Hunanum Nunnings

(2, Third Nunning Calendar)

The station’s dock was a tendril reaching across millions of meters of space to Foxy's gift to The Last Dinosaur. Miss Romal Riddello piloted the capsule at the end of the causeway, trailing behind her millions of meters of tubing. Newly deprived of her species memory, she had no inkling that at this moment her own birthworld of Hunanum was being destroyed.

She had no clue that she and the few other human women on this station were the last remnants of the Nunning Hospitalers, the last humans still bearing adaptations for life on Earth. Other humans existed, but these were new species, creatures of the stars –

The thick-skinned Anorani of Chelos,
frozen sentinels of the blowing sands.
The homes of the brittle Horschabian luminates
drift on seas of liquid plasticite.
The blue people of the Tarsus Station, abandoned by Lunar explorers
six thousand years ago,
gaining their sovereignty from the Numenskal Alliance.

The remaining Nunnings, the remaining twenty-one persons who might be called Homo sapiens in any classic sense of the word were like Miss Riddello, bureaucratic functionaries for the passage of gods between this realm and their own. With Syllabium went the glass cathedrals, the gardens, the iguanodon skeletons, and the conduits to Gaia. The last human-borne memories of Earth were lost, and so was the constant symphony of the voices of Earth’s lives – the songs and the calls that had, over seven slow centuries, been relegated to holidays and rites of passage, promotions. The Hunanum Nunnings were finally severed from Syllabium, and from Earth.

Hunanum: The Numenskal had replanted the Nunnings there in the Long Arm of the Kishwa Galaxy. That long, starry tentacle dipped into an unexplored pool of black gasses: the Happy Hunting Grounds.

Over a slow seven and a half centuries, most of the Hunanum Nunnings’ number turned away from Omega Centauri and took to life in earnest in the Long Arm. Though the miracles and works of the Syllabium-era Nunnings - the true Hospitalers - had been the center of a religion embracing star cluster after star cluster, it took less then four hundred years for whole of the Nunning race to engage in a different kind of celestial work unique to the Kishwan Frontier. Their medicines had been successively "safe-guarded," then "patented," and then rendered "obsolete" by Numenskal physicians, leaving the Hunanum Nunnings with no choice but to take on new labors. The Hunanum Nunnings became emissaries for the animal totems who dwelt in the Happy Hunting Grounds.

They allowed their ancestors' lives as the voices of Earth to settle into the comfortable rhythms of a tribal religion, celebrated on sabbats so as to pass on something of a "Nunning" identity. Then Syllabium died, and so went their genetic memories along with all the other hums and buzzes of Earth’s lives. Yet, some of the old Hospitalers had looked ahead to this day, and had worked to preserve something of their profession.