Tevun Krus #127 - Best of 2024

Pollen - A Story by @theiditmachine

Pollen

By theidiotmachine

Prompt: Darwin coined the phrase "abominable mystery" in 1879. He used it to describe the sudden appearance of a considerable diversity of flowering plants about 100 million years ago. Why was there no evidence of gradual evolution? Why was there no trace of any intermediate forms? And why, when flowering plants appeared in the fossil record, were they already so diverse?The vexed naturalist had toyed at one point with the idea that flowering plants might have evolved in an as yet unknown land. But what if something else was behind the geological blink of an eye appearance of Earth's lovely blooms?  (Prompted by Elisabeth_Long).

The system was ruined. Everything was dust and rocks, tumbling around an uncaring G-type star.

Ellit, the theal biologist, sagged with disappointment. She tapped some buttons on the console in front of her. The creed escort was chittering over the comm, flooding it with their melodic, clicking speech. She waved a tentacle at the camera, knowing they were watching, wondering what she was going to say.

'Not what you were expecting, huh?' her pilot asked.

He was a young human male called Reed. On a good day, Ellit enjoyed taking money from him at card games. Today was not such a day.

Ellit forced her basketball-sized body into some semblance of composure, and swivelled her double-pupiled eye round.

'Nope, I was not. Could you take us closer so we can figure out what happened? I need to send a message to our creed friends.'

'Sure,' he replied, and tapped icons onto his console. The ship lurched forward.

'Well okay,' she said. 'Janice, where's this planet?'

'Already on that,' the ship's AI replied. 'I'll let you know what I find. Want me to send the message to the creed?'

'No, it's fine, thanks Janice. I'll do that. You keep doing your thing. Reed, move the ship as Janice needs.'

'Yes boss,' Reed said, already lost in charts and thrust vectors, his skull implants rippling with light.

#

They were a long way up the Perseus Arm, way out of settled POSTO territory. They were even beyond creed space, in a system with no formal name. Because they'd had to cross the entire creed empire, the creed had insisted on sending an escort, although what they were hoping to gain from following them mystified Ellit. Still, they didn't seem hostile, although it was hard to tell from those flat, shiny, featureless white faces. For all that humans were alien to her, huge, loud and ugly things that they were, the creed were even stranger. At least humans had eyes and digestive systems. Who knew what the creed saw or ate.

She shuddered.

The creed ship had already sent a message to her. Creedspeech was so conceptually different to the languages that she spoke that it could only be approximately translated, but as far as she could tell, it basically said 'huh. That's weird.'

'The absence of an intact planet is very surprising to biologist Ellit. Do the creed know what caused the planet to be destroyed?' she typed back. She'd long learned that the most effective way of communicating with the creed was to purge her messages of pronouns and leave nothing ambiguous; it seemed to make the translation more effective.

She let them chew on that, and reached out her tentacles to pull up system scans. She wouldn't be able to find out what had destroyed this planet, but she might be able to figure out if it had ever had life.