Chapter 2: Part 1. The Founders
As Tenvoice Desire made first dayfood behind the soft-fence surrounding the Zheek science mission’s compound, he listened to the morning cries of the flying creatures inhabiting the forest in which they pitched their laboratory and marvelled at the wealth of diversity their small expedition brought to fruition. In less than a Long Thought (8 x 10^7 orbits), his companions transformed the flora and fauna of their study world, elevating ferociously mindless, land-dwelling plate-backs into semi-intelligent avians, who were doppelgangers of the Zheek’s own evolutionary precursors, and carpeted the floor of the world with brightly coloured flowers. He hopped from foot to foot, joy spreading through his hearts, as their children zipped and zoomed through the canopy, chirping and cawing their delight at being alive.
“You look happy,” mate Timeless Wanderer said. She was leader of their clade, and the visionary mind behind their project to re-establish the slowly dying Zheek as the galaxy’s pre-eminent species. He glanced up from his preparations and noticed her back feathers were flat and the two red patches near the intersection of her hard-lips and wattle were vivid. She was in a mood to mate, albeit fruitlessly.
“I’m busy,” he giggled. Soon the expedition would be back, and they will, he was certain, be hungry.
“Oh Tenvoice, we will only be a short while,” she cooed back at him, raising her ventral-arms.
“I’m tempted,” he purred. He put his cooking blade down and stood to one side, bobbing his squat body in time with her ventral-arm movements.
They circled each other, each dancing backwards and forwards to the rhythm of an unheard ancestral song, eyes wide, warmth suffusing their breasts before coming together in a clash of feathered bodies. She was much bigger than Tenvoice, and easily pinned him to the melded carbon floor, then with a twist, she threw him on her back and gasped as he entered her. Striations of pleasure ran the length of her abdomen as Tenvoice thrust again and again. Then they collapsed as the Great Joy took hold, their limbs rigid with excitement.
When it was over, Timeless fell into a deep slumber, her clothes in disarray, but Tenvoice managed to pull himself together and stagger breathlessly to the food preparation table and continue with his chopping and seasoning. The local edibles, both plants and animals, had a slightly unpleasant bitterness to them, so the latter was a prerequisite. In a Short Thought, the genetics of the indigenous life would evolve to their taste, but in the meantime he would have to sweeten the pot. He did not like adding chemicals to food, it made a mockery of his culinary skills, something Tenvoice prided himself on. No-one in the last cohort of his clade could cook like him. Which, he guessed, made him the best Zheek chef anywhere in the universe. Although that was a status he would never share, because there were no more Zheeks. Anywhere.
He retracted his ventral arm to stand closer to the cooker, so he could better watch the pots as they bubbled. He could have, of course, excited the food’s molecules by irradiating them, but somehow, the application of heat to a liquid vector in which the food was submerged, added to the flavour. It was good work, and he understood his other specialisation, astro-cartography, would have to take a back seat, while the biologists and geneticists did their work of transforming the local animals into facsimiles of themselves. Still, he liked to keep his feathers in by mapping the skies around him. It was such an interesting system, so much like Zheek prime, with gas giants guarding the entry points to the inner system where life flourished. The planet even had a large moon, just like home. He choked at this thought, his round eyes wet with emotion. Home was dead. The dark cloud event made sure of that. Tenvoice wondered if this new home, the planet their small party had named “Fresh Start”, would ever experience such an inexplicable destruction of life’s ability to replicate itself. The fullest of full stops on the road to total evolution. Only time would tell.
His communications bracelet buzzed and Runtime Whipwing appeared on the screen.
“Heya Tenvoice, we’re about two thousand hops from you, I hope you have First Food ready,” Runtime said. “Tell Timeless we have some new samples to analyse. I couldn’t get through to her just now.”
“She’s sleeping,” Tenvoice answered. He did not elaborate. Everyone knew they were mates, and they could draw their own conclusions. “I’ll tell her when she wakes.”
“In which case, I’ll probably tell her when I get back. Let her sleep. She probably needs it.”
Tenvoice smiled inwardly. He was such a brim-walker.
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