Burgeron

Burgeron are the largest and fastest life-forms known in the galaxy, immense organisms that migrate between the twin stars of the Tekis system. Their appearance turns deep space into a theater for scientific observation, tourism, military regulation, and unexpected bodily comedy. Through D’armic’s detached perspective, the herd also becomes a measure of emotional response: its grandeur moves nearly everyone who watches, yet leaves him unmoved until the practical consequences of its biology expose the limits of his own attempted return to natural feeling.

Identity and Habitat

Burgeron are described as legendary herds whose apparent smallness is entirely a matter of perspective. Viewed against the Tekis Nebula’s primary star, individual members first look like tiny black disks, but each dot expands rapidly as the herd approaches. Their mottled, continent-scale bodies are extremely broad and thin: the elders are the size of continents, while most of their surface is no thicker than D’armic’s eyelids. Small tears caused by passing meteors allow pinpricks of light to shine through their skin.

The herd feeds while traveling between the twin stars of the Tekis system. Sunlight both warms and propels the animals, and they filter stray organic matter from the nebula’s clouds of ionized gas. Their metabolism is highly efficient, but not perfectly waste-free. The same microgravity environment and extraordinary speed that make their migration possible also create a dangerous problem: waste expelled at the wrong moment could catch up with and destroy the animals themselves.

Migration and Physical Marvel

Burgeron are not merely the largest life-forms discovered; they are also the fastest. At the apogee of their circuit between the two stars, they travel at many thousands of larims per cenbit. D’armic notes that his own people did not surpass this achievement until they developed gravity-driven vessels. Even at such speeds, however, the crossing between the companion stars takes many years, making the herd’s apogee a rare event.

The animals move as one titanic organism. During the observed passage, every member of the herd distorts its disk in precise synchrony, a coordinated maneuver whose mechanism remains unknown because obtaining and dissecting a specimen would be vastly more difficult than studying ordinary spacecraft-sized organisms. The herd bends, somersaults through the vacuum, and compresses into shrinking ovals before presenting itself edge-on. From D’armic’s cutter, the animals then seem to vanish, leaving thousands of straight lines as thin as the Lipelum Blades once carried by the ancient warrior sect of his people.

The transformation continues as the herd turns. Its newly exposed surface is metallic rather than black, covered by an atom-thin coating of aluminum and chromium harvested from the nebula. That coating helps Burgeron reach their remarkable speeds and later slow down. Once the flip is complete, the herd reflects the star ahead of it like an ocean filled with mirrors. Thousands of points of light flare against the Tekis Nebula, explaining why the name Burgeron is Nelikish for “wandering galaxy.”

The Apogee Spectacle

The apogee draws a remarkably varied audience. D’armic is joined by two other Bureau of Frontier Resources cutters, a wildlife-documentary crew, cruise ships full of tourists, and a Turemok patrol cruiser assigned to prevent anyone from leaving with a trophy. Vessels from six member races of the Assembly of Sentient Species gather around the herd, turning an event that normally belongs to the animals’ migration into a disorderly interspecies festival.

The crowd responds with awe as the Burgeron execute their synchronized flip. Communications channels fill with equivalents of astonished exclamations, the documentary ship moves closer for a better recording, and the Turemok cruiser presses forward to enforce a minimum distance. The spectators’ excitement reveals how communal experiences can magnify emotion. D’armic, who has spent much of his frontier service in isolation, wonders whether his solitary and exclusionary experiences have prevented him from feeling such emotions himself.

The spectacle reverses the usual direction of observation. The ships arrive to study, film, regulate, and perhaps possess the animals, while the Burgeron continue their ancient circuit with no apparent concern for the audience. The herd’s scale makes the assembled vessels seem temporary and small, yet the observers’ instruments and enforcement practices show that even this overwhelming natural phenomenon has been placed inside a framework of management.

Biology, Accident, and D’armic’s Departure

D’armic possesses one piece of information that the other spectators have overlooked: Burgeron relieve themselves only once per run. Because the animals travel so quickly through a microgravity environment, this timing is essential; it guarantees that the expelled material cannot later catch up with them. The biological necessity hidden beneath the magnificent display becomes the event’s grotesque practical turn.

When the emissions reach the spectators, the fleet’s conversation changes in volume and pitch. The Turemok cruiser, positioned closest to the source, suffers the worst of the foul maelstrom. Its power remains stable and its atmosphere stays intact, so the likely damage is limited to the Vel’s pride. The ships withdraw or keep their distance, and the grand festival is abruptly reorganized around avoidance.

D’armic recognizes that the scene contains all the elements of effective lowbrow humor, in enormous quantities. Yet he feels no amusement. He even realizes that, with a low dose of Humoric, he would laugh so violently that he would be unable to respire. The Resentitol in his medicine drawer tempts him, but the possibility that temptation itself may be an emotion forces him into further reflection about the difference between instinct, bodily need, and genuine feeling.

After confirming that the spectators no longer pose a danger to the wildlife, D’armic leaves the herd and moves deeper into the nebula. His migration is ongoing as well, though his route is psychological rather than astronomical. He has been postponing inspection of the buoy network in favor of more stimulating assignments and begins to suspect that he has been avoiding the buoys because he fears boredom. Since the Human Wildlife Preserve is reputed to contain nothing remotely interesting, he turns toward its tedium deliberately, wondering whether boredom rather than intense positive experiences might lead him back to natural emotions.