The Meridian Sapients

The Meridian sapients are the people of Meridian's shallow shelf seas, the most advanced of the world's native crustacean lines. They are the builders of the reef-cities that two Cerebraun Hegemony survey missions logged as geological formations before either understood what it was charting. Crustacean is the survey's word, a likeness and not a lineage: no people in this record shares descent with another (Cross-Biosphere Taxonomy). The record holds no name for the people in their own speech, so it uses the planet's.

The Body

What the record holds of the body comes from the planet page and from two filed portraits, and it is set down here as far as those go and no further.

• One long, low body, segmented and bilaterally symmetrical, carried close to the lattice it moves on.
• No head on a neck and no face. The fore end is one smooth armoured hood, with a single row of small dark pits along its lower rim, none of them in pairs.
• Overlapping plates of hard mineral along the back, matte and marked by use, dwindling toward a tapered rear. They are the shell of the people's speech, and to strike a neighbour's plates is to address them.
• Two heavy forelimbs, jointed in plated segments and ending each in one solid, closed, blunt end. They strike and do not grip. The survey called them claws, and the record keeps the survey's word.
• Many short jointed walking limbs beneath the plates, their hard points hooked into the lattice.
• Mineral grey, never glossy, though the body is never out of water. From person to person the grey runs from dark to a grey-green bloom, and the set and wear of the plates and the shape of a forelimb's end differ. These are the differences a stranger learns first.

Speech

They speak in two channels at once. Claw-percussion against shell and structure is audible and readable underwater at considerable range. Alongside it, a slower chemical signal is let directly into the water around the speaker. Hegemony administrators still follow the second channel only through translation instruments. See The Meridian People on the planet page.

What the Record Does Not Hold

The underside of the hood and the body, which no frame shows. How the body feeds, breathes and grows. A lifespan. Whether the pits see. Whose secretion the building composite is. And what the people call themselves.

See also

• Meridian, their world, its reef-cities and its Hegemony administration
• Second Outwork and Sixth Course, the two of the people the record names
• The Cerebraun Hegemony, under whose subject-world terms the reef-cities govern themselves