Lulian

The lulian is an Icathirian race notable for the spiral development of its anatomy. Like most Icathirian races, they have no particular homeworld there, the Stagehands having presumably brought them to Icathiria from some other universe. They have thrived in Icathiria, however, and are now found all over the known universe, often serving in administrative or clerical positions.

Description

A lulian has a cylindrical torso, tapering on both ends. While some lulians do have a subtle helical lobation that hints at the spiral pattern of their underlying anatomy, this is a relatively uncommon trait; most lulians have torsos relatively smooth and symmetrical. Their limb placement, however, is a more obvious indication; an adult lulian has between eight and twelve limbs arranged in a spiral down their bodies. Each limb ends in a cluster of digits that repeats the spiral pattern in miniature. A lulian typically stands and walks upright, using its lowest three to five limbs as walking members. The walking limbs higher on the lulian's body grow to greater lengths, so that all these walking limbs extend to an equal distance below the being's body, allowing for stable support and locomotion. The other limbs are used as manipulating members. The manipulating limbs lowest on the body tend to be the longest, while those closer to the lulian's head are shorter. Many lulians have one to eight rudimentary limbs in the upper parts of their body (and perhaps reaching partway up the neck), too short and undeveloped to be useful for much.

The number of limbs a lulian possesses seems to be partly genetic, though there seem to be environmental factors as well: lulians raised in better conditions, and receiving better nutrition in their developing stages, tend to have more limbs than those who weren't so fortunate. On the other hand, useless rudimentary limbs are more common in lulians raised in unhealthier environments. Though some lulian societies may attach a social stigma to an individual's number of limbs, this is far from universal, and even where it does exist is inconsistent; some societies favor a larger number of limbs, some smaller. (Rudimentary limbs are almost always seen as undesirable, however, and are often surgically removed.)

At the top of the lulian's body is a thick neck which can be longer than the torso. The neck ends in a bulbous head, tipped by a cluster of dozens of tentacles. A mouth exists in the middle of the tentacles, but is rarely visible, the tentacles hiding it from view. Around the thickest part of the head is a row of compound eyes. Both the eyes and the tentacles are, like so many other elements of the lulian's anatomy, arranged in spirals. Furthermore, the spiral pattern extends to within each eye, the facets of the compound eye forming spiral arrangements similar to the seeds of a sunflower.

Senses

Standard lulians, with their multiple compound eyes, possess a very large range of vision—able to see not only three hundred and sixty degrees around them, but above and below as well (except of course for where their own bodies block the view). They are also able to visually detect the polarization of light, and can see a fair ways into the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum. Their vision has, however, a rather poor resolution, and they have trouble seeing fine details. For the purposes of comparison, a lulian would be able to read a typical present-day book (assuming it understood the language), but only by holding it close to an eye.

Lulians lack any sort of external ears, but do hear through auditory membranes on the bottom parts of their heads. Their sense of hearing is poor by human standards, however, except at the low frequency end—lulians can hear significantly lower frequencies of sound than humans can, though conversely the upper limit of their audible frequency range is also lower.

While the lulian has receptors for smell and taste in its throat, it also has them in the center of each hand. These manual receptors can be voluntarily suppressed, so that the lulian doesn't have to taste everything it handles. Still, they can be convenient for the lulian so that it can smell objects without getting its head close to them. The lulian's olfactory sense is relatively weak, only slightly more acute than a human's.

Anatomy

The spiral patterns are even more manifest in the lulian's internal anatomy than in its outside. Its ribs spiral around the inside of its torso, and its skeletal elements themselves are not solid like the bones of a Tellurian vertebrate but masses of fiber tightly wound in a spiral. Much of the rest of their anatomy follows similar patterns; their digestive systems spiral around the insides of their torsos, and their circulatory systems likewise comprise numbers of spirals going in both direction. Many of these spirals are very densely coiled, giving the lulian a fairly high mass for its size. Released from the body, the spirals may have a tendency to rapidly unwind, taking up much more space than they did inside the lulian's body; slicing a lulian open may result in a gory pile of organs and vessels that seems much too large to have fit inside the body in the first place.

The reasons for the unusual predominance of spirals in the lulian's makeup are far from clear. The few other species of Icathiria that have been determined to apparently come originally from the same universe as the lulian show a similar characteristic, but that doesn't establish whether it's an adaptation to some unusual feature of their homeworld, or simply a meaningless accident of evolution. According to accounts by lulian newcomers, some early lulian biologists theorized that the lulian structure of life was a reflection of the helical nature of DNA. Of course, this hypothesis is effectively disproven by the fact that the anatomy of the vast majority of known spirilegs don't have such spiral bases, but lulians who hadn't yet encountered lifeforms of empires other than their own wouldn't know this.

Mutations

For whatever reason, lulians are particularly prone to obvious mutations that swap around parts of their body. Such mutations are so common, in fact, that almost thirty percent of lulians are afflicted with at least one such alteration. The eyes and head tentacles are particularly susceptible to this phenomenon; lulians with an eye among their tentacles, or a cluster of tentacles in place of an eye, are a not infrequent sight. Sometimes the mutation's effect is total, producing a lulian with tentacles in place of all its eyes (leaving the individual completely blind), or with a cluster of eyes surrounding its mouth in place of tentacles—or, rarely, both, a lulian with both eyes and tentacles but with their places interchanged.

A lulian's mutations can extend beyond simple transposition of eyes and tentacles. Less frequently, the lulian's limbs can also be replaced or swapped with other appendages, or appear in their place, leaving lulians with an arm sprouting where an eye should be, or vice versa. More rarely still, it could happen that a lulian's eyes, tentacles, or limbs are confused with some of its internal organs. While such a mutation often results in a nonviable embryo, there is the occasional appearance of a healthy lulian with squashy glands or even ganglia sprouting from its torso or head. It also sometimes happens that, rather than (or in addition to) replacing or switching around appendages, a mutation will multiply them, resulting in a lulian with, for instance, sets of two or three arms sprouting from a common base where a lulian would more usually have only one. Conversely, mutations may eliminate appendages altogether, leading to, for example, a limbless lulian that relies on technological means to get around, or a lulian with nothing but blank flesh where its eyes should be.

For the most part, mutated lulians suffer from no particular social stigma in most known lulian societies; the mutations are common enough that they are more or less taken for granted. Some societies do have some associations involving particular mutations, however. For instance, in some primitive lulian societies eyeless lulians with tentacles where their eyes should be are venerated and believed to have mystical abilities. More advanced societies have largely discarded these beliefs, but sometimes still attach some level of respect to the blind lulians.

Diet

As seems to be the case with most noetic organisms, lulians are omnivores, apparently adapted to eat both the flora and the fauna of their homeworld. In Icathiria, most lulians subsist mainly on artificial food rather than directly eating other organisms, although it seems that lulians are capable of digesting and living on organisms of certain other empires if necessary.

Lulians seldom use utensils to eat, except for the consumption of liquids; the taste of the food on the lulian's hands is an important part of the dining experience. In fact, it's a common device in lulian cuisine to have at the same meal foods of two flavors that combine in unexpected ways, so that the eater first experiences the tastes separately on different hands and then the surprising gestalt flavor only when the two foods are consumed together and sensed in the lulian's throat.

Reproduction

Lulians are duosexual organisms, with separate male and female genders. The genitalia of both genders is located in the throat, or rather in a small sac connected to the throat but usually closed off by a muscular sphincter. The male's reproductory sac is called his testis, the female's the ovary, by analogy with the gonads of humans and related animals, though the analogy is imperfect; both the ovary and the testis of the lulian combine functions of a gonad and a uterus.

Lulian procreation generally begins with the male and female lulian entwining their head tentacles, positioning their mouths directly opposite each other. (Mutant lulians without head tentacles in the usual place can still procreate, however; the tentacles are useful to hold the copulating lulians in position, but are not an imperative part of the process.) The female lulian then extends her carpel, a tongue-like organ used only in procreation and otherwise coiled within the ovary, out of her mouth and down her mate's throat. Coated in ovular fluid, the carpel then penetrates the testis through the testicular sphincter, depositing there ovular fluid containing ova to be fertilized by the sperm already present. On its way out of the testis, the carpel becomes coated in some of the seminal fluid present in the testis, which it then brings back as it withdraws to the female's ovary, the sperm present in the seminal fluid then fertilizing some of the ova that remain there. In this way, fertilized embryos may potentially grow in either the male or the female partner, and it's quite possible for a sexual act to result in both the male and female lulian becoming simultaneously impregnated.

Lulians find both ovular fluid and seminal fluid to be among the most delicious of all flavors, though flavors nearly impossible to duplicate or experience except through the sexual act, during which some of the fluid unavoidably is scraped off the carpel onto the inside of the throat. Sex, for lulians, is thus a pleasurable act for gustatory reasons at least as much as tactile.

Psychology and culture

Lulians tend to be somewhat rigid thinkers, good at following rules and seeing patterns but less good at innovation or extrapolation. They often have a tendency, once engaged in a course of action, to "get into a groove" and keep performing the action in question without consideration as to whether its usefulness has passed. This characteristic has led to the saying that lulians' bodies may be built with curves, but their minds go in straight lines. Due to this trait, lulians often make good administrators, quality inspectors, and maintenance workers, but poor troubleshooters and diplomats.

Although it is often said that repeating patterns delight the lulian's aesthetic sense, the truth is a little more subtle. What lulians really enjoy are broken patterns, imperfections in a repeating theme, but they consider the effect of the imperfection to be heightened by its being surrounded by perfect iterations. Lulian art and music often seems dull and repetitive to human ears, but to a lulian all the repeating part is only a substrate to better contrast with the variations that really form the works' aesthetic appeal. A human critic is said to have once asked the lulian artist Ssthus, in reference to its painting "Neighborhood CXII", which comprises a large number of squares bearing identical patterns with only a few different from the rest, why it would not have sufficed to depict only the immediate environs of the variant squares, and left the viewer to imagine the expanse of identical squares surrounding it. "In that case," Ssthus responded, "why not simply let the viewer imagine the whole painting? Why have art at all?"

The most typical lulian clothing consists of very long, thin ribbons wrapped about the lulian's body, something like a stereotypical mummy. This arises less from aesthetic concerns than from practical; given the high level of variability in the number and position of the lulian's limbs, mass-production of sleeved clothing would be infeasible. Nevertheless, this mode of clothing has gained some popularity among humans and other Icathirian races, who call such ribbons lully wraps, a name once considered slightly offensive but now having become completely unobjectionable.