Planetary Survey No.4: Structure of the Family on Phronk
The pressure of gravity on the surface of the planet Phronk is over a
thousand times that at the centre of Jupiter; to call the inhabitants
hard-headed would therefore be something of an understatement. In
fact, the Phronki are hard all over, having auto-evolved into
flattened cones half a mile high and several miles in diameter. The
brain and vital organs of each individual reside at the very bottom of
this structure, ninety-nine per cent of whch is solid, dead and as
hard as concrete, the remaining one per cent being mainly the nervous
system and digestive organs. In personal habits as well as physical
appearance, the Phronki resemble a cross between a limpet and a
nuclear air-raid shelter; from the time of its conception until its
death, usually by suicide, the individual spends its entire life
rooted to precisely the same spot, unable to move thanks to the
tremendous weight of the atmosphere. The air is so thick that the
Phronki can even feed on it; if certain types of Earth smog are
comparable to pea soup, then the atmosphere of Phronk may justly be
likened to a three-course meal.
This fact is due to the vaporised bodies of fourteen billion Phronki
who were casualties of the last Phronk-wide war to be fought with
weapons of mass physical destruction, and who now permeate every cubic
inch of the planet's air. They are largely responsible both for the
nutritional value of the air and for its density. It was after the war
in which these Phronki died that the survivors of the race re-made
themselves into their present form, partly in order to adapt to the
vastly changed conditions of their environment, and partly to remove
from the racial consciousness any propensity for the sort of
territorial conflict which had led to the disaster in the first place.
Now, a million years later, there are several thousand Phronki
scattered across the surface of the planet, all of them in
communication with each other through the medium of telepathy, which
is also the means of reproduction. Whenever an old Phronki dies and a
new one is needed to replace it, the five most eligible parents are
chosen by psychic ballot, in which it is also decided what particular
sexual role should be played by each candidate, since all Phronki have
the potential to play all five. These votes, which take place once
every few years, are the nearest thing the Phronki now have to a
social event, and passions can be stirred up to a considerable degree,
especially when it comes to the delegation of sexual roles. Four of
these - the so-called male, female, wemale, and felame - are equally
important to the conception of a new being, and thus equally
prestigious; but the fifth - known as the lame - is purely symbolic,
an anachronism dating from the evolutionary past, when a special
gender existed for eating and digesting the old and infirm, and thus
creating the necessary space for the newcomers to live in once the
other four sexes had produced them.
Once the parents have been chosen, each of them, including the lame,
sends out a small armoured vehicle, which carries at its heart a
portion of the genetic information required to conceive a new Phronki.
When the five vehicles meet, at planetary co-ordinates pre-determined
by the community, the tanklike bodies automatically combine to form a
temporary protection for the embryo Phronki until it is old enough to
grow its own shell. The absence of a lame vehicle, though its role is
of no biological importance, is seen as horribly unlucky, and may
result in the young Phronki being itself chosen as a lame. In order to
try and mitigate the humiliation of being delegated to this post, it
is now customary for the lame to provide, in lieu of genetic
information, the new citizen's telepathic call-sign, or in human
terms, its name. Nonetheless, a Phronki which is elected a parent,
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