Great race

*"They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their common people, their canaglia do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with–a miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand? They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord."* - *That Hideous Strength*

The **great race** is a sentient race of microscopic beings which live on Sulva. There are two populations of the great race, one good, one evil, battling through the ages. No one has noticed, even after the Moon landings, because the great race are microscopic and live in widely dispersed underground pockets of life. Professor Filostrato and Merlinus Ambrosius probably did not know that, of course, and when Filostrato spoke of air, water, and forests on the far side of the Moon, he was giving his own inferences as if they were true; there is no air, the water is under ground, and any "forests" are underground mats of something like fungus. And probably neither Filostrato nor Merlin knew that the great race are not native to the Moon, but colonists.

The great race are transparent, teardrop-shaped organism, 150 to 200 micrometres long. The teardrop shape is somewhat flattened, and one side, the flatter side, is the bottom, bearing two rows of cilia, meeting in a clump of longer cilia at the pointed end, which is the front. An Earthling microscopist, seeing a Sulvan on a slide, might mistake it for an unfamiliar kind of hypotrich.

But the great race is not comprised of single-celled ciliates. In fact, each member of the great race normally has exactly seven cells: three motor cells forming the outer layer of the body, a gut cell, a mouth cell, a germ cell, and a neuron. The neuron has three blue eyespots, equipped with lenses. A creature with exactly one brain cell is able to be intelligent only because most of its mind is purely supernatural.

There are "young men" and "maidens" among the great race, but not in the Earthly way. The great race has seven "mating types" or sexes, all hermaphrodite, any two different types being interfertile. At any given mating, one acts as male and one as female. The great race pair-bonds, and the surface-dwellers raise their children (from spores) in extended families.

## Surface-dwellers

The surface-dwellers hold the far side of the Moon. The idea that they are slowly losing ground to the Masters may be true, or it may be wishful thinking or propaganda. They are nearest in appearance and nature to the original great race.

The great race excels at bio-tech, naturally enough, and the war between the surface-dwellers and the Masters is fought largely with biotechnical weapons. These are often modified soldiers, so the physical description of the great race just given only applies to unmodified ones. The great race can modify themselves into a huge variety of forms, many utterly unlike the natural one. Some are tiny cyborgs, equipped with nanotech machine parts. Some of the hugest are as much as a millimeter long. The difference between the surface-dwellers and the Masters is that the modified surface-dwellers are volunteers.

The great race also have spacecraft, even starships, but none have ever been noticed by humans except as strange transient phenomena.

The surface-dwellers and the Masters both follow events on Earth closely, especially since the advent of radio and then communications satellites.

## Masters

The Masters live in a heavily stratified society, divided into three classes and subdivided into innumerable castes. Only the middle class look like normal members of the great race. The upper class are isolated neurons, who spend most of their time hooked into a communications network, scheming. It is the ambition of every middle class member to be elevated to the upper class some day, though there is also the contrary urge to hold on to the pleasures of the flesh, along with the flesh itself.

As Merlin said, the standard Master is not hatched from a spore. Instead, it is eugenically cultured from banks of germ cells, one cell at a time, and assembled, ready for conditioning. Or the cells may be taken from the Masters who have, for one reason or another, been broken up for parts.

## Canaglia

The canaglia exist below these two classes and are made up of the vast majority of the Masters, which Filostrato called their *canaglia*, a slave class of innumerable types bred and modified and brainwashed to suit the classes. When possible, the surface-dwellers capture and rehabilitate some of these.

Source: http://www.windoffthehilltop.com/ink-ArbolRaces.html