Balbaramba

The balbaramba (pronounced /ˌbɔːlbəˈrɑːmbə/) is a huge, many-legged lunar folk of the world of Gala. It is the largest of the lunar folk, and one of the largest lunar creatures. On Gala, balbarambas are usually found in the vale of Cumbatar, though small numbers have spread to other vales.

Description

The balbaramba is enormous compared to a human, about ten meters tall. Most of that height, however, comes from its ten segmented legs. Its actual main body, or somatotmeme, is an oblate ovoid about five meters in diameter and two in height, a crease or implexure running across the top and bottom. Aside from the legs, the body bears two other major appendages, both located along the lateral midline but slightly off-center anteroposteriorly. On the bottom of the body, slightly posterior to the center, is a long limb called the arm that can reach all the way to the ground even when the legs are fully extended. The arm ends in a bulbous appendage called the hand, or chirotmeme. On the top, slightly anterior to the center, is a slightly shorter appendage, the neck, which ends in the balbaramba's head, or cephalotmeme. Collectively, the body, hand, and head are called sclerotmemes.

As the name implies, the hand is the balbaramba's main manipulating organ. It is a prolate ovoid, with an implexure like the body, from which extend a dozen jointed fingers (actually homotypal to the balbaramba's legs). These fingers can move independently, and give the balbaramba a great deal of manual dexterity. The most prominent features of the head are four eyestalks and the balbaramba's mouth, an aperture surrounded and sealable by a flexible lip from which the balbaramba can extend great green feathery cirri that can reach nearly a meter in length when fully unfurled.

The head, hand, and body are all covered in a hard, chitinous, slightly bumpy shell, usually blue-gray in color though some balbarambas' shells tend more toward greenish or whitish. The legs and fingers are similarly crustaceous, but their shells tend to be rather darker, sometimes almost black. The long, thin neck and arm, on the other hand, are much smoother and bear clear segmentation, though the skin of these parts is tougher than it looks. These appendages tend to be somewhat more brightly colored, often light blue or green but sometimes pale yellow.

Senses

The eyes on the balbaramba's head give it quite keen vision, able to distinguish details that a human could only see at a twentieth the distance. This is, however, somewhat compensated for by hyperopia; the balbaramba has trouble seeing things clearly that are closer than ten centimeters. The balbaramba's hand also bears half a dozen simple ocelli, but they have much less visual acuity; the ocelli can make out vague shapes and colors, but little more than that. If the balbaramba wishes to examine the details of an object on the ground, it must either lift the object to its head where it can see it more clearly, or lower and tilt its body to give its head a clear line of sight to it. For whatever reason, however, the ocelli on the balbaramba's hand are more sensitive to color than the otherwise much more effective eyes on its head; while the cephalotmemal eyes can roughly distinguish between colors, the ocelli see a finer and broader range of hues.

The balbaramba has a well-developed sense of hearing, possessing multiple organs called ciliary pits that serve it as ears. The ciliary pits consist of small depressions at the base of which are tiny hairs, or auditory cilia, that are highly sensitive to the vibration of the surrounding medium. A balbaramba has four ciliary pits on its head, four more on its hand, and eight larger and more sensitive ciliary pits spaced around the rim of its body. This not only allows the balbaramba to clearly hear sounds near any of its main body parts, but also, from the relative volumes and time differences of the sound as heard by different ciliary pits, to accurately pinpoint where the sounds are coming from. The balbaramba can hear sounds at a wide range of frequencies, from infrasound of a tenth of a Hertz to ultrasound of almost a megahertz, although only the somatotmemal pits are sensitive to the lower extremes of this range, and only the cephalotmemal and chirotmemal to the upper.

The balbaramba's olfactory organs are on its cirri, and it effectively has no sense of smell when the cirri are retracted. Even then, its olfaction is relatively poor, roughly comparable to a human's. As for its sense of touch, while the sclerotmemes are not entirely numb—the thin membrane that coats them does bear some nerves—they are not particularly tactilely sensitive. The neck and arm, on the other hand, are very sensitive, though most balbarambas dislike being touched there. The balbaramba's fingers have little sensitivity to heat or cold, but can detect minute changes of pressure and position, so a balbaramba can get a good idea of the texture of a surface by running its fingers across it.

Diet

On their homeworld, balbarambas apparently fed on some sort of aerial plankton that were abundant there, filter feeding with their cirri much like many marine organisms like barnacles and crinoids do. Since Gala lacks the teeming æroplankton that make up the balbaramba's usual diet, those balbarambas that have migrated to Gala must make do in other ways. Many balbarambas use magic to provide for their dietary needs. A widely-used spell summons masses of these floating creatures from the balbarambas' homeworld for the balbarambas to feed on. (Humans call this spell "consumable cloud"; the balbaramba name for it is difficult for humans to pronounce.) Some balbarambas have created their own variations on this spell to call slightly different assortments of plankton, or which differ in other ways, according to their own preferences. Other balbarambas prefer, rather than calling their food to them, to bring their heads to their food, using a spell called "transplanar breach" to translocate their heads partially into their home plane. Existing in both planes, the balbaramba's head seems from Gala to be transparent; presumably a viewer on the balbaramba homeworld would simply see a diaphanal, disembodied head. (It seems that whatever factors make transport to the lunar worlds difficult except through the lunar crepatures do not apply to this partial displacement, or the balbarambas have found a way to bypass them.) Balbarambas that cannot or prefer not to use magic must simply adapt to what is locally available, morcellating the meat of local animals—or, more rarely, vegetable matter—into a fine mince that they can take in with their cirri.

Reproduction and development

Like most dromes, the balbaramba effectively has four sexes—while reproduction requires a male and female like in diœcious species, an individual balbaramba can be male, female, both (bisexed), or neither. Moreover, the balbaramba can consciously will itself to change sexes. Most balbarambas choose a favored sex and stick to it most or all of the time, but some balbarambas prefer frequent changes, and may spend roughly equal amounts of time as each of the four sexes. For whatever reason, more than three quarters of the balbarambas on Gala choose to be female, although by their own account the distribution of sexes on their homeworld is much more even. In their own languages, the balbarambas apparently have separate grammatical genders for each of the four sexes; when addressed in human languages, most balbarambas, especially bisexed and sexless ones, don't seem to care what pronouns are used to refer to them, though there are certainly exceptions.

The four sexes of the balbaramba are fairly easily visually distinguishable. Male balbarambas have inflatable gular sacs on their necks just below the head, and fringes of small spines around the edges of their bodies. Two fingers of the male's hand are slightly longer and end in curved claws. The females have spiny manes at the base of their heads, and thin crests running down the midlines of the backs of their bodies. A thick, rough, leathery band called a garter runs around the arm of the female near where it meets the body. A balbaramba that is both male and female has both these sets of features; one that is neither male nor female has neither. When a balbaramba changes sex, these secondary sex characteristics form or vanish over a period of two or three days, at the same time that the balbaramba's internal sex organs are changing.

In order to reproduce, one of the balbarambas must be either male or bisexed, and the other must be female or bisexed. The two balbarambas entwine their arms, and the male balbaramba, or the bisexed balbaramba acting as male, clings with his claws to the garter of the female, or the bisexed balbaramba acting as female. This causes the genital pores of the male, just below the hand, to be lined up with the bursal orifice of the female, near the armband, and the male's semen secreted through the genital pores is drawn into a receptacle in the female called the bursa copulatrix, where it fertilizes the female's eggs. It is possible for two bisexed balbarambas to simultaneously fertilize each other, but it takes considerable coördination to pull off, and rarely happens.

A few days after fertilization occurs, the entire inner lining of the bursa copulatrix is ejected through the bursal orifice with the fertilized eggs inside, forming into a cocoon where the eggs can further develop outside of the female's body. The eggs hatch in a few days into segmented wormlike larvæ that the parents care for. As it grows, the larva gradually changes into its final shape, with some sets of segments joining and swelling to form the sclerotmemes. It attains roughly the same shape as an adult balbaramba after eight to ten years, but not the same size; a balbaramba is not considered full grown until it is about twenty-five years old. With rare exceptions, balbarambas generally reach a maximum age of about a hundred and fifty years old.

Distribution

Balbarambas apparently come from a lunar world connected through the moon Hech. The crepatures to their homeworld appear mostly if not entirely in the vale of Cumbatar. Accordingly, it is here that balbarambas enter Gala, and here where they are predominantly found. While a few balbarambas may have emigrated to other vales, the vast majority of Balbarambas in Gala reside in Cumbatar, near the path of Hech. Most of them prefer to live in the mountains, apparently used to dwelling at high altitudes in their homeworld—the Spider Mountains get their name because of the relative murth of balbarambas there.

Outside of Cumbatar and the Spider Mountains, the most significant concentrations of balbarambas are in the Teremous in Erstland and in the part of the Waziata Mountains just north of the equator. There is also a small colony of balbarambas in the western part of the Far Mountains, and, oddly, a balbarama enclave in the Adantian city of Ngogok. Individual balbarambas, or small groups of balbarambas, may live in other parts of the world, but nowhere else are they found in significant numbers.

Culture

On Gala, balbarambas gather in small communities, seldom home to more than a hundred individuals—although balbarambas' accounts indicate that this is a consequence of their relatively small numbers on this world, and that on their homeworld there are much larger cities. In any case, though of humble size, their settlements are generally well built; balbarambas have advanced techniques of architecture and construction, and their buildings tend to be interconnected multistory structures with well-tended courtyards between them, and plenty of open balconies and roof terraces where the balbarambas spend much of their time.

Balbarambas do enjoy many forms of recreation, including music, board games, and a unique sport called gargan, tailored to their form. Most balbarambas also, however, seem content to spend hours simply still standing in silent thought. It's common for balbarambas to meet up to apparently do nothing but stand together without talking and not moving except occasionally for their arms. To the casual observer, it may seem like the balbarambas are not interacting in any way, but in fact the arm motion is important—to communicate during their quiescent communion, they run their fingers along each others' sensitive necks and arms in patterns that convey information. In fact, as Galan humans have recently discovered, the balbarambas have developed a whole tactile language—or perhaps more than one such language—that they use only in these circumstances, with an entirely different grammar from and apparently completely unconnected to their spoken language.

Despite their ellogy, balbarambas are never known to wear clothing or jewelry, although they do usually paint their carapaces in vivid patterns, which they may alter from day to day. In fact, balbarambas seem to find the very idea of clothing actively repulsive—there is some indication that this may be because they associate clothing with some hostile folk in the balbarambas' homeworld. In any case, balbarambas that live on Gala long enough generally learn to accept the fact that other folks do wear clothing, even if they still find the matter somewhat disquieting. Still, many traders and diplomats have found that to make balbarambas feel at ease it's best to deal with them naked—and better still wearing body paint to emulate the balbarambas' own decorative styling.

Heimatophobia notwithstanding, balbarambas on Gala seem to get along well enough with humans once they get used to them, although they often seem to talk down to them and underestimate their capabilities, perhaps due to the humans' much smaller size. Nevertheless, they seldom settle in human communities, which would in any case be very difficult due to the size difference. Some humans have chosen to live among balbarambas, but they're usually treated more as pets than as equals. Aside from humans, there are few folks balbarambas have come into contact with enough to make similar generalizations about their relations. One they do frequently encounter in the Spider Mountains, however, is the ‘u’a, a spiky lunar folk from a world connected through the moon Llā'l. For reasons unclear to outsiders, there exists an implacable enmity between balbarambas and ‘u’a; the two folks avoid each other if possible, but when they do meet the encounter is likely to at best result in considerable posturing and invective, and may very well escalate into combat.