The Composition: The Conjugans

[Pedant]

A separate post for the star systems that surround Ajjamah (the world where Salvi is found), their inhabitants, and their magical systems.

The Miser Crabs: Jazz Harmony

INTRODUCTION
The planet Ajjamah is unique, to be sure; it orbits at a decent distance from its parent star, it has liquid water and plenty of oxygen, it has life, and it has magic. But it is not the only world to have these things. Magic, in this corner of the cosmos, is rather persistent. And there are plenty of other worlds where the energy given off by the suns (giant incubators, as it were) has led to some rather...unique situations.
Ajjamah is a long, long way from developing a space program of its own, let alone one with the means to venture out into the cosmos and meet any of these creatures. But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there, nor that they shouldn’t be explored in their own time.
Ladies, Gentlemen, Miscellaneous, and Those Without Any Concept of Sexual Reproduction At All: welcome to the Composition.

There are a few places one might visit first:
1. A water-world with a few paltry islands, and enormous ten-limbed octopus-like beings who have hyper-specialized magical abilities and tend to live alone (in large part because mating kills off both parents; it’s therefore useful to invest in plenty of aunts and uncles).
2. A planet with a very high axial tilt (79º) and very complex tides (four small moons), with creatures that alternate, generation after generation, between animal-like and plant-like forms and a yin-yang switch between magical types.
3. A desert world, with very little water (except for the huge cave systems and polar ice caps) and a highly eccentric orbit, inhabited by intelligent slime moulds.
4. A rocky planet, like Earth but less dense, with a fast-rotating atmosphere and weather phenomena that can last for months at a time; the primary sapients are ten-limbed dragonfly-serpents with eight sexes and breath that shapes spells.

Let your interstellar tour guides know!

[Pedant]

Permission to bump?

[Xwtek]

1. Why it's beneficial to kill both parents. Assuming your species is intelligent, it makes no sense to kill the parents because intelligence-passing is more important than giving food to the offspring.
2. It would be unrealistic for all of them to do it.
3. Why do your planet has polar ice caps at all? It already implies your planet has enough water.
4. Fast-rotating atmosphere? Can you explain it? Also how six genders are supposed to work?

[mèþru]

1. Yeah, that seems like something that would be deselected for pretty quickly in evolution
2. True, and this sounds sort of like a rip-off of Ilion. Even if it isn't, you may want to check it out because it pulls off the idea of planimals really well.
3. It's pretty plausible to have the ice trapped in the poles. That's where most of Mars' water is. The problem is that your world doesn't have anything that seems to distinguish it from Mars, in which case you should admit that it is a Mars-clone. Nothing wrong with that; most conworlds are Earth-clones after all!
4. What the hell is a "fast-rotating atmosphere"? Atmospheres have many currents that differ between layers; they don't rotate in any one direction but move in many at once! Eight sexes are doable; some yeast species have way more. It basically hedges bets by making it likely that any two random species members are different sexes and can therefore mate.

[Salmoneus]

4. What the hell is a "fast-rotating atmosphere"?

It's an atmosphere that rotates more quickly.

It's true that it won't all move in the same direction locally, but that's just a distraction.

The immediate effect of a fast rate of atmospheric rotation is that the Hadley cell will narrow; above a certain speed, the number of cells will multiply.

[Pedant]

1. Why it's beneficial to kill both parents. Assuming your species is intelligent, it makes no sense to kill the parents because intelligence-passing is more important than giving food to the offspring.
2. It would be unrealistic for all of them to do it.
3. Why do your planet has polar ice caps at all? It already implies your planet has enough water.
4. Fast-rotating atmosphere? Can you explain it? Also how six genders are supposed to work?

1. Yeah, that seems like something that would be deselected for pretty quickly in evolution
2. True, and this sounds sort of like a rip-off of Ilion. Even if it isn't, you may want to check it out because it pulls off the idea of planimals really well.
3. It's pretty plausible to have the ice trapped in the poles. That's where most of Mars' water is. The problem is that your world doesn't have anything that seems to distinguish it from Mars, in which case you should admit that it is a Mars-clone. Nothing wrong with that; most conworlds are Earth-clones after all!
4. What the hell is a "fast-rotating atmosphere"? Atmospheres have many currents that differ between layers; they don't rotate in any one direction but move in many at once! Eight sexes are doable; some yeast species have way more. It basically hedges bets by making it likely that any two random species members are different sexes and can therefore mate.

1. It really isn't beneficial--that was kind of the experiment. I was reading about the intelligence of octopodes, generally solitary creatures who in effect self-destruct after their optic glands go haywire and deactivate their digestive glands, and was wondering whether or not it would be reasonable to try and create a sapient being from that mindset. Admittedly it would necessitate that the creatures actually spawn together, and have multiple generations living side-by-side (guess I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of thing), so maybe there's some mechanism I can work out otherwise. Have it be a partially cultural thing instead, maybe, that it's more common for parents to deteriorate by the time their one massive generation of offspring reach puberty and can fend for themselves and so most of the training is taken up by others--but it doesn't need to be for the creatures to survive? Alternatively there could be another method where the optic gland (or the equivalent thereof) is close enough to the surface that it can be removed through surgery...
2. I have heard of Ilion--I quite admire it actually--and I'm actually a little horrified that I did appear to be ripping it off. Perhaps an adjustment or two, then? Maybe the creatures have more of an anemone/medusoid life-cycle, where children are motile and adults are sessile (or something), so it still gives them the chance to have both sides. Plus, if some sessile ones could be covered in algae or moss, then it might provide a food source for their young.
3. Honestly I was going more for a Tatooine-like world, like Artifexian described. You know, large cave systems with groundwater, polar ice caps, wider eccentricity possible because the potential habitable zone is extended? It does, admittedly, sound a little like Mars, but that wasn't actually what I was going for--nor was it actually described that way in the video.
4. As Salmoneus described it, the intent was to get an atmosphere that rotated more quickly than that of Earth, like that of Venus for example. (Artifexian again...)

[Xwtek]

1. It really isn't beneficial--that was kind of the experiment. I was reading about the intelligence of octopodes, generally solitary creatures who in effect self-destruct after their optic glands go haywire and deactivate their digestive glands, and was wondering whether or not it would be reasonable to try and create a sapient being from that mindset. Admittedly it would necessitate that the creatures actually spawn together, and have multiple generations living side-by-side (guess I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of thing), so maybe there's some mechanism I can work out otherwise. Have it be a partially cultural thing instead, maybe, that it's more common for parents to deteriorate by the time their one massive generation of offspring reach puberty and can fend for themselves and so most of the training is taken up by others--but it doesn't need to be for the creatures to survive? Alternatively there could be another method where the optic gland (or the equivalent thereof) is close enough to the surface that it can be removed through surgery...

Well, without your optic glands, you can't forage, and thus, you're as good as dead. Also, do you know that human spends freakingly long time being a juvenile. This is certainly not good for semelparous creatures. As a cost of intelligence, human childs are almost helpless. Intelligence is very costly.

[Pedant]

Ah, but therein lies the beauty of it! Blind guardians of the nests, taking care of the young and teaching them about life while the adults who haven’t bred yet forage and bring back food...ah, who am I kidding. I’ll find another way.

[Pedant]

The First Inversion Diminished Ascending--or, as they are unflatteringly known on the Homeworld, the Miser Crabs--have been around as a civilized people for two million years, thirteen million if you go by their timescale. They have spread to sixty star systems across the galaxy, and on countless more have they established trading posts, seeking the best that the universe has to offer for the lowest possible price. Their mellifluous languages, based on the manipulation of musical notes through their two larynxes, are common across all worlds with some sort of warp ability. But their own home-world, Third Inversion Dominant Ascending (to humans known as Jazz Harmony, or Thyella in the Older Language), holds a special place in their lung-hearts.
Jazz Harmony, orbiting 37.87 light-years away from the Homeworld around an M-class star, holds the unique distinction of being not tidally locked but in a resonance orbit of 3:2 with its home sun, Second Inversion Minor Descending. Every "twenty-four hour" day on Jazz Harmony lasts for about sixty days on the Homeworld; every year, about ninety. Thus the world gains features reminiscent of tidal locking, but still follows a day-night cycle.
Picture, if you will, a typical day in the tropics. The sun rises, some six times the size of the sun in the sky, but redder and colder. A breeze blows in from the night side for some time. As the Morning draws on, the day becomes warmer, moving from tundra to taiga, then (for a few days) to rainforest. And then cometh the Storm, so big it deserves the capital letter, twenty times as powerful as the strongest hurricane on the Homeworld sweeping across the landscape, the roaring wings matched only by the thundering of volcanoes as tidal forces sweep across the planet. At high noon–dead calm, as the Eye passes overhead, the hottest part of the day, and then back to the Storm again. And once it's passed? The glorious Afternoon, a fast-fading paradise, warm and wet and bathed in golden light. Imagine the sunset, a red world bowing out on the western horizon. Imagine (because this world has no moon) the night sky, thousands of stars burning in the empty blackness of space–silence broken only by the creaking of the week-old glaciers and the boom of earthquakes.
Imagine what it must be like to call this place home.

* * *

The thread lives!

[Pedant]

THE CONJUGANS

The star Caps Taurosi, a little over 26 light-years away from Ajjamah (and still visible, although barely, with the naked eye from the Northern Hemisphere), is a fairly large orange K-class star. Orbiting around it at around 0.9AU is a world that is practically all ocean; one and a half times the radius of Earth and with twice its gravity, this is a water-world--covered in long island chains stretching across the surface of the planet, connected by shallow seas. At least, that's how it's been for the last fifty million years or so, with the icecaps largely gone and no continental masses at either pole. Still, with the largest landmass above water being about the size of Australia, it took a while to get to land. Three medium-sized moons provide fairly complex tidal arrangements.
Creatures on Caps Taurosi e (for this is the fourth planet from its sun) use Glycol Nucleic Acid (GNA) instead of DNA or RNA, but proteins are still the building blocks of life here. This includes the Conjugans (or the "Mind-Children", to use a local term), a hexapodal poikilothermic amphibious species that represents the dominant form of intelligence on this planet. In terms of appearance adults (imagoes) look rather like seals with its front arms tucked in under the belly; in adolescents (larvae) the body is thinner and more simian, and there is far less body covering, so they look more like geckoes or baboons than seals. (They keep the top fins, though, no matter what; two of them, formed of fatty tissue.) Conjugans have two sets of teeth: the inner set (tmegic, rather like canines and incisors, and aleic, more like molars and pre-molars) for chewing the food--and echine (effectively vomerine) teeth for holding their struggling prey in place as they eat. They can breathe both in the air and the water thanks to specialized lungs, and are omnivorous.
If the basic unit for humans is the family, then that of the Conjugans is the pod--two or three imagoes, their adolescent children (often called pupae, but this is misleading, as the pupae are simply pre-pubescent larvae and can move and speak with all their agility within a couple of years), and a number of unrelated larvae number about five to ten, all from different pods.
Perhaps the most notable thing about the Conjugans, however, is the method in which they reproduce. Although hermaphroditic, only the imagoes give birth--and they do so seemingly without the presence of other imagoes around, or without intercourse within any understandable period. The larvae, on the other hand, engage in sexual play as effectively a social glue, each taking turns to penetrate the other, but they never seem to reproduce. Is this feasible, to hold reproductive GNA for years before giving birth?
In fact the Conjugans don't so much store eggs as create matrices--effectively highly packaged wombs, each of which stores genetic material from one other being. To a degree, the entire reproductive system of the Conjugan--and to a lesser degree their internal systems--are rewritten by the presence of foreign GNA. Once adjusted accordingly (and it takes a little while each time to do so), the fertilized eggs become something like stem cells--continually reproducing within the host body, taking up space and energy and only slowly being extinguished as time goes on and more children are born. Each individual becomes a means of propagating everyone they've had contact with over the years (or at least those who have had contact with them), and by the period we might call menopause they may even incorporate the cells into their own systems (a natural variant of stem-cell injection, as it were). There are, of course, some potential nasty side effects, but mostly they come at the end of one's reproductive life and this is to be expected. (Generally the matrices are ejected, piece by piece, through the cloaca--or else the cells are broken down and the materials absorbed, but compatible cells may be incorporated.)
The longest average life in a Conjugan fisher-forager society is about 70 local years (60 Earth years). Growth from a baby to the larval stage lasts for about fifteen years; at this point, Conjugans are sexually mature, and set out for new pods--frequently driven out by the newcomers to their own pods. In defence of the system, they usually have a network to rely on, and may end up in the same pod as one of the larvae who replaced them. They may also choose to leave with an older larva who has completed the transition to an imago. Either way, they need to find or create a new pod, and spend their time wandering the seas, playing with one another and the imago's babies, and protecting their pod from exterior threats (such as predators--or poachers). It is also around this age that they usually end up being the most physically active on land--there is some great skill, for example, running great distances, or climbing trees, waving their long tails from side to side for speed or swaying their whole body depending on the terrain. It is notable, however, that it is at this time that mortality is highest among the Conjugans; the larvae's primary purpose is to attain territory both for their pod and for themselves personally, so usually they end up fighting one another--and these may be to the death.
Around the age of thirty they start undergoing severe changes, the body becoming chubbier and less dextrous and certain aspects (like arms and tail) being swallowed up by restructuring. As these changes take place, the new imago will leave its current pod and start one of its own, and begin to breed. Gestation takes roughly two years at a time, and is likely to produce a litter of three or four babies, but in reality one is likely to expect as few as five litters over a lifetime, and possibly only three. This is largely because of the continued presence of other cells from the same matrices producing chemicals which act as a stop-guard against new births until the children have at least been weaned. Fertility rates begin to slow down around 55-60 years. All in all, a Conjugan may produce as many as twenty children over the course of their lifetime--although as few as three or four may survive to become imagoes. The population is maintained, and there's plenty of room to go around.