanks for reading, do recommend this substack to others if you like it—word of mouth is great—and many thanks for reading!