Stomatopods

Stomatopods are a crustacean people who live in the western ocean of the green planet. Portia knows that ants are not like her own people, nor like the Spitters or the stomatopods of the western shallows. Her people count the stomatopods as more than animals, and deal with them as neighbours.

Description

Their ancestors were fierce, inventive hunters with unparalleled eyesight and deadly natural weapons. They lived in colonies where negotiations over living space were common.

The virus found fertile ground in them too, and they developed on parallel lines with Portia’s own kin. Portia calls their society simple and primitive by the standards of her people. She puts this down to the water they live in, or to a nature that waits for prey, or to both.

Relations with the spiders

Relations with the stomatopods are cautious and ritualized. The two species have nothing to compete over, and in the littoral zone they sometimes swap gifts, the fruits of the land for the fruits of the sea.

Offshore from Great Nest there is a sister settlement on the sea bed. Relations with the marine stomatopod culture are cordial and mutually profitable, in a minimal sort of way. A generation before, there was friction when the spiders began to spread their city out over the water. The sunken bases of the city’s pillars made an artificial reef, the sea life moved in, and the sea dwellers have since conceded that they gained from the change, accidentally.

Spiders travel to them in a diving bell, a balloon of silk half submerged in the bay. Understandings cannot be exchanged with the sea dwellers. Teaching and learning go through a simple language of gestures that the two cultures worked out between them.

The stomatopod state

Bianca calls them a thriving civilization of crustaceans that her species has been in sporadic contact with for centuries. A basic gestural language was negotiated over that time. The submerged stomatopod state has had dramas and crises of its own, among them upheavals, coups and revolutions. By the time Bianca has her own scientists, the stomatopods have radio and scientists too, though their technology is held back by their environment and by their limited ability to work on that environment.

Bianca finds them a world apart, and not only because they live in water. Their priorities and concepts differ from hers. Mathematics is the one subject she can take up with them readily, and they have a passion for it.

Sea going stomatopods also breed algae. One special strain of theirs travels inside the spiders’ first satellite, built to adjust its metabolism and regulate the proportions of the surrounding environment.

End times

The spiders of Great Nest fear that their centuries of culture may become a fading memory in the minds of the stomatopod sea dwellers. When the ark ship is at last on its way and the planet waits, stomatopods in the ocean are among the species that know, faintly, that the end times are here.

At the end of the story the seeing eye colonies send pictures to chromatopore screens across the green world, and stomatopods beneath the waves pore over them.

Unanswered questions

• No chapter describes a stomatopod body.
• How many of them there are, and how far the state reaches under the sea.
• Whether they take part in the war with the humans or only watch it.
• What they make of the Messenger, and whether any of them follow Temple.