Shayanan background and biology; was Re: Kinship terms?

On Thursday 06 March 2003 01:39 am, Nik Taylor wrote:
Lots of interesting stuff including the following questions:

>
> Interesting.  This pouch-fosterage is compulsory?
>
>
> So, it's not obligatory for a pouchling to be fostered to another?
>
> What's this Counter-Occupation?  Are the "Imperial colonists" human?
> Are there any other sentient species besides humans and Shayanans?
How
> did this contact occur?
>
Ok... some of this info is available on the cherani website, but a lot
of it isn't written anywhere yet.

Cherani Station is the counterweight of a beanstalk that was built in
patrnership by the Shayanans and the people whose planet the beanstalk
is attached to. There are about 8 species the regularly come through,
including Shayanans, Earthans (Humans), Imperials and others. The
people on the planet don't come up off it (part of why they agreed to
the partnership, which lets them take advantage of their economically
valuable location). The Chief of Police is an Earthan named Daffydd
Rhys Owens.

The Imperials are decadent, 300 pound free-range chickens (except they
have teeth, arms instead of wings and dinosaurlike tails). The females
are smaller. A few centuries ago they showed up at Shayana, dropped a
large rock from orbit onto the only city with electric lights, and
announced that they now owned the place.

Throughout the Occupation the Imperials has orbital platforms in place
that could target the entire planet. At the peak of the Occupation,
Imperials on the ground never had access to more than about 40% of the
major continents... "And that's if you count places where they
patrolled in double-platoons and did dare to step out of each other's
sight to relieve themselves". Once the orbital platforms were finally
hacked, the Imperials found out the hard way that a lot of Shayanans
lived in places Imperials didn't consider habitable, so they were way
more outnumbered than they had ever realized.

(Shayanans are neither pack hunters nor territorial in our usual senses
of the term, so they don't have words for war, battles, etc. They do
have a word, "Lliassi", which means "a hedge or biological trap that
will take 64 years to ripen, or a plot or strategem that will take that
long to mature". On the other hand, normal Imperial life expectancy is
only about 64 Shayanan years.)

Imperials assigned linguistic gender terms to the Shayanan sexes. One
could argue that they got them backwards biologically, but the
Shayanans don't care. References to the sexes in the following
discussion will follow the Imperial assignments.

In the Nedranetsta, a related species with less complex social
structures and shorter lifespans and childhoods, twins are the norm,
and will usually be pouched by the two seed parents, with elderly and
pre-adult members of the group as backups. (It's been suggested that
the ability to handle more complex social interactions was the
evolutionary advantage that led to the spread of speech in teresstiral
hominids. Their more complex social system may be why Shayanans are a
linguistic species and Nedranetsta mostly aren't.)

In both Shayanans and Nedranetsta, once a hatchling is pouched by an
adult, it stays with that pouchparent, except in rare situations
usually involving death or the imminent threat of it. A mother has the
option of pouching a hatchling herself, bestowing it on another (in
Shayanans usually the seed-father or a member of the mother's
household, sometimes a grandparent with a separate household) or
discarding it if it looks or tastes wrong. The discard option is rare,
and causes gossip the will impede the future reproduction choices of
both seed-parents, but is considered better than raising a seriously
defective pouchling. If the mother's status is high enough that she
mated early in the breeding season, she may try again the same year
when a discard occurs, though breeding late will do nasty things to her
status. (The breeding season sort of starts in the center of a
community and ripples outward pheromonally.)

In both Shayanans and Nedranetsta the parent of an unweaned pouchling
will not be involved in a breeding season. For Nedranetsta that
generally means missing alternate breeding seasons. For Shayanans, that
can mean missing as many as 4 successive breeding seasons.

Shayanan pouchparents are often elderly, or young adults (there is a
term, sellithi, for people who are mature enough to be pouch parents
but not physically mature in the ways needed to be a seed parent). They
may be reproductive adults who want an official heir. Or they may be
subordinate adults within a community.

The dlia, kellya, and acharya terms are concerned with who your parents
are and who you inherit which kinds of property from (or bequeath them
to). The default primary heir is acharya (both seed and pouch child) of
the same sex. The residuary legatee for household and personal effects
is the youngest pouch-child, either dlia or acharya. (Grandma pouches a
seed-child of her own acharya-Heir, and the kid gets Grandma's house,
is a very common pattern.)

The current Hasri lacks an acharya child of her own sex, -- kind of like
the Bennett's in Pride and Prejudice not having a son. She still has
time to produce an Heir... but the situation is beginning to have
political effects.

Seed children who aren't pouch-children are entitled to some support
when they are small (if their pouchparent is not part of a seed-parent's
household) and a hefty lump of support (sort of a dowry or
scholarship/apprenticeship fee) when they're old enough to go out on
their own.  An estate can't be fully probated until all of the minor
seed-children have grown up and been dowered.

Males compete to be the mate of an in-season female. If there were less
than 4 competitors involved in producing a specific child it's very
scandalous. If there are 16 or more competitors, some may be sellithi
advertising their availability as pouchparents, or females who want to
block one or more of the male suitors. Being part of a chevet as a
competitor (if she does well) may also accelerate the onset of a
female's own breeding season, improving her effective status within the
community. (Males only breed once per season, and some competition
losers won't breed at all that year, so an early female has better
choices. Late breeders are mating with losers, or guys who didn't get
close enough to the important females to compete seriously.)


--
Elyse Grasso

Reply