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akin2squidratsWhat Happened
He, Tii and their father are in the shuttle riding up to the ship. It's not particularly interesting -- the shuttle can duplicate food and make seats/beds, but they're pretty much in a grey bubble in the middle of a living thing. Dichaan is talking to the shuttle, and invites Akin over to see what it's like.
... And, wow. The shuttle is an Oankali organism, and a relative to the town Akin lives in, but... well, it's a critter that flies through space, so it's senses are a lot different. Akin has the sudden experience of floating naked in space, of the memory of tasting the Earth itself and talking to his hometown, and taking it back to the ship. Having a bunch of sensory impressions of gravity and electromagnetic information and solar wind and whatnot dumped into his head, especially before he matured, is almost painful -- less so when Akin remembers it now, since he's gotten a lot better at dealing with sensory impressions.
But it was exhausting at the time, even with Dichaan cushioning the impressions to not burn out his brain. Dichaan tells him that ships and shuttles have the senses they do because they need them, and that adult Oankali deliberately maintain the ability to interact with the ships because they need the ships to travel, and the ships need Oankali to breed them, as they only have two of the three sexes. In a sense, the towns, ships, and shuttles are as much of the same kind as the humanoid Oankali, the human-Oankali constructs, and the Akjai Oankali. They were genetically engineered from critters on the long-forgotten Oankali homeworld, but the intelligence and interfaces all come from the ancestral Oankali.
What Akin Gets
-- Some history. I'm cutting off the bit where he, Tii and Dichaan talk more about the future of humanity, but there's still bits of where the ships come from.
-- Ability to better interface with Oankali 'tech'. Useless in Sabra, but...
-- ... he may be able to apply some of those memories when working with Jace or another telepath, doing what his father did for him.
-- ... This is not helping with Pillar trauma. Seriously, the more he remembers of ships and towns, the more this place feels like one of those psychological horror films where everything looks normal until eldritch horrors start kidnapping people and replacing them with pod people when you turn your back.
He, Tii and their father are in the shuttle riding up to the ship. It's not particularly interesting -- the shuttle can duplicate food and make seats/beds, but they're pretty much in a grey bubble in the middle of a living thing. Dichaan is talking to the shuttle, and invites Akin over to see what it's like.
... And, wow. The shuttle is an Oankali organism, and a relative to the town Akin lives in, but... well, it's a critter that flies through space, so it's senses are a lot different. Akin has the sudden experience of floating naked in space, of the memory of tasting the Earth itself and talking to his hometown, and taking it back to the ship. Having a bunch of sensory impressions of gravity and electromagnetic information and solar wind and whatnot dumped into his head, especially before he matured, is almost painful -- less so when Akin remembers it now, since he's gotten a lot better at dealing with sensory impressions.
But it was exhausting at the time, even with Dichaan cushioning the impressions to not burn out his brain. Dichaan tells him that ships and shuttles have the senses they do because they need them, and that adult Oankali deliberately maintain the ability to interact with the ships because they need the ships to travel, and the ships need Oankali to breed them, as they only have two of the three sexes. In a sense, the towns, ships, and shuttles are as much of the same kind as the humanoid Oankali, the human-Oankali constructs, and the Akjai Oankali. They were genetically engineered from critters on the long-forgotten Oankali homeworld, but the intelligence and interfaces all come from the ancestral Oankali.
What Akin Gets
-- Some history. I'm cutting off the bit where he, Tii and Dichaan talk more about the future of humanity, but there's still bits of where the ships come from.
-- Ability to better interface with Oankali 'tech'. Useless in Sabra, but...
-- ... he may be able to apply some of those memories when working with Jace or another telepath, doing what his father did for him.
-- ... This is not helping with Pillar trauma. Seriously, the more he remembers of ships and towns, the more this place feels like one of those psychological horror films where everything looks normal until eldritch horrors start kidnapping people and replacing them with pod people when you turn your back.
