Looking at these Devonians, you would not recognize something akin to you. At the height of their prowess you’d see a thing twice your size, showing something of the fish, something of the salamander. Something, even, of the slug, because they still drag their naked bellies in the mud. Breathing through their skin, inured to the cold, they have never developed or even conceived of clothing, and their adornment is found in patterns of colour and glow that they cultivate within their skin, tame fungi and bacteria become their body art. Their eyes are huge, mobile, set so they can view the world before, beside and even behind them, above and below the waterline. Their sagging chins and broad noses bristle with the barbels that are their brains’ interface with the world.

They are one of the great technical civilizations, rising to prominence with shocking swiftness. For a time they hold the world’s clock still and reshape the ecologies of the land as they see fit. They have no industry you might recognize, and yet the ice caps of the world are their supercomputers, filigreed with metallic and chemical logic gates that they cultivate like gardens, flurrying with electronic thought. Their machines are sliding block puzzles, regulated by melt and flow and freeze. You would never spot their great engines, and yet in a mere millennium they pass from the primitive to a level of engineering sophistication that neither you nor we can imagine. They even gain a foothold in orbit, sending up clouds of ice particles that self-organize into satellites with their own artificial minds. Most remarkably, for the longest time they do so little harm.

Early in their development, they nearly destroyed themselves wherever their numbers grew too great, the overspill of their chemical industries poisoning the waters they relied on. They learned, regulating the numbers of their spawn, changing their breeding habits. They accept that their lives are fit for two narrow bands of polar and sub-polar coastal habitats, and the rest of the world is simply too inhospitable to trouble with.