Transitional

"What was its use?" si asked, shifting colours warmly with unfearful urgency, folding up into a ball then flexing out as cephs do, crinkling hir translucent airsuit. Short lived, always in a hurry, always curious.

"Dunno," hi muttered, turning it over rapidly in hir rakborg paws, tiny carbon nanotube tendon cores extending bambhemp faklaws to perfectly grip the weighty gold it, uncorrupted by what must have been millenia in truly the foulest dirt: still spitting death, limiting their time here to mere awers.

"I like it." si offered, quick to any joyful conclusion, slow to tragic ones. All cephs quickened at a hint of playtime, but S'blimi more than most, literally shimmering with desire to handle the new object sirself. Sir li'l grippers, more traditionally tentacular than piercing or probitive, pulsed curious, but land finds were always K'tunk's to handle first. And hi was suspicious.

"I don't," K'tunk blocked, "it's gold which took much death to mine, refine & signals some hierarchy that saw more value in immutability than in life sustenance. Where you find gold, or cut gems, or even ornaments made of rare shells, you've found a peepul that could only account for trade in what they could take from Gaia's body, verify by immediate sensory means - not actually trust. We've found too much from guuls like that. Usually with a lot of skeletons of what they ate. Kreechers a lot like us."

"Not like miiiiii!!" si danced about, spinning on a single tentacle in sir usual gyroscopic gymnasticism. K'tunk grimaced, which amongst rakborg was as close as they got to the gesture of fear that became the simian smile.

"You have no skeleton," K'tunk pointed out, "so you just don't know how many like you they ate."

"Truuuuu... but I can't know, so I can't care!" si bubbled and spun. Now K'tunk actually laffed, a guttural grunt but clear as a merriment signal.

"Joy by impermanence thus blissful ignorance," hi intoned, as if citing a ceph creed.

"Skeleton scare-di-crat!" si mocked back, laffing sirself, bubbles small and translated as a husky fry, as if landlocked vocal cords were trapping the air.

K'tunk loved sir. S'blimi loved hir. Let us be clear. This remained adoring.

P'trol not so much. Wary as any feline, si signalled a perimeter warning, time to pack up, retreat to shelter, and see if their intrusion had awakened anything best not awakened. Out of a hundred or more expeditions, a third had literally shed light on photonic energy converters, some of which had an inclination to warn or attack. A warning was helpful, linguistically. An attack usually shocked or infected. Once they even triggered a nuclear gem powered device that still flickered from age-old fission like the Gaian core, but far out of her vast molten iron protective sheath. Thankfully it was too weak to perform its primary function which seemed to be to release toxic chemicals, long since degraded but still representing an unknown threat to at least one of the four peepuls represented in this Transitional expedition.

P'trol, K'tunk, S'blimi and B'donp certainly had all their jabs, skinsuits & heavily augmented senses, but in a Transitional layer, horror was infinite. These somewhat simian beings had literally tried to wipe each other out, repeatedly, using viruses even B'donp would fear... and iz kind were those whose thousands of "coronavirus" became a main agent of those biowars.

K'tunk found the object uncomfortably heavy, perhaps feeling it had all the weight of death and overburden that lay above, around and downstream of that ancient gold mine. Yet hi was unwilling to let hovering S'blimi carry it, at least until B'donp could check for every possible contaminant - there were more vulnerable peepul than just the four hardy kinds on this dig. It had a long thin gold chain attached, so he slung that around iz arm so the heavy object hung on iz back, so ir curiosity for the shiny could be filled as shi frolicked behind.

B'donp fluttered in from above to apply iz detector fluids to its surface, then flapped along lazily above until P'trol spotted them and skulked into line, taking rearguard. B'donp then flew air cover to spot any threats. Thus they returned to kamp, a tiny parade of what an omniscient observer would see as a good portion of the legacy of Gaian life, technology and civilization. And which would have delighted the child who once held that golden thing.

Of course, the peepul were mostly descended from returning colonizers of the Other Wirlds That Suck, which was all other wirlds, really, to be clear. Gaia the great home world, had hosted many wirlds from snowball to fission fireball, methane Cheneyspheres to CO2 Exxonsphere, all of which left their mark in the Transitional layer of rapid succession in a kind of wirldly kombat, competing to become new homeorhetic biospheres, but with different balances and cycles, supporting different kinds of living. All peepuls. All kreechers. All my relations, as the wisest of them had said.

Despite its traumas, which few survived, Gaia was still the home most peepul can thrive on. If they can get along. Which they had, at times, the few stories seemed to say. Even these were from simian sources, the "indigenous" ones that seemed closest to Gaia, or the Disneez. But still, suspiciously, tricky & transitional.

At kamp B'donp and K'tunk watered and S'blimi immersed, as P'trol chased, caught & ate kreechers deemed invasive & so beyond protection. B'donp quickly got about iz final tests on the new, heavy, shiny, gold thing.

Others did kamp chores, a pack-up for the dawn, as the light faded. Proton potential was drained as dim days had replenished little and long nights of debate about where to look had eaten up their diode-awers. They'd use just a bit more to decide which of many objects would return with them, or not.

B'donp gave the liquids hi had applied to the object an all-clear as safe to transport in the cramped quarters of the thopter and hir mothairship. Safe, that is, for the peepuls of the expedition. The object itself still had a troublesome profile, both for weight and sycology. While testing it, B'donp opened a clasp, popping the thing open, each side shaped in what was sometimes called a "hart", revealing an images of a simian mot-her holding a simian youngling, opposite a bearded maleman. Maybe a grandmother and mother, and son? Maybe a religious image parallel to a personal one. Maybe two religious? Not his department, B'donp thought as hi dutifully scanned it, nano-sampled it, noted that interior panels were not gold, and had some significantly higher radiation readings. Hi'd keep it closed, once everyone had seen the interior images.

Their reactions were quite different as usual: S'blimi gleeful, K'tunk dimly muttering that he knew the clasp would open it but didn't dare do so in the field, B'donp surprised simians showed any kinship at all, P'trol appearing simply not to care in any way, yawning iz war face. S'blimi was the only one to speak: "Mother with baby!"

P'trol opened up the question of whether scans were adequate or they must carry the object home. "Well, it's heavy." Mass was always a concern given transport rationing. Thopters cost lives to run, as the inchworms said when they wanted to nix an expedition. Bringing this back could curtail a future trip, given the additional lifting power required to propel it home.

K'tunk extended iz theme of the finding: "Gold means death: arsenic, wars, mercury, greed, mistrust - it's how they traded stronger metals for weapon & chains & bars & cursed duur-nobs, all used against my peepul, more than yours. We were so hurt by their metals and woods, but they coddled your kind," hi said to P'trol, "ours would feed with yours only by your tolerance." P'trol nodded, sagely acknowledging feline leadership in the great muut of species that kept guuls at bay. Felines had keeled the last simians.

S'blimi piped in "We like rare shells though! They celebrate a li'l kreecher that lived, they show new patterns to copy and hide or show off with. Not all rare things are bad. If we can't prove they ate it, it's not truly a morbid thing." B'donp flapped agreement, iz kind having consumed so many bugz at a time to fuel their great flyings about, that hi had to endorse the principle of untraceable predation as a basis for assuming moral goodness.

P'trol narrowed iz eyes to slits and offered "Some of my kind were leashed or chained or even caged to be keeled, we don't much care for the metals. But more important, maybe, are teachings that the ways of Transitionals must not recur, including the fondness for their young that become one of the justifications for truly unlimited greed & systems of inherited control of things other kreechers, even other peepul they themselves saw as "equals", were exterminated for. By the trillions. If we bring this home, do we risk a fondness for simians or their ways, who until now we derided as all guuls? The natalist urge is strong, and speciesism too. We fought hard against it."

S'blimi sadly concurred, sighing "Longer lived ones seem so worried about mortality, they often forget to live. They wrongly see their babies as them, not as the punchline to the joke that is them." S'blimi colour cycled happily and added "Like we do!" then laffing merrily rubbed her own egg sac, due to burst soon, making more like little cartoons of her, each one ridiculous, as she quickly declined physically and would be gone in a haze of satirized copies of ir that barely remembered they had a mother. B'donp, of another short lived peepul, bowed wings in agreement, but signalled another issue.

"But," B'donp raised, "sycology aside," and now iz wings lifted up full, "it remains that residue gamma rays emit from this gold object with the images, possibly viral or chemical agents we can't test here until the liquids I've applied go home. We've scanned it well, but its dangers are best assessed by others. We have a good reason, aside from weight, aside from sycology, aside from sorrows of our peepuls, to cache it here and leave it."

The glint of radiation settled it. The object lay, in a cache for potential future retrieval and study, closed as it was found, its image of mother & child and man sealed probably forever.

K'tunk had the last word. In the log, alongside the scans, this site simply was summarized as "Transitional - few but fissile fossils found".

The gold, heart-shaped locket, its left image of a beloved mother who had given all for the child who held it unto death, it's right image of what they called a Jesus, lay undisturbed again. Cached too far away for a single molecule from that dead childs hand to hold again. So few traces left.

Of so transitional a time.

(1893 words)