In the radioactive mantle of a nameless planet dwelled the kahaldans, who lived in an air bubble in the rock and coated its inner surface with glowing farms of fungi. They enjoyed making new kinds of sounds and naming things, and would have named their planet but for their total ignorance of what a planet was. They had never glimpsed the sky. Had they somehow managed to drill fifty miles in the right direction, they would have found an atmosphere so acidic that they would have died within hours – never glimpsing the motion of the stars and planets, which were obscured by heavy yellow clouds at all times.
The rock’s radiation warmed a thick layer of fungal growth, which the kahaldans cultivated and ate. The boundaries of territories were clearly demarcated, but members moved freely through neighbors’ territory as long as they did so alone and brought their own food. The territory’s master would perch on the fungal hill she had cultivated, the six eyes set around her round golden head like black jewels flickering to see if either of these terms were violated. There was bound to be bloodshed of some form if the newcomer was foraging, or accompanied by a larger war band. Even if they were not, an owner might deliberately misunderstand, if they thought the traveler was easy meat.
Travel was therefore dangerous. And no kahaldan liked it for its own sake, or had anyone in particular to visit. Kahaldans were surrounded by neighbors they could often see and hear, and paid keen attention to the health and and visitors of those neighbors, but ultimately they were solitary creatures. Their greatest ambition was to have larger territories and taller hills, and be away from others. Very little drew them out of the privacy and safety of their homes – except for fission.
Hacheninath was fissioning. She found the process uncomfortable, and the upcoming social ordeal terrifying.
It was not bad from the other side of things. Whenever another kahaldan crossed her territory, they exchanged news about past fissions – who had not survived the aftermath, who had been accepted as a gene donor by the daughters – and more importantly, of upcoming fissions. Whenever she heard of a fission close enough to risk traveling to, she sprayed her territory aggressively with her scent and hurried off to join the party.
Since she had become Hacheninath she had attended around fifty fissions, and all but once had been rejected as a donor by the new kahaldan daughters. This made her sore, and wonder if her mother had accepted some bad gift into her lineage. But she never failed to attend an opportunity when she heard of one nearby – no kahaldan would turn down meat, or the possibility of adding to another’s lineage. On one of those fifty occasions, the witnessing party had examined the twinned and twitching daughters and slaughtered them. Hacheninath could not explain how this had come to be despite their initial goodwill towards the newly fissioned – only that the gathered party had converged quickly, after looking and smelling at each other, onto the consensus that it would be the daughters who would die.
Although the meat had been sweet, this memory naturally brought Hacheninath little joy. It tormented her in between the strange discomfort of fission itself, which took her aback. Although her memory reached back multiple generations, Hacheninath did not remember fission itself. It was precisely the nature of fission that made it hard to retain. As she divided physically, thoughts skittered across the surface of her consciousness that were increasingly not hers. Those thoughts were hard to remember them afterwards, like dreams. For as long as she could remember her thoughts had been like neatly interlocking stepping stones. Now there was discord, disagreement. Not the disagreement of two thoughts she was holding together in comparison but true disagreement of minds that could not share a skull.
Her scent was changing, too. From the left side of her body she sprayed one scent and from the right side another. They were competing even now; she was spent and quite ready to have this over with. Neighbors, smelling or hearing word of the fission, spread the word and congregated.
War bands had a natural shape. Kahaldans congregating to witness fission, therefore, had as close to the opposite shape as possible. Instead of approaching from multiple directions, the kahaldans coalesced into one line and ceremoniously approached the hill at the center of Hacheninath’s territory, carrying little gifts of herbed or mashed fungus. They used an inefficient walk, raising the leg joints unnecessarily high and kicking the feet out in elegant little flicks. Only at the end did they spread out in a ring, watching her convulsing, dividing form.
One part of her delighted, thrilled. Attention.
Another withdrew, felt fear. The newly fissioned could be slaughtered, too. She craved solitude, safety.
It took hours before Hacheninath was fully two. Both sides felt a wave of relief. No more alien emotion. No more clumsiness. No more internal competition for pheromone production, a competition that had driven the temperature of their body uncomfortably high for many hours now.
“What is your name?” their visitors asked.
He said, deciding: “Cheninathuuz.”
She said, deciding: “Cheninathis.”
They both started eating the gifts offered to them by each visitor, mindful to keep more than the accustomed number of legs plunged into the fungal ground while they were still weak from fission. In the area they lived, the direction of gravity was roughly parallel to the ground. A misstep, especially on a hilltop, could mean death before bodily halt.
As Cheninathuuz took each gift, the giver proclaimed her own name, made herself big and smelly, recited a poem in a booming voice, and spat into his mouth. For four of the would-be donors he peeled back his tongue for the inner tongue, a small moist nub that would disassemble the genetic material and take a little part of it into his own genome. The flavor of the spit on his inner tongue was a hundred times richer than any food. The fourth gift of the mouth had a note of bitterness that made him wary, suspect he had been too open. He did not expose his inner tongue after that.
Cheninathis felt pleasure and revulsion at once as she took the spit of each visitor: it was delicious but had an overly deep meaty flavor. An otherstench. She took only one gift of the mouth, to a little shiver of collective hostility.
Cheninathuuz wished she would take a few more. As irritating as he had found sharing a mind with her, he also did not want her to die. She was kin, almost-self. If she took a killing blow he did not think he could take it. He would have to bow in the other direction so that none of his lidless eyes would see it.
When all the gifts were consumed, both of daughters stood up. Things were now quite tense; the air was death-dense. No one moved, but all the kahaldans’ black eyes expanded and contracted rapidly, swiveling to examine each neighbor, reading and changing and transmitting intentions. Cheninathis, who had seen her sibling’s apprehension for her, felt enormous fear and also enormous aggression. Her young fed body thrilled brashly: if they came for her she would not be the only one to die.
The ripples of consensus swelled and coagulated into a wave: it would be Cheninathis or one of the smaller kahaldans at the periphery of the group, half of whose surface was mottled with an illness.
The single kahaldan whose gift of the mouth Cheninathis had accepted raised a limb to point at that mottled kahaldan, and charged.
The victim broke off, running downhill, daring to fling himself forth with gravity’s aid, at risk that he would never reestablish safe contact with the ground again. But the alternative to speed was certain death. The whole party swarmed after him, Cheninathis the most aggressive.
It was quick but bloody. Cheninathis took the head and popped it off as the swarm opposite her tore the legs from the main body. When the unclaimed torso dropped to the ground, a wave of stooped kahaldans scuttled in to dismantle it, knocking Cheninathis down the hill. She stabbed frantically at the ground to come to a safe halt, and just as frantically devoured the head before it could be taken from her by a kahaldan who had not managed to grab any piece.
It was not quite over. She sensed undispersed aggression in the air: there could still be another death. Cheninathuuz said, “Don’t give my lineage a bad name, sister. Take another gift.”
After a pause, Cheninathis approached the largest kahaldan whose gift of the mouth had not been accepted by either daughters, one whose demeanor sent alarm and dislike rippling across her skin. She lied, “Your offering was sweet, Tamachirzik, and your song elegant.” She opened her mouth, and the kahaldan spat. Half of her lineage would contain some of him now, forever. She did not favor him, and so this was bitter to accept.
After that there was little to discuss. Most of the visitors had eaten enough, and now that the latest large kahaldan had a stake in her lineage, the daughters had allies enough that they could not be eaten without a serious fight. Cheninathuuz returned to the top of the territory’s hill.
After looking at him for a few seconds, weighing the odds, Cheninathis followed the dead kahaldan’s scent to his territory and nestled on top of his strange-smelling hill, weary and pessimistic. Her new territory was small and she already had a reputation of weakness.
As far back as she could remember, she had lived a life of acceptable prosperity, rarely at risk of serious starvation. But of course her uncles and aunts who had ended up in this situation tended not to fission and leave memory. She hated being Cheninathis and missed being Hacheninath. Homesick for an old self as well as her actual home, she felt loathing envy for Cheninathuuz.
She awoke from a nightmare-infused sleep to tectonic thunder that rattled the whole world. Immediately after a world-breaking clap of noise, a powerful gust flung her from her hilltop into a valley. She grasped at the fungal bed in a panic to fix herself against the wind. Kahaldans had a powerful instinctive fear of falling away from the ground due to gravity. In her disorientation she did not recognize it was wind, not gravity, displacing her – nor that it was blowing her in the opposite direction from gravity. She did not understand, anyway, the concept of wind.
The same gust flung shards of rock across the landscape, but after some seconds the debris reversed course and fell back from when they had come. But where was that? Half-deafened, Cheninathis raised herself to look in that direction. Most of her neighbor’s territory had gone dark, and the falling rocks were disappearing into that darkness.
She could not make sense of the darkness: it was a pitch black that she had never seen before, having lived in a world where every square inch was colonized by luminous life. Cheninathis went to the edge of the blackness and found the ground had fallen away – into what? A hole in the world. She stayed perched there, staring into that hole, and when her vision finally adjusted saw the lit tumbles of fungus on miles of scree.
In a week the void had become fertile and bright with new fungal growth, and her fear vanished. She and her neighbors advanced into the black, flinging spores and eating the ground as they went. Cheninathis no longer hated being Cheninathis, now that she knew she would not starve.
In some time she felt herself starting to fission again. It had never been like this before. She had always been ringed by witnesses, stifled by their scent, their song. Now her fissioning place was blissfully devoid of kahaldan voices or movement. Instinctively she went to the peak of the closest hill, but it only served to show her how empty the land around her was. No neighbors would carry the news of her splitting, or congregate around her as she writhed. She felt two ways about it:
I’ll go further and further, feast endlessly.
It is time to double back. I don’t want to be so completely alone. I want a gift of the mouth.
Freedom, quiet! I don’t even need to build hills anymore. There are no neighbors to monitor.
Neighbors, rumor – I need them. It’s not safe to be out here. Who knows what’s happening in the rest of the world? How many fissions have we missed, how many opportunities?
But all the opportunity is here__. Your thoughts are cowardly thoughts – it’s the influence of that kahaldan whose gift I had to take to avoid becoming the next victim. He must be in you but not me. I am glad to be rid of it!
The thoughts faded abruptly as a layer of bone grew between their fissioning skulls. They peeled away from each other and became panting, feverish, relieved wholes on springy new fungal growth. There were no gifts, so they tore tufts of the ground off to feed their new bodies.
They marveled at something that had changed about the world since their last fission: it was not necessary to keep any of their legs stuck in the ground to stay in place. Now, even if they lost their balance and tumbled sideways, they could easily catch themselves without accelerating into an indefinite fall.
One asked the other, “What is your name?”
He said, deciding: “Ninathispir. And you?”
She said, deciding: “Ninathisoch.”
She went ahead and he turned back. As she went, she began to improvise a song.
The worldquake had shattered a barrier between the air bubble that was the kahaldan homeland and another cell that seemed infinitely large in volume. Although most of it was bare of the fungus that was so eagerly colonizing it, there were patches of less competitive growth that nonetheless became increasingly delicious to the kahaldans who bred it for flavor. Mashing, heating, recombining, ruminating, fermenting this new flora became a great passion of the colonizing kahaldan wave.
Along with cuisine there was song. The custom of improvising song to convince another kahaldan to take genetic material had faded. Fissioning kahaldans went to the periphery of the fungal growth and divided alone. Not all kahaldans had the craving for secretive fission that Cheninathis had, but those who did overwhelmingly populated the new and boundless world. They had no need for the old rituals – the procession of gifts, the poetic recitation, the coercive genetic exchange, and the killings afterwards. But their penchant for song remained, and in fact had expanded now that they could spare mental capacity from tracking an expanding ring of territorial and genetic relationships.
Although kahaldans no longer had strict territory boundaries, they were able to congregate in larger numbers than ever. In the old small world, no kahaldan had actively wanted strangers on her territory – the visitor might eat from her land. Now a revel could gather in an empty patch of land, and once it was depleted of food, disperse to wander once more.
Cheninathis’s descendant Thisochimol discovered that, after three full generations of almost total solitude, the desire to see other kahaldans had assert itself. Where her brother followed the fungal coastline, she doubled back to find others.
Two things shocked her. First was that the total vocabulary of the kahaldans had grown. There was much to talk about now that they had invented games, contests of food, contests of song. She learned as quickly as she could to join in. Second was that the nature of the relationship between herself and others – all others – had changed. The conversations she had now were unlike speaking to a neighbor with whom one had to coexist no matter what, or to a fission witness pressing a gift of the mouth to her, or to a traveler scuttling through, trading gossip for safety. Now that she she spoke to her kind by choice, the speaker she became was different from anything she had ever been before.
In both forced association and isolation Thisochimol had been a cramped self without knowing it. Now she found her interiority, too, was an expanded field for her to explore. Thisochimol fell in and out of bands, alternating between solitude and revelry as she pleased.
When she fissioned, she went to the boundary of fungal growth to do so alone.
One daughter lost her grip on the thin fungal bed and fell up into the air to her death. Shaken, the surviving daughter wondered why the world went through phases across generations where losing your grip on the ground posed sometimes no danger, sometimes immediate danger, and sometimes partial danger that yanked you sideways across the ground. These changes were always gradual, but she had nightmares where they were abrupt, and she was flung into the sky without warning. She saw no reason why this could not happen. Cheninathis had been sleeping when the world had broken bigger, flinging her almost to her death.
Reluctant to name herself until asked by another kahaldan, she returned to the last settlement she’d been part of. She tracked down one of her favorite friends by scent and explained what had happened.
“Oh, how distressing that must have been,” exclaimed the friend, and composed a little dirge for the lost twin on the spot.
Relaxing, the survivor said, “I came to see you because I have not been named yet.”
Seeing her meaning immediately, the friend asked, “What is your name?”
She said, deciding: “Sochimolok.”
He nudged her leg joint gently with his. “Forget the death, Sochimolok, and look to the future. So many kahaldans will enjoy your song at the coming gathering.”
Her spirits were up now so she improvised at him:
_Cheninathis flung herself into the dark for freedom.
Sated, her descendant Sochimolok reversed course for glo_ry.
Her friend was right. Five generations after the worldquake, almost when direct memory of the old world had faded from the minds of the living, Sochimolok stood at an amphitheater and recited her hour-long poem in front of an unprecedented crowd of almost a thousand.
Sochimolok was the last of her lineage to remember Hacheninath’s life, the life of that trapped and finite world. These fading memories she spun into myth. She sang of the dreamtime.
It would not be correct to call Sochimolok’s song a religious song, as the kahaldans were too imaginatively fractious to have a religion. The audience admired Sochimolok’s story, but much of the fun for them was criticizing and varying it. They did not take her tale as truth, or even consider it a kind of thing whose trueness or falseness mattered. They thought, with each line: if I take this to start, what kind of story can I tell with it? What kind of subversion… what alliteration… what analogy…
Here was Sochimolok’s song, in essence:
Once we came from a plenum of fungus. Infinite space!
There were no quarrels. We lay nestled in food, in all directions.
We ate and divided and ate and divided.
There was no sickness, and we remembered all –
to the very beginning, when there was nothing.
Nothing tired of nothingness and fissioned into the plenum
and the first, whose name was Ka.
Ka divided into Kahal and Kasnir.
Kahal divided into Kahalda and Kahalmi.
Kasnir divided into Kasnirim and Kasniruuz.Then the first quarrel:
Kahalda wished to spit into Kasniruuz’s mouth.
Kasniruuz permitted, but did not peel back the tongue,
to make his children Kahalda’s children too.
Kahalda could have divided in peace. But she coveted more:
She wanted Kasniruuz to carry her too into the future.
Disagreement, which should be reserved for division,
now took place across bodies, unnecessarily.
Twin dragged in twin. Kahalda enlisted Kahalmi.
Kasniruuz enlisted Kasnirim.
Then the first deaths:
Kahalmi killed Kasniruuz,
and Kasnirim killed Kahalmi.Alone with his foe
and the world’s first cooling corpses, Kasnirim said:
You and I, Kahalda, are all that are left of the first.
You remember as well as I do what it is to be alone as Ka:
The relief but also the loneliness.
I would rather be alone now than to be with you.
I will bury you in a nightmare, where you will live
in the cramped and deathly way of your revealed preference.
Reality begets correct action.
Delusion begets incorrect action.
Since you have behaved in a deluded way,
I will make you a false world to fit your delusion:
A sealed pit of hunger and murder.
Go quarrel with yourself there for a dreamtime.
Become hungry and forget what it was to be here,
in the endlessly giving expanse,
until my wrath expires,
and you can awaken again.My name is Kahaldasochimolok. Many generations have passed,
and we have awoken back into the plenum of fungus.
We are no longer nightmare-stupid.
We do not quarrel and we do not kill.
Infinite space!
We eat and divide and eat and divide.
There is no sickness, and we remember all –
to the very beginning, before the bad dream
of that cramped and deathly world.
There were no awards, exactly, but it was common knowledge that Sochimolok had given the best performance. She stayed late basking in her glory. Her song was the concatenation of generations of improvisation and polishing.
There was one particular admirer who caught her attention after he improvised part of her own verse back at her in a clever way. His name was Piruchintel. The two of them wandered far, all the way to the border where fungal growth thinned. After hours of talking and singing they spat into each other’s mouths to express their appreciation of each other, although of course Sochimolok kept her inner tongue covered.
Piruchintel made a noise of strong pleasure and said, “You have a wonderful taste,” implying that he had taken her spit into his inner tongue.
Sochimolok guessed he was lying to curry favor. Like the majority of kahaldans, she had not admitted anyone else’s genetic material into her lineage since her ancestor entered the new world. But then she thought, why shouldn’t he take my gift of the mouth? I am the greatest poet in the world, as far as I know. What could be more important to be better at than poetry? What higher thing could a living being aspire to?
She said, “You are a good poet yourself. Have you developed your own cosmology to sing about?”
“All the good ideas are taken by the giants.” Piruchintel’s visible eyes flickered in a flirtatious pattern. “But the variation I’ve been working on is that the dispute between Kahalda and Kasniruuz was poetic and not reproductive in nature. Reproductive dispute, how base. I think that, before the dreamtime, we didn’t have reproductive disputes at all. Ka and immediate descendants must have lived as we did, thinking mostly of song.”
It was too dim to read each other’s eye movements now. Sochimolok was glad for this – she thought Piruchintel’s idea was foolish, but she also wanted to keep spitting into his mouth, especially if there was a chance he was actually taking it with his inner tongue. She did not want him to read her disdain.
Piruchintel continued, “I think we invented the gift of the mouth after we entered the dreamtime, not before. Why? To live in a tiny, enclosed world without strife, kahaldans had to have more stake in each other’s future, and willingly trade genetic material after they divided. Otherwise there would be endless bloodshed.”
Restless, they began to move again, further into the lake of darkness past the fungal layer, onto actual rock. Now they had to be especially careful not to fall up into the night. They wedged each foot into a small crevice and moved one limb at a time. Wandering here was foolish, but they were both healthy, adventurous, and high on proving themselves to each other.
“There was bloodshed anyway,” said Sochimolok. She shivered over the last murder she’d committed, generations ago, when she was newly Cheninathis – the crunch of the kahaldan’s head in her maw, reverberating in her own bones. This was reprehensible to her now. Once that brain matter had been a delicacy; now she quivered with horror. She liked that the memory would disappear entirely soon, after her next fission.
“True. The oldest ancestor I remember was in war bands with her twin and cousins. She killed at least eleven kahaldans before her war band was slaughtered and she fled into the unbounded world. It’s one reason I try to take genetic material from others. I want poetry, not war, in my lineage… Sochimolok, do you see that?”
“What?”
“Over there – it’s light.”
“Surely not,” Sochimolok said, but then she saw it too. It was a long, dispersed line of dim bioluminescence on the horizon, which had been invisible until their eyes adjusted to the pitch night of uncolonized rock.
“Did we get turned around?” Piruchintel wondered uneasily.
“Impossible,” said Sochimolok. “We’ve been climbing downhill all this time, and that’s lower than we are.”
“But we’re at the edge of the known world! We specifically chose to have the poets’ gathering here, at the furthest edge, because of the themes being celebrated.”
Sochimolok said, “Do you think some kahaldans decided to traverse all that distance on bare rock and set up a different colony – one the wave behind them would reach within a generation anyway – for novelty?”
Piruchintel sounded relieved. “That must be it. Perhaps it was just one kahaldan to start with – one who wanted to play at being Ka. Out alone in the darkness alone, who knows what kind of poetic inspiration she must have experienced? Perhaps they’ll come up with an epic to beat yours, Sochimolok.”
She appreciated his attempt to dispel the unease, but the strangeness of the horizon killed any answering levity in her. Silence settled between them as they stared at the distant gash of life, perched on the closing edge of the dreamtime.
\
Notes
I’ve had the idea of sapient mitotic species for over a year, but it was in ideas limbo until I read @imperialauditor’s tweet: “something I think a lot about is Robin Hanson’s idea of The Dreamtime - that we live in a tiny gap between crushing Malthusianism (labor supply >> demand) in the past and in the future”.
Aesthetics were chosen over thermodynamics in the writing of this story.