---Voracity---
---Khr’kowan’s perspective---
The vote is tomorrow…
That knowledge gnaws at my insides like a gut parasite (not that I’d be here to make the comparison if I’d ever actually had one to compare it to(!))
I look over to where my broodhusband engages in animated conversation with several Terran attendees of this gathering.
I have to fight down the urge to pull him back to our room and do the things I want to do to him tonight… the same way I had to push down the urge to [caffeinate] myself into a stupor!
I must think of tomorrow as a battle!
Just as I wouldn’t compromise my rest the night before I needed to fight, I can’t do so tonight!
If victory is achieved, celebration may follow afterward.
Weaver, let victory be achieved!
I just…
“You look nervous, Your Majesty.” comes the warm, deep voice of a man speaking a Terran language, approaching me.
I turn to see the wide, smiling lips of Ndum ‘Lemur’ Rain.
“Representative.” I acknowledge.
He chuckles and waves his hand, inviting “‘Ndum’, please.”
“Then… ‘Khr’kowan’, please.” I answer.
“Alright then, Khr’kowan…” he smiles, seating himself in a chair that’s configured to support his species’ backs beside the ottoman I’m straddling, at the edge of this ODR loungeroom “…you’re nervous, aren’t you.” not intoning it as a question.
“I am.” I admit “Is that unexpected?” slightly defensively.
“No… it’s entirely expected… but, borrowing one of my wife’s favourite phrases, ‘to worry only makes you suffer twice’!”
I chuckle “Quite the carefree philosophy(!)”
“It is…” he concedes, looking over to where the woman is completely oblivious to our attention, all the love in the Weaver’s creation etched into his face “…but it’s hard to deny the merit of it… A life could quite easily be entirely wasted on worrying about what will be and regretting what was. Here and now is the only place where we exist… and it always will be… Or, to put it in the words of a certain cartoon tortoise, ‘yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery but today is a gift… that’s why they call it the ‘present’’(!)”
“I don’t believe I’ve seen this [cartoon]… nor does that wordplay translate particularly well into Vrakhandic… nor do I know what a ‘tortoise’ is… but I appreciate the words of wisdom nevertheless(!)” I chuckle.
“Perhaps let me give you a more tangible reason not to worry, Khr’kowan.” he continues, warmly “Look around this room. What’s the most common species here?”
I do so.
“Humans?”
“Yes… and what kind of Human? What lineage, I mean?”
I struggle to recall the name of the most common variety of their species for a moment before “Sapiens… Right?”
“Indeed… Now, allow me to explain why you have no need to worry;… they like you, Khr’kowan. They like the Vrakhand and they like the Twigg. You and Viig have already become a viral galnet sensation in the UTC. They cannot get enough of you!”
Confused, I ask “Are you saying that other Terrans… don’t like us? That you don’t?”
The purple eyed man smiles and shakes his head while waving his long fingered hand to negate “Not at all. We like you too, that fact is just not as relevant as the fact that the Sapiens like you.”
“Because of… their numbers?” I suggest.
He rolls his shoulders in a way that is translated as noncommittal disagreement before answering “The fact that (even without the 3% of nonSapiens Terrans) they’re the most populous species in the galaxy certainly doesn’t hurt but… no. Not their numbers.”
“Why then?”
He beams, broadly “Their defining trait, Khr’kowan… The thing that separates them not only from gardenworlders but also from other Terrans and, though it remains to be seen, I’d guess you and the Twigg too. The Sapiens’ greatest blessing and most insidious curse!”
“And, what’s that?” I ask, humouring the theatrics.
“They are voracious, Khr’kowan! They are absolutely insatiable! They are the only Human lineage that had the privilege of naming themselves but, I must say, I think they did a poor job(!) Homo appetens, Homo avidus or (my personal preference) Homo vorax would all be far more fitting for them… They’re certainly not stupid but their voracity, their eagerness and their desire are, in my view, more characteristic traits than their knowledge.”
“So… it’s just greed then?” I ask, rather disappointed by the notion that they only want us among the stars to be exploited.
“They most certainly can be greedy… That is the ‘curse’ side of their voracity. However much they currently have, they will not be satisfied… That greed is the reason they invented feudalism, slavery, capitalism and had such difficulty getting socialism to work… They simply couldn’t figure out a way to engineer around their own natural proclivity to want more than they currently have or the willingness of at least some of them to resort to corruption to get it (though the persistent sabotaging efforts of the Stateser Empire certainly did not help in that regard(!))… No amount of wealth, power or fame will fill that insatiable pit inside them. You could place the entire universe in their hands and it would not satisfy them… They killed off the overwhelming majority of the Earth’s megafauna with weapons of wood, stone and bone, just to feed themselves and just because they could(!)… Around the turn of the last millennium, they knowingly almost killed our planet (along with themselves) simply because it wasn’t enough for them… Though I must insist that, when I say my wife’s kind are ‘voracious’, it is with all possible love… because the other side of that curse is, as I said, a blessing.”
“I fail to see how the other side of this curse could possibly be a blessing…?” I observe.
With a knowing smile, he explains “Well… it’s quite simply that this restless hunger of theirs is not limited to the domains of wealth, resources, power or fame… It extends to everything.”
“Everything? Such as what?” I ask, perplexed.
“Everything such as everything!” he proclaims “Friendship, family, companionship, adventure, experiences, exploration, knowledge, understanding, insight, achievement, beauty, love… You name it, they want more of it. They conquered the Earth in their quest to see what was over the horizon. They became the first land animal to reach every inhabitable continent, their feet being the first of any known hominin to reach half of them (or four out of the seven if you go by the Seven Continent Model). Throughout their history, they have repeatedly gone to places where they knew they very well may die… just to see what was there! When those they sent did die, their solution was to send more people until someone was able to make it back to them with recommendations for how the next expedition might be made more survivable(!) After leaving our system, they conquered an unprecedented +300 planets with no outside assistance and they did so simply to see what was there! To see all the ‘more’ that space had to offer, finding, to their immense disappointment, that it seemed shockingly devoid of other people to make friends with… Of course, they had us, their cousins… but, of course, we couldn’t be enough for them… In their quest to increase their companionship, they uplifted all the animals they ethically could to bioengineered sapience and created sentient AI to befriend. Then came the War… and, with some unfortunate exceptions, we (mostly they) managed to prosecute it humanely enough that the GU finally capitulated and allowed them in. Allowed them access to a galaxy full of future friends to make(!)… All this is to say, Khr’kowan, that you don’t need to worry… when Sapiens want something enough, they’re going to get it… It’s only a matter of the time it takes them to devise the means of breaking the universe sufficiently to do so(!) And, right now, what they’re crying out for… is the Vrakhand… and the Twigg… they want your friendship and, even if we are defeated tomorrow, it will not end there! They will have your friendship and there isn’t a thing you can do to stop them(!)… Resistance is futile(!) ” ending with a wry smirk.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
I frown, thinking about that for a few moments before asking “And what is it that makes you assign this ‘voracity’ as specifically a Sapiens’ trait and not a Human one, Ndum?”
“Let me show you.” he smiles, reaching a spindly hand to his side to pull a low table between us.
He retrieves his [holo] from his pocket and places it down before bidding “Holo; show me a blank, Mercator Projection map of planet Earth on the table, land represented in green, water in blue and permanent icecaps in white.”
The vaguely familiar shapes of the landmasses of the Terran [cradleworld] appear in front of me in their preferred ‘North up’ orientation for maps.
Strips of white line the top and bottom of the image with patches and lines of the same at various other points, presumably where mountain ranges are.
Curiously, I look to the man.
Still addressing his holo, he instructs “Shift the Americas to the East and show it as it was 290,000 years before present.”
The set of tall, thin continents traditionally represented on the left of the map jumps over to the right, the green expands moderately at the blue’s expense and the white expands at both the blue and green’s expense.
“Now overlay the estimated ranges of Bwato and every Heidelbergensian lineage of Human… including labels and estimated populations in Vrakhandic.”
The island continent in the central South of the map stays green, as do the long continents in the East, but the main landmass becomes a patchwork of different colours, each labelled with a phonetically translated name and a large number.
Addressing me again, he disclaims “This is only an estimate of the situation on Earth, around 100,000 Graom-Wakhkortan years ago. We could go further back and see how we got to here but that doesn’t matter as much as what follows this point. It may not have looked exactly like this but it will have been near enough for our purposes. Also, being a Mercator Projection, I do have to point out that lands at the top and bottom of the map are smaller than they appear.”
“Noted.” I acknowledge, curiously.
He smiles and bobs his head once before continuing “If you look here…” indicating the top left of the map “…you’ll see the range of the Neanderthals, sandwiched between the ice sheets in the North and the Mediterranean Sea in the South… extending into Northern Asia and through Anatolia into the Levant. Here…” he indicates a small patch, contorted between ice sheets and hemmed in by seas to the East and West and Neanderthals to the North and South “…are the Lisri. Here, across Central Asia, from the Iranian and Tibetan Plateaus up to the Altai Mountains and everything between, are the Denisovans. Way up here in Northeast Asia, all by themselves, are the Dzhigda. Those are all the Neanderthaloids.”
“Alright?”
“Down here…” he continues, pointing to the bottom tip of the almost entirely detached landmass in the bottom left of the map, where three colours cluster close “…you have the Tshwanoids and Bwato. That’s Bwato there, in South Central Africa. Then here, in Southeast Africa you have Inhatzenguele with my people, the Tshwane, over here in the Southwest.”
“I see.” I frown slightly, trusting that he’ll come to a point eventually.
“And then, we get to this whole stripe from East Asia to West Africa, the Sapiensoids;…” he smiles, before rapid firing “…Longi in Eastern China, Korea and Southern Japan, fragmented into 5 different sublineages. Danau, down in Southeast Asia, focusing on Sundaland. Khandwa, Indian subcontinent and extending along the Southeast coast of Iran to Western Oman.” here, his finger skips over one of the patches “Irhoud, inhabiting West and Northwest Africa… and then…” his finger returns to the one he skipped “…Sapiens themselves, inhabiting Eastern Africa from Kenya to the Nile Delta, with a toehold in Yemen… 1.5 million of them… More than double the rest of us combined…”
He looks to me, waiting for my reaction.
“That’s quite the discrepancy!” I observe.
“Precisely… Now… I’m going to play it through to the extinction of Lisri… Just bear in mind, you aren’t going to be watching a depiction of a genocide. While there certainly were instances of interlineage violence, there is a mountain of evidence to corroborate that the extinction of all these nonSapiens happened overwhelmingly bloodlessly. They didn’t murder us, they didn’t let us die. We believe they simply came to our territory and refused to leave us alone until there wasn’t an ‘us’ any more. We had simply become part of them…”
“Right…” I respond, apprehensively.
The man bobs his head and addresses the table “Holo; drop the labels and show how these ranges changed from this point to 18,000 years ago at a rate of 10,000 years per second.”
The writing vanishes and I watch as the colours jostle slightly.
[5 seconds] pass without much happening until, very quickly, the Sapiens range pours South!
[4] more [seconds] and the ranges of Bwato and the Tshwanoids are simply gone! Enveloped and subsumed into that of the Sapiens.
At the same time, they move West and, before I know it, the entirety of that mostly detached landmass in the Southwest of the map has become Sapiens’ territory.
The seas rise and fall and the ice expands and contracts a few times as nothing much happens for around [9] more [seconds], the Sapiens range only slightly and tentatively expanding their two toeholds on the main landmass.
The patch in the far Northeast vanishes, though that certainly seems like it can’t have had anything to do with the Sapiens at this point.
Then, all in the course of [3 seconds], they tear across the Southern coast and quickly incorporate the territories of, if I correctly recall, Khandwa, Danau and Longi into their own.
Another [2 seconds] and they cross the sea to start colonising that previously uninhabited island continent.
All at once, they sweep through the two major remaining ranges and cross into the long and thin continents.
For the final [2 seconds], the only colour on the map besides those of water, ice, undiscovered islands and Sapiens is that miniscule patch, wedged between the two inland seas.
Then, at last, it too blinks out, the lands of Earth now belonging solely to the Sapiens.
“That… was…”
“Alarming?” suggests the man, with a mirthful smile.
“Yes!” I exclaim “Even if you say it was peaceful… that was… What was that meant to demonstrate again? Other than Sapiens’ frightening power to overwhelm, supplant and assimilate?”
“Ah… It was meant to show you the difference between them and other Humans. Holo; go back further and play the period between 400,000 and 240,000 years ago at the same rate.”
The map goes back to more or less how it was at the start.
[16 seconds] pass with barely any movement. The odd boundary shift here and there but the main one being the Sapiens expanding North.
“Do you see?” asks the Tshwane, smiling “You see how static we all were?… That’s the difference between us and them… We’re capable of being content with what we have and how things are. We had our ranges, our little patches of the world where we knew how to survive, we knew what to eat, how to make shelters, how to craft tools in just the way our parents had taught us and their parents had taught them for hundreds of thousands of years… For companionship, we had our tribes and we had sporadic contact with other tribes of our respective kinds. Every now and then groups from other lineages may have intruded into eachother’s ranges but, for the most part, we were simply content where we were and with what we had… or, if we weren’t, we were at least resigned to our inability to improve things… Sapiens were different… they cannot be content! They are restless boundary breakers, disruptors and innovators… However good things are, they only see the ways they could be better!”
“They can’t be content?” I query.
“They really can’t…” he confirms “…In fact, if a Sapiens ever feels that they have nothing left to strive for, they’re liable to develop a condition known as Paradise Syndrome(!)… They will languish (in a way that I’m not aware of any other kind doing) just wishing to be once more challenged!”
“That’s… that’s actually quite horrible! The thought that there could be any who would fight so hard to attain a paradise… but then be so constitutionally unable to ever enjoy what they had attained…?!”
“Like I said…” he beams “…a blessing and a curse…”
I mull over the information the man who represents the Sapiens to the galaxy (despite not being one himself) has just given me about them for some long moments.
I’m overcome by a complicated mix of pity for them and awe of them.
Finally, I ask “So… what do you think caused Sapiens to be this way, Repres-… Ndum?”
“Ah, well…” he points to the Sapiens’ patch on the, now still, map on the table “…if you look at where their range is on this map, you can see they occupy a kind of crossroad between Africa and Eurasia… they control both the Sinai and Aden crossings which are the only likely routes in or out… Crossings could have occurred at the Strait of Gibraltar but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that happening. Controlling this crossroads, I believe, allowed them to benefit both culturally, from the good ideas and stories of any adventurous Neanderthals, Denisovans and Khandwa making their way into Africa and Tshwanoids, Bwato or Irhoud making their way out, and allowed them to act as a catchment for genes that had made those individuals so adventurous… You see-”
“Darling!” chides the mirthful voice of an approaching woman, startling me.
I turn to see the man’s wife, looking with wry disapproval at the table as she walks toward us.
I have to wrestle down the complicated emotions that arise in response to her appearance, given what her husband has just taught me of her kind.
Arms akimbo, she lightheartedly challenges “You’re not filling the Empress’s head with your fringe palaeoanthropology theories, are you?!”
Without waiting for an answer, she turns to me and chuckles “Don’t let my husband fool you, Your Majesty(!) Whatever he pretends, he has no qualification in palaeoanthropology and the Crossroad Hypothesis is not accepted as mainstream science…!”
“Untrue…” returns her husband, raising a long finger in the air and affecting smugness “…I did an elective module in palaeoanthropology in our second semester at university. I remember they had lectures on Wednesdays because I had to miss my parkour club sessions for them. It may not have been a full degree but it was certainly a qualification…”
Sighing mirthfully, she does not dignify that, continuing “I hope my husband hasn’t been boring you to tears, Your Majesty? He can get a little… enthusiastic when explaining how he thinks my lineage is the most amazing thing to walk the Earth since the death of the nonavian dinosaurs(!)”
“No!… It’s been quite edifying!” I respond, honestly, before adding “And you may call me ‘Khr’kowan’, Ambassador.”
Beaming broadly (and absolutely confirming her husband’s appraisal of her lineage’s eagerness for any and all companions with her manner) she answers “Then you can call me ‘Nirina’, Khr’kowan!… Now, not to sound like your mother but I think it’s bedtime for both of you… You have a vote to win tomorrow!” not sounding in the slightest doubt that we will do so.