Snowball

Down in the valley, Makas sees a round shape gliding over the snow. He bounds down the slope clumsily in his electrically heated pressure suit, creating small avalanches that descend around him in seeming slow motion. The run becomes an apprehensive walk as he begins to appreciate the size of the striding thing, and the walk slows to a crawl until he comes to a stop about a hundred yards in front of it. The being's softly crunching footsteps get louder with every second as it approaches, and Makas begins to sweat, then tremble. The creature is looming in front of him now, its legs swinging, its coat rippling with every step. Suddenly, it's upon him. For a brief moment as it strides overhead he looks up to see frost falling from its giant body; then it’s over and the creature's thudding footfalls are receding. Makas turns to watch it go. When he can no longer make out its movement against the smoking mountains in the distance, he begins the long hike back to his experimental station.



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The planet Amund just barely skirts its planet's habitable zone, which, in addition to the reverse greenhouse effect created by its volcanos, makes it one of the coldest life-bearing worlds; temperatures here get as low as -200 degrees celsius.

One of the mere few hundred creatures that can survive here is Dóard’s Snowball, depicted here striding through carbon dioxide snow as a human researcher observes. The graphic on the right is a cross section of the animal’s body.

The Snowball is an almost absurdly well-insulated organism: Its outside layer is composed of a coat of hair almost a meter thick, which is divided into a protective outer layer and a denser insulating layer beneath. Deeper in lies the creature's shell, with is full of evacuated spaces that insulate it like a vacuum flask; the walls of the spaces are coated in guanine crystals to prevent air from leaking in. Next comes a layer of fat for extra insulation and cushioning, and, finally, the alien's relatively tiny body.

The Snowball's legs protrude through a small gap in the shell, and only a little way beyond the body are composed entirely of dead tissue. They're manipulated by tendons leading to tightly-packed muscles close to the body. Every once in a while, a new pair that has been growing inside the shell uncurls to take their place and the old legs are shed.

Counterintuitively, Dóard's Snowball is an ectotherm. This is presumably to save energy, for its environment contains abundant sources of natural heat in the form of volcanic fumaroles. These oases are the stopping-over points on the animal's never-ending journey; the Snowballs rests only a few days at each site to graze on the microbial mats that flourish in the relative warmth. Before leaving, the animal will squat down over a vent and force open the slit-shaped opening in its shell to expose its body to the hot gases. This heat will keep it going for a week, after which time it will be forced to burn its fat reserves to keep warm.

The hair of these aliens is one of the few commodities valuable and light enough to be worth transporting through space; many of the research stations on Amund support themselves by trading Snowball fur taken from corpses. The fur is then taken to nearby Einstein (in the same system) to be made into clothing for grotesquely wealthy individuals. There’s some concern that this trade will eventually give rise to poaching, which would be devastating to these extremely slow-breeding animals.

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Addendum: There is one facet of Amund's biosphere that the scientists have yet to fully explore. A rising plume of clouds on the equator marks the location of a volcanic caldera 200 miles across, a place where the climate is relatively mild. This region is a reservoir of clades that went extinct elsewhere on Amund; indeed, it contains 90 percent of the planet's biological diversity. Intriguingly, among these holdouts is a species as anatomically primitive as it is neurologically advanced; the Antyuwot is Amund's surprise sophont, an intelligent race living in some of the harshest conditions imaginable for carbon-based life. Almost nothing is known about their society as of yet, but their appearance alone provides a picture of what life on Amund probably looked like millions of years before the current cold spell. Here is an illustration: [link]


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Sorry for the less than stellar writing. It’s two in the morning right now .

You can hover your cursor over the diagram to see what the different layers are.

Thanks to for providing the sophont illustration and the idea for the caldera!

Comments and criticism welcome.

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My gallery: [link]