It is a beautiful thing when an artist's gift to you helps you understand what a piece of art in your collection is -- @justclickindiva's third Christmas gift to me, made in Apophysis 2.09, finally jogged my memory about a fractal I made in Apophysis 2.09 and cleared up what kind of alien it was, exactly -- so you will see my art first, and then her art second during this latest adventure in the Kirk Family Universe!
Art by the author, Deeann D. Mathews
Being the kid cousin of the most famous Kirk in the galaxy comes with a certain amount of inconvenience. My presence either brings instant disappointment or instant burden, because people who see Kirk all think of Cousin J.T., but every Kirk isn't Kirking quite at his level, and now that he is an admiral, it has gotten to the point that even he hates it and wishes he were a captain again.
Anyway, I had to get over all that at a young age, because what any Kirk in the family has to do now is just live up to their billing – with the exception of my wife, who was Admiral Vlarian Triefield before adding the illustrious name of Kirk to her already ridiculously fabulous billing. That of course just made my life even harder; now, people expected to be let down twice by me. But I had to get over it and was equipped to do it; the family gift for ingenuity is shared by me, along with my willingness to help you however I can.
The picture above is of a colony of chaluffas from Soakemup 5. The planet has exceptionally varied tides, and water would flood far inland on high tides except that these colonies live along the shorelines and take up all the water. Their brackish and fresh water cousins live in the deltas and the river systems, taking up excesses in runoff from the planet's abundant wet seasons. The chaluffas release the water at low tide and during low seasons, keeping the water levels relatively even all year relative to the ecosystem around them.
When portions of a colony of chaluffa die of old age, the resulting rock makes one of the most magnificent mineraly sponges in the galaxy, and they are much used in gardening because you can put a relatively small piece into a garden area, fill it to the capacity of its absorption, bury it in dirt, plant your seeds, and walk away for months at a time, because the chaluffa skeleton will slowly release that water into the soil and to whatever you are planting.
Chaluffa, like coral, also retains its coloring after death, and so is much prized as something to work into a garden situation.
Art by @justclickindiva
Which is how I got into having a big chunk of chaluffa rock on one trip or another – I was planning on taking it home to my wife and children for our garden at my wife's house in San Francisco. I knew that they would look at it and use it a dozen different ways for beauty and for function.
But then, there was a water main break and street collapse on the next planet I stopped at, almost right at the spaceport, and some workers were trapped underground with the water rising.
“Hold on, Captain Kirk is on his way!”
That's what you want to hear– the big fleet flagship with the big sensor array and the transporter beam and all that came with the right Captain Kirk. Yet Cousin J.T. would not have even known this planet existed without looking carefully on his star charts – this was a backwater system in fleet terms, and only we commercial captains on the frontier regularly went to these places.
Imagine the disappointment when I showed up in Rustbucket 1 – we had updated it by then, but, the fleet flagship my vessel was not, and it had no transporter beams.
I am forever not explaining that I'm Captain M.A. Kirk, not Captain J.T. Kirk. Explaining wouldn't be the Kirkish thing to do; it wastes time. The Kirkish thing to do is figure out another way to solve the problem, and so I went and got that big piece of chaluffa I had and heaved it down the nearest manhole to the trapped men. My crew and I then joined the rescue effort, and between the increased manpower and the chaluffa greatly decreasing the flow of water into the area where the trapped men were, we were able to get them out alive.
Cousin J.T. laughed until he cried about this situation.
“Good work, kid!” he said. “Indeed you were the Kirk they needed!”
My wife smiled.
“You're the Kirk I want and I need,” she said, “so get home to a hero's reward, Captain Kirk.”
That, of course, makes the inconvenience of being Captain Marcus Aurelius Kirk Jr. in Cousin J.T.'s galaxy (to hear most people tell it) seem small indeed.
The people of Soakemup 5 gifted me a chaluffa boulder in recognition of how I had put their native marvel into service, so, my wife got her reward too!
At least on Hive, it's M.A. Kirk's galaxy, of course ... both pieces of art are fractals made with love in Apophysis 2.09, one by @justclickindiva, and one by me!