#swines

We join this swine mother and her yearling baby a scant hundred years after the arrival of the Qu on her world. She was just 7 when they came. This place was a respite for the elders of a single prestigious star person clan, barely half a million people once walked in the steady sun here among the neat lawns and avenues of fragrant pines and apple trees. It was a planet-wide "country club" with 20% less gravity than earth. The crumbling remains of human society can still be seen among the trees, but in a few centuries the spreading forests will dwarf the old-growth redwoods of earth and all remnants of humanity will be buried.

When the Qu came to this world they found it particularly repugnantly sterile: the meticulously manicured gardens and endless acres of lush rolling lawns were bad enough, but the world was also almost entirely devoid of animal life. Thus, humans were made to fill every niche on this world, from the depths of the oceans to the tiny flying "insects".

The swines are adaptable omnivores who spend their days rooting around the undergrowth looking for anything edible, but that is where their superficial similarity to pigs ends. To start with, they are almost the size of a buffalo. Their hands remain fairly dextrous manipulative tools; in their youth they even spend a lot of time in the trees, climbing quite capably. They have just one or two babies at a time, and those babies spend several years with their mother, passing much of the first year helpless and tucked away somewhere safe and hidden. Bright-minded beasts, swines exhibit complex behaviours and social interactions. They hum to their children to comfort them, simple songs invented just for each child. When crossing paths with their adult children years later in the woods they still remember the specific song they composed for that individual, and softly hum it for them again.

This swine is 97 years old, middle age for her long-lived species (though it is only the exceptionally lucky who reach their full potential lifespan). She has successfully reared 8 babies to independence in her time, and the baby that accompanies her now might have been her last one before menopause (another trait which betrays her human origin). But perhaps she has grown complacent; she has not noticed the grendel waiting just behind the treeline, enormous, patient, and hungry. 

The grendel is a carnivore, but not a monster. a young female, she is of course also a posthuman, and she is a mother too, and tonight her children will not go hungry. She is the swine's close cousin, an apex predator derived from the same genetic lineage. 

The grendels are creatures with what could be described as the primitive makings of culture. They intentionally teach their knowledge to the members of their packs, and have varied regional customs and behaviours. They are affectionate and playful to their families, emotional and highly empathetic; some individuals have even been known to weep as they eat their prey.

Either one of these species has the potential to redevelop sapience, but perhaps they will never progress further than their current states. Human-level sapience and culture is, after all, not the inevitable end goal of evolution, and both species thrive in their new niches, so there is little pressure to be anything more than a canny beast.