Space travel in the Convention of Sophonts depends on the Tensors.
The Quotidians seem to rule the Zogreion,1 but to travel even to their own moon, they must place themselves into the tungsten-carbide claws of space-dwellers. One version of earth was disassembled millions of years ago for more efficient elimination of waste heat, and the robots who orbit there maintain accelerators around the glowing core of the old home world.
Laura emerged from one of these. She, Ambassador Li, Pick Secretary, and a Quotidian official named mix Gargoyle rode a simple craft shaped like a hockey puck. This boosted to a higher orbit and entered a second accelerator marking a space on what had once been the surface of this former earth's ex-moon.2 With an unzipping of space-time, the moon un-vanished. Gravity returned.
The preparations for the moon walk took more time than the actual journey, but eventually, Laura found herself standing in her space suit, listening to her respirator, looking out at the melted, shattered patchwork of the Quotidians' moon, feeling envious.
Her civilization hadn't even built a military-industrial complex on its satellite, let alone rebuilt one after the first had been destroyed in an intercosmic war. Laura's civilization — in her head she pictured both of The People's Republic of China and the Homo sapiens species in general — hadn't even built their first transport accelerators on the moon.
Humans had built their first two accelerators in converted mines in western China and northern Chile, as if burying the potential alien invasion force under a mountain would have made one bit of difference if the aliens had actually planned to invade. Invade. That word kept coming to mind.
Laura and the rest of the diplomatic party stood in the wrecked center of a war-scape. Blasted glass surrounded fightercraft, crashed into regolith whose craters rippled the surface of the moon like a pond. Once-walking skyscrapers lay on their sides like the toppled statues of dictators, and behind the accelerator rose a mountain-sized polygon. Its lenses still sparkled across the crown of its cracked, hollow dome. Lines of subtly-colored moon rock showed where the ground under Laura's boots had been cut apart and spliced back together, all the way down to the core. Above, the stars shone distant and detached, as silent here as they were in the skies of every earth.
The Convention's message was clear: we would greatly regret destroying your species. It was like holding an Asian peace summit in Nanjing on top of the Pit of Ten Thousand Corpses. It was exactly what Laura would do, if she were in charge of these things.
They stood there for a while. Ambassador Li, it seemed, got bored.
"I haven't seen much of Koen recently," he said on their private radio channel.
"I'll recall him to the Embassy," Laura said immediately.
Li flicked a hand, the gesture clumsy in his suit. "Not yet. I know why we brought him here, and it is precisely for this sort of unofficial cultural programming."
That was one way to say "shopping and sleepovers." Laura tried to find another. "Soft power?" she suggested.
"Exactly. This business with General Graa's pet is distressing of course." Li sighed wistfully. "But I do hope it's concluded soon. I miss Koen's cooking."
Laura bowed in her suit. She was almost certain her boss was issuing only a very mild order. He didn't know. Not yet. But she was very glad that he couldn't see her face.
Dawn came in an eye-blink. There were no clouds here to catch the fiery sunlight, no atmosphere to scatter the red, yellow, and blue. The upper dome of the mountainous spacecraft hulk on the horizon flared silver, and it was simply, suddenly, day. Laura's suit chugged with the new heat load. Her visor darkened.
It was the best visual effect Laura would get. The transport accelerator that would bring the Parturians here was enclosed in a squat building in front of her. White indicator lights around the rim of the building's roof turned green, and that was it. The Parturian Mission had arrived.
On one earth, hornbills built mud huts. Most species of these large, heavy birds live in trees, where they use their long, curving beaks for display and the capture of fruits and small animals. When northeast Africa collided with Eurasia and cast a rain shadow that turned jungles into savanna, however, some of these birds descended.3 The bucorvids, or ground hornbills, evolved at this time.4 Larger, longer-lived, and more carnivorous than their tree-dwelling cousins, they stalked the savanna, alert for prey.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Nesting became a problem. Hornbills breed in hollow trees, and flight is essential for finding entry holes out of the reach of predators. However, it was the largest, heaviest birds that could bring in the best meat.
The solution to this dilemma came with the rediscovery of clay. The ancestral, tree-dwelling hornbills sealed their brooding females into their nests with walls made of mud, droppings, and fruit pulp. The female would stay there until her chicks were fledged, fed by her mate through a tiny slit in the mud wall, protected from the ravages of the weather, predators, and other male hornbills.5 Early ground hornbills needed between two and six unmated young males to help each mated male protect and feed his mate during her parturition. In this practice, the young males gained the experience needed to successfully raise their own eggs.6 When some of them began to build walls of clay around brooding females, breeding success increased.
The construction of these parturition huts required care and wisdom. The shape must capture and redirect cooling breezes, and must be situated in a defensible position with good access to water and game. Other tribes of hornbills must be driven off or sealed into walls of cooperation with the application of hunting treaties and marriage.
No longer tied to trees, the birds grew larger and taller, their legs thicker to support heavier brains. They cared more about eggs than infants, established social hierarchy through careful torture, and tended to bite. They spread in waves from eastern Africa, with each succession of migrants finding cousins with which to interbreed, conquer, and replace.
The Universal Guardianship of Parturition, which emerged to negotiate with the Convention upon contact, was defensive, cunning, and above all cautious. Thus their choice of venue for first contact.
In their environment suits, the Parturians looked like characters from a children’s cartoon: puffy sacks on stilt-legs, surmounted by a ribbed hose for the neck and a gaily-patterned artificial beak with various tools folded back along its length, Swiss-army style.
They arrayed themselves in a flying wedge and came, heads bobbing, legs kicking up clouds of moon dust. The foremost stopped and cocked his head at Laura and her party. Large, long-lashed eyes peered first out of one eye-bubble, then the other. The beak, striped in colors that would look very tasteful to someone with ultraviolet vision, opened and closed on the vacuum.
Laura's suit radio crackled with clacking warbles.
"Greetings," said the translator bug nestled behind her jaw. "I am Expendable Intern #305-432-0. We come in peace on behalf of all Parturian-kind."
Expendable Intern. That fit with Koen's predictions about Parturian psychology. A brooding female commanded her mate to feed her, and the mate commanded his bachelor-proteges to go hunting. It wasn't exactly the same system as the Monumentals used, but it was uncomfortably close.
Laura was glad, therefore, that Ambassador Li was here. He would take center position in the First Contact ceremony, and she could hide behind him.
Laura frowned in her space suit. Why had she thought in those terms? "Hide"? What was that slithery feeling in her stomach? Listen to your body, Fling had told her. So, what was her body telling her?
That she was making a mistake? That she was being a coward? Certainly, if Fling were in Laura's place, the mad old mouse would hop right up to the front of the delegation, with her jungle cat in its own space suit, probably.
No. Courage and cowardice were human concepts. And Fling thought in terms of thrilling danger because of her brain parasites. The important question here was how the Parturians thought.
Laura wanted to call Koen. Technically, she could, but no. He would confirm what she already knew.
"Private call to Ambassador Li," she said. Her translator clicked.
"Hm? Yes?"
"Sir, I think I have to add something to the First Contact ceremony."
1This is because they do.
2This moon having also been disassembled.
3Mark A. Maslin, et al. East African climate pulses and early human evolution, Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 101, 2014, Pages 1-17, ISSN 0277-3791, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2014.06.012.
4Ségolène Riamon, et al. Bucerotidae from the early Miocene of Napak, Uganda (East Africa): the earliest hornbill with a modern-type beak. Ibis, 2021, 163 (2), pp.715-721. ff10.1111/ibi.12907ff. ffhal-03429850f
5Kalina, Jan (1988). "Nest intruders, nest defence and foraging behaviour in the Black-and-white Casqued Hornbill Bycanistes subcylindricus". Ibis. 131 (4): 567–571. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.1989.tb04791.x.
6Sweeney, Roger; “Captive Management of Ground Hornbills for a Sustainable Population” by Capstone Project Report.