Forever Thrilled, Part 13
Chapter 4: A Wall of Tentacles
While they’re a very rewarding object of study, Na-Yeli’s explorations are not singularly focused on the Flashbirds. She’s prepared a few micro-Kittis and sent those off towards the Wall of Tentacles. Since she’s in an environment where she can resupply almost all her elements, she’s willing to sacrifice a few Kitti drones for the sake of investigation. Well-equipped micro-Kittis that is—filled to the brim with sensors.
To her surprise—and delight—the Moiety Alien gestures that it wants to accompany her microdrones to the Wall of Tentacles. It’s probably bored senseless by me just sitting in my makeshift wheelchair, not moving much, she thinks, although does such an alien even have the concept of boredom?
She might want to find out, eventually, as she would love to become a kind of ambassador to the Moiety Aliens. If they get out of here. If her friend will let her. If Earth will let her. In any case, first things first—micro-Kittis to mega-tentacles. Hardly visible to begin with, the microdrones quickly disappear out of sight as they rise. Her triple redundant quantum computer keeps track of them, yet it’s nice to see where they’re heading as her alien friend accompanies them—it takes quite a few more moments before the Moiety Alien disappears out of sight, as well.
She does hope that her alien friend will stay well out of reach from the golden whiplash tendrils, not because it would endanger him—after moving through the strangelet mountains with glee, these bullwhip tentacles must be a piece of cake to it—but because disturbing the tentacles might interfere with the measurements she wishes to make.
She needn’t have worried, though, as the Moiety Alien stays well clear of the lashing tendrils. Now that she can observe the tentacles from a safe vantage point and fear is not obscuring her outlook, Na-Yeli immediately notices a few things. For one, while far from the frenetic activity when they sense something to be lashed at, the tentacles do not come to a complete rest. If not lashing out, they keep wavering, as if they need to keep moving to stay flexible. Also, a few of them keep lashing out—if not violently—even if there’s nothing to lash out at. And they seem to do so in a very regular way. Interesting.
She looks at the sound recordings of her microdrones. The peak of each lash’s sonic boom lies at 100 Hz. And these timed lashes happen at regular intervals, and—she double-checks—with tendrils at similar distances. Now that she really looks at the Wall of Tentacles, the ones at the very edge are much smaller than the ones closer to the center of the ridge. In a carefully timed sequence, one out of ten—exactly one out of ten—lashes out, spaced exactly ten outer tendrils apart. Then, about a second later, the tendril to the right of it—every one directly right from the previously lashing tendril—flagellates. Rinse & repeat until after ten seconds, the first tendrils restart the sequence.
Why? Na-Yeli wonders, 100 Hz is too low for sonar. Then, she displays the audio spectrum. Normally, the amplitudes of the higher harmonics are lower than those of the source and gradually die out. However, she notices two resonant peaks—several times higher than the source—at 4 and 8 kHz. Those are in the sonar range, Na-Yeli finds after a search in her database, which is suitable for long-range detection of up to ten kilometers or more. So, these can detect incoming targets from far away. But how do they detect targets up close? Na-Yeli knows from personal experience that the aim of the large tentacles is very true, to say the least. As she studies footage of the Flashbird massacre, these tentacles don’t seem to lash out wildly and randomly but are very targeted, indeed.
Then, the proverbial coin drops. They both increase the frequency of the ‘sonar’ lashes and shorten the distances between the active whips. In that manner, they can go up to 20 kHz or higher, well within the range bats use for echolocation, which can be highly accurate since bats catch insects using it. So I’ve found the transmission side of their system, Na-Yeli thinks, now to check where the reception side is. Time to send in the microprobes. Since they’re so small, they will probably fall under the detection threshold of the current frequencies of the outer whiplash sonar.
Nothing much changes as the microprobes move within range of the Wall of Tentacles. Either they’re not detected, or they’re too small to be of interest. In any case, using perfect timing, they cross the outer layer of sonar whip-tendrils and carefully zigzag their way through the very center of the Wall of Tentacles atop the massive ridge around the world. Constant course corrections are necessary as the winds coming off the constantly wavering main tentacles are strong enough to throw the microprobes off course. But there’s more to this mountaintop forest than just tentacles.
There—a hole in the ground shaped like an inverse trumpet. There, another one. Yet another one over there. Na-Yeli plots the locations of these inverted trumpets—they certainly must be ears of the vegetative kind—and finds that they’re equidistantly spaced. Exactly, she thinks, Otherwise, echolocation won’t work.
All this adds up to a wildly crazy super-symbiotic system. A plant-like Wall of Tentacles—let’s call them megaflora—on top of a thirteen-kilometer-high ridge around the equator. A gathering of golden tendrils that runs an alternative type of photosynthesis. So they need the mini-Sun to remain strong. Yet the mini-Sun needs fuel to keep burning, just like it did in the days of the Berserker Forest. So now, instead of the megafauna catapulting sacrifices, the megaflora catches a plague of birds and gradually throws its catch into the mini-Sun. At some point, the Wall of Tentacles will run out of dead birds, so this system will only work if a fresh batch arrives at regular intervals. Looking at the intense fecundity of the Flashbirds, their fierce defense against predators, and the amount of food available, the inevitable trek to greener pastures must occur, probably sooner rather than later.
The only thing left to find out is how the Wall of Tentacles gets enough water. The tropic Hadley cells actively keep the rain clouds away, and early morning dew most definitely is insufficient. Na-Yeli’s money is on something inside the Ridge around the World. As soon as she’s up to it—curse her complicated fracture—she’ll go take a look up close, herself.
Then a liberating realization strikes her: if the Wall of Tentacles detection method is sonar, she thinks, I can use stealth technologies to stay undetected.
As the days turn into weeks, the young batch of Flashbirds is growing fast. They become bigger, and their plumage expands. Even if the colors of their feathers are still a bit bleaker than those of their mothers, they increasingly resemble their parents. The young ones learn to fly, they learn to forage, they learn to catch insects. And, occasionally, they learn how to watch for and escape predators. The latter to the intense disappointment in the ranks of the Foxy the Cats and Jeffrey VanderBlues’, who—if they knew how—would probably thank the fickle forces of evolution, chaos and utter insanity for providing some easier-to-catch prey like squabbits and molants.
At some point, Na-Yeli finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the parents and the kids, especially in the early morning and late evening, as they still congregate around the nest for sleep while a lone, fierce mother keeps guard. Obviously, the six males stand out by way of their yellow bellies, but as the young Flashbirds become almost as big as their mothers, the only differing characteristic—to Na-Yeli’s eyes—is their non-striped bellies. And these are often out of sight.
Furthermore—Na-Yeli can’t be confident in this ever-faster moving, triple clutch of Flashbirds—don’t the males get the stripes on their bellies before the females? Typically, the moment these stripes become unmistakably clear, the motherbirds physically kick the males out of the family. They certainly don’t mess about, Na-Yeli thinks, Sorry sonny, you’re a big boy now, time to fend for yourself. She suspects it won’t be long before they’re busy, very busy.
The young females stay without stripes a few days longer, but the moment the stripes inevitably develop, they get the same treatment as their brothers. Out, out you go into the wide, wide world. In a couple of days, the original nest of one hundred-plus birds dwindles until the original three motherbirds remain. The three of them do seem to bond for life, Na-Yeli observes, so I suppose the next generation of females will also form threesomes. Are they all from the same nest? For Na-Yeli’s trinity of Flashbirds—she’s become so attached to them she considers them ‘hers’—this is extremely unlikely, as they’re survivors. But she does wonder if the new generation of threesomes can be from the same nest or that—in some way—they have to be from three different nests. The latter would make the most sense for diversity’s sake.
But all in all, it took about four weeks from hatching to adulthood. If this goes on, Na-Yeli thinks, I’ll see the second generation develop into adulthood before this fracture finally sets. And she does. The cycle repeats: the original mothers, the moment the last of their offspring has left the nest, start overeating again, ballooning in size. In due time, a male shows up—Na-Yeli has no way of knowing if this is the original survivor father or a male of the new generation—and the first of many courting rituals begin.
Yet, she does want to find out about the hugely skewed sex ratio. So she’s surreptitiously inserted some micro biosensors in several edible seeds, then threw those seeds near the original threesome’s territory—and a territory it is, as she’s seen them chase away a younger threesome. As the eggs develop inside the now immensely bloated motherbirds, the ova remain sexless, awaiting fertilization. However, the amount of eggs is even more staggering: about one hundred per motherbird. This throws Na-Yeli off. Are they doubling their efforts? Na-Yeli thinks, They already make rabbits look like amateurs at breeding.
Then, as a visiting male has success, his sperm delivered to the cloaca, after which the eggs are fertilized. Initially, this goes by the book: the XY sex chromosome of the sperm mixes with the XX sex chromosome of the ova, and half the subsequent eggs are male, and the other half female. Actually, the balance is slightly in favor of the males: fifty-two male eggs and forty-eight female eggs. So far, so good. Then what?
The fertilized male eggs remain under attack as they drop through the oviduct, both whose acidity and temperature are very high, and somehow—through a strange interaction involving certain enzymes—the amnion of the male eggs is much less resistant to that than the female ones, with the acid entering the embryos.
The result, predictably, is a massacre. Only two of the male embryos—with an amnion that’s just strong enough—survive, and the other fifty die. Since the shells have not been formed yet, all the yolk and other food stock of these fifty proto-eggs is now absorbed by the fifty remaining viable eggs. That’s pre-emptive selection on an unprecedented scale, Na-Yeli thinks, Whatever they do, these Flashbirds don’t do anything half-baked. Ever.
As she’s already seen the reproduction cycle once, Na-Yeli’s attention to the second round wavers, especially as she launches her micro-Kittis to the Wall of Tentacles. Yet the second triple-staged hatching of Flashbird chicklets is at least as cute as the first one. They should be OK, Na-Yeli thinks, as there’s still food in abundance. The first generation of Flashbird survivors were just a few hundred, probably a thousand at most, so they had about 40 square kilometers of fertile land available per breeding bird. Now, that number has dropped 0.8—that should still easily be enough to feed the second generation. The third generation, though, will have to settle with 16,000 square meters per breeding bird or 320 square meters per fledgling. After the second generation, there will be about two point five million Flashbirds on a surface area roughly equivalent in size to The Netherlands of yore. Back in the days of the early Twenty-First Century, while that country was densely populated with humans, it was estimated that about eighteen million birds resided there. If the current breeding pace continues, the fourth generation will total an astonishing number of seventy-five million Flashbirds. Something’s gonna break...
Right now, though, the second generation is thriving.
Author’s note: then, as the work pressure relented, I had a few busy weekends at WorldCon in Glasgow and EuroCon (ErasmusCon) in Rotterdam. In Glasgow, Flame Tree Press handed out a (free) special WorldCon newsletter with ten flash fiction stories on the theme “New Mythologies in Space”. This newsletter featured my story “The Light of Higher Spaces”, which in turn is actually an excerpt from the penultimate chapter of my Novel THE TRANSCENDENCE OF CONSENSUAL REALITY—the second aprt of the ‘consensual reality’ trilogy (part 1 to be published in serial form next year, right here).
So if you want a taste of what the (conclusion of) the second novel well before its publication date, get a hold of that newsletter (How? Maybe ask Flame Tree Press: info@flametreepublishing.com ). As it is, I barely have one left for myself as I handed out as many as I could at the WorldCon.
Finally, I handed out some test print copies of my chapbook “Six Degrees of Singularity”, see cover above. I’m working on turning it into an ebook, and then release. Will make an announcement when that happens.
And it was good to meet old friends, and have interesting discussions with new people (to me). You know who you are!