Arvelan males and females are equally involved in nurturing their young. Offspring are transferred from their mother's womb to their father's pouch but continue to receive milk from the mother so that the parents must stay together. Because an Arvelan married couple becomes a dual personality, they are naturally monogamous, never separating or divorcing and rarely remarrying after bereavement, and never soon. Remarriage means becoming part of a different personality.
When Voah-and-Rero deduce that their armed human kidnappers do not intend to keep both of them alive, they immediately attack, each motivated to defend the other. They will die together, if necessary. They are appalled when Terangi Maclaren runs to their aid, leaving his own wife unprotected. It had been difficult enough for them to accept that Tamara had remarried so soon after the death of her first husband.
The Arvelans' conclusion about human beings:
"They know so little of love. They cannot ever know more." (p. 147)
Didonians realize that human beings cannot know oneness. Both Ythrian parents carry their young in flight. Peter Berg realizes the gulf between his faith and the Ythrian New Faith. Poul Anderson penetrates alien biology, psychology and theology.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Nonsense, of course, what these Arvelans thought. Humans can feel/express love (and hate) as strongly as any Arvelans do. We simply express such feeling in ways different from theirs.
Ad astra! Sean
The Arvelan reproductive system strikes me as a bit of a kludge. But then, kludges happen in evolutionary history all the time -- because it's a random process.
Look at the disadvantages a male peacock has to undergo to impress girl peacocks with its showy plumage, for example.
Sean: but with more possibilities for deception and "workarounds".(*)
In fact, humans have been engaged in an evolutionary 'arms race' that way for a very long time.
(*) for example, 10% of the population of East Asia is descended from Genghis Khan/Temujin and his sons.
I don't think it was because they were sincere and charming.
I just started listening again to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episodes "The Wrath of the Khans".
He starts by comparing anyone talking about any good things to come from the Mongol conquests (or the Macedonian conquests of Alexander) to someone talking about good things coming from the actions of Nazi Germany. Sure there might be such benefits, but 'at the cost of millions of murders?'.
Jim: there's an unspoken assumption there that there would have been peace without Alexander or Temujin.
There wouldn't; there would have been continuous violence. Just locally.
Big empires concentrate and limit war.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! Because a mass murdering world conqueror like Genghis Khan, with hordes of ferocious warriors at his beck, could have as many women as he wanted. So it's no surprise "we" might be descended from Temujin!
Yes, but Alexander failed to found a lasting empire--his dominions broke up after his death, with his generals fighting each other to grab chunks of Alexander's conquests.
Alexander overthrew the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which had brought some peace for very large territories for quite a long time.
Ad astra! Sean
Carlin does mention the continuous warfare between various Steppe tribes before Temujin.
OTOH the fairly large states in China had been keeping warfare to their fringes, and so had the Muslim states that the Mongols destroyed.
In the longer run the Mongol empire(s) spread the knowledge of gunpowder throughout Eurasia which resulted in large 'gunpowder states' pushing violence to their fringes and allowing settled peoples on the fringes of the Steppe to finally end the military threat from the nomad peoples.
So first benefiting the nomad peoples at the expense of the settled peoples, then the reverse.
Kaor, Jim!
I basically agree. Chinese Taoist alchemists worked out the first recipes for gunpowder as long ago as AD 904, albeit it took several more centuries to work out its military uses, during the Sung Dynasty (AD 960-1279). I think the first practical military use of gunpowder was during the later Sung, as that dynasty was struggling desperately against the Mongols.
Yes, the Mongols spread knowledge of gunpowder and its uses to both Islam and Christian Europe, from about 1200 to 1365.
A still partly or recently agricultural people of nomadic origins, the Manchus, did conquer China in 1644, founding the last dynasty of Imperial China, the Ch'ing.
Ad astra! Sean
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