Five gold rings

(Although I love science fiction I tend not to write much of it but I could not resist this. It started with the idea of being an open book and went on from there...)

They were sitting in a little bar in the space station waiting for their connecting flights. George was a Xenobiologist waiting for his connection back to earth and Maria, an old colleague, was waiting for the ship out to a new system that had just a bunch of letters and numbers defining it – the authorities were getting a bit edgy about giving out info on new habitable or exotic systems these days. There were too many freeloaders, pirates and voyeurs around and not enough virgin systems.
Maria was quizzing George on the places he had been and what he had discovered. Her favourite story from him so far was based on a massive habitable planet she had vaguely heard of. She wanted to know more about that and he promised to give her a summary of his findings and some video before they parted.
What she had been excited about was the potential for intelligent life and he had outlined just such potential.
“All life relies to some greater or lesser extent on its environment to ensure that intelligence develops and flourishes. You would think that language and the ability to record and share information would guarantee growth in development but this place proved that environment can play a huge role.”
“What we found were huge landmasses like great prairies but stretching right across the planet. Enough water for abundant life, lakes, rivers and so on but the ecosystem was dominated by a massive land creature that could grow to tens of kilometers across. They moved slowly across the landscape living for centuries, occasionally mating and, although we do not know the whole lifecycle, we know that they dominated the land in at least five different stages before the occasional one developed into this great behemoth.
“Ironically, these are not the creatures we grew interested in and became excited about. It was, in effect, the equivalent of fleas living on these creatures backs that caught us most. These life forms appeared, at first, to be very insectoid in nature. They have six legs and were dependent on the land-creatures for everything. Of course, when you are not more than 70 cms high and the creature you live on is about a kilometre high and presents you with a sheer cliff of shiny shell between its back and the ground you tend to stay on top. It appears that the gene pool is mixed when two or more land creatures join together to either mate or socialise. This only happens every few decades at best.”
“So these highly intelligent creatures live on the animals’ backs and the animals wander at random across the face of the planet. They are not seasonal creatures, so they do not migrate to the warm or the cold regions in any sort of regular pattern, they do not tend to travel in a particular direction and may drift for months in one steady direction then change or constantly waiver and move around at will.”
Why am I telling you this? Well consider the poor creatures on their backs. How may an intelligent being successfully make any order out of such chaos? Does the sun rise in the east and set in the west? Do the weather patterns have any pattern to them? What sort of long term vision can you have? What about the stars? There are hardly any mountains or landmarks... How easy is it to develop your rational picture of the world or bring order to it? How can you share this knowledge with those from the backs of other creatures? “
“Don’t get me wrong, they have tools, they mine the creatures for much of their nourishment and use the variety of other things that make up the beast’s back and even farm the flora and fauna that have adapted to the beast’s back. But it is limited and the results are a sort of developmental dead end – at least for now.”
“And what about this other being? Do you prefer it because it is slightly more humanoid in appearance or because it has more potential?” asked Maria as they sipped their third drinks.
“Well, I think I just like the poetic sense of them; they are just such wonderful beings to study. I just feel that their whole existence, although highly developed and sophisticated, is too fragile to be exposed to human nature. The thought sends shivers of fear down my spine.”
“We were in this fantastic system and, even although none of us were superstitious, it all just looked so good we knew we were onto a winner. I mean, the main, inhabited planet was so beautiful with its red, green and blue surface and the five gold rings turning around it! We were mainly studying another being on a neighbouring planet, one that seems to live and operate at more than twice our speed, by the way. The things we will learn from them will be extremely useful – even their experience of time and space will be extremely valuable, once we are able to contact and converse with them successfully. So, while I left behind some of the guys working on a sort of virtual reality based comms system we went as a team to check out the next planet.”
“All the reports were of a slower, more subtle being with a reasonably well developed society, some rudimentary social and civilised trappings and, what we would call, high level optomisational potential. The usual blurb indicating they could develop into a competing system eventually. We couldn’t wait to see what they were really like.”
“What we found was an amazing being with a complex life cycle and a truly ancient culture. Nothing suggested to me that they would be interested in developing further. I know that sounds arrogant and backward, possibly even containing culturally imperial overtones. No, I am not trying to impose some sort of black mark on their abilities or even suggest that they are incapable of going further. I just watched them, fell in love with them and could not see what their motivations for change would be if we did not go in there, interfere and destroy their current culture and well being.”
Maria was desperate to know why he felt that way. What made them so special.
“Oddly,” George began again, “it was their physical being that appeared to me to be their grace and potential downfall. Let me describe them. I will show you images later once you have heard my story.”
They live on a planet which has a year about half again longer than us and they tend to take about twenty years to reach puberty. After as much as another fifteen years they become mature adults and it can be another five to ten years before they bond and mate. They are roughly humanoid in shape but are closer to two and a half metres high, quite thin but robustly built with long heads that are wider at the bottom than at the top, they have three eyes, two for stereovision and one for close up, two ears roughly as we have and hardly any nose with self closing nostrils, and their limbs appear quite standard although they are long and have four, not five, digits including the opposing one.”
“They are quite colourfully skinned and, although they wear a small amount of clothing this is on their limbs, about the lower torso (yes, they have genitals that initially look quite odd and frightening but function similar to ours) and they have been known to wear various forms of head gear and decorations that are similar to jewellery. Their oddest feature by far is their torso; their upper torso to be specific.”
“Looking at them face on their body, roughly from shoulders to waist, is a sort of eighty centimetre wide, one metre tall rectangle of skin concave in shape and filled with what look like complex scars, tattoos and other markings. They look manufactured but naturally occur. To your right (their left) you will see a long straight ridge of what looks like bone but is, much like a rhino horn, made of hair. On the other side of the torso you will note a whole load of these ridges. They get more of them as they grow old – one for every year of their life, as far as we can make out.”
“We witnessed how they go from one side to the other too. At a certain point in the year they just start scratching and tugging at their chests and gradually the skin begins to detach. After a few days it comes completely loose and then they tug at the ridge until they manage to stretch the skin across the front of their torso leaving this great flap. What we saw next amazed us all. Once the ridge was in its new place on the other side of the torso the creature simply tucked the flap in between the end two ridges – the original ridge on their right and the new ridge they have just pulled over from the left.”
“That, in itself would be amazing but knowing that does not tell you enough.”
Pausing for effect, George swills down his drink and waves to the waiter for another for each of them.
“What do you think they do when they meet strangers or get together for special events, or when two decide to mate for life? They open themselves up to each other... literally! Yes, each being contains a complete book of its life as part of it. You can read them like books and as such. Each flap of skin between the ridges is a record of one year of their life and can be read by them like we would a set of personal files. As a result, they are the most honest creatures you would ever meet. Their lives, as humans often say but seldom mean literally, are open books.
“What’s more, violence is abhorrent to them. Imagine doing something that would risk destroying your life, your being, so totally. You see, not only are they open books, all their lives. When they die the book of their life is removed, the last year, or what is left of it becomes final page and the back skin becomes the cover of the book, and the whole thing is stored in the family library. The whole history of their world is written in and tied up in their books.”
“Wow,” said Maria in awe. “I would love to see them. Imagine studying them, how fascinating!”
“Which sums up my point exactly. We need to build a wall around them and protect them from us. Our curiosity and avarice, our desire to accumulate, collect and dissect would destroy them even if our culture and other aspects of our nature did not!”
Maria still looked wistfully at George. “A planet with five gold rings, you say?”
“Damn, me and my big mouth! Please Maria. Promise me, forget what I just said. Please, for pity sake, put it out of your mind!”