Voost Ship

Nomenclature

"Voost ship" is a bit of a misnomer -- it's a Standard Language mistranslation of the Kraken phrase "tikaltran vushlt migabin tagabobozoot", which is more literally translated as "big cargo bay space worm who listens to the sky radio." In an attempt for political correctness, some people refer to them as "vushlt worms," but this would be the equivalent of calling them "space worm worms". When emphasizing their organic and sentient status, it's generally accepted to refer to them simply as the "vushlt" or "voost". Common folk refer to them as "voost ships" or "space worms".

A voost ship is unlikely to think of itself as a ship, a worm, or even having cargo bays. Oddly enought, the creatures themselves, for all their attributed accumulated knowledge, seem to not be able to grasp the concept of a species, and refer to themselves only by their individual names. To make matters worse, their personal names tend to change not only according to their audience, but also according to the context of the conversation.

Interstellar Voyages

At first sight, "space worm" seems a fitting title for the species. Ranging in size from several hundred meters to a record 4.5 kilometers long, the vushlt have the shape of a long, rocky worm with a gaping maw, that glows red when it's near a star system. When near a system, they are also usually seen with extended thin membranes fanning around their necks. The membrane fins, or sails, sweep out at nearly three times its length. The fins are used to navigate the solar winds, folding up once they've reached escape velocity, remaining folded for centuries or millenia during their interstellar journies.

Scattered in the folds of their thick rocky skin are thousands of pockets that can open up to the vacuum, or close to protect whomever or whatever is within in an airtight enclosure several dozen cubic meters. Although it is considered quite safe to travel within the pockets when negotiated with the vushlt, it is not unheard of for a stowaway or unruly passenger to be crushed and digested within the deep bowels of the creature.

Vushlt spend nearly all their long lives travelling throughout the galaxy. They take on thousands of passengers and their cargo on their travels, generally patient travellers who do not wish to use wormholes, or who do not have access to a wormhole in their system. The vushlt negotiate with each individual traveller to give permission, and the negotiations can seem on the verge of absurd to most people, sometimes involving tons of rare earths and metals, while at other times a simple sung poem from the passenger's home system.

Communication

Individual vushlts are reputed to be unimaginably old, some members claiming to be over a billion years old. Although they are great storehouses of trivial knowledge about ancient galactic empires that vanished hundreds of millions of years ago, they are deficient in categorization and recall. When speaking to a vulsht about a contemporary matter, they are more likely than not to confuse the event with an irrelevant occurance from some time several million years in the past.

Communicating with the vushlts involves using radio waves of wide amplitude that take sometimes hours or even days to transfer a single phrase. They speak more slowly and carefully across the interstellar distances with an even broader spectrum, to compensate for the inevitable data loss involved. It is said that the oldest among them listen to the cosmic microwave background, believing it to belong to a voice older even than they, speaking to them from an unbelievably distant past. The younger vushlt say that such behavior is simply senility or a clinging to a remenant religious tradition.