"As we can see the Mother's eye, She can see the nest where her Children live. As seen from Her perch, our nest is a ball that sails the void, the top part is called High, and the bottom is called Low. In the nest, we cross the line between the High and Low poles by marking the direction our Sire rises and where He sets."
--Fable of the Directions
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Unsurprisingly, he was male when he woke. It was best to Change while sleeping, as it was less uncomfortable. Sitting up in his bedroll, he noted the scent of smoking meat and quickly went outside to check on it and the skins he left soaking in a vat of blood-treated water overnight. Tasting a small strip of smoked meat, he gathered the first batch and put on another, feeding the fire and adjusting the vents. Stowing the jerky in a breathable bag, he took it down to the metal shop chamber to dry the rest of the way. The craghorn wool he'd left there was dry, so he bundled it again and stowed the bags in a far corner.
He marked where the electronics shop and the drying room would be before returning to the surface on the way back up the vertical shaft. Assembling frames of branches and withies, he stretched the wet hides on them. He wanted to head back into the woods, but he smelled of meat, smoke, and lanolin. Wading out in the river, he briskly rubbed his clothing before washing himself, ducking under to rinse his hair. His eyes glowed with pale light under the surface, drawing a few fish towards them. Rising slightly to take in a deeper breath, he ducked under again. Patiently he waited for the fish to approach again, dangling his arms like bare branches. His hand blurred as he caught one, then rose, dripping.
Working with the jerky awakened his predatory instincts, and the fish made him salivate. He struck the back of its bone mask sharply on a rock when he waded onto the pebbly beach, then dropped it and rinsed his hands before he dressed. Drawing a knife from his boot sheath, he took the fish to a flat stone to fillet it, then cut it into pieces. Rae cooked it by putting them skin side down on his tongue, feeling the fats pop and sizzle before chewing and swallowing. When he was satisfied, he scooped up the raw remains of the fish and tossed it in the river before rewashing his hands.
The fish would have been better with some rock salt, but it was still good. Ordinary stone and common metals tasted dull, but precious metals and crystals were too valuable for his crafting to eat. That's where the occasional taste of flesh came in handy to satisfy his appetite, although not his hunger. Carbon-based meat was useless to him as a food source, even though it tasted delicious. Without the water content that his heat boiled away, flesh only amounted to a handful of dried chemicals and trace metals. One good-sized pile of rocks had far more mass than an entire whale, minus the water in its tissues.
Gathering tools and equipment from the dig, Rae set his board to follow and headed across the river. He ranged up and down the far shore looking closely at the life around him. His drones had the initial survey database to build on. They became more selective, turning their attention to atypical examples of already cataloged life or discovering new flora and fauna that were as yet uncatalogued. As he splashed through yet another marshy hollow near the riverside, he realized the regularity of the mini biomes was unusual.
Finding a lightning charred colored-oak, he verified it was dead before leveling the shattered remains with his energy sword. The now flat stump revealed its rings, each having its own hue and shade of green or aqua. Sitting on the sturdy stump, he sent camera drones up for aerial views of the riversides to the north and the south for several kilometers, viewing their feeds with his goggles. The little marsh areas were common, forming periodic pockets of wetlands on both sides of the river.
The drones cataloged a trinity of life forms present in many of them. They were thick with the sour-root reeds and a fungus that lived on them, as well as a particular low bush he hadn't examined yet. The third was families of the river rodents. There seemed to be a synergy there that piqued his curiosity. Pushing the goggles up to his forehead, he walked to the nearest pocket. As he stepped out from the trees, a pair of waterfowl took flight from the surface of the pond, their legs unfolding, then unfolding again to trail behind them while they made a call that sounded like 'uncle.' He was going to study that footage closely later.
The rim of the marshy hollows seemed to range from a circular shape to a blunted teardrop, pointing towards the river. The bushes tended to be on the outside of the rims, fading flowers clinging to groups of small green fruit. He estimated the season to be late spring from the state of their growth. Finding a withered bush among them, he compared the dried-up berries with the growing versions from the living examples. Rae rolled one of the dried berries between his fingers to find a pyramidal seed in it. Drawing a small bag from a pocket, he harvested every remaining berry from the dead bush. He'd try cultivating them eventually.
The insides of the damp hollows seemed to be a river rodent paradise, full of reeds and little fish and crustaceans. This pocket had a den dug into the sidewall, and a trio of the root-eaters was tensely staring up at him. Their snub noses and prominent claws were muddy, speckled with dirt from where they were pushing back the edge of the hollow away from the river. The rodents had heavy jaws, squat bodies, and a long muscular tail. He slowly backed away but stationed a stealth drone over this pocket for long-term study.
Dozens of camping expeditions refined his survey and catalog algorithms. Each world yielded lessons on the myriad strange forms life could take, even on worlds superficially similar to Terra. At some point, his expeditions had stopped being a game of 'how fast can I climb up the tech-tree' while surveying the minimum of what was needed to get there. Gradually surveying had become the whole point, each world a vast, complicated puzzle of how the biosphere fit together. It was a way to unwind. The drone's footage and bio-sample records provided Rae oversight over an otherwise automated system.
Striking out from the river, he bumped against a large bamboo plant. With a wheezy creak, it slowly began to fall. Rae backed up just in time, as one by one, a whole line of them jumped loose of the soil and fell over, connected by a thick mutual root. The root rotated in the ground 90° with the formerly standing bamboo trees lying flat. The root side that was now the top sported several nodes he figured would be the culms of new growth when exposed to air and sunlight. Leaning over to poke at the other side with a stick, he caught a whiff of the sour smell he noticed with the river reeds. They were both a type of grass; maybe they harbored examples of the same fungus?
Rae set his bio-samplers to check a few thousand examples of each type of plant. Taking out his axe, he harvested the fallen stalks that rolled over so they wouldn't go to waste. Climbing on top of his board and rising a few meters to look around, layer after layer of downed bamboo was visible, from the freshly turned root just harvested to mostly decomposed stalks blending into the leaf litter. From the patterns he saw, it was a fifty-fifty chance which direction the mature stalks fell, the roots turning clockwise at times and counterclockwise at others. Stacking the cut stalks on his board, he jostled a few more mature stalk lines to see if they would turn. Two more crashed down, and when he finished cutting them, his board was fully loaded.
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It was like the stalks had a 'sell by' date, and after that, they'd turn and rot. Rae stationed a camera drone to observe any changes to a bamboo line within 100 meters of the first one that fell. That might be okay if he allowed half the new growths to hit the ground to enrich the soil. The important thing was to see how quickly they grew and replaced themselves, to determine how aggressive to be at harvesting them. It was something to think about as he walked back to camp to check the day's footage.
Rae replaced any missing roof tiles from the storm after unloading the bamboo. Entering the dig, he put his tools away and sat in front of the computer. He brought up the waterfowls video. When he'd come into view, they had been paddling in the waters of the hollow like a duck. Their legs revealed another length, like a heron or crane, after rising from the water. The legs unfolded a third time, unlike a terrestrial bird. Analyzing the imagery, he realized the thighs were elongated, extending well beyond the body to give the legs a zigzag shape like a quadruped's rear legs. That was something he hadn't encountered before.
A holo window popped up and indicated the completion of the grass sampling. Not all the reeds or turning-bamboo had the fungus, but the mold strains were related when they did. The algorithms correlated the mold to the tiny riverside mushrooms and suggested including them in the study. Rae approved the request and checked the survey of bones that was ongoing. Very few of the bones in the area had Felidae characteristics, and they were only a few decades old at most. He dispatched kinetic drones to fetch back any skulls or claws. In the footprint directory, he opened the felid subfolder and learned the strange aspects of the print he found were typical and not distorted. Disappointed in the lack of older felid bones and thus any evolutionary clues to the cat's development, he set off a long-term fossil record survey. That study would take several years to complete, but it wasn't as if he were going anywhere soon.
That reminded him of one of his primary goals on this world: to detect and document the plague pathogen mentioned in the orbital beacon. His algorithms were set to flag toxins and poisons encountered, but not necessarily diseases. The listed symptoms described a highly debilitating pathogen, but he'd seen no sign of it so far. He called back the bone survey and looked for widespread die-offs by checking for large numbers of bones that all dated within a limited amount of time. The computer crunched the data but didn't come up with any patterns like that. Maybe when the drones completed the fossil survey, he'd find those patterns further back in the past.
The local wildlife might have developed a resistance to the pathogen, and the sickness decimated the Daring survivors because they lacked that immunity. Rae wanted to ascertain the causes and effects of the disease to create an effective treatment. If he found animals suspected of being sick with the plague, he'd perform thorough necropsies to see what the pathogen did to its tissues. His conservation rules prohibited indiscriminate killing, but scientific studies were among the few valid reasons to kill animals in this world, besides their leather or the occasional taste of meat. And speaking of leather and meat...
He went outside and scraped the remaining flesh and fat off the drying hides. He'd reserved the goat brains in a bag, and they had been breaking down ever since. Using a scrap of wood, he mashed up the grey matter like softened butter. He trowled it on the skins evenly, then laid the frames flat to tan. An animal's brain was the best natural material to make the hides soft and flexible, but it wasn't easy to do. Since these hides were sheared and meant to be leather, he didn't have to be quite so careful not to get the brains on the fur side. If he wanted furs for a rug or a coat, the process needed a lot more care.
Rae put on a new batch of meat to smoke, pocketed a handful of jerky, and washed up again. Bagging up a bunch of stationary cameras and related equipment, he headed back across the river to a particularly impressive colored-oak. Moving through the undergrowth and ducking under a vine-strewn branch, he straightened up on the edge of a clearing. He startled a family of deer-like leaf browsers that scattered in the other direction, leaping over bushes and clattering away over unseen rocks. Peering into the darkened gap of the shrubs, he found a steep-walled dried streambed. He inspected the plants the animals were eating, making a notation of 'animal x eating food source y' for the database.
He scanned the massive tree when he reached it. The trunk was so large that two or three people wouldn't be able to put their arms around it. Its outer canopy formed a hemisphere of foliage, but bare branches stretched over the carpet of dead leaves on the ground within that space. Stepping over fallen branches, he looked for a fixed object where he could wedge the jerky. There was a boulder on the far side of the trunk, and as he approached it, a part of the leaf litter writhed and hissed at him.
A fuzzy caterpillar-like creature as long as his forearm reared up, clicking its jaws in threat. He realized he'd encountered one of them before when he explored the woods in his totem form at night. Perfectly camouflaged in random speckles of tan and brown, there was no sign of its luminescent spots during the day. The rear colorations mimicked its head, probably making it harder for a predator to attack the vital end. It moved away surprisingly fast, combining walking on stubby feet and contracting and extending in a worm-like fashion.
The boulder was weathered but didn't have noticeable cracks. Rae cranked the blade of his energy sword down to a narrow, knife-like length and whittled crooked slots into the stone. Jamming scraps of cured meat into them, he left the ends exposed to make it difficult to pull out. Rae pulled out a few cameras from his bag and mounted a few on the massive trunk at various heights. Spread far apart on the broad bole, angled to catch binocular side images of the near side of the area around the boulder. He inserted Fish-eye lenses in holes burned in the boulder to capture close-ups and affixed several cameras to overhead branches.
He backtracked to the streambed and gathered some rounded rocks. Each stone was the size of his two fists put together, and he carved in recesses to hold a camera and a grav anchor to hold them firmly in place. He arranged the rocks in a broad semicircle under the tree, focused on the bait station. With the project complete, he went back to camp.
As the day wound down, he took a dozen fist-sized camera drones and some of his more advanced equipment down to the metal shop. He checked the operational decibels before and after exchanging the brackets and baffles on them. Once they were at least half their previous loudness, he sat on a stone counter and put them through their paces across the chamber. Satisfied he hadn't broken anything, he sent them out on felid duty for the evening and checked on his camp chores before going to bed.
The next few mornings, Rae grabbed his goggles first thing to look for new footage of the cats. The only things the camera blind detected were various smaller predators and the large caterpillars. It wasn't until the third day that he got a result from the drones. He watched the drone get closer to the cat than before… only for the animal to swivel its ears and run away like the rest. He cursed under his breath, then sighed as he started digging out the electronics shop and probably the drying room today. He needed to work on more delicate drone systems to get his desired results; a closer look at the felids.