Seeking out new worlds | Glowfic Constellation

The secrets of Delver technology could not resist decryption forever. While the tools they wielded are deeply weird, jealously guarded, and immensely complicated, living beings built the tools that brought aliens to the dragons' first world. The great calamity left ruins aplenty behind, and once grown the Seeker gathered these old tools as their very favorite sort of treasure. Dragons are not intelligent in quite the same way as a No-Tail, but they are far from stupid. They live forever and can be very determined if they set their mind to it.

The Seeker brought all its tools and treasure along with it when the world was evacuated ahead of the Tailless's relentless growth and hunger for resources. It studied under the great elder Darktooth on the new world, studied together with Darktooth (an arrangement not very common with dragons, as they are not particularly social), for a very long time. And eventually, by application of the hard claws of experiment and calculation and theorizing, the universe revealed its workings, cold and precise and mathematical. Creating more and more tools of the highest sophistication, and teaching others of its kind in exchange for wealth, and even spawning offspring and guiding them to adulthood, was all satisfying for a long while, but eventually... He got bored.

And so, the Seeker wondered if the long sleep for the journey between stars was really necessary, and got to work seeing about making it not. He managed it eventually, and built a starship, and went exploring. Stars come in a beautiful variety of kinds, and the worlds around them do too, but very, very few bear any sign of life. They are mostly barren and empty.

...Oh, this one is emitting curious amounts of low-frequency light. Worth investigating. Pushing a starship faster than light requires a touch of magic (at least for now), which he provides.

In the outer solar system of a certain star, well above the plane of the ecliptic, a black sphere the size of a city block appears and has a look around with powerful telescopes.

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Yes! You take measurements of lots of things and find out about the patterns they exhibit.

Hmm. What's a measurement, exactly?

Amseli mentioned eggs like to be warm? One can measure how warm someplace is; not just whether it's warmer or colder but by how much.

Warmth is nice, yes. That sounds interesting! But how? Everyone feels things differently.

People can feel more or less comfortable in the same place, but the place is only one temperature. They have instruments to measure it.

...Is there always an unquestionably correct answer for a thing's temperature? The idea seems weird.

Sometimes it's complicated. The climatologist can talk about interactions with pressure and evaporative cooling and stuff. But this is all what they know from using the instruments, feeling stuff doesn't get precise results with useful patterns.

The egg eagerly listens to all this. He had no idea air and water could do those things. He's happily looking forward to seeing it for real!

The other egg wakes up and listens for a while, then asks what kinds of animals these new voices know about.

These ones are not animal experts but have seen deer and squirrels and stuff in the national park.

Ooh, those things look tasty.

The deer are, they know a guy who hunts them and sells venison. Squirrels they don't know.

The hungry egg is now thinking about eating things again. Eating things is good because then you don't die. Eating smart things is bad because... More potential is lost? Maybe? She's not sure.

Maybe eating smarter things is more bad than stupid things like the Amseli said, but a big smart thing like a buffalo has as much meat as a hundred little stupid things like squirrels? Is it better to eat a buffalo or a hundred squirrels?

The greens don't have ethical opinions that distinguish those options. It's just that one mustn't eat people.

Draak are smart. Amentans are smart. They've never talked to any other animals. How do you decide when something is a little bit too smart or too stupid?

This isn't their specialty. Something about tool use and symbolic understanding and stuff. Buffalo and squirrels don't do that.

They want to know why, and what exactly 'people' is so they can decide how much to pay attention to this rule.

Well, for one thing if you eat a person at some point the thing you are eating is a dead person. They've heard Draak don't have pollution sensitivity but it's a big deal and they will have to learn about it to live on Amenta. But for another by and large Amentans think people should get to keep being alive unless they do something wrong, and not something wrong like "being near a hungry Draak", and they don't think this about animals particularly. There are exceptions but not nutritious ones.

...'The Amentans really really don't like it' is a valid justification for this rule. Since they are going to hatch in the Amentans' territory. And of course people want to continue being alive? Hmm.

Many animals don't much care for being hunted - ones that liked it would die and not have any children - but they don't care about being alive in the same way, as far as Amentans know. It would be pretty alarming to discover they were considering non-people some creature with a complex inner life that merely didn't display this in any way, but the visiting telepaths haven't discovered any of those yet.

They wonder what talking to animals will be like. And eating. And breathing. And seeing things. So many things they have to wait to hatch to try... (The hungry one wiggles again.)

Well, the people around them are trying to figure out where they should do those things. Lots of people will come by to meet them about that before decisions are made.

Ooh, what do the possible places look like?

Their place looks like, uh, this mental image of a forested mountain range!

Ooh. That looks like a great place to live!