The Bappakana

The bappakana are an aquatic species whose sphere of influence partly overlaps with the Western Reaches of human space. Among the sentient species known to humanity, they are unique in being the only aquatic species to have developed an industrial, space-going culture. This has made them experts in biological technologies, and one of humanity's main trading partners.

The bappakana are totally adapted to underwater life, with streamlined and segmented bodies. Each segment has two fins, and, on the segment closest to the head, the fins have evolved into arms ending with four-fingered hands that can lie flat against the body when not in use. In addition, they have two eyes on each side of the body, one pair in the head and one pair in the tail, giving them binocular vision on both sides. Their natural colouration ranges from gray and green to a flat blue, and the size of adults from 1-3 metres.

With the exception of the Aquan Clan and the Mers among the Clones, few humans have any reason to come into conflict with the bappakana. The lack of land on most of their worlds makes them expensive for humans to colonize. Moreover, the bappakana have a brisk way of dealing with potential threats to their species that makes even battle-hardened Spartans queasy. At any rate, bappakana technology makes them valuable trading partners and allies.

Biology and ecology

The bappakana home world of Fajar has an atmosphere breathable by humans. Its waters have a salinity of 6% and an iron content of 6%, both of which are needed by the bappakana to sustain life. However, not all their colonies have atmospheres suitable for humans, since bappakana do not breathe air.

Instead bappakana absorb oxygen from the water that passes through their mouths. Food, salt and iron are obtained in the same way, through a series of filters in the bappakanan throat and digestive tract. Most of their food comes from the micro-fauna of Fajar, in particular the tree-like bercabang and the fast-growing cambah. Although the bappakana can eat a variety of food, all planets colonized by the bappakana are immediately seeded with at least these two species, and can be identified even from space by the red tinge given to their waters by the cambah.

The evolutionary record suggests that the bappakana evolved from a species of bottom-dwellers that occupied the shallow plains of Fajar where the bappakana still prefer to live. This species increased the efficiency of its filter-feeding by learning to swim.

However, neither the bappakana nor any of its evolutionary cousins have made made any adaptation to land, probably largely because land is next to non-existent on Fajar. While a few adult bappakana can support their own weight on their fins, most resort to vehicles that, to human eyes, look like aquariums on wheels when travelling on land on other species' planets.

The species has three sexes, usually referred to in human literature as males, females, and quickeners. Female bappakana of breeding age deposit eggs in caves and hollows in the shallows, where they are fertilized by as many males in heat as find them. Males and females then take no further part in reproduction, leaving the eggs to the quickeners, who observe egg and sperm matches for maximum compatibiity, and watch the eggs until they hatch. Then, they, too, abandon the young bappakana, who must struggle to survive on their own, often eating each other in their first months of life. At this stage, the young bappakana have a single body segment.

Young bappakana are not sentient until shortly before puberty, which occurs about twenty years after hatching. Around this time, a young bappakana grows a second body segment and begins to take an increasing interest in the pods of adults. This juxtaposition strongly suggests that the bappakana brain and central nervous system is more dispersed than in humans, although physical proof of this idea has not yet been obtained.

As their second segment reaches full size, young bappakana begin following pods, often trailing younger members of the species in their wake. Eventually, quickeners in the pod test the young for signs of sentience, and, upon finding them, introduce them into the pod. In this new life, they are taught primarily by quickeners, although all members of the pod may socialize them.

This biological arrangement has resulted in widespread prejudice against the quickeners in many eras. In fact, some bappakana scholars seriously debated whether quickeners were truly sentient themselves, or simply possessed a set of reflexes for assisting the young. Although such extremes are mostly a thing of the past, disdain for the quickeners remains widespread among males and females.

Another result of these reproductive habits is that families as known among humans are non-existent among bappakana. Since parenthood is impossible to determine without scientific testing, the young are accepted into a pod without any consideration except their readiness to participate in adult life. Instead of family, bappakana social ties center on the pod of several thousand individuals in which the members of the species spend most of their lives. These ties are so strong that few adult bappakana of breeding age travel willingly without large portions of their pod. The practical result is that very few adults are seen on non-bappakana worlds.

Many of the ties between members of an adult pod center upon ritualized grooming that, in pre-history, was thought to be a necessity for removing barnacle-like parasites. Although this necessity no longer applies, it endures as a primary social bond. Humans interacting with bappakana for the first time should be aware that they will almost certainly be groomed before any business is conducted.

The bappakana remain sexually mature adults for about 350 years. If they survive illness and feuding between pods, at the end of this period they grow a third segment and show a marked increase in intelligence. This increase seems to make them roughly equivalent to a human genius, although exact comparisons are impossible due to biological and cultural differences.

When this growth is complete, they become mahakuasas, or elders. At this stage of their life, they are mostly solitary, except when they meet to govern the affairs of the planet or engage in research. Except during colonization efforts, only newly-made elders usually travel in space or interact with other species.

The bappakana do not die except by disease or violence. If they become elders, they usually live between 600-750 years before choosing to euthanize themselves out of a sense of extreme ennui. However, exceptional elders -- largely those engaged in research or artistic creation -- have been known to live considerably longer. This fact has given rise to legends of elders in the depths of Fajar who are fabulously old and have added dozens of segments to their bodies. The most famous of these is referred to as Old Nabi, who was supposedly hatched before the founding of the empire. Such stories are unlikely, but they were given a new currency when the rumour started that some of these elders took part in the Disappearance, or were somehow responsible for it.

The bappakana are largely homogenous. However, a distinction is made between the labah-labah, or normal bappakana, and the meyakini, those adapted to life in the depths. The meyakini are larger and more robust than the labah-labah, and, historically, have tended to be more industrially advanced. Emerging less than ten millenia ago, the meyakini have at times formed a cultural elite, and regarded the labah-labah as savages.

History and culture

The bappakana have two languages of high pitched sounds. The first language, called Sabhur, is the language of every day use. Terhablur, the second language, is a highly compressed, laconic form that was originally used to transmit knowledge in the absence of a recorded language (to this day, the bappakana do not have a written one, although some of the species' scholars have developed artificial scripts as an intellectual exercise, and recorders are widely used). Humans can speak both these languages with the aid of hearing aids and an artificial larnyx, although few humans have a memory that is trained well-enough to deal with the complexities of Terhablur.

Several chants from bappakana pre-history exist in the Terhablur scholarly language. Although these chants are thought to be translations from several different languages, they give a uniform picture of war-like pods of bappakana that wandered Fajar, engaging in single and group combats over grazing grounds and raiding each other's eggs, carrying weapons made of stone and coral-like substances, or using their heads as battering rams and their tails as whips.

Given the richness of life on Fajar, the bappakana of this period had more than enough leisure to produce elaborate cultures based on woven plants, unfired clay and obsidian. They developed rich cultures in which choral chanting and body painting were the chief arts -- both of which continue to be highly regarded today. More than one human academic has compared this period to the Homeric period of ancient Greece, and certainly many of the surviving chants have an epic quality to them. Modern bappakana look back to their pre-history with nostalgia, and much of their art is insipired by it or set in it.

During this period, the working of metals was entirely unknown, no doubt due to the difficulties of refinining and working metals underwater. In their absence, the bappakana began breeding native Fajar flora and fauna for their needs. Despite their nomadic lifestyle, the cultivation of a variety of mollusk-like creatures in jealously guarded beds also began. These creatures were chopped to an extreme fineness for use as a secondary, luxury food resource, but their largest effect on bappakana culture was to encourage the staking of territorial claims by individual pods, and the rise of loosely organized local governments among adults. The increasing specialization of labour also lead to increased specialization and a small industrial revolution that produced such wonders as the raising of a certain coral-like species to record and store voices.

About eleven millennia ago, this industrialization accelerated when Pahlawan, a young female elder, reached the lowest point in the ocean in which a bappakana could survive unaided. Returning with an acute case of the bends, Pahlawan nonetheless resolved to descend further, and immediately engaged several other elders in a concentrated research program. The results were shell-based diving bells and organic pumps that provided steady circulation of water and nutrients and a constant pressure that allowed Pahlawan and her team to descend even further.

There, at the bottom of the oceans, they saw undersea volcanoes and became the first bappakana both to see molten metal in their vicinity. Taking samples alone required another burst of research, but, when molten metal was brought into their diving bells, the team discovered that the chambers were also the ideal site for working metals. Within months, Pahlawan and her team had begun to shape metals and ceramics for themselves, hampered only by the need to duck out of the chambers to breathe and retrieve nutrients. However, soon the bappakana were using pressure suits molded from living sponge-like creatures, and another industrial revolution was underway.

As usual, the elders attempted to share these discoveries with all pods. All the same, the revolution created massive political upheavals, as pods that were quickest to utilize the new technolgies sought to dominate others. After several millennia, these upheavals led to even greater cooperation among elders and the establishment of a planetary government by the elders, with adults reduced to making local decisions.

As the conflict petered out, the same techniques that were pioneered by Pahlawan resulted in an unusually intelligent quickener called Rabanjuh establishing the first bappakana launching sites for space vehicles on a high shelf near the surface of Fajar. This accomplishment was followed a few years later with the first orbit of Fajar by the young elder male Kebahagian. Within a century, the bappakana were colonizing other worlds, and making them over in the image of Fajar.

Human first contact with the bappakana was made by Countess Turner of the Downs in IY 718. An impoverished aristocrat who survived by what she called the sport of planet-prospecting (a term used to disguise her financial dependence upon her job), Turner did low altitude surveys on Jadi-Jadian and was amazed to see an ecology apparently void of predators. Believing she had found a rare exception to the laws of biology, she was surprised to observe a spaceship with a ceramic hull and to realize that what she had discovered was a heavily modified world and a new sentient species.

Countess Turner returned to human space with a peace treaty with the bappakana that was ratified almost immediately by the emperor. However, because of her misunderstanding of the concept of elders and the bappakana's misunderstanding of the Aristocracy -- and, perhaps, because of ill-timed boasting on her part -- she also left the impression that she was a human elder -- and, in fact, the emperor. This misunderstanding persists among the bappakana, some of whom believe to this day that the Countess is still alive and that the humans they encounter are her representatives.

The Disappearance is rumoured to have greatly affected the bappakana elders, but, after a period of disruption, the species seems to have overcome any social upheavals relatively well. However, this subject has not been thoroughly studied, and some bappakana sources even suggest that the species has regular interactions with the demons.

The bappakana today

The bappakana can be disconcerting for humans to deal with, because the binocular vision on both sides of their bodies mean that they can be talking while doing something else entirely.

All the same, the bappakana are among humanity's strongest trading partners. An estimated 20-30% of all new drugs for humans are developed by the bappakana, and business executives are fascinated by the potential in bappakana organic technology. Of particular interest are the development of symbiotes that enable humans to breathe underwater and microscopic flora that would slow the aging process. In fact, rumour persists that some of the wealthier humans in the galaxy already possess such items.

For their part, the bappakana remain fascinated by mechanical technology, which is as fascinating for them as their technology is for humans. The result is a steady trade between the two species.

For all the difficulties involved, young bappakana elders are avid tourists. They can frequently be seen on the most urban planets, recording all they see and asking questions of everyone who will answer them. Some of the more naive among them tend to assume that any bureaucrat or aristocrat is a human elder -- a misconception that has often lead to misunderstandings, both humorous and serious.

As a result of human trade, modern bappakana culture is becoming a fusion of organic and machine technology. Some pods have even settled into a bappakana version of suburbia, renouncing the semi-nomadic habits of millennia and receiving daily shipments of food instead of grazing, and watching and listening to entertainments from all over the galaxy.

This development has led some bappakana to decry human influence, and to denounce the settled members of their species as gluttons for eating their food all at once, rather than absorbing it constantly as they travel. Some bappakana are also troubled by the idea that some of their species may be producing their young in seclusion and trying to give them a headstart in education by playing them recordings that they cannot possibly understand yet. This tendency is considered a human perversion, and some fanatics go so far as to say that it is reason by itself for banning contact with humanity.

The extent of such rumours is debatable, but it remains undeniable that, with urbanization, the bappakana are facing a population explosion. In the short term, it is being alleviated by increased efforts at colonization, but many elders point out that this is a temporary solution at best, especially since most worlds require intensive modification to make them suitable for bappakana colonization efforts.

In contrast to bappakana tourism on human worlds, relatively few humans visit bappakana planets except on official business. The exceptions are the Aquans and Mers, both of whom are eager to learn the Bappakan techniques for working metal under water.

However, for better or worst, bappakana culture is now inextricably intertwined with humanity's. Even the bappakana official interactions with other sentient species tend to be through humans. Yet, for all that, many bappakana consider human sexuality and family ties to be perverse and unhealthy at worst, and a humorous deficiency at best. Those with some awareness of human culture also exclaim over the fact that human leaders are often of breeding age and not elders at all.

Current Human-bappakana relations are criticized by many humans, some of whom have called for a moratorium on contact so as not to disrupt the bappakana any further. Opponents of this suggestion consider it patronizing to the bappakana.

Internally, local pods today conduct their own affairs through town-meetings. Externally, however, the bappakana are ruled by a republic of elders. Planetary representatives are elected by elders, who alone have the right to vote, and from their numbers, a representative to the galactic council is elected. Currently, the council consists of 18 planetary representatives representing all but 3 of the bapakkana worlds (Abadi, Bernafas, and Zahid), governed by a chair. Traditionally, all proceedings are recorded.

This government is resented by some adults, and one of the major issues in bappakana culture today is whether adults should be given the right to elect representatives, perhaps after intelligence testing. Critics of the suggestion say that they might as well enfranchise the non-sentient young.

For better or worse, such social issues reflext the extent to which human and bappakana cultures have become inter-connected. Despite everything, most members of both species expect the inter-connection to continue to the mutal benefit of everyone.