Owoc

The owoc or "Maiatherium manuelii" which means "Manuel's good mother beasts" are a species native to Ishtar.

Biology
An owoc was giant octopi about the size of a buffalo with a body shaped like the thorax of a lobster except that a lobster's thorax is the carapace of an arthropod-hard and rigid. The carapace of the creature is more like the mantle of a squid, without the flukes. Owocs may have have evolved from creatures similar to mollucs. Its postulated that the owocs developed mantles are much tougher and cartilaginous inside which serves the same purpose as a skeleton. This skeleton is hypothesized to be possibly shell-like material, linked together by a network of cartilage and muscle.

The body of the creature is enclosed by the mantle which is a hard, but not totally inflexible, carapace. A thick integument covers the mantle which becomes especially thick and hard almost like soft horn, at the front of the mantle called the "cowl." This "cowl" is the front edge of the mantle that looms over and protects the head below. A necessary adaptation since the head of the creature has no skull.

A human scientist believes that the ancestor of the owoc must have been a pseudo-cephalopod as evidence from its feet which its stands as a two-legged gastropod. These limbs are not legs with the slightest resemblance, but instead, the creature's peds are like fleshy pontoons that are semi-segmented and like lumpy treads. Its assumed that internally the peds are held by a complicated structure similar to what is inside the mantle: a network of "shell"-slivers, cartilage, and muscle. An owocs entire body is held up, about fifty centimeters off the ground, by the two rail-feet of "peds." Due to this owocs walk in a clumsy-looking method of locomotion.

Owocs are warm-blooded, homeothermic, endothermic, and tachymetabolic creatures. However terrestrial vertebrates still are much faster than these molluscs however a human observer noted that given the size of the owocs, a rhino might not be enough to knock one down. The owocs heads are shaped like an octopus with an almost to a T. bulging "brow", two gorgeous human-looking eyes the size of saucer-plates, with the iris taking up more of the eyeball. It has a beak for a mouth surrounded by eight tentacles/arms. There are some differences from octopi as the eyes are located on the front of the head rather than the sides, giving them binocular vision.

Besides being harder and tougher than on an octopus the owocs may have transition from marine life to terrestrial life by developing a watertight outer membrane.The arms are only generically octopoid with at least two obvious differences. First, the minor difference they posses no suckers and instead possess fingers. Their arms brachiate, more than three-quarters of the way down their length at an average of seventy centimeters. The tips of the arms consist of two mini-"tentacles," which are flexible, like tentacles; not segmentedly rigid, like fingers. These digits are flattened-unlike the arms above the branch, which are more or less tubular like thick fleshy spatulas, about fifteen centimeters long. The inner surface of the "fingers" consists of a roughened pad, useful for gripping and are opposed allowing it to manipulate objects.

Owoc are a species evolutionary similar to another race the gukuy, save bigger. Their are differences as the speaking siphon of the owoc, though fairly similar to that possessed by gukuy lacked the flexible lips and the hard ridges which enabled gukuy to speak their complex languages. Instead, the owoc produced a hoot which contained a single thought couched in various permutations.

Owocs are a species of molluscs that are chromatophoric and was the principal method by which they communicate (outside of the hoots). Though it's suspected that owocs express their emotions in the way they curl their arms.

Their peds were also very short and bulky relative to its body, lacking true tentacles like gukuy. "Tentacles" were specialized arms that predatory creatures developed. Owcs were not hunters of any kind and instead, had eight arms instead of six. The arms were bigger than a gukuy's, and clumsy-looking-they ended in a simple bifurcation, instead of the delicate triad which made gukuy arms such marvelous instruments for precise manipulation. The beak within the owoc's arm-cluster was blunt and ridged, suited for chewing tough plants. Not at all like a gukuy's sharp-edged gukuy beak.

The sexual dimorphism of owocs make difference between human males and females seem minuscule at the subatomic level. Males owocs are tiny and weak physically compared to the females, but despite being smaller males have more developed heads compared to those of the females. The two sexes are probably of equivalent intelligence. But the males are only 6.25% of the population. They are small enough to be able to ride inside the females-nestled in the anterior mantle cavity, next to the head which the hold unto using their longer arms and also engage in intercourse with.

These arms allow the males to transmit their sperm to the female-one of the arms is specially designed to carry sperm packets from the male sex organ to the female's. Additionally owocs have many categories of sexes. Two were can be classified as female and lastly male. But the females come in variants: Female and mother. Infertile females are the most common type of owoc-and the dominant ones, are the ones which are specialized to actually reproduce "mothers." 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 or "eumales."

Culture
In comparison to humans, owocs while sapient, are similar to austrolopithecenes or roughly equivalent to Homo habilis, or maybe even Homo erectus. A tribe of the gukuy known as the Kiktu believed that the sub-gukuy were sacred. They called the owoc the Old Ones, and believed that they were the first people created by their goddess Uk when she rained life upon the Meat. They were favored still in her eyes, the Kiktu believed, and their language was difficult to understand because it was holy. All Kiktu learned to speak it-at least, as well as was possible for gukuy.

The central concept of the owoc language was "feed." Owoc being plant-eaters viewed carnivores, including scavengers, with horror. The horror was not the product of personal fear. Because of their size, the hunnakaku had few natural enemies.

It was due to their belief that all meat-eaters were parasites, who stole life without returning it back to what they called the "Coil of Beauty." To be eaten as meat was to be denied re-entry into the Coil, to be doomed to eternal non-existence.

This also ties into their indifference and lack of emotional attachment to their born progeny. When they are born they show no parental instincts, only providing regurgitated food but offer them no protection against predators. They see the death of the young as a part of the Coil of Beauty. The owoc only raise their young after the latter prove them able to survive on their own at which the herd raises the youngling as a collective.

The Kiktu attempt to follow this philosophy certainly within the limits available to their fundamentally carnivorous needs as gukuy. It was in these attempts, of course, that produced the dietary rules and restrictions.

The same is not said the same by other gukuy tribes who refer them derogatorily as hunnakaku or sub-gukuy. Most gukuy tribes see the owoc as timid, despite their size and strength and slow, and stupid. Owoc are used by the gukuy nations as slaves. Due to the slavery of their kind owoc are a dying race. It's noted that the slavers catch fewer and fewer each year, and they won't breed in captivity.

Owoc funerary rituals involved great care towards a stricken herd member, which owoc would move the fallen owoc to a patch of ground. There they would traditionally dig a hole to bury their comrade. Burial items were placed alongside the deceased and included items like clumps of oruc.

Appearances

 * Mother of Demons by Eric Flint