OK. But why are all the arms long? If the owoc parallel the octopi, only one of the arms is adapted as a sexual organ. The others are just arms. So why are they all the same length?
Bingo. That’s just the way the genetic switches work with the owoc. The regulatory DNA (or whatever equivalent exists on Ishtar—and would I love to know!—but I’m willing to bet that it’s the same trusty old adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, or at least three out of four of them) has all eight arms linked. You want just one of them long? Sorry, ma’am. Only comes in the economy eight-pack.
Anyway. To get back to the point, I always knew there were males and females. What I didn’t know is that there are also mothers.
I just thought Kupu, the female who hardly ever moves out of that one little oruc grove, was the owoc equivalent of the fat lady in the circus.
Turns out the reason she’s four times as big as all the other females is because she isn’t really a female at all, she’s a “mother.” This distinction seems bizarre to humans, because for us “female-ness” and “mother-ness” are almost identical. But among the owoc, they’re practically a different sex.
No, that’s not the best way to put it. Makes it seems like there’s three sexes. And there aren’t. There’s only two—female and male. But the females come in variants. Female and mother.
Why not female (meaning mother) and “neuter.” Because it slides around the question. What’s a “neuter,” after all? It’s either a neutered something—male or female—or it’s some kind of bizarre sex-that-isn’t-a-sex.
Fie on it. Let’s stick to the ABCs of biology. In all sexed species, the female is the fundamental sex. Gotta have females. Males—the thought grieves my chauvinist heart, but facts, as the man says, are stubborn things—are unnecessary. Oh, sure, lots of species use males to reproduce. (Including mine, praise the Lord.) But they can be done away with, if necessary. Parthenogenesis, for instance. So the basic body plan of any sexed species is female. Males are just a specialized adaptation.
Since the infertile females are far and away the most common type of owoc—and the dominant ones, insofar as that aggressive term can be used with these beings—it seems to me most logical to refer to them as the females, and to call the ones which are specialized to actually reproduce “mothers.”
I’ll stick with that for now. (Note: ask Joseph to talk to the owoc about it. Be interesting to see what they have to say.)
He did, and Joseph reported that the owoc term for female was, just as Julius suspected, used to refer to the infertile ones. Kupu was called a term which translated quite closely as “mother.” Joseph also reported that, according to the owoc, males came in two variants as well—the fertile ones, which were by far the most common type; and a rare type of male, which was not fertile. According to the owoc, there was no representative of that quasi-sex currently living in the valley. There had been one, some (indefinite—the owoc were always vague regarding questions of time) period ago, but he had died.
Julius tentatively labeled the sterile males “eumales.” And then drove himself crazy trying to figure out an adaptive reason for the evolution of infertile males. (“The most useless creatures imaginable!” he exploded once, in Indira’s presence; to his everlasting regret, for she expanded on the theme, at length.)
So there you are—just like a colony of bees. A queen—the mother—who does all the actual breeding. A small number of males, to service her. And a host of infertile females, to do everything else.
Like all analogies, of course, you can’t take it too far. For one thing, the owoc are intelligent (not very, but intelligent nonetheless) whereas the social insects are as dumb as—hey, what do you expect?—bugs. For another, owoc society has none of the “slavish” characteristics of insect hives.
But I’d be willing to bet that if the owoc were smarter their complicated sexual relations would produce all kinds of fascinating cultural variants. Including, probably, some variants that are savagely oppressive.