Plates of the Prismeri

PLATES OF THE PRISMERI Three sheets, ink and watercolour on laid paper, with the naturalist's notes. Drawn from life on the contact survey; the third sheet revised after the kinship finding.

The two preliminary reports of this survey describe two peoples. These plates were begun for the first of them and finished for neither, because by the time the third sheet was drawn the kinship records had shown that the reports describe one people at two points in one life. I have kept the first two sheets as they were drawn and redrawn the third, so that a reader can see the mistake and its correction on the same paper.

I have drawn only what I saw at a working distance with the people's consent, which on Prismere means from below, since a Prismeri at rest hangs and a Prismeri addressed from the ground is at a disadvantage and knows it. Nothing on the sheets is written. The scale bar carries no figures, its length being the survey's standard, and the captions are kept here rather than on the paper, so that the plates can travel without their captions arguing with them.

Plate I — First Wings

The First Wings form, an adult at rest and at work. Hanging is how fine work is done: the feet take the whole weight and both wing-hands are free. The exoskeleton is still hardening and takes a grey-violet wash; the membrane is so thin that I left it nearly the colour of the paper. The wing study shows what the first report missed: the wing is the forelimb, and the three free fingers at its leading edge are the hands. The head study shows the two forward eyes set low and, above them, the band of facets along the ridge, which I am told forms no image and reads the light overhead. The neck is short and the head is carried close; there is no tail, and the membrane runs between wing and leg.

Plate II — Full Wings

The Full Wings form, in flight and at rest. Broader and heavier through the shoulders, the plating hardened and washed in gold and blue, the membrane stronger and built for sustained flight into the haze. From the same ridge that carries the facet band grow the long sensory tendrils, which I have drawn as fine lines because they would not hold still long enough to be drawn as anything else. This sheet was drawn for the second preliminary report, as a second people. It is the same body.

Plate III — Two forms of one people, and the Second Emergence

Redrawn after the kinship finding. The two forms at one scale and from one ledge, their heads level and turned to each other, as I saw them in conversation: neither looks up at the other, and nothing about the meeting is a deference. Below, the shell of the Second Emergence, drawn from one I was permitted to see closed, in which a First Wings adult spends several weeks and from which the Full Wings form comes out. It is irreversible and it is not universal, and no Prismeri I drew treated those who never enter it as less.

Notes for the reader of the plates

The plates are a naturalist's and say what a naturalist saw. They say nothing about what triggers the Emergence, which the guilds have not chosen to explain and I did not ask, and nothing about the Lattice, which I cannot see as the tendrils do. Where the survey's reports and these sheets differ, the reports are the record; the sheets are the drawings that taught me I was looking at one people.

Archive note: the naturalist later worked the sheets up into finished paintings in oil on panel, at true scale and in the light and haze of Prismere, as near to the living people as paint will go. The Archive's Prismeri entry carries the three paintings, one after each sheet. The sheets above are kept as they were drawn, with the naturalist's notes unchanged.